Would you do that? 

There is, at this point, invariably a pause. After a bit someone in class will say No, of course not. I ask: Why not?

This is where it gets hard, not just for undergraduates, not just for Writers In Residence, but for any honest reader going to Conrad’s testing ground of the human conscience. In my experience the answers tend to be some form of, “Because I would get caught.” 

But you can’t be caught: for the purposes of this exercise, all rules are removed.

“Because it’s still wrong.” 

Why is it wrong?

“Because if everyone did that we wouldn’t have a society worth living in.” (Kant’s answer.) 

But we’re not discussing everyone right now; just you. 

“Because someone is always watching. Because you’d go to hell. Because you can’t escape God.”

None of this is to the point. The severe challenge presented by Conrad’s novel is this: What would you do if there were no sanction or prohibition, no external judge, no punishment or observation, at any time? Forget the ivory and the severed heads. What would you do, given absolute freedom, for even a single day?

This is the question of the soul’s contours. It is the deepest meaning of: Who are you?

In the middle of the last century, emerging from an orgy of death known as the First and Second World Wars, the existentialists took this question with the seriousness it requires. The famous phrase Sartre gave us is that humans are “condemned to be free,” meaning we cannot escape the absolute freedom we experience at every turn. Gods are an evasion; laws, a provisional construction. Freedom—individual choice, and the consequences of it—is the very stuff of conscious existence.

What shall we do with so terrible a gift?

In my historical novel Killer of Crying Deer, just released, two characters sail into a realm of radical freedom at the turn of the 17th century. One, a pirate named Quirinius Whitepaul, lives a life of extremity. All persons—saving an indigo plantation slave he has liberated, and an abducted British child whom he keeps as his own—are a threat, to be met with immediate violence. During a raid on a transport ship he murders the opposing captain and then paces “in front of the crewmen in a fury, his stride bringing him to a head-on charge toward each figure followed by a last minute reversal. While other thieves began appearing over the companion ladder he stormed wildly across the quarterdeck, looking each sailor blank in the face as if they were shouting insults at his soul.” Whitepaul hurtles obscenities at heaven with spastic abandon, despising God, Queen and the Virgin Mary, flouting any law that has been handed to him as sacred because it is sacred. He is an extremely desperate man.

More than one reader has told me Captain Whitepaul derives from Cormac McCarthy’s Judge Holden in the novel Blood Meridian. For me, a closer derivation is “The Misfit” from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find: a philosopher-thug who may have killed his father, though he suspects the charge is untrue; an escaped con who feels he and Jesus have much in common; a gunman who tells us, “I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.”

In Killer of Crying Deer, the other side of freedom is seen in Fray Juan Batiste de Daylalyo, a former Spanish missionary to the New World who has experienced a mystical vision in which the Church seemed to him nothing but a grotesquerie on the face of God. For Daylalyo—neither theist nor atheist—divinity is beyond the capacity of faith, indeed beyond the capacities of man. When another European sees him participating in native ritual dances in the Florida Keys, Daylaylo is accused of not loving his own God.

“I loved Him too much,” the mystic responds. “Too much. To believe in Him was to do Him an injustice.”

Juan Daylaylo, on liberating his mind from his former belief system, finds himself in an ecstatic state. It is a world in which experience of the here and now is not contingent on some other reality; a world in which moral exigency is rooted in the recognition of all things being exactly what they are. When Daylaylo the believer first brought a crucifix to the Native American inhabitants of the Keys, they mistook its image for that of a man bursting free from a tree in which had been imprisoned. The image is Daylalyo’s own.

In his seminal work Escape From Freedom Erich Fromm, the psychologist, social philosopher, and self-defined “atheistic mystic,” said that freedom

“. . . has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but that at the same time he has become isolated . . . alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual's potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously.”

Freedom is coming to us all. It occurs in the individual life, leading us to discover and express more of who we are; or, conversely, to conceal ourselves, most conspicuously under various forms of fundamentalism. As Fromm noted, it has a societal trajectory as well. Some societies embrace individualism; many are repulsed by it. Of all the traumas of the 20th century, the recognition of personal freedom was arguably the most significant, a discovery of greater power and importance than the atom bomb. With it, the most awesome knowledge we have uncovered as a species—self-knowledge—has been released, and while this truth can be avoided, it cannot finally be escaped.

Where will we find the courage to face this ultimate challenge? Will we spin, like Captain Whitepaul, like Mister Kurtz, ever deeper into violence and rejection, striking out at the world as we seek a stable center not of our own making? Or will we discover in our freedom the wonderful reality of our lives, the capacity to love each unconditional moment—the dancing joy of Daylaylo?

 

William Orem writes about spiritual quest across different cultures and times. His new novel is Killer of Crying Deer. His first story collection, Zombi, You My Love, won the GLCA New Writers Award, previously given to Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Richard Ford and Alice Munro. His second collection, Across the River, won the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. He has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in both poetry and fiction, and his plays have been performed nationwide. Currently he is a Writer-In-Residence at Emerson College. Read more about Orem and his work at http://www.williamorem.com/