Second to last Wednesday of the year. I am Working At It In Five Parts, in homage to Toni Cade Bambara, and her piece of the same name. If you missed, here’s Part I (rivalry/let’s act like love and freedom are the same thing), II (it is right now), and III (it is participatory). The ‘It’ I am working at, trying to get to know, is the it that is on, freedom also known as love, love also known as freedom. Today is somewhere, sometime, some place to start, to get one inch closer.
Just so you know, I’m riffing.
Since I read it years ago, Mia Birdsong’s assertion has been a thick branch caught in the gears of my mind. She writes, “Being relentlessly known terrifies us, but I think we also crave the freedom of it.”1 At first it felt so contradictory to me, almost senseless. Huh? I realize I had a dim association of being known as limiting, ranging from inhibitive to oppressive. At the same time I associated freedom with anonymity. In hindsight my resistance was the American understanding of freedom, soaked as it is with entitlement and an absence of accountability. I kind of thought freedom was transcendence—the ability to get above or get away. This is not the freedom I’m after, and I don’t think it’s even really freedom, it’s more like avoidance or escape. How could being known be freeing? For example, when you’re scared to tell someone something and you tell them anyway and they are gentle and you feel immense relief and maybe even exhilaration.
There’s another way to get at this, one of the greatest teachers of freedom/love of all time, James Baldwin, writes “love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” 2 I think about this all the time. The question becomes, hey, why is everyone wearing a mask? The reasons are countless and might almost be boring if they weren’t so painful. I mask, which is to say dial it back, withhold the full dose usually for the illusion of safety or control. From what I’ve gathered these masks (not the kind that are performance or fun or ritual), are a combo platter of fear and habit. I make all these decisions about what other people can handle, and what I can. It is hard to walk among the serrated edges of the world3 (the serrated edges within ourselves), and not become calloused. The callousness is a mask too.
And, I don’t think I can be loving or free and hold on to my elaborate defenses. We feel different around people who we don’t have to put on masks for. It can be kind of excruciating when people see through your masks but it can also feel like a weight is being lifted. We all think we are so slick and it’s like hey, I can see you. It’s kind of hilarious that we think we’re ever pulling one over on people, we’re barely fooling ourselves. We crave the freedom of being relentlessly known, to be relentlessly known is to be loved—to know someone requires some amount of love, otherwise you just know your own projection or judgment.
This thing of how we want to be known, how it feels good (expansive, softening, sharpening, opening) to be known, is what has us willing to risk. This thing, force? is how the guards can come down, how we imagine what it would be like to not cling so tightly to the masks, or the mask-versions of other people. FOVE lol or LEEDOM. It’s dangerous:
“That people—people suddenly started to think that they could be who they were. And that would be powerful, that would be a miracle for everyone around them….And it’s like, oh, that’s what’s so profoundly dangerous about love and the light of love that you’re offering, it’s like ooof, what?” Alexis Pauline Gumbs (about Daniel Alexander Jones’ work) Particle and Wave, pg. 47
“It’s like the first time you catch a glimpse of yourself through eyes that notice and really believe, how beautiful you are, and the way that realization cannot be shut down by doubt or tentativeness ever again, and so must be lived…” — Harmony Holiday, Somebody Who Loves Me
FOVE/LEEDOM is the force, energetic current that allows people to be themselves, we have to pass it around, beam it on each other, communicate it. People can feel it, it has a permissive element. When you see others living the realization, it’s so inspiring. This force makes us powerful, possible. We’re restored to joy and tenderness. We are less willing to accept degradation. LEEDOM/FOVE make us ready for the doggone curveballs this existence seems intent on sending. Everyone standing at the fence, wanting you to win, pitcher wound, batter up.