Looking down the Abyss

Chinese laborers building railroads at Sierra Nevada Mountains ~1870s 

“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to."

Jonathan Franzen, "Freedom"

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Dear Alex,

Yesterday I looked at the faces of the forgotten in monochrome and daguerreotype images blown up on screen during a feature presentation at my local library. We were celebrating Chinese New Year by delving into the past 150 years of Chinese heritage in Oregon.

For money or freedom, they came in the 1860s and became the 90% of manpower to build the first transcontinental railroad by hand. These men, having left their native homes in southern China, arrived in California to drive to completion the western railroad tunneling through impossible boulders and blizzards, thereby linking the western half to the existing eastern railroad system.

The freedom and fortune that followed this feat was as fantastical as its founders. The transcontinental tracks condensed traveling time from several months to days at one-tenth of the cost. In commerce and camaraderie, the Chinese diaspora merged East and West of the American frontier raw and ripe for fresh pursuits of liberty.

Labeled as the 20,000 “coolies”, the Chinese laborers, their lives and personal liberties obscured, drilled spikes into rocks, shoved black powder into holes and pulled their hands and bodies out just in time before blasting mountains. From dawn to dusk, they pounded on solid rock an inch by breath, pummeled through the fiercest winters on record in the Sierra Nevada and at some segments, dangled on hand-woven reed baskets to detonate cliffs and constructed bridges for tracks at eerie heights and slopes.

But their names and legacy were buried with the rubbles of dynamite in the crags and cracks of American history. New freedom flipped to fear during the economic depression when Chinese immigrants were perceived as competitors in the decaying work force, nailing into federal law the first ruling against citizenship to a specific race, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The decree thrived through modern era until its repeal in 1943. So why fume and freak over the freedom of bygone centuries when we ought to fight for our present liberties?

The clue to this nagging question comes from the 20,000 echoes for freedom in the 2019 non-fiction accounting for the “Ghosts of Gold Mountain” written by Professor Gordon Chang at Stanford University. If we fail to heed these voices, our liberties in gold or god will come stale and become ghost tales.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

I was planning to respond to you by saying something along the line of what Kierkegaard said about anxiety being the dizziness of freedom.  But since he has said it so well I might as well plagiarize:

Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it is an intimated nothing. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. [Anxiety] is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility...

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.

Yours, Alex