condamné

The esprit of Sartre has been flitting about, hovering, casting a shadow on these days. He said once that there is no a priori meaning to life, that we are charged with giving it our own meaning. Condemned to be free, we are to make our own fate.

It's not as easy as it sounds. We're only free in the present when we are free from our history--cultural and personal. [That's probably why drugs are so popular, allowing us to forget our past and be truly free in the present--and unmindful of the future.]

Over the weekend, without any particular provocation, I had a sudden return of mental images from my past; in general, I am not very good about keeping my own history present, so it was a welcome change. I realized that we are imprisoned by our past even when we don't forget it; repressing it, we store it in our subconsciousness and are still controlled by it. And, being imprisoned by our past, we need to be aware of this while acting in the present so as not to enchain ourselves in the future to a maximum security prison.

Every time you read it or say it, it makes another copy in your brain.

So if everything is in there, recorded by our mental supercomputer, there is no real escape from the past; we might as well be aware of its influence so we can consciously choose it: bend to it (so as not to repeat a mistake) or stubbornly oppose it.

And all of this, of course, takes place in an ideal vacuum, where physical bodies don't exist. Our bodies constrain us, too, and shouldn't be ignored. JPS thought we could control them--even believing that Simone should be able to control her seasickness. Clearly, we are controlled, to some extent by our physicality. In fact, it's like a wrestling match between our bodies and our minds. [That is, Sartre, as a man, thought of it like a wrestling match, one that he could win, but maybe we should see it more like a dance.] I think our physical bodies are a random element, like a knuckleball dancing in the breeze, constantly remind us that we are physical beings first and intellectual and spiritual beings second.

I don't know if thinking like this will help me make decisions: I tend to either wait till all the facts are in (procrastinate) or impulsively choose at random. Some sort of middle ground would be helpful.