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Freedom is to live your own craziness - the potter by Ritsos
The Potter
One day he finished with the pitchers, the flower pots, the cook-
ing pots. Some clay
was left over. He made a woman. Her breasts
were big and firm. His mind wandered. He returned home late.
His wife grumbled. He didn't answer her. Next day
he kept more clay and even more the following day.
He wouldn't go back home. His wife left him.
His eyes burn. He's half-naked. He wears a red waist-band.
He lies all night with clay women. At dawn
you can hear him sing behind the fence of the workshop.
He took off his red waist-band too. Naked. Completely naked.
And all around him
the empty pitchers, the empty cooking pots, the empty flower
pots
and the beautiful, blind, deaf-and-dumb women with the bitten
breasts.
It is easy to imagine the man who no longer goes home, to a wife which only nags, but stays instead where he has worked day-in, day-out to make a living, and still she is not satisfied, does so after a kind of personal revolt. He goes no longer home because the clay in his fingers has given him the idea to make instead of pots naked women with " big and firm" breasts. All what can symbolize is important for what happens then. He starts to live behind that wooden fence in the court yard of his workshop. It is filled soon with many naked women, and all of them have in the end bitten breasts.
It is something that gives him satisfaction. He could not have imagined how free he became by this act.
This poem reads like a declaration by Ritsos to a special meaning of freedom, namely the freedom to live your own craziness, provided you do not harm anyone else.
Seldom does society allow for such craziness to simply exist. Anyone disturbing by falling out of the usual pattern, he will soon be taken away, if not by the police or social workers, then by those who consider psychiatric places as normal institutions when they are in fact prisons in disguise. There exist as well closed stations for the very crazy ones. All of them look out the windows through bars, bars Ritsos knows only too well from his hard lived life.
Hatto Fischer
10.7.2013
« Yannis Ritsos | Zbigniew Herbert »