I didn't see it coming;
I expected nothing else.
Thirteen years old, hiding behind the rules
so I didn’t have to face
that shortcoming, that missing piece.
Once I had accepted limitation as
the sublime:
something that would come in time.
The constraints, then, gave it meaning,
deciding who says what.
Syntax is rules, and rules are limitations.
Without them, we are-- what?
But in time I came to want it,
that freedom to--
I traded "pressure to not" for "pressure to do".
Peering through the rhetoric,
I ventured into the upper reaches, and
I came apart.
There was nothing to hold me together
in this elevator, its yellowed walls crumbling away.
“Not all freedom is good. You can have terrible freedom.”
Was it the mother or the Aunt that said this?
Or Friedrich “entsetzliche Freiheit”--
Ah, Schiller.
What of the Mrs? Did she have freedom
in her husband, in Richard F.?
More freedom in the
(****-and-) (ball-and-) chains
than in the haze of youth?
The most, then, (it can be presumed)
from her departures: first to Alaska,
then even farther north, from where none return.
As freedom dissolved into expectation,
itself now another limitation, I wondered.
Which had it worse:
the woman (machine) outside the yellowing elevator walls,
or the girl (ghost) pacing within?
“We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art... like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.”
Joseph Fink, 2018
“Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere you’d come apart, you’d vaporize, there would be no pressure holding you together.”
Margaret Atwood, 1985
"The morally cultivated man, and only he, is wholly free. Either he is superior to nature as a force, or he is at one with her. Nothing that she can do to him is violence because before it reaches him it has already become his own action."
Friedrich Schiller, circa 1801
"Mrs "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest."
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
“I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892