The moth that dreamed of Freedom

If the other side of the window is seen as freedom and the spiderweb as traps on the way to freedom, then this is a sorrowful tale of self-deceit.

It is tragic to see the moth’s story sadly ended despite the fact that it had wings — which, according to many, are enough to embrace freedom.

To me, the devastating predicament of moth’s story is that it gave up its life on what it thought to be freedom, and not the real freedom. It did never occur to the moth that the window, with its generous image of freedom, was nothing but a deception. So it persisted on following the fake freedom until it gave up hope and trapped into the spider web — which I call it the dictated ideologies by society or religion.

It is true that spider web put an end to the moth’s story, but self-deception was the mere reason for its miserable ending. The moth was dramatically obsessed with a fake reflection of freedom that it never realised that few meters away, another window was open. A window which could be a passage to freedom.

Some wisdom from The Book of Mormon

I finally had the chance to watch The Book of Mormon musical. One of my most favourite parts of this very funny musical was the illustration of hell. A missionary who has abandoned his partner has a dream. Watch the video. (FYI, rule 72 of Mormon church: missionaries must work in pairs).

The closest thing that came to my mind was Stephen Dedalus, the young protagonist in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The sixteen year old Stephen, full of desires, commits the first of the seven deadly sins: Lust.

After having sex for the first time in his life, instead of thinking about the interesting experience that he just had, Stephen starts to condemn himself:

“A cold lucid indifference reigned in his soul. At his first violent sin he had felt a wave of vitality pass out of him and had feared to find his body or his soul maimed by the excess. Instead the vital wave had carried him on its bosom out of himself and back again when it receded: and no part of body or soul had been maimed but a dark peace had been established between them. The chaos in which his ardour extinguished itself was a cold indifferent knowledge of himself. He had sinned mortally not once but many times and he knew that, while he stood in danger of eternal damnation for the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin he multiplied his guilt and his punishment.”

Based on church’s teaching, eternal damnation was his ultimate destiny.

Here, there clearly is a paradox in Stephen’s story. On one hand, he knows that he has an infinite desire to commit sin; on the other hand, an authority tells him that his desire leads to infinite damnation. First reaction: Out of guilt and fear, young Stephen begs for God’s mercy:

“—O my God!—
—I am heartily sorry—
—for having offended Thee—
—and I detest my sins—
—above every other evil—
—because they displease Thee, my God—
—Who art so deserving—
—of all my love—
—and I firmly purpose—
—by Thy holy grace—
—never more to offend Thee—
—and to amend my life—”

In his inspiring talk against self-criticism, Adam Phillips, the British psychotherapist, states: “Morality born of intimidation is immoral”. He suggests the critical part of ourselves has a great potential to make us coward. Self-criticism prevents us from growing because it blindly condemns some of our desires. To kill or ignore a desire is to neglect a truth that resides in us. The unspoken truths stay alive. When a truth is repressed, according to Lacan, “it is expressed elsewhere, in another register, in a ciphered, clandestine language. Truth, the repressed, will persist, though transposed to another language, the neurotic language.”

In the case of the missionary in The Book of Mormon musical or Stephen (or better to say the young James Joyce), the self-criticism (a form of intimidation as Phillips puts it) was dictated by church. South Park creators know about this very well.

But as the name of Joyce’s book (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) suggests, Stephen becames an artist. Let’s have a look at the word artist. What is the truth about artists and art? Wilde describes the truth in art in De Profundis as “the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward”. Good artists do not censor their inward desires. In fact, they give form and life to their desires — the outward rendered expressive of the inward.

Later in the book, Stephen, rebelliously, like all true artists, says yes to his desires:

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do.
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe,
whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church:
and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art
as freely as I can and as wholly as I can….

I will tell you also what I do not fear.
I do not fear to be alone
or to be spurned for another
or to leave whatever I have to leave.
And I am not afraid to make a mistake,
even a great mistake,
a lifelong mistake,
and perhaps as long as eternity too.”

Joyce remained faithful to his words, and that crowned his triumph.