The Bath:


Martha and Helen spent their time developing a habit of impaling people on hypothetical spears. They assumed the worst of everyone, and after a few cups of coffee, they unearthed even more despicable facets of the person in question. For 20 years the sour notes of their character assassinations were reduced to shorthand nods and smirks. If they happened to be in a coffee shop or restaurant, everyone was fair game. They chewed on the staff, whispered about patrons, and even nibbled on the quick passerby with razor critique.


Martha and Helen nurtured each other, insofar they honed their critical imaginations of other human beings. Their observations weren’t necessarily true or false, and each critique led to a new and insufferable speculation. In every direction they saw failure, stopping of course, at their own conclusions.



Helen was a widow and Martha was divorced. They had been married to their respective husbands for long enough to have settled into an unmoving shape. Their similar experiences made commiseration easy and effortless, and after finding each other, they found little need for other company. By the end of their 21^st year together they behaved much like twins; as 2 parts of a shared mind.



When Helen had her first heart attack, Martha’s mind started to show her a future without Helen. The details were decorated in the most painful and grievous outcomes, having only her miserable imagination to use. Helen however had a different sort of mental haunt. While in recovery, she began to see a future where she was running, or swimming. She could see her flabby arms, and her purple lined legs. She could see the sweat and the gray matted hair. The worst features of the mirror were shown dancing and shuffling about. She hated herself, or rather she could not turn away from the vision, even as her typical life resumed.



Until one day, Helen told Martha about her dreams, about how she hated seeing herself exhausted and enfeebled, like a withered and sloppy hag. Martha could see the image clearly, and began crying, and after some time, shared her nightmares of her dearest friend not being in her life. They held each other, and let the moment past, they did not speak about it again for a year. Their lives resumed their habits like nothing happened.



Helen had her second heart attack while she was driving. After the hospital called Martha, she rushed to the hospital with no regards for anyone. She hated her fellow human beings, and their existence. The cars were in her way, blocking the path to her star in the darkness. Such desperation makes people reckless, and in her narrow vision. Martha crashed into a 1979 Dodge Dart while running a stop sign.



The collision nearly killed Martha, and after 27 hours of intensive care, she stabilized, but remained in a coma.



Helen recovered slowly from her heart attack and despaired at the loss of her friend’s company. She visited her daily, holding her hand and whispering vile gossip about the front-desk personnel, the inept doctors, and the dreadful parade of horrible people passing through.



However, something happened during these visits, which began to affect Helen. Martha’s absence began to interrupt their habitual commiseration, even with the daily whispers. Helen started to think about herself again, and the idea of exercise did not seem to be as horrific. Little by little the internal voice of self-preservation showed Helen she could exercise without the sense of self-loathing, perhaps live long enough to see Helen if she comes out of the coma. The idea of seeing Martha again drove her to begin exercising.



Perhaps not having a loyal friend to commiserate with, or perhaps the second heart attack finally struct a chord within. Helen tried her best to become healthy, a new person. However, a lifetime of habits is not easily undone. Helen regressed month after month, unable to change into a new shape or fix her faulty heart.



Helen suffered from being only one person in a 2-person mind, and the second part was deep in a coma. She tried for a year, still half-despising the image in the mirror, still thinking half-thoughts in fractured conclusions. She began visiting her friend Martha longer each day.



6 months later something happened to Helen. In those moments of staring into her friend’s cold face. Morning after morning, conversations with no answers, questions with no replies, a pitiful soliloquizes rolled over Helen’s tongue; dry and desperate. Eventually the words dried up, and silence was all they had.



Helen decided she didn’t want to leave Martha in a coma and began making plans of a most ceremonial nature. She waited until one evening when the staff was thin. They had already grown to ignore her due to her regular attendance. She was not physically very strong, but Martha was only paper and bones at this point.



Helen put Martha into a wheelchair and dressed her with a blanket and hat. She wheeled her out of the hospital and managed to get her into her car with only minimal effort. The staff wouldn’t discover the empty bed until later in the evening during the regular shift rotation.

Once at Helen’s house, she drew a bath and wheeled her friend into the blue-tiled room. Candles were set around the edge of the windows and on the shelves, which usually contained towels. The dull light was pleasant and calm. Helen lowered Martha into the bath; her naked and wrinkled body offered no response, her body slack with indifference.



The candlelight soaked the room with a golden fuzz, smearing the wrinkles of Martha. Her body floated momentarily with the soft pressure of Helen’s hands as she lifted her up partially out from the water. The hospital crew was efficient in their cleaning, but not complete. Helen put on some soft music; the Twin Peaks album reminded her of conversations they indulged in, they effortlessly diced the love stories apart in mockery and caustic tongues, however tonight was different. This time the music didn’t seem as cliché or naïve. She looked down at her friend, having never told her what she meant, how much their conversations filled her with the same candlelight as this night. She gently used a washcloth, whipping the hospital smell, the grime of age, and her neglected tangled hair. This continued for a few songs until the caress of the cloth on her face erased some of the familiar scowl. With utmost care, Helen turned her over to wash her back, following her age spots, her frail body, and motionless limbs, until reaching the tips of her curled fingers. She lingered in Martha’s hands; unraveled the crooked fingers, placing her hand in hers, and talked to Martha, one last soliloquies of a fading duet, ending in the soft crackle of “I love you.” The tonal soundtrack played until her tears welled into heavy drops, falling into the cloudy waters.


Helen then submerged her friend and waited long enough to be sure she was gone. Then with a sense of relief, she called the hospital and told them what happened.

A Short Essay on Freewill:



If you will pardon a couple minutes of a prickly descent into a philosophical blackberry patch, then I will try and leave you with a tart and lingering taste self-determination. To begin I wish to first define the boundaries of the blackberry patch, or rather a basic description of choice, free will, and determinism.



The thorns of free will can be described as the feeling of agency. Rather than a metaphysical description, I would like to delve into this feeling of freewill, because I think there are some nuances worth pointing out. The feeling a freewill can be empowering, and a crafted story of how you can make choices, plan, discover, or learn. Encouragement like “you can do anything!’, or “you can achieve you dreams if you put some effort into it!” both describe the ability to do something or overcome something. These narratives assert that people can have some control over their lives, that your desires can be realized. Plus, it feels good to be empowered, to overcome.



Which moves us to the stem of the blackberry plant of freewill.



Control is elusive, and often neglected unless someone can achieve absolute control. Take hunger for example, when feeling a little hunger, you can plan to have dinner or breakfast, set out your ingredients and cook them. You can assert control over your resources and craft them into something. If you wait longer, hunger may feel more intense, making high cognitive functions more difficult, and when blood sugar drops planning becomes strained. Perhaps you eat something out of convenience or visit a default restaurant in times of uncertainty. There are plenty of strategies for avoiding starvation which involve a great deal of choice. Yet if you wait even longer, hunger may cause frantic choices to be made, taking advantage of desperate situations to resolve hunger like stealing or hunting. Even further, low blood sugar may induce coma, rendering choice impossible due to cognitive functions shutting down.



The same scale of control can be applied to driving, dating, conversation, and a variety of other environments which allow for selection and choice.



As we follow the stem down to the dirt, we find the roots of the freewill-blackberry plant. These roots may stretch out over the shallow soil and become a patch or briar of the single blackberry plant. This analogous behavior may be called society or civilization. To organize ourselves as creatures, both practically and emotionally, we need agreed upon points of reference. Today’s society involves things like lease agreements, lawyers, incarceration, consent, legal age limits, applications, surveys, and credit cards. All of which require a choice, or at least a minimum amount of agency from a single blackberry plant. Choice is a required illusion (depending on your metaphysical inclinations) for the structures we have built so far. Things like voting are considered very important and removing ideas like choice or freewill would describe an entirely different social structure. Conditions without choice are typically referred to as slavery. Before I regress further let’s continue with the assertion that choice is important to contemporary society.



The roots and the stem may be required, and the thorny pricks of self-responsibility dangerous to those unaware of the consequences of self-determination. This means that before the fruit is tasted, before the feeling of empowerment washes over, there may be a painful dread. This is the anxiety of too many options, too many things to select and evaluate. Choice becomes burdensome, heavy, and may provoke many people to avoid making choices all together. In this sense, choice is can blossom out into an endless abyss of possibility, with nothing to reduce or curtail nausea of descent into doubt. Free will in this environment may be considered a curse, or rather, something unproductive to society because it can paralyze those with the greatest potential.



Inversely, a narrative of heroism or single mindedness can overcome the doubt. This is seen in sports players, war heroes, those with the instincts and compunction to act. This is an inverse to the dread of possibilities. There is only one path, and with certainty the player acts out their role with a resolute and narrow focus. Here choice may disappear, but the empowerment has run its course and produced a moving, acting and determined character upon the world stage. However, every sun has a zenith and the fall from such overwhelming heroism may lead to even deeper abysmal depths when the glamour fades. How many acts of heroism can someone achieve before they stumble, if only for a step, before the earth reclaims the bright fruits of their labors? How long can the pleasant feeling of success hold against an aging body?



These questions do not have debatable or strict lines, they are simply used to point out that perhaps different strategies maybe insufficient for those with a high magnitude imagination. A thing which provides human beings with their most potent tool. Imagination can overcome obstacles where muscle cannot, it can reveal choices, invent new evolutionary strategies, and new narratives for heroes and villains to play out. Without imagination, the fruit of plant of free will withers and dies, having nowhere to grow to, sequestered to the whims of of change.  



So where are the edges of freewill, and why does it matter?



In a disembodied and intellectual sense, it doesn’t, simply because of the lack of meaning points other than the human condition. However, as conscious and self-deterministic creatures we must navigate the eddies of change, the turbulence of society, and the soil of consequences. We may tend the garden of our choices diligently and still see famine and rot. We may toil and weed, cultivating the sweetest fruit, and yet it could still amount to nothing. The vanity of life may still make any effort fruitless, and freewill seems to contain nothing which is exempt from this vanity.



In conclusion, freewill exists as much as blackberries exists, or hunger exists. It remains a relevant cornerstone of the human condition if the rules of society hold. However, if you delve further and travel into the dark soil of determinism, then another altogether different madness awaits. Determinism is a direct assertion of knowledge, or rather the certainty of knowledge. The concept of determinism is that with enough knowledge anything and everything can be predictable, unfolding based on pre-existing conditions. The ability to predict an outcome is proportionate to the amount of knowledge. With complete knowledge comes complete prediction, and we have little ability to know exactly how complete our knowledge is.



The certainty of determinism can be undone with the phrase “We don’t know what we don’t know.” The ability to explore the unknown arguably depends on imagination, innovation and empowerment, which I think rests in the territories of freewill and choice.