Often in my life I have felt as if I lack self-possession. I make choices I do not want to make, I become a person who I do not want to be, and with whom I do not identify.
I have sought the means to assert myself, in the world, in relationships, and in myself. I can think of only one short period of time wherein any of these efforts were met with successes.
And to my own misery and humor, I can not identify nor recall the cause for such success. All I remember is a kind of “mood”.
I hope that by stewing in this past that maybe I can gain or lose whatever is necessary to make anew a similar period of felicity.
In all that was lost and forgotten, I only have two memories of this mood.
The first part is a kind of childishness. The other is a certain form of surrender.
The childishness requires carelessness without incuriosity. I remember having so many questions about my own future, but none tied to that which lie beyond the day, that were not ephemeral and abstract.
The surrender I think was that abstraction of the future.
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I recall a quote from Grand Prix (1966);”The danger? Well, of course. But you are missing a very important point. I think if any of us imagined - really imagined - what it would be like to go into a tree at 150 miles per hour we would probably never get into the cars at all, none of us. So it has always seemed to me that to do something very dangerous requires a certain absence of imagination.”
I remember that feeling, the air free of imagination. Imagination is a killer of curiosity. I think it is more important to have questions rather than answers. Answers are things we should be suspicious of.
Imagination answers all the questions born of curiosity, faithfully or unfaithfully. I remember abandoning my truths and answers for things.
Answers, and truth, offer some security from questions. Questions prod us, drive us on, not in an unpleasant way, but in a way which delivers us to ourselves by external force, and that can be unpleasant for some. Answers, truths, or what they really are, which is judgement, are a cheat to life-making. It passes one’s decisions on to an abstraction of the world. By reason and answer we have punished the world.
And not only by answers. Like from before, from answers we make “truth”, from truth we make judgment, and from judgment we have made odious and unnatural regulation.
The state, and its ideological and social parasites of capitalism and bigotry are the culmination of these regulations.
But these are old realizations, things I have previously covered in changed words.
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What I am more directly interested in is to challenge an idea which I have formerly discussed. In the past I’ve written that people possess an internal and interminable power. Given that, so long as someone lives (remains a person) they can take action, no matter how difficult, or doomed it is to be, to change their circumstances. Essentially, it is ability, not permission, that determines someone’s possession of power, and their freedom and participation in the social and stateless process of democracy.
Sometimes I wonder if that is really true. What if power possesses us? Our ideas make us do strange things. It seems as if agency and decision making do not cause the most important events of today.
It seems the children of maladaptive ideation; systems and ideologies have consumed mankind. As they feed on sentience itself, they manipulate and abuse us.
The closer an individual is to authority, to the heart of these systems, the more and more their power seems to turn, and be wielded against them, the more they are made empty vessels of fleshy mechanisms.
It seems as if the world we construct is now designed for us. The masters of the world were once leaders, warriors, organizers, and geniuses, now they are vessels, struck dumb and enslaved by this power invented.
So then, what is it? When does power unbecome our possession to possess us? Is it simply given up? Submitted and subsumed for authority, for a higher station, or is there some more sinister, more active, more commanding force within ideology that compels this action?