A few weeks ago waves rippled through space (by waves I mean gravitational waves) causing scientists to hastily run inside to dust off their copies of relativity and mumble apologises to a bored looking Einstein (seriously though if you haven’t read relativity do so- it will change your life) proving that not only are there black holes but that they can move and collide causing gravitational waves (if the thought of black holes zooming through space terrifies you, before you run off and hide let me assure you it will do no good). The movement of the black holes is caused by inertia from stars going supernova and creating the black hole. Another shock wave for me was when I heard on the radio I heard that Sinatra disliked his signature track- finding it too self-aggrandising (my favourite Sinatra performances being Autumn Leaves, Softly, As I Leave You and In the Wee Small Hours Of The Morning although my favourite Sinatra song is Why Try To Change Me Now? which is definitively performed by Dylan on his Great American Songbook covers album Shadows In The Night, the sequel of which is due in May and will probably be featured here).
Another surprise came last week when I was writing an essay (for fun) about Freedom with reference to John Paul Sartre. Sartre, as you may or may not know, was what was known as an existentialist, and although the conception of which is prevalent from pre-Socratic thought, through Dostoyevsky and so forth, it was only in 20th Century France where it took off or came into vogue. Suddenly the miserable beret wearing stripy shirted café crowd had a name- existentialists. The main premise of existentialism is freedom- freedom of choice, free will, ‘condemned to be free’, (although some existentialist such as Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky came from a theological standpoint), to be without a conception of God. However, what is generally known as existentialist is actually nihilism for actual existentialists state that there is no reason in existence so they seek to find reason. Yet, in spite of the premise of freedom, whilst writing the essay I realised, much to my surprise, that there was no freedom in Sartre.
The death of his father at an early age freed Sartre but ‘crushed’ his mother, turning her from a matriarch figure into a child- a sister- a sister for whom Sartre had unresolved incestuous desires, desires that shape his work and his relationship with women. For Sartre, who once claimed that the freest he ever felt was in Paris under German occupation, freedom was simply freedom from responsibility. Unable to be alone Sartre had a string of lovers- with whom he developed long relationships (damaging them in the process if their biographies and autobiographies are to be believed) and yet he could not stand the thought of losing one of them. When the prominent female philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, who met Sartre on their course where she finished second to him, and with whom he had a long relationship (they are even buried together in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris- I have made that pilgrimage) planned to go away with the writer Nelson Algren, Sartre demanded that she come back and not leave him (which she did).
In his memoirs Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan, speaking of Michelangelo stated ‘…didn’t have any friends and didn’t want any’, is this to be free? To be free, as the Buddhist preach, of attachment? Yet in his seminal poem To The Moon (Final Version), the great Goethe writes
‘Happy is he who can
Withdraw from the world
Without Resentment
And hold to his breast a friend
And with him enjoy that which
Goes unknown in the human heart’
Is this freedom? To withdraw from the world into love? My understanding of freedom is that one must forsake all things, even space and time to transcend to pure knowledge yet, seriously, how many people honestly want to do this? How many people desire this? As with Kafka whose authoritarian nightmares came from his relationship with his father and Freud (or as I call him Fraud) whose notions came from fear of his own desires it seems that Sartre was not seeking freedom, indeed he never longed fro freedom, but maybe he was only seeking the one freedom that may be obtainable to us mere mortals- possibly the most valuable freedom we can possess- self knowledge.
Surprise!
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thegreaterfool2016 