Saturday, October 18, 2008

UNDER SURVEILLANCE



I’ve been following myself around, observing my actions, enumerating the possible motives, calculating the probabilities that I have never been in control of anything I have ever done. I am coming to find much agreement between the theory put forth by intensive study of social insects and my experience of observing how many of the indications that I am alive are admittedly authorized by other than me, the voyeuristic stalker of myself, whoever may remain after this investigation into the atoms of the self.

I know that I have a knack of being able to fill in all the unknowns with a comfortable story so facilely that I often forget and take it for reality rather than the life journal it is. Experience is a constant expansion of that saga as my borderless worldscape invites diversity as the fractal identity of scale ties it all together in a mobius loop of parts and wholes, chickens and eggs, us and them.

If I can do that with the unknown that confronts me every day so automatically that I mistake my painting for the tree without vigilant awareness, how much more refined have I become with the story of how I meant to get where I find myself. I could possibly have become so slick at the weaving the story of my life and what I’m doing that I interpret the changes in the hive of my biological bees as they motivate my thoughts and actions with a plausible narrative of what seems to be happening as I go along in such lock-step lip-sync that, like a glib football announcer calling action on the field, I can seem to be in control, at least enough to fool myself most of the time and would be monitors always.

Yipee! Something else to slow down for, new flowers to smell, more shit to dig up to fertilize new growth. It may turn out that the only thing left in my control is my attitude about being an ongoing chemical reaction which like the basis for every attitude, is a choice of having to or getting to be whatever we are.

That leaves the question of what is it that is left with such an awesomely simple choice?

9 comments:

red dirt girl said...

if i am naught but an ongoing chemical reaction, albeit a mutated one as i am told that my own particular chemicals appear to be out of balance with the rest of the world's..

if i am part and parcel of a mobius loop, chickens, technicolor eggs and a fractured identity ...

then i have the dubious ability to be without and within myself simultaneously ...

choice. choice. choice. we humans now have decided we have choice. did the fish who crawled out of the sea onto land - and lived...

the same fish who's chemical reactions were so out of whack, he his gills, did he have choice?

are we so in our heads these days?
i so want to connect and disconnect at the same time ...

what story am i telling myself today?

xxx
rdm

Yodood said...

Usually the same story every day with external influences for flourishes. Or not. As I said, this is a theory under intense scrutiny.

Yodood said...

By the way, that was "fractal identity", but if you find your identity fractured, maybe its time for a rewrite of the story, which I took the switch from girl/scribbler to the mule to be.

red dirt girl said...

fractured, indeed was intended ....

remember, i suffer from mbp: multiple blog personnae ....

xx
rdm

bulletholes said...

Hey 'Dood!
I wrote a big long thing about my Dad last year and qwhen I finished it and had my sister read it I discovered that the ending was not as nice and tidy as i remember it.
The way I remembered it the Nursing home had called at 5am to let me know Dad had passed.
It wasn't that way.
They called again at 8am to let us know he was sick with a bladder infection.
Between 5 and 8 I had gone back to sleep and was not there withmyu sister and family at 9 qwhen he actually passed...
Am I traumatized?
Not a bit.
I started to rewrite the ending a few months ago, jusdt ain't got around to it.
Some of my stories I do "tweak" a bit, some I probably actually believe the fabrication, but I hope I am not deluding myself.

Yodood said...

Hey, Holes,
You make a good point about being honest with ourselves. Unless we are, our experience will be no better, even worse, than second hand information because we rarely question our perceptions, and only a little more, our memory. The self is the only thing we have the power to improve, the rest follows.

bulletholes said...

"The self is the only thing we have the power to improve, the rest follows."
Yeah, well, some of my stories could use a little work...and my God the grammer....grammir...grammar!

troutsky said...

Coming here reminds me I need to spend more time reflecting and less time struggling.

Yodood said...

Hi Trout,
We teach our children to be better strugglers than we were, ensuring that catching on to the game may come later when they're too worn out to struggle. It is stepping outside one's own prison without bars that makes the rest of liberation possible.

A good life is possible without compromise or confrontation in plain sight of but disconnected from the grid.

Just as atheists are not anti-theists — theocracy just doesn't seem valid enough to include in their life's world view — I am also apolitical in that just the act of expecting, waiting for or demanding that our "representative" tell us to do the right thing is the lie were taugh to tell ourselves silently everyday that opiates the herded herd until the bleating of a closer ox being gored. Exactly like an orthodoxy.