Steve_Bamlett_blog

My convoluted title is meant to avoid the sense that bonds are unimportant and contrary to what freedom is.

Freedom and bondage are only binary contraries either to:

1. Those who only want a notional freedom, one wherein there are no motives to to be free of the sometimes invisible bonds chained around them like those on Marley’s Ghost: those chains are of upholding your social standing, a settled and immobile life, or defined by the cash nexus – the latter being the biggest bond of all, since it teaches us that we must never give away what we could sell.These are those Rosa Luxembourg refers to in saying: Those who do not MOVE, do not notice their chains. They call themselves free while being more in bondage than any other person, assuming that the good it gives them now at the cost of their soul are goods forever. Dr. Faustus was a fine example, Donald Trump is another.
2. Those whose bonds are not of their choosing (that are imposed on them) and for which any attempt to escape binds them in further unless they give in to the dictator that imprisoned them. Yet even those Prisoners of Zenda are more like the free if they contest not only the own bondage but that of others, the only way to be free according to Nelson Mandela, that great communalist soul:

Freedom is oft best experienced and compromised in relationships. The death of love of any kind is usually the accompaniment of the plea of one person on another to give up their freedom to be share their love with honesty, without constraint or without the need for payment or contractual bond. The extreme is the abuser who asks those they abused not to tell of what they call their love. More often, it is the one that does their best to sustain that the principle of giving in a relationship works in one direction only – to the benefit of the recipient. Bit it works in other ways involving the receipt of payment for any exchange. In the last case both partners bind themselves into bondage but it will feel to both that one binds the other.

Freedom is probably an aspiration only. Few can make ‘movement’ such a principle of their life that they birth and motivate ‘social movements’ towards a shared liberty, as both Luxembourg and Mandela did. They do it always because they are prepared to accept that the real forces they contest with prove their reality by the imposition on them and their words of very viscerally effective bondage – real chains. That story is allegorised in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.

But even in Fidelio and the life of heroes like Rosa Luxembourg, chosen boinds and trysts of truth matter. The point is in knowing how and why you know they were chosen in freedom. That is nowhere as easy a task as it sounds. The greatest poet the world knows could only play with the ambiguity of the freedoms that love forces one to give away, often in return for accepting bondage, both in his play The Merchant of Venice and this sonnet:

So now I have confessed that he is thine,
And I my self am mortgaged to thy will,
My self I’ll forfeit, so that other mine,
Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still:
But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,
For thou art covetous, and he is kind,
He learned but surety-like to write for me,
Under that bond that him as fist doth bind.
The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,
Thou usurer that put’st forth all to use,
And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake,
So him I lose through my unkind abuse.
    Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me,
    He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.

That poem addresses a three-way relationship that is won by another. It is the plot of the other story – the one in dramatic form.

Of course Shakespeare, for even genius gets bound to prejudice somewhere along the line, sold the soul of his meaning (which is that we love bondage too much and to our detriment and that most of us will fall for a self-interested Bassanio in our lives) to appease the racist Antisemitism of his audience, but, don’t blink – the current Labour Party is at this very moment trying to buy off the pressure of a Fascist Reform Party by aping even more its right wing immigration policies. It will, as anyone with political sense knows, bind them the more into the deal with their devilish opponents and they will line the road to eternal political bondage with ‘red’ carpet. The red will be a stain of oppressed migrant blood and they will bind us all to the recurrence of European Fascism.

But don’t despair. Mutual bonds freely chosen still exist, I believe.

Bye for now

With love, Steven xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx