The Choices We Make

After my work is done I'm going to write a blog about all the times people say that life is about the choices we make. I'm going to describe the ways that it really is about that, and the ways that it isn't.

I'm going to talk about the gradual deconstruction of this idea and the grip that it has held on our society, from the middle ages on down past the present age.

In the middle ages, madmen were thought to have chosen a path of iniquitous action, which would surely lead them to eternal damnation unless their souls could be saved.

Today we believe instead that people suffer from mental disorders which cause them to interpret stimulus differently from the way the rest of us do.

Who are the rest of us, anyway? Do you understand this page the same way that I do? Does every atom that belong to me really as good belong to you? We are dust of the same proto-stellar explosions, but I argue that this, my middle finger, as it hits this letter, "I," is mIne. This my Idea is mIne.

The argument is ludicrous, of course. The endless debate on the authorship of the Shakespeare plays and poems has shown us nothing if no that an author is more of scribe of a milieu or zeitgeist than an autonomous creator of new cultures. Well, a successful author, anyway. I coudl write a hundred novels without any plot, theme, narration, characterization, point of view or language. You might not want to read, them, though.

You'd be more interested, probably, in the Walts; Cronkite, Whitman or Disney. It's not that an author has to write down simply what's happening at a certain time and sign off at the end of the day's news. There's a placefor people who write about what they're feeling, and what they would like to do. Then there's a place for people who put together our everyday lives in absurd ways, mixing together the ideas of mice and men until we better see each from each side.

There are traditions to follow through even new genres. New dances and new romances are old stories with new characters. Movie remakes where the next new thing takes wing in the flight of the old great kings of storytelling. You meet me and audition me for the part of him. I am typecast before we begin and every step is somehow a test of our ability to dim the image of the archetype until we find the right light to make ourselves believe we've invented a new dance.

And we could invet a new dance. Every day we have the chance, as long as we can feel ourselves drivenby the rhythm in our own stuttering, splutterig, splitting, spitting pulse. We could walk new steps and face new consequences. See our own eyes through different lenses, doesn't that sound bright?

But it wouldn't be right. There's a way things are done and a way things are fun, and surprising evryone is only one aesthetic. It doesn't have to be athletic, this search for a new earth or a bold, new way of looking at the old. It doesn't have to get us hot and cold. It's not really a choice, either, to speak in this voice. It's a condensation of time and nation.

The doctrine of self-determination can be overdeteministic even as it is simply ritualistic. But it sticks at the point that we try to believe taht what we are deoing, in the inaction of an aesthetic requirement for newness is new. It sticks and sometimes it stops and we are not at all ironic when we crave retro. The tradition of innovation works in harmony with our tradition of tradition, itself.

I could teach you a new dance called the nuclear fission, a dance that's hard to do and exposes all our faults, and you'd try to learn it, to try to understand my perspective and my thoughts. You'd be more interested, probably, in the waltz.