Freedom Redefined

Rousseau remarked, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” This statement leads us to the question: Does freedom only mean being free from any kind of physical bondage? Is freedom only of the body? This is not the case. The chains here refer to both the physical as well as the mental chains that surround us at all times and at all places. What is more important is a mind that is liberated from all kinds of shackles, all the things that create hurdles in its path of the flight of imagination, of fulfilling the aspirations; the flight to nowhere. The freedom of thought is what empowers your creativity. It lends broad dimensions to your horizons of thought. A mind that is free to think is the thing that helps the person as well as his nation to attain new heights.
Another important aspect is the freedom of speech, which is often misused. This freedom doesn’t license the user to speak anything he likes, which is often taken to be its meaning. The exercise of the freedom of speech should liberate the person himself as well as his listener. But often it happens that the freedom of one person becomes a heart-rending volley of words for the other. This is not what is called freedom. It is rather that the freedom of thought and speech go hand in hand – think before you say something. What we do instead is, as Søren Kierkegaard has rightly put it, “People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have. For example, the freedom of thought. Instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation.” The other side of this fact is that when we have the freedom of speech, we don’t use it at the right moment. The hurdle there is the universal “Who will bell the cat?” And this marks the end of the freedom.
We don’t use our freedom for the right cause; probably this is true in the case of those who have always been free, because as Pearl S. Buck says, “None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.”

The flight of a bird, the young child roaming here and there, the bubbling waters of a stream, the vast expanse of the oceans, the clouds on a roaming spree…these have all been considered symbolic of the perfect kind of a freedom, the one that we all would want to enjoy at one point of time or the other. But time has to change. Things won’t remain the same always. This is the freedom of life itself – changes its hues and we have to match ourselves with the ever changing tones of life. But we would all pray to enjoy the moment that John Clare wanted to cherish (as mentioned in ‘I Am’):

I long for scenes where man has never trod,

A place where woman never smiled or wept--

There to abide with my Creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie,

The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

This poem was written by John Clare (1793-1864) when he was confined in the General Lunatic Asylum in Northampton, where he spent about the last one-third part of his life.

(This product is licensed under:
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. Author: Amritbir Kaur)

Words - The Two-Edged Swords

Words are like beads that drop out of the necklace of thoughts. They are placed in the carvings on the golden pages of time. And you have a ‘stone-studded life’! Words are an expression of your thoughts, emotions, feelings, views, ideas and what not. They are a concrete manifestation of abstract ideas. It is an art to use the right word at the right place. Words are not just letters put together. They carry a world with themselves; you never know what effect a particular word will have in a particular situation. Even a single word can work wonders for you. As George Bernard Shaw has rightly put it, “Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap”. Words can join two hearts or they can break one into two. Words can help you to make people laugh or they can make so deep a wound that even a lifetime won’t be able heal it. Words are the bridges, but if misused they can themselves act as barriers.
Another important quality is using the right quantity of words – don’t waste them you might need them later and don’t be a miser either. If you won’t say it out people won’t see it. There are very few who can understand your silence. But at the same time don’t over use them, nobody has the time. Try to inculcate as much as you can in as less as possible. Remember Shakespeare said, “When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain”. So make the most of what you have in hand, howsoever less it is.
We have often heard, ‘Pen is mightier than sword’. But you have to have that fire in your words to turn them into swords. Otherwise, they will only fall on deaf ears. A word is a two-edged sword, if you won’t use it in the most effective way; they will be lost in the humdrum of the world gone astray.
Watch your words, or you might have to chew them later, much to your embarrassment and to everyone else’s amusement. Also remember, say it before it is too late. Expression is what makes the words a living entity – it is the meanings which they carry otherwise they will be as lifeless as stones.

(This product is licensed under:
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

Author: Amritbir Kaur)

‘The Seven Sorrows’ by Ted Hughes

‘The Seven Sorrows’ (text)

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

The ‘slow goodbye’ of the things is what disturbs the poet. The poet begins with the imagery from nature and finally moves on to death. He uses animal imagery, as is his trademark. Death imagery is there in the last stanza, although the “sun gathers the minutes of the evening” can also be linked to the last phase of life.
Regarding the sun, I am reminded of the following lines from Wordsworth’s Ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ in which the poet while describing the scene of the evening refers to the immortality and mortality of man:

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

The same is the case here. The sun does not signify death, rather it is the minutes of the evening that symbolically refer to the last stage of life, the last few moments “when the year packs up” (to put it into the words of Ted Hughes himself).
In the sixth stanza, the poet refers to a fact that we find just as true as any universal truth in our daily lives: ‘the sorrow of the fox is the joy of the huntsman and the joy of the hounds’. This is as true of life also – “when you cry, you cry alone”. Moreover, people are not concerned about others.
The last stanza mentions the sorrow of the old age – the wrinkled face looking out of the window, probably searching for the last moments of joy, the joy that evaded them for the whole of the their lives, which they spent not living for themselves. Life is short and their time fled away breathing in life for their offspring.