On Liberation

Liberation with existential sincerity

Liberation is existential for me. Without it, I will die, I would rather die. My deep, enigmatically deep desire for liberation has saved me many times. It gives me wings to fly away from an oppressive country (PRC), an oppressed relationship, and a suffocating job.

But the concept of liberation or freedom, also feels elusive, amorphous, even fleeting sometimes, but when you feel it, you feel it. Your body feels, your heart feels it, and you start to dance and sing with so much self-awareness but so little “shame” or “self-consciousness”. I am thinking of the moment when I dance my heart out in a techno rave, I am thinking about me feeling slightly more solid as I meditate. It is like a north star that you cannot grasp (intellectually) but can only feel when you get a bit closer to it.

Or maybe, it is like coming back home, where other freedom warriors and awakened souls live, where they devote their whole lives to create liberation in themselves and in others, with their music, with their poetry, with their writings, with their economic policies, activism, spirituality, and maybe with nothing, just simply but also radically be who they are.

There are both the sharpness (cutting through the traps and chasms) and tenderness (intimacy with selfhood, sexuality, art) qualities of liberation and it should not simply be intellectualized or econometric-alized, but also be felt, lived, experienced, sensationally and viscerally.

I have decided, a while ago, my life to be devoted to creating liberation: in myself and the world.

This essay is my love letter to liberation. There is commentary of my 2024 favorite essay collection <On Freedom — Four Songs of Care and Constraint> by Maggie Nelson, which interestingly, perhaps, not surprisingly, references my 2023 favorite essay: Paul B. Preciado’s <Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era>. In this post, I weave insights gleaned and discovered from my own mindfulness practices and Zen Buddhism teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) and Dōgen Zenji. Here, I also explore my contemplation on freedom and liberation, their intricate relationship to care, fear, time, and peace.

Liberation is surrendering to the ambiguities of living

I prefer the word liberation and not freedom. Freedom implies the promise of ending up in a kingdom where you are then living in forever free-dom. Liberation rejects this binary story. It does not escape, but rather resides in the daily practice of creativity. The kind of creativity that authentically expresses the truth and reality of life, which is constantly changing, including the one who is creating. It demands a “wholehearted faith” that almost seems blind, to put in intentional efforts without attachments to the results but also believe they will lead us to a path of alignments.

This may sound simple, naive even, but is certainly not easy. We, human beings, love the comfort of certainty, predictability and clarity. And linear narratives (timeline), dichotomous outcome (positive vs negative) or characters (good vs evil) gave us some illusion of safety.

“Hard” sciences, such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and logic began their hegemony over emotions, spirituality, psychology, art, and poetry starting in the Science Revolution (16th and 17th century). This trend accelerated during the Enlightenment and then further solidified by the Industrial Revolution. As of this writing, the whole world is celebrating all the amazing progress made by hard science, highlighted by the Nobel Prize awards. The rigor in hard sciences, though, with their heavy focus on finding causal effects, also lead to rigidity. The kind of rigidity that affords ambiguities, they need to be “solved”, “optimized”, or “controlled” out.

Can we also embrace the ambiguities of human living, that is already part of our nature (sexuality, gender, race)? To embrace what poet historian Jennifer Michael Hecht called “non-answer life”. In her book <The Wonder Paradox>, Hecht asked us to learn to live with and to love the questions and forget about the answers. Yes, answers might arrive and can be helpful, but the seeking itself can also be an answer. “The feeling of a meaning can be sufficient as meaning”, standing on its own feet.

That sounds exactly like poetry. As Ben Lerner discussed in his work <The Hatred of Poetry>. The beauty of poetry lies in the “failure of language”, in other words, to capture the ambiguity of living, which even more structured language is unwilling or unable to go. This is not just limited to poetry, but also other types of art: visual, music, dancing.

Art that liberates instead of “cares”

Our increasingly polarized political climate starts to exert increasing pressure on artists to also become activists. Their arts need to serve as political declarations. (Setting aside the whether or not they are making art or producing entertainment) Taylor Swift pressured by the right and Chappell Roan pressured by the left to make political statements are clear examples.

This is most clear in the rise of the “orthopedic aesthetic” many advocate for. “Either the twentieth century model imaged the audience as dumb, constricted and in need of being awakened and freed (an aesthetic of shock) or the twenty-first century model presumes the audience to be damaged and in need of healing, aid and protection (an aesthetic of care)”.

Both models violate arts’ fundamental principle as a channel to diffuse power. These models take away viewers’ agency to participate and collaborate, they consolidate power back into the makers. This process inevitably leads to uni-directional transmission of information with its uniform interpretation.

Artist Paul Chan, when addressing this increasing demand to politicize art, wrote: “collective social power needs the language of politics to consolidate identities, to provide answers”, while “art is nothing if not the dispersion of power”. Similarly, Jacques Ranciere said that “art’s status as a third thing. Whose meaning subsists between artists and spectators, excluding any uniform transmission, any identity of cause and effect”.

The liberating beauty of art to me is exactly its indeterminacy, and its ability to twist and fold time as well as reality into a non-linear, non-narrative, no-answer multi-dimensional surreal space. Unlike information, which tends to reveal one particular interpretation. Art is non-informative, and as Nelson put it, characterized by the “plurality of variegated encounters it generates”. In other words, art has a super power of transcending reality.

I see the parallel again in poetry. Poet Alice Notley called this rebellion “poetics of disobedience”. In her epic 2001 poem: Disobedience, she said: “my rule for this poem / is honesty, my other rule is Fuck You”. “I think of myself as disobeying my readership a lot. I began Disobedience denying their existence.” This “not care”, is ironically paradoxically the “true care”, the kind of care that liberates rather than constricts.

Folsom Street Fair: sex that liberates not “reduces”

I still remember the shock: first time attending the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco.

The “blazen” display of nudity in public: bodies that are not seen as conventionally “desirable”: fat, old, saggy, colored, disabled. And sex, and not just the “normal” kind of sex, but gay, queer, kinky, “pain”-ful, “violent”, ”nasty”, fetishistic, and voyeuristic. I was also deeply uncomfortable with the power “play”: scenes that dramatize power hierarchy, with outlandish outfits, toys and machines. The idea of “sub” seems diametrically opposite from sexual liberation. How could idealizing be dominated anywhere close to freedom? I am fearful too, what if straight people see these, our alliances will turn away from us and our enemies will use these against us. Is this “regression” of queer movement?

I can feel all the intense raw, unprocessed fear, shame, judgment, and yes internal homophobia, rushed out of my chest all at once.

At the time, I was freshly out of the closet, gingerly stepping into this “gay” community, what I imagine as this beautiful communal house that is decorated with rainbow paintings, blue sky, fluffy clouds, with James Baldwin and Harvey Milk radiating lights through.

Now the house suddenly, completely crumbled down. As I am smelling the mixed odor of body fluid, chemicals, smokes, the pee pool that are now infesting diseases towards the end of the festival, I almost threw up.

As I am writing down these lines, I notice all the quotation marks I have scattered throughout. I cannot help but laugh at my shallow understanding of BDSM culture, Folsom Street as a liberating space, and the many nuanced and complex layers of sexual liberation.

To begin with, the immediate (visceral, sensational) shames, associated with body images, with sex, with queerness, I felt inside of me, were simply not mine. They are planted in me, but by others. Especially by the doctrines of Judeo Christianity. One particular way the Church consolidate their power is to claim themselves as the only “herd of the crowd”, by denouncing sex as sinful, and the only possible space to have sex is this sanctioned private place called marriage, specifically designed to be between a man and a woman.

But why?

Folsom street, with its radical display of “sinful” vulgarities, makes direct mockery of such ridiculous rigidity. By normalizing “shames”, it places shames outside of oneself, and returns to where they originated.

My worries about how Folsom can be exploited by the right are certainly valid: one just needs to pick up any conservative anti-queer, anti-trans book or watch Fox news, how San Francisco is being chastised and caricatured. The pathological root of these violent hatred is clearly multifold. Reductive religious teachings, the obvious one, but also what Carl Jung called “misoneism” in his book <Man and his symbols>: the fear of simply witnessing something “abnormal”. And the equally complex and nuanced homophobia that is caused by homoeroticism and repressed homosexuality. But wherever the root is, my worries will do nothing.

Sexual optimism and the consumption of it

Almost a decade later, I revisited Folsom. None of those discomforts came up, even the air, same odor, smells like rebellious freedom.

But then, a different question comes to me. How many people here, understand the difference, between

the kind of liberation that is:

simply participating and consuming pleasures from sex, or “sex optimism”

And

The kind of liberation that is:

intentional space making and reclaiming self sovereignty that Foucault talked about: the kind of space making that increases degrees of possibility and decreases degrees of domination?

The kind of “sexual optimism” that is the “totalizing conviction that sex, desire or pleasure is essentially good, essentially healing, essentially empowering, essentially political, essentially any one thing at all” (Nelson). The kind that posits that the “participation of Reichian orgasmatrons or queer orgies can bring death to capitalism or fascism”.

This sexual optimism is not liberation, as sex is inherently amoral — not shameful for sure but also not moral. And as similarly pointed out by Paul B. Preciado in <Testo Junkie>, instead of bringing death to capitalism. Capitalism devours sex slowly and churns out various consumer products, porn, viagra, Testo, thirst traps, G. including the leather harness they are wearing on Folsom st.

A more realistic view is poignantly pointed out by Berardi, that sex not just as an optimistic force, but a field. Where one can certainly play, be cheerful, optimistic, to express self and love, but it can also be cruel, evil, convoluted, self-harming, elusive, destructive and deadly”. Think of choking, think of abuse, think of excessive substance use (whiskey sex or drugged sex), thinking of the unconscious self destructive suicidal demon summoned Jung illustrated in his vivid anecdotal writings.

Sexual liberation from space making

BDSM culture is certainly not just naive sexual optimism. Nelson shed some great insights on how BDSM culture can teach us about liberation.

The first order teaching is boundary setting in kinky settings. Using safe words, consensus to navigate and negotiate the boundary between pain and pleasure. This boundary is also already encompassed by the atmosphere of non-judgementality: nothing is considered “abnormal”, “extraordinary”.

A more profound teaching is to be found on how participants express their real desires within this safe space, starting from the greeting question of “what are you into?”. Sex can then become both a maker with its own creative agency and its own consumer and audience. Various roles and scenes played out, gendered power, dynamic hierarchies: feminine bottom dominating submissive top, the art of “choking”: safe sweet spot of pain, risk and pleasure.

These creativities and dramatized sex acts also reminds me of the art of drag. With its humor and mockeries, both inject lightness by normalizing shames and absurdities. In their own way, shackle the chains and traps of religion, racism, homophobia and patriarchy (not as empty slogans but concrete forms on display).

I also find so much beauty in how they also defy linear narratives, with intuitive improvisations. This arguably stands in contrast with a recent sexual liberation movement: #MeToo. On the surface, all of them (BDSM, Drag, MeToo) all point to safety and liberation. But one reason #MeToo has been facing recent huge backlashes, Nelson argues, is the oversimplification of storylines into power act and victimhood.

The most common story is always a powerless victim being violated against their will by the powerful. This linear storyline left a lot of questions unanswered, to begin with, “what leads to the situation in the first place?”. The “leading to” rather than the “situation” and painful harm, could potentially expose a lot more about the fundamental flaws we as society should focus on, rather than the reparative litigious victories.

Each time Monica Lewinsky re-examine what happened with Bill Clinton, the whole story seems to get more complex, more entangled and closer to the truth. She shared the similar point, that her story has been reduced by the media to a simple narrative of “the powerless intern being used by the most powerful man in the world”. But what about her own true desire and love for him, what about how the system allows this to happen, and how politics colored every single detail in the story telling?

Create liberation by Gyoji Dōkan

After traveling to all these realms and examining liberation from different angles, one gains a deeper understanding of its true form, its colorful texture and its multi-dimensional contour. But the question that I started with: “how do we create liberation?” is still left unanswered, at least not with the concreteness of daily living.

Here I find Zen Buddhism teachings by Thay and Dōgen particularly helpful.

The answer, to me, starts with the term “create liberation” Thay mentioned in various books.

The word “creating” is important. Not only that creation itself, the betterment of craft, the creation and discovery of beauty from patient labor, is liberating. But creating is also itself a non-dualism: even though a physical, intellectual, or mental object is created. “Creating” focuses on the process and detaches itself from what is being created. Like how Thay describes walking meditation, it is not about a destination to walk towards, each step is a kiss to earth, each step is its destination.

Creating also points to the patience that is required. A devoted artist has to be patient, a patient artist is also a devoted one. Paradoxically, this devotion and patience is actually liberating, from the fear of time, of silence and loneliness.

Sometimes, creating is actually a process of removing rather than adding. Liberation requires eliminating traps, releasing pain, relieving suffering. Part of my interests in economic and development policies is rooted in their unique power and advantage to shackle seemingly inescapable poverty traps. These economic traps also lead to the deep psychological despairs, which lead to further trap and vicious self-feed cycle. The despairs, with nowhere else to release, are manifested as violences, or war, often towards the most vulnerable margin of our societies: women, disabled, old, children, queer, brown, black, poor, low caste.

So how does one create liberation in everyday moments? I find the Zen Buddhism teaching of Gyoji Dōkan (行持道環) particularly insightful and helpful.

Dōgen talked about gyoji (行持) as the daily practice with Ichigyo-zammai (wholehearted concentration on just one thing at a time). Dōkan (道環) is the “circle of the way”, speaks to the back and forth, and continuous cyclical nature of the practice, because of the habitual tendency to be pulled back into the unfreedom whirlpool created by the modern capitalism consumerist societies and conformists culture.

And it is an intentionality, a compass towards too, a small lighthouse, blurred by the chaos and violence of the world today but still shimmering regardless, unapologetically solid.