very brief and superficial remarks on free will

i'm going to austin, tx next week. i'm looking forward to it. it's been so long since i've been anywhere.

a friend was talking to me about free will yesterday so now i'm thinking about it. i guess i think it's like a necessary illusion - you need to believe that you have it, while also understanding on some level that you can't act on what you don't know or don't understand, and that there will always be things you don't know and don't understand and you're ability to act will always be limited by those factors, as well as other things about your style of thought and temperment that have of developed in you just from being alive as long as you have been. Those last two things might not be limiting, but they do kind of determine who you are and what you're going to do. I feel like a good tradgedy is when the ultimate disaster comes about in a way that couldn't really be avoided, because for the hero to have avoided it would have required them to be someone else entirely.

one thing i wonder about is how the whole free will thing gets applied to performance. like, how you perform when eyes are on you kind of being determined by sommething larger about the context of who you are, where you are, and who's in the room with you. there's that one socratic dialoge, ion?, where socretes is talking to this guy who's really good at saying one kind of poem (homer's), but completely fucks up whenever he tries to recite anything else. so he gets into this whole crisis of "am i actually good at this or am i a fake" and socrates/plato chalks it up to a kind of divine inspiration that's there with homers poetry but nothing else. idk maybe there's more to it - i haven't read it in like a year. but when i did read it, i remember thinking that it was describing something real because those weird little discepencies are always popping up - one situation where i can talk very easily and others where i can hardly get the words out of my mouth, some performances where it feels like singing and playing is like hard-wired into me and others where i'm constantly forgetting lyrics and playing the wrong chords. i'm sure everyone has some kind of experiences like these, and of course most of the time it's a matter of preperation. but sometimes i wonder if it's something else, too. it's kind of profound to come into contact with your limitations and speculate on what exactly is happening with you.

i need to learn more about spinoza's take on free will. i keep going back to the ethics but i feel like that's even harder read than anti-oedipus for me. honestly though, the free will question has never really been super appealing to me as a main focus because who actually cares. maybe it just feels like lame philosophy to me as opposed to the cool and interestesing theory. idk maybe i'll think more about it and change my mind.