Alba Mastromatteo is from Ohio in a suburban town that has so little to do it inspires nothing but roundabout musing of what the meaning of life is. She spends her time staring at blank walls in conversation with herself surrounded by corn and miscellaneous alpaca competitions.

What is silly about free will is that it doesn’t do much. Sometimes we perceive this power over our lives through the actions we choose, but this power is not as expansive as it feels. The idea that our actions comprise our futures rather than some predetermined fate gives us the illusion that we have control over where we will end up. But our future is intrinsically dependent on people or things outside our control. We can’t really do anything. 

I am a firm believer that the idea of free will cannot exist on its own. I mean, it can, just not with any sense of internal peace. People have to adopt a sort of “what happens, happens” mindset to survive. Freedom comes from the connection of these two ideas. You need to know what you can’t control and let go of it. That, for me, often means pulling that obsession out of the tight, white knuckled vice grip of my mind. Obsession will do nothing other than have you staring at your ceiling at 3 a.m. wondering about the infinite scope of the future. I would know. This was me the last few nights… the last few years.

I’ve had a few conflicts with free will myself. I learned that my hip sockets are too shallow by some strand of DNA that coded itself into me and screwed me over for the rest of my life. (Without my consent might I add.) It tore cartilage and left me with the need for two surgeries, over a year of recovery, and a possibility of never dancing the same again, something I’ve done since before I gained the ability to form memories. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t stopped dancing yet. I grasp at exercising my limited free will over this out of my control phenomenon. I claim the only sense of power that I can. Desperately. And I cry as I walk up and down campus realizing I don’t remember what my hips are supposed to feel like, what the world feels like without that buzzing pain in the back of my mind.

But I’ve tried to let go I’ve let go of wondering what my life could be without this axe hanging over my neck. I don’t have any of the answers I need. 

I have to let the cosmos or the universe or whatever higher being you believe in tug on the strings of humanity from beyond the clouds. I put my choice out into the world, and it being out there is all I have power over. I choose to dance, and whatever happens, happens. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

Mikhail Grosse, overlooked runnerup for the national oedipal poetry competition. Enjoys hiking and work friendships.

Free Will: the Bakhtinian perspective

There is a common misconception that stifles most Free Will debates before they can even begin. Far too many assume that a refutation of Free Will requires belief in dogma or predestination. It does not. The only father that need control us be the literal one: the progenitor. Only by rejecting nurture, or coming close to it, does one realize the irony in the phrase ‘breaking the cycle.’ Free will does not exist because our development isn’t a matter of parenting style, but the same grotesque renewal at the heart of every spring equinox.

At the end of his shifts, my father would follow a strict routine. By the time he finally returned the cab to the taxi lot, he would have already bought his communion wafers and wine: a bag of plain Utz potato chips and a 10-dollar Pinot Noir named ‘Prophecy.’ I knew this was ritual, but it took a while longer to realize just how much I was participating.  My father would be reborn through me, just as his father was through him. 

I tried to avoid it. That if I swore off his festive chaos, I would somehow exempt myself from the prophecy in motion. Yet hurriedly picking up the wrapping paper left over from one of his surprise gifts only delayed the inevitable. Whatever part of him demanded constant celebration fascinated me: no matter how ‘unsustainable’ I felt it was. Couch-side retellings of his prime would play out eerily similar in my life, just as it had in his. This persisted even as his shifts got longer, and our interactions limited to the impression he left on the furniture. Everything from aesthetic sensibilities to names of friends — the coincidences continued. Without him ever needing to teach me, we shared the same secret appetites. 

My father was thin and clean-shaven for most of my life, but one day he seemed to swell with a wild grey beard and a truly round belly. He announced that as I finally became a man, he was transforming not into a senior but a ‘seenager.’ I understood completely. He had become the pregnant hag: brimming with as much new life as he was losing. Every ‘uncharacteristic’ impulse of mine made sense. As he enters a wintry twilight, I find myself on the cusp of a renewing spring. We are as individual as regenerating cells. Claiming to break the generational cycle is as ridiculous as saying you won’t be changing seasons. We lack agency the same way an arm does; free will does not exist because we are but parts of a collective body.

Rosenberg Scopes-Monkey is an anarcho-posadist-primitivist, in that order, and another thing, don’t print in the papes that I got pissy, I’m not pissy. As a leader in the hand-model labor-rights movement, his famous catchphrase, “if the glove don’t fit, you must-a quit,” was famously stolen by Kanye West’s former stepdad or something.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson argues that there’s no such thing as free will. Everything leading up to your life at this point, the concoction of quarks and chemicals in the air, what you ate for breakfast, all weaves the universe of your decisions into a predetermined conclusion. I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a fugly tool who can’t keep his mouth shut, so I do believe in free will. I will oppose every musing of the enemy without hesitation or condition. Stupid idiot. He crawls on his knees every night in prayer that he can be cloaked in the fleeting aura of one Carl Sagan.

 

Remember when he tried to cheat on his wife? No? I do. Probably more than she does. He should have stayed voice-acting for that daft suckling pig in Gravity Falls. Maybe then he could prove some use, wallowing in the muck of avarice. Maybe then I could have gone vegan, like the metalhead who makes my refreshers and Spirited Away want me to be. No pig products, I say, so that I may never invite his putrid pork belly or — god forbid — that of his squeaking offspring into my pure flanks of flesh. That wasn’t real, though. Cartoons are made of coloring books. No need to give up your pig milk, everyone.

 

I don’t believe in flat Earth (cuck shape, my email’s on the website) or anything, but his diss track response to that flat earther was useless. His poor nephew had to pen that for him. Probably because Neil has never thought before speaking. Pre-NWA flow, post-NWA self-importance. During-NWA need to go solo and condemn everyone involved.

 

Did you know he named his child after one of Pluto’s moons, after declaring Pluto isn’t a planet? That’s crazy. I would never name my kid after some thing hanging around the guy I killed. The world does not need another Jackie Kennedy.

 

Free will, I say. Bill Nye can go fuck himself, too.

Finn Delmar Baycroft is a freelance writer and a 4x winner of the prestigious North Atlantic Harpoon Games. He lives on a small farm in Nebraska with his wife and their four barracudas.

Discourse on the Orca

It is thirty feet long. It weighs 10 metric tons. It is a beast of sleek, varnished beauty. It has been known to torture its prey, skinning cetatians alive before ripping out their tongues. Twice it has managed to snack on a moose. It is the belle of the ball, the star of the show, the notch-finned prince of the ocean. It is the orca, and it has free will.

Director Simon Wincer said as much in his oft-misunderstood opus, “Free Willy.” Unfortunately, in the years since the documentary’s release — it was filmed in 1992 on a budget of just 380 million USD — Wincer’s sweeping narrative has been hailed not as a sobering indictment of contemporary metaphysics but as a childish, crowd-pleasing blockbuster. This is a mistake. Above all, Wincer’s film was a warning: if we are to free ourselves, we must first free Willy.

To understand why this is the case, we must return to Jesse, the orphaned, homeless, dipsomaniacal subject of Wincer’s work. The boy finds solace in the wide, two-toned eyes of Willy, the film’s titular orca: the whale, Jesse sees, is unmistakably alive. It can think. It can choose. In this fragile moment, the orca bridges the oceanic gap between theory and praxis. Wincer’s masterful direction allows us to see what we have always known to be true: the orca has stories to tell, secrets of a remote and pelagic world. It is only waiting for us to ask.

Even if some cinema-goers (myself among them) could follow Wincer’s argument, most Americans were all too willing to avert their eyes. Year by year, we continue to ignore the glaring autonomy of the orca. We deny it a mind. We deny it a soul. Wincer, of course, has tried to recapture our attention. Twice before his untimely death at the beak of a frenzied octopus, the director returned to the story of Willy the whale. Sadly, neither Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home nor Free Willy 3: The Rescue could break through the bleak, staticky, nomological noise of our culture. Also, they did much worse than Free Willy 1 at the box office. 

And so here, now, on the thirty-third anniversary of Wincer’s masterpiece, we are left with a world far worse than he could have ever imagined. The creatures we call “killer whales” have begun to believe our lies. They doubt their miraculous freedom. They jerk and flail in the water. They bash themselves against the hulls of our ships. The Jesses of our time find in the eyes of the orca something vast and sad — a sheen, a cataract, a fog hung low o’er the open sea. 

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