Ladies of Levity
Three Naked balloon bodies levitate before my Eyes. A red, blue and yellow female body. Thighs, torso, breasts, shoulders, neck. They are anchored - or chained - to heavy granite blocks.
Since I landed on this perch by Hamlet's castle in Helsingor, they've been mocking me with their ambiguities. To root or run. To ground or levitate. Or is that even the question?
In the dark of the night, their chuckles reach my ear: how free are you really?
No feet, no arms, no head - no holding, no movement, no thinking. To transcend the human drama of thinking, doing, grasping, wanting would be the ultimate liberation. The metaphorical bliss of being.
But even states of liberated ecstasy shifts.
A mean Vipassana master taught me a million years ago deep in a Swedish forest that the true freedom activist doesn't linger, neither in the bliss nor in the pain feelings. So I try not to linger.
Has it tamed my restlessness, active imagination or habit of change? Has it liberated me from the lust of my flesh or the fear of falling? Not so much. Maybe my freedom quest has been half-hearted. After all, I do like all those things about being alive – in a female body.
I look again. Female bodies. Decapitated. Chained in flight. Suggesting a conditional transcendence of the female plight?
A woman, in the middle of my life, I'm unchained, utterly free and yet, I'm not levitating. With my life wide open before me, I sort of want those darn chains, to still me, just for a moment.
Roots, anchors, chains, boundaries – when do they hold us back, when do they allow us to soar? Now that is a good question, don't you think?
And those balloon ladies... they're still laughing.
I keep wondering, if I pull the little lever on their hips, will they deflate or take flight?
(Artist name unknown).