I’ve been thinking a lot lately about fate. Well, in a way. Stop me if I’ve said this all before…
How much of who we are and what we do is out of our control? I don’t know the answer to that question. Part of me wants to say that we are who we are and we can’t help ourselves. You can interpret that statement as me saying, “People don’t change,” or you can interpret it as me saying, “We have no control over our actions.” I’m saying both. Another part of me wants to believe in the ol’ rugged individualism, the power of self-determination. We are the masters of our ~ fate ~ and those that succumb to the worst of themselves have failed morally or otherwise.
Obviously, people much smarter and deader than I have thought about the above quandaries for a millennia and more. I’m sorry to say, you aren’t going to find the answer to it in this here newsletter. But I think it’s an interesting problem to think about and we should think about it more. We here meaning each of us as individuals.
I recently started reading Rachel Aviv’s latest book entitled Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us. The introduction already has me thinking about my own life and the story of it that I tell myself and how much of that produces self-fulfilling prophecies of how things will play out. Can the worst struggles of the mind in life be psychosomatic in a sense? Perhaps. Something bad happens and then a mental loop starts, some sort of buggy code that errors out continuously until addressed with a patch of a pill or therapy.
Do you think you control the decisions you make? Or do the tiny electric firings between the synapses of your mind fire at will?
The below is some fiction I’ve been trying my damnedest to think about and work on. If you read and have thoughts, please do tell me. Feedback of any kind helps. I may have already shared this with some of you. Sorry for the repost if so.
Determined
“It was always going to be this way,” he said.
He took out the neon green BiC lighter from his right hip pocket and then a worn leather wallet from the left, a strand of stitching at its corner trying to break free into oblivion. Inching his chair closer to the dust covered IKEA coffee table between them, he removed a bill from the wallet. Hovering over the small circular mirror before him, he laid the twenty dollar bill on top of the pile of cocaine, flattening the miniature Matterhorn. Andrew Jackson stared back bemused. Tightening the bill to a two-dimensional plane with his left hand’s thumb and index finger, he began to to run the length of the BiC back and forth across the presidential portrait. Slowly at first then picking up speed, his experience showed through every stroke. Beneath the bill, the rocky clumps of illegality became a thin layer of powder. All to maximize surface area.
“I mean, like, from a philosophical standpoint. Like, we were always going to end up here tonight. The chemicals in our brain fired and interacted in a molecular dance to bring us here and we had no control over it, you know? Like…did you choose this? Did I? It’s all an illusion, choice.”
She nodded in agreement and replied, “Yeah, sure.”
Her inner monologue began to quietly question how the fuck she ended up here in the first place then wondered if he was actually right. Did she come here on her own volition or was something potentially simpler going on, something she couldn’t control. The candles on the ledge of his bookshelf flickered to and fro and she thought that that was the real dance happening, the dance of light across this man’s living room wall fed by the solo samba of each tiny fire feet away. First dates? She always seemed to pick the best of ‘em. Then again, it would be a good story for the girlfriends tomorrow. Or once the hangover dissipated.
“I majored in Philosophy for a bit in college, you know,” he said with an air of authority. She saw right through it, knowingly reading into the massive work that the phrase ‘for a bit’ was doing in his comment. It’s one thing to take a Philosophy course once or twice a semester your sophomore year. It’s another to have an actual degree in the field. Did he even graduate? She wasn’t sure and his dating profile on the app hadn’t offered much information on the matter.
I have a book of quotes from things read that I keep. I may have mentioned it previously here. I can’t recall. So, for lack of anything else to say, I shall share some with you here now.
1.
People dies as they live and they live as they are.
Rachel Bedard in The New Yorker issue from March 6th, 2022 from the article, “What My Grandmother Knew About Dying”
2.
Elected in 1952, Eisenhower proceeded to secure his party’s acquiescence to the big-government principles of Roosevelt’s New Deal order. In 1954, he presided over a comprehensive piece of legislation meant to render America’s high-tax regime permanent. It restored the tax on the highest income bracket to a level (91%) near its World War II peak. Eisenhower understood that high taxes constituted a burden. But, he asserted (in language that would shock 21st century Republicans), it was a burden that, “every American is proud to carry.”
Gary Gerstle in The New York Review of Books from the February 23rd, 2022 issue in the article, “When Americans liked Taxes”
3.
He didn’t ask, “Where will you spend eternity?” as religious the-end-is-near picketers did but rather, “With what, in this modern democracy, will you meet the demands of your soul?”
Saul Bellow from Ravelstein
Anywho, that’s all I have for you this morning. Enjoy that cuppa joe.
Best,
Rob
P.S. This song still slaps.