Variation #3

The commentariat in every age and epoch, with their eagerness to adjudicate and their need to dictate meaning, have in their various commissions formulated countless ways to capture the essence of liberation, as though it could be tapped and extracted like a syrup, or clad about with a definition both bespoke and interminable. The impulse to frame and fetter, to bind within some concrete distinction, may occur any time a person becomes narrativised, the story etching out a permanent record within which an existential death is often guaranteed. It is said that a person is not a person without a story, but in the end a story may after all serve as executioner rather than liberator, undermining the very personhood claimed to be inhered.