Freedom. Voices.

I've been in a digital retrograde for quite some time.  During the summer, I decided to commit to writing in my journal every day as a kind of creative/imaginative therapy, and the habit took so well that it eventually claimed the majority of my free thoughts.  My blog posts and even my facebook status updates diminished so radically, maybe even beyond the zero--I don't know that I will reestablish that habitual online presence again.  I don't particularly care.  I like writing in a journal with a fountain pen.

But today.  Today two of my students have cancelled late, so I have a free afternoon and a lot of thoughts to organize.  Since they somehow swirl in the universe of Pilgrims Dream, I thought to record them here.

Freedom.  Voices.

On an infinite field of equidistant points, no point is distinguishable from another.  Start anywhere.

Last night I watched Metropia, a semi-animated Swedish film set in a post-apocalyptic future where all of the metro systems in Europe have been connected by a corporation, Trexx, that would appear to be the only surviving power structure.  The main character begins to hear a voice.  He doubts his sanity.  But scientists at Trexx have developed a tool by which they can insert thoughts into a person's interior monologue.  Some worker sits at a desk, like any office job, shirt & tie, watches monitors, reports to supervisors, listens through headphones to his subject's--the main character--thoughts, and can turn on a microphone to thereby plant thoughts into his subject's mind.  These plants retain the sound of the worker's voice.  It is not entirely mind control.  The worker cannot dictate the actions of his subject.  He can only plant a thought, which the subject may or may not act upon.  In the case of the main character, the subject goes so far as to refuse to accept that the thought originates within himself, but by this, he is set apart.

Voices are a fascinating little dark and largely ignored corner of human experience.  I've tangled with them from time to time.  Here's the thing: we say, Only crazy people hear voices.  And yes, they do, and the thoughts they hear as voices have a powerful auditory quality--though I doubt this last aspect of the crazy-person-experience is very important.  We also say, It's impossible not to think, unless you are some kind of Zen master, and even then you can only manage to be thoughtless while you meditate.

It seems to me that to think is to hear a voice.  When I've analyzed my thoughts, I've realized that they come in varying qualities--I might even describe them as personalities.  Sometimes they are crude, brief, and full of expletives that are somehow meant to be humorous.  Sometimes they are disjointed, fragmented, maybe with an aura of striving, but locked up, broken apart, unable to communicate, but if they could, maybe toward coherence, or maybe not.  An elegant thought comes now and again; it sounds pretty.  Some thoughts run through my mind in recursive cycles, looping through some problem or idea in wider and wider loops, as if orbiting the unattainable center of a problem in an eccentric ellipse, going out further and further with the hope that on this return, by some strange, unidentifiable twist in the path, I'll crash straight through a center, and voila, problem solved: it doesn't happen, and sometimes I don't want it to happen.  Sometimes I indulge distraction.  Diamonds come too: perfect thoughts I can recognize as such.

Now and again, I have a thought after which I think, That thought wasn't mine.  It was someone or something else.

Things aren't so simple.

Perhaps the dangerous move is to identify any voice, any thought, as foreign.  Maybe, if you had a machine that allowed you to plant words in another person's mind, the most harmful words you could insert would not be some radical ideology or incoherent nonsense, but simply the words, That thought wasn't mine.

This thought isn't mine.

We buck at the possibility of mind control because it assaults our belief that freedom is an essential human right.

Loop gets larger.

Freedom is such a big word, such an incredibly influential word, at least to us.

I'd meant to mention earlier, without getting too deep, that Pilgrims Dream features a plotline in which Agents Grossberger & Troutslop plant words into the mind of Aleister Van Dirk.  I'd stolen this from Gloria Naylor's 1996, which resonated with me because of my longstanding interest in voices.

Freedom is one of the cornerstones of our culture--when we look into a future in which the influence of America and Europe has waned, when we confront China's rising power, we feel apprehensive because Chinese culture, at the very least, doesn't pay as much lip-service to freedom as does ours.

What if freedom isn't a question of rights but of possibility?

To place so much value on freedom is to assume that we have free will.  After all, we might think, we cannot fault a person for creating a mind control device if he did not create it out of his own free choice. Is it possible that someone has the bizarre fate to invent the first functional mind control device?

I'm getting loose with my words.  But this isn't the novel.

Myths and religions have come down on either side of the free-will/predetermination debate throughout the centuries.  Science seems to say that either everything is determined, or everything is a product of chance--whichever is true, it doesn't much matter since human choice doesn't enter the equations.  Electro-chemical processes are governed by physical law, without room for human choice, and electro-chemical reactions produce our thoughts and our actions.  Maybe they are fated, or maybe they are random, and maybe we were never free after all.

This can easily devolve.  Someone might say, if we don't choose our actions, if it is fated, or random, that so-and-so will commit mass-murder, then he is not truly responsible for that mass-murder: it wasn't his choice.  Therefore, we shouldn't punish him since we can only hold someone responsible for a freely chosen action.  The Judas problem.  But remember, if we don't have free-will, to talk about what we should or shouldn't do is a farce.  How we choose to respond to mass-murder would also be fated.  The crime and the punishment would both be predetermined.  There's no stepping out of that loop.  If some Einstein could prove that everything is determined by Fate, it would be the most ineffectual scientific discovery in history.

. . . my scientific, philosophical voice.


All the world's a stage
and the script is all around you
is how the script goes


In the beginning was the Word

and words words words

and I heard a Voice, and It spoke to me

as I speak to you

--this thought is not mine--

--that thought was not mine--

as it was in the beginning


Some thoughts lead nowhere.