Freewill the Oxymoron

Ganik discusses his struggles with freedom, power, and influence.

Freedom: that acclaimed grandiosity that so many of my peers throw themselves over the edge for. To be free of pain and to live with ease; to take each moment as good and just and to see each thing as love and stardust. This is the dream of the weak. Oh I have been so weak, let me tell you, weaker than maybe any of the others I've known. But I - and likely you - have also a strength that sustains, perhaps occasionally misdirected, which sours hard at such a strong dream to be free. The opposition inside me, “you are not a creature to be free! To be free is to be nothing!” it implored, for years my mind only seeing it addressed to what drives me. It is because of such weakness I have that I now see the weakness in that dream. Even in this moment I feel splotches about me which whisper that it would be so good to be unattached; I feel those whispers of surrender. There is purpose above all else to be attended, that attention which throws us under heavy blow after heavy blow. Us as the world is a destructive way to move when we are so many weak through and through. What are we weak by? Well, that ferocious knowing of heavy blow after heavy blow. It is our remaining intellect which predicts the coming pain and tells us early that it will be bad. Bad like the death throes of a closed system. This early warning system and our own complexity locks down fortitude and we trust in numbness to secure passage through such pressure and writhing. Numbness tells us right away that we must find feeling again, but that numbness survives through the dismissal of meaning so the feeling it directs us to is the nearest pleasure.

What purpose could there be that sets such pain inside you where it is felt fully in its badness and thanked? This purpose could be a direction towards the endless horizon. Far off a day when the world sings as one - do not pretend it already does. How can this numbness be avoided? We must accept the prerequisite of contextual influence for individual power to emerge. And I have been so weak; still I only see what I say. My play is still of weakness today, but I see that weakness and I tell it that it is also that context which is creating my power.

So what am I? Am I object or am I subject? Now, let us not confuse being subject with perceiving subject. I say I surely perceive subject in all directions. Perhaps I even perceive object somewhere, but that I could never know. How could I? All I see is all I see. To verify object I must see beyond all I see. By definition, I cannot do that. Can I then know if I am object? There is this idea that to be thinking is to exist. The implication of this is that something exists which thinks, rather than that thinking exists. That leap is not one I will take, friend. I am subject which perceives subject. Clearly this can invalidate everything I have told you but, as I suspect you are also subject which perceives subject, that is for you to decide.

For I to state for you that the pursuit of freedom is weakness must be founded on something. Perhaps it can even be said that the pursuit of freedom is the strongest of strengths, only when its impossibility is tacked permanently in front of the eye. Which link is there between that far off horizon and the concession of freedom’s futility? I venture that it is in movement which should be by all accounts hopeless, yet still dances painfully into the night.

Author's Note

work in progress