December 8: horrible, horrible freedom

In my mental trove of references to “The Simpsons” (which are becoming too dated to use in my classes) is the quote I used for this title. It’s from an episode in which Homer somehow takes a trip on the space shuttle (also too dated) and, unsurprisingly, manages to destroy and yet save everything.

One thing he manages to break is the mission’s ant farm—an experiment critical to any scientific endeavor. As the ants, who know only the collective, float out of their glass cage of worn tunnels into the pathless and gravity-free shuttle’s hull, they scream (it’s subtitled), “Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!” The security of the known path, the constant routine, the group mind is all they have ever known and all else is rife with the threat of newness.

In T.H. White’s “Once and Future King,” Merlyn turns the young Arthur into an ant so he can experience a life of no choice, of powerlessness, in order to develop the empathy he will need as king. Arthur retains his human consciousness but embodies an ant—he knows he’s an ant, but he doesn’t know how to ant. When he encounters members of the nest, they decide, because of his decidedly un-ant-like behavior, that he is insane, which in ant language is said as “undone” and message back as much to the collective.

Everything to the ants is coded in the language of work, as either “done” or “undone.” If an ant is doing the work it is supposed to be doing, it is done; if not, it is undone. If an ant is of the nest, it is done, if it is from outside the nest, it is undone—and promptly executed. If an ant responds as is expected to the litany of programmatic messages the collective sends to its head, it is done. If it asks questions, it is undone.

My 3G this morning focused on the idea of giving—What can I give today? I wrote a bit on it, but then quickly rebelled—what if I don’t want to reflect on giving, glistening, or guiding? What if I want to come to my day in a different, non-G, way?

I have come undone. And it is kind of horrible.

I (secretly) love ritual and routine. I created an orderly, effective plan I like—The real 3G—it is done, and I want to do it. I believe that building momentum through routine will move me forward and make it easy to find something to write about every morning at 9 am. By creating a consistent habit of writing at the same time every day, I will train myself to produce.

But I can’t do it; I can’t embody it. Routine is an abstraction—it’s out there somewhere. How can I encourage myself to bring my writing practice in here?

What can I do to embody my writing to such a degree that it leaves the abstraction of ideas and becomes simply who I am?

I can spend more time in my body.

I’m not saying I leave it—I’m not an astral projector or anything like that—but I do spend a lot of time trying to ignore it. I ignore its pain, its hunger, and its fullness. I pretend not to notice when it is tired. I get angry at it for what it cannot do or look like. I am unhappy about all the places it is not and cannot be.

When I was 5 or 6, I spent a lot of time looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, telling my reflection over and over, This is who you are. This is all you will be. You can’t be anybody else. You are limited by this body. You cannot be outside this body. I said it until I believed it.

But perhaps I never believed I was this body. Perhaps I just learned to deny it.

The ant in my story fully inhabits its body—its existence pushes out to the full reaches of its ant body— it knows what it feels and knows what it knows. The ant can only contribute to the ant-whole through the sensory experiences of its ant body. Its experiences feed the collective wisdom of the whole.

So, not living in the body means not contributing to the whole. So, not living in the body means not having purpose in the whole.

To that end, the freedom the ants of the ant farm experience is horrible. It’s separation from the gravity of the body and separation from the completeness of the whole.

Freedom is complete aloneness.

And, perhaps, just perhaps, that is the freedom I have been living in for a while now.

If I want to embody who I am and, through the muscle memory of words and writing, leave behind the horrible, horrible freedom of aloneness, I have to let myself feel what it is like to be here—not just in time or in place. And not there in the mirror but here in my body.