“If we want to divest from the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing that have come to menace and control even the most well intentioned among us—habits that, when continuously indulged, shape what’s possible in both our present and future—we are going to need methods by which we feel and know that other ways of being are possible,” writes Maggie Nelson in the introduction to her new book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press). Nelson’s many fans and acolytes know this orientation of hers well: Across an incendiary career, in such critically-acclaimed books as The Red Parts, Bluets, and The Argonauts, Nelson has dwelled in possibility, finding new means of expressing ideas in the palimpsest of modes and disciplines, mobilizing criticism to plumb the intensely personal and the personal to access the theoretical. Now, in her first book since her 2016 receipt of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Nelson directs these energies towards a consideration of ideas of freedom at play in four fields—art, sex, drugs, and climate change. The array of cultural examples Nelson draws on to make her considerations is vast, but her discussions converge on a theme: Freedom lies in the direction of subtlety, nuance, and openness, an embrace of all of which might position us for better fellowship. I spoke with Nelson about what this fellowship might look like and the freedom of the future.

I want to start with Alice Notley, as so many good things do. I’m probably telling on myself when I say how much I like the poem from Disobedience that you quote with the lines “my rule for this poem / is honesty. My other rule is Fuck You.” You quote Notley saying, “I think of myself as disobeying my readership a lot. I began Disobedience denying their existence,” and you point out that it’s this very attitude that is such a gift to the reader, that’s so permission-giving and visionary. It made me wonder what the relationship is that you hope to have with your readers, particularly since I think there are real and clear stakes in how a reader takes and what you have to say, for example, about climate change.

I don’t tend to think very much about an imagined reader, just because it makes it too hard for me to write. In the climate chapter, I talk about the way Timothy Morton writes in Dark Ecology. In the second person, he’ll be like, “You’re entering the second darkness now, don’t be afraid,” and he’s comfortable with that. I tried not to talk to anybody quite like that, but rather to use myself as an example of the person going through these different darknesses. (Though, come to think of it, at times I do use the second person, maybe in the sex chapter.)

People have asked me, “Why doesn’t the climate chapter give a 10-point plan for decarbonization?” After somebody asked me that in an interview, I Googled “10-point plan for decarbonization.” I realized the reason why I didn’t is because you can find that in five seconds; I wanted to offer something different, something that I thought I had to offer, which was to demonstrate, dramatize, the difficulty that I have had—which I think a lot of people have had—in emotionally contending with climate change, and then consider how that attitude might be impeding collective action. That isn’t to say that we can’t act without first performing some kind of long emotional reckoning; we can, and we must. It’s not an either/or, it’s an all-hands-on-deck.

Maybe another way of asking that is to ask what you see as being at stake in the book.

In the whole book?

[Laughter] Ha, yes, that’s a lot. What are your hopes for what it does in the world? I guess, again, I’m thinking especially about that last section.

There’s a line in the beginning of the book where I say, if we take time to fathom the freedom drive with all its dark corners and contradictions, “we might find ourselves less trapped by freedom’s myths and slogans, less stunned and dispirited by its paradoxes, and more alive to its challenges.” That’s what I was trying to do for myself, anyway.

I think there’s a kind of “Onward, old heart,” feeling in the book, which I locate in Emerson at the end of the book, and try to connect with Robin Kelley’s writing about keeping on with love, study, and struggle. I think just a recommitment, like a recommitment ceremony to our entanglement—even if and when we recognize how painful, and difficult, and conflict-filled, and maybe even fatal it may be. By fatal, I just mean that the human condition is fatal. So I don’t know, just a recommitment to all that, I guess.

I felt that so acutely. A good friend is a climate scientist and I wanted to send her all those passages of the book in which I felt a kind of new stoutness in my own heart as I imagine approaching these questions. So much of what we’re navigating with climate change is posited as an either/or, but in fact there are many positions to occupy between total despair and a rosy outlook that wouldn’t comport with the state of the world, and those many positions then allow us many ways that we might respond—so, thank you for that.

Well, good. I’m glad. I mean, I think in some ways it’s very sad, because the time when we could have staved off certain effects of climate change have passed us by. It’s hard to get our minds around the fact that our actions have already baked certain effects into the atmosphere that we can’t undo, and that those effects will last decades, if not centuries, even after we stop emitting. That temporal fact, combined with global inaction—or not total inaction, but not enough action—has understandably made people feel like they’re in a bucket on a sluice to hell.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that even though it’s unthinkably upsetting that we will hit 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming (or likely more), the only silver lining is that this doomed/not doomed paradigm is now falling away, and we can move into the formulation, put forth by David Wallace-Wells, that the more decarbonization, the less suffering. As he puts it: “no matter how hot it gets, no matter how fully climate change transforms the planet and the way we live on it, it will always be the case that the next decade could contain more warming, and more suffering, or less warming and less suffering. Just how much is up to us, and always will be.” That, hopefully, can bring more people away from this “If it’s all doomed, then there’s nothing more to be done” idea, because it’s just not true, you know?

I think it’s a foundational movement of the whole book to refuse binaries in favor of nuance and ambiguity and openness and indeterminacy and murk. I love Pema Chödrön’s phrasing of such complexity as a “big koan.” It feels like the book evidences a recent drift towards or reliance on binary thinking, particularly as it shores up false moral certitudes about morally correct sex, or morally correct art, or morally correct speech. I wanted to ask if you feel like the tendency towards creating these binaries in those different fields is interrelated, and if so, where do you think that tendency is originating, and how might we begin to counter it?

There’s so much that seems villainous—the deceptions of oil companies, sexual violence, the brutalities of racism, and so much more. There’s so much to be opposed to, to work and struggle against. In the face of all that, one big question I have is how to partake in those struggles without relying on the conviction that all ethical righteousness belongs to you. It’s like that Butler quote I take up, from The Force of Nonviolence, in which Butler cautions against assigning “the flawed or destructive dimension of the human psyche to actors on the outside, those living in the region of the not-me, with whom we dis-identify.” Because that approach can have a form of aggression in it that can undermine your cause.

It’s also the mentality behind locking people up in cages, because how else could you do that? How could you lock so many people in our country up in cages, unless you thought that they were bad and guilty and disposable, and you were not? You couldn’t.

We’re living in a time when the injustices are writ so large, and yet we can feel so paralyzed, or we resort to fighting among ourselves because the fact that there’s no tool without blood on it is so hard. The more we can acknowledge that, the more we can get out of this circular dance of accusation and othering and self-loathing, I think.

That dovetails with what I wanted to ask you about the discourse around the Me Too movement and question you open up about the ways that maybe we have leveled out some space for women’s ambivalence around sexual encounters and emergent desire. I wonder if you can say more about what you think we, particularly women, lose in language that reverts to binaries in labeling sexual experience, maybe especially as it has come out of or has evolved around the Me Too movement?

Well, there’s a sense where we’re like, “Women, know what you want, say what you want,” but yet, we’re also revolted by this idea, this frat boy image of the guy going out on the town with a score card of like, “I want to try and get to fifth base tonight,” or whatever. I wanted to put a spotlight on the fact that it’s not a crime to not know what you want. If you’re going to take seriously a model of emergent desire, then you need to be willing to have a discourse about sex that doesn’t overvalue clarity or presumes a subject that can know everything about itself. Because all that is not really commensurate with a lot of people’s erotic lives. (Katherine Angel has been very good on this point.)

It’s very hard to talk about. I’ve even noticed it in talking about this chapter with people, in part it’s hard because to talk about sex, even in the abstract, involves putting some of your cards on the table as to what you think about sex, or how you’ve experienced it. But I really did want for that reason to try and carve out space in the chapter for more open-ended thinking and questioning about our actual, lived erotic lives, you know?

Because I think that those lives are often what gets neglected in these kind of Technicolor stereotypes of sexual activity that are fed back to us. It’s partly why I get so much out of reading and teaching sex writing from all quarters, because literature is one of the few places where there’s a store of information about people’s erotic lives that is not from the newspapers, or other forms of mass media, or from Hollywood.

About the section of the book about sex, I also wanted to turn to the passage where you say, “I will never share in the desire to cut ‘freedom to’ down to size, for the following reason: experimenting with a robust freedom to has the power to diminish that deprivations and degradations that fall under the rubric of freedom from. The ‘defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free produces a different reality than does perseverating on the insidious aspects of our disempowerment.’” Can say more about that distinction? Why does that matter, and what does it make possible?

This is a new thought; I’m not sure what I think of it, but I’ll just try it out for size: I think that in a freedom from model, it’s relatively easy to name the things that are nefarious or toxic, like the new law in Texas, like the kind of behaviors you don’t want to encounter in a sexual encounter. But the freedom to part is harder, for some of the reasons that we’ve already discussed—when “freedom to” doesn’t just mean “the freedom to know what I want and to do it.” It’s more—and I guess this is the new part of the thought that I’m having today—that “freedom to,” when it comes to sex, probably will involve reckoning with shame in some way or another. Because if you’re having freedom to, then you have to face not just the bad thing you’re trying to get away from, but also the convoluted phenomenon of your own desire, its fundamental risks, and the shame that likely accompanies it. As I say in the book, desire is always at risk of being disappointed. And that disappointment can feel humiliating, even in the most “safest” of circumstances.

It has been my experience that other areas of life open up to you, other areas of sex open up to you, when you start conducting a sex life that’s not riven with shame and self-judgment. This does not happen, like, once and for all, and it doesn’t happen overnight. And sometimes you need—I know I needed—to learn from others how this might sound or feel before you can experience it yourself. In the book I describe how Eileen Myles’s story “Robin” [from Chelsea Girls] did that for me at a formative juncture. Reading “Robin” I was like, “okay—now I know that appreciating, having, or fucking, an enormous cunt that’s big and red and needy is a possibility.” That, I think, can change your life. It did mine.

I was particularly moved by the passages in the book where you describe the influence of coming of age around the time during the AIDS crisis, and the ways in which artists making work then maintained what you call “a voracious, unapologetic, open attitude towards sex and desire while contending with the contaminations of life-threatening disease, sexual violence, government malice,” et cetera.

I love the Amber Hollibaugh quote you call on: “We refused to be shamed or disowned because of our own desires or our antibody status. This was truly a terrifying time. But through it all—although we were frequently wrong—we were also brilliant, and we were brave.” I wondered if you can speak to how that has informed the kind of art that you seek to make, and particularly how you think this spirit can manifest in criticism? Can criticism be a place where we develop pleasure and seek pleasure, and also where we contend with crisis?

I mean, I backed into some of those revelations about the AIDS era when I was writing. Speaking of shame: It was so shaming and so terrifying, coming up, to think that your desires might lead you into contracting a fatal disease for which there was no cure. I mean, how fucked up is that. All the while, cruel “solutions” like abstinence, putting HIV positive people into camps, charging HIV positive people with murder if they had unprotected sex with somebody, were all being bandied about nightly on the news. Thank God, all this was met with a huge wave of activism that had harm reduction and safer sex at its base. That was very instructive. We’ve seen a revival of this mode in the pandemic (though not enough of it, in my opinion), in which advocates for harm reduction—some of them the very same people who did this work in the AIDS era—have advocated very eloquently and fervently for the human need for congregation, and for intimacy—they understand that you can’t just tell people to stay at home forever. They understand our need for sociality, for desire.

At any rate, you say, how can this relate to criticism?

Yeah.

Well, I certainly argue against a lot of things, so it’s not like I’m just living in a kind of puff-cloud space where I’m only talking about things that I like. Paranoia and the reparative go hand in hand—I feel that, even in my own work. But I really do try and put the bulk of my attention on the artists and thinkers I like and who have expanded my mind in exciting ways, and to take up their invitation to think with them. This is the work of criticism, which is decidedly not the same as the work of critique. Another thing criticism can do, at its best, is to draw people together. I like imagining all these disparate people in my book at a party, you know? They’re talking, laughing, flirting, sometimes fighting, sometimes throwing a drink or leaving in a huff, but generally speaking they’re held together in conviviality, even if it’s a conviviality with edges.

I like imagining that, too. Somehow, that puts me in mind of our friend and mentor Christina Crosby, [the noted gender studies, disabilities, and literature scholar] who passed away earlier this year. It’s impossible for me to think about care or about freedom without thinking about her. When I was writing about her for myself after her death, I realized one of the things I’m most thankful for is the ways that she made me feel freer and wilder, and I guess I’m curious where you feel her presence in this book.

There was a service a few months ago for Christina on Zoom. And as often happens at a funeral, I realized that the specific, precious way Christina made me feel was the way she made everybody feel. Hearing it en masse was really striking. It made me think a lot about how Christina didn’t have tons of book publications. She had her book about the Victorians and she had the book about her accident. But there was something about her personhood that impacted a lot of people very, very intensely, and created its own sort of legacy.

I also learned at the funeral that a lot of things I just took to just be Christina, or the Christina I met in academia—a lot of them came from her upbringing in a certain religious tradition, and a lot of them were learned through her years of feminist activism, including in and around domestic violence (she co-founded a shelter for battered women called Sojourner House), all prior to her academic life. These experiences had taught her how to listen to other people closely, how to give them her full attention, how to make them feel deeply seen. It was a form of interpersonal service, and her curiosity about others always outweighed her judgment. Even, or especially, when she bellowed and raged against injustice, there was this kind of devotional generosity that grew from being in her presence. I think that’s why—now I’m going to cry—it sounds so self-centered, but when she died, I just thought, I’ll never talk to anybody who will make me feel the way I felt when I talked to Christina. It just is gone now, and it was so singular.

Anyway, I’d like to think that my book has some of this capacity, to be enraged and curious, to hold forth and to listen. And also her sense of humor. Christina was very, very funny, even about the gravest things. If anyone could stay with a difficult sentiment, it was her, you know?

I feel her here in your book, in all of those qualities. I feel that patience, and that openness, and that attention that is such a devotion. I think it’s what moves me in this book and in all of your books.

Thank you, Emma. I’ll also say this about Christina and care, which is that the last e-mails we exchanged were about art and care. She was describing, which is very typical for Christina, her total and complete suspicion of the discourse of morality in George Eliot, and her total and complete attachment to that discourse in George Eliot. I could remember her teaching The Mill on the Floss (pre-accident) and pacing around the classroom, really yelling, just booming, “Why are we so sad Maggie died? Why are we so sad? Why is this so moving to us?” I was like, Wow. She’s really upset about the death of Maggie Tulliver. That capacity to bring suspicion and wonder to the pull of moral gravitas, to the pull of sentimentality, that was something she had a particular capacity for.

That leads me to an anecdote from a New Yorker profile of Catherine Opie that you quote in the book. In this anecdote, Opie is teaching in a class where a student is calling out another student for the failures of their work and its engagement with colonialism. Opie enjoins the second student to defend their work and not to shrink away from these questions. You describe how the scene makes you smile with recognition. You say, “The amount of time I’ve spent politely workshopping hyper-violent works steeped in an unexamined misogyny can seem at least in certain moods like wasted hours of a life. But I value its lesson that, without suppressing and shaming your rejection as go-to options, we can learn fellowship differently.” I wonder if you can speak a little bit more to what that fellowship might look like, maybe particularly what it feels like both for the student who made the work and the student offering that critique.

Well, here’s the thing. There are of course points at which ejection from a certain community becomes warranted, you know? But before that kind of behavior transpires, I think that what Cathy is demonstrating is that you’re trying to construct a holding container where you can behold difficult things, have difficult conversations, be called upon to stand up for your work, and still stay together. It’s not just practice for later. It’s real.

In school, we have a contract to be there together. My contract is to teach the people who show up in my classroom, and their contract to me is that they’ve agreed that they want to be there. Until big elements of that contract are broken, you’re trying to figure out what that fellowship can look and feel like. As you know, as a student, and I was a student once, too, it doesn’t always feel great. There are classes where you think your fellow classmates are assholes. You have workshops that you think were below the belt. I mean, all kinds of things happen in school, and they have to be addressed and dealt with and borne. What I liked about that scene was Cathy’s lighthearted but determined effort to keep everybody on the boat. I think about teaching a lot as a boat. You don’t want your students to be jumping ship, though if they have to, they have to, and that’s okay too. But you’re trying not to lose anyone.

It makes me think of all the other places we might manage such a boat better.

Yeah, teaching is just a room full of people who have a reason to be there together. So’s the grocery store, you know what I mean? So’s the globe. So’s a family. There are different settings and scales, but the lessons I take from teaching—I mean, I wouldn’t keep teaching if I didn’t find them eminently valuable everywhere.

One last question: As I read the book, I thought a lot about questions that loom in my mind about freedom and ease and what the relationship is between them. In this past year, when so much has felt like a struggle, I realize that I often conflate the two, that freedom to me often feels like ease, but I don’t know that they’re really the same thing. I’m curious what you think about how these two things might relate. If we’re entitled to some freedoms, are we also entitled to some ease?

You mean just a feeling of not being in struggle?

Yeah, I think so. I feel like there’s a triangulation between freedom, ease, and struggle that I carried through my whole reading of the book, maybe especially to the passages where you’re talking about Buddhist ideas of radical acceptance, and maybe related ideas of a relinquishing of grasping. It seems to me like if you were able to ungrasp, you’d be moving radically towards ease, and maybe towards freedom, but I’m still thinking about how these things might relate.

The title of Angela Davis’s book, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, encapsulates a certain idea, or tradition, of freedom and political struggle: basically, the heavy, ongoing labor of decolonization, of abolition. This is real, often bloody work, with high stakes and huge sacrifices. In this sense, or in this tradition, the fight for certain freedoms is absolutely a struggle. There are other registers of the word, though, in which freedom doesn’t align with ease per se, but it does have to do with surrender, surrendering the struggle. Think of the famous Niehbur Serenity Prayer, which is essentially a recipe for serenity/liberation: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” Interestingly, Angela Davis herself rewrote this phrase (or at least, the rewrite is attributed to her), to say: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” The tension between these two statements is a source of endless fascination to me, and lies at the root of this book. It may all depend on what it means by “accept,” but I’ll leave that for another time.

There are also different strains of freedom. Some of them come from driving fast on a road and leaving a bad situation, your windows are down and the music’s up. Some of them come from more interiorized spaces where you can let go of a resentment, or a vengeance, or an anger you’ve been holding. Some of them come from collective political action. Some come from experiencing oblivion. That last comes up a lot in the drug chapter, where I don’t think it is fair to say that certain drug experiences offer only false freedom. I think drugs can offer real experiences of liberation. But like I say at the end of that chapter, it’s about staying alert to when things that were once forms of liberation have become self-enslaving, or do more harm than they’re worth.

Driving fast in our gas-powered cars felt good for a while. We know now what that means for the planet, and we are going to have to find experiences of physical ease and speed that don’t cause us to be cramped and burned up and destroyed by rising temperatures. I think we can find them. I don’t see why not. But it does mean we have to let go of some things.

It reminds me of Sedgwick’s sense of the “queer,” in which “any affect can attach to any object” (she got this formulation from Sylvan Tomkins). If we keep attaching the affect of freedom to the thermostat, the gas-powered car, which is what a lot of right-wing rhetoric does: “We won’t let go of our hamburgers, we won’t let go! They’re trying to make you let go. Don’t let them! Hold on, hold on to that burger!” That kind of grasping is so tight, and engages this whole endgame drama like, “You’ll have to pry the hamburger out of my cold, dead hands.” That’s a really desperate, kind of apocalyptic, and essentially, I think, very restricted feeling about freedom. I think we can do better, you know?

I think so, too. ♦