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Drop

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Pre tree NYC

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Kennebunkport, Maine

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Free Willy

There was this movie that you may have heard about called “Free Willy”. It was about a whale, trapped in captivity. It got 57% on Rotten Tomatoes. Its sequel, Free Willy 2, got 36%. Free Willy 3 bumped up to 44%. Free Willy 4 doesn’t even have a rating there. That’s 4 films, and by god, Willy still isn’t free.

But if we look deeper: deeper than the deep end of Willy’s Whale Pool (yes, they are called that), here’s a Mariana’s trenchant observation: this is a film about free will. Free will. Free willy. It’s a metaphor, a piece of literature, using a whale to symbolize all of us. And why not a whale? It’s big, like all of us, and it has a blowhole. Which we don’t have, but it means it has lungs, which we do, so as an ocean-living mammal, we can relate.

As an example of free will, it offers us some perspective. Here is a whale (read: us), trapped in a routine of performance and rest, at the behest of humans. These humans adore the animal, but don’t see it’s suffering. Whales don’t have expressive faces. And that’s a good thing; imagine a whale jumping out of the water, with a massive, agonized human face, at the helm?

It can’t escape its confines. It does what it has to do in the culture of the performing aquatic animal. It meets the humans expectations and in trade receives food. It is made distant from its phylogenesis; and the divide between its natural state as whale and its nominal whalehood as performance mammal is a wedge driven into its mind. Were it born in confinement, it wouldn’t know the nature of its feeling of ill-at-ease, it would think life simply about discontent.

But if it were released into the wild, then is it free? If the self were the aegis of the self, and controlled by no other? There is no difference between the ocean and the pool. On the one hand, you make your own choices. On the other, they are made for you. But this choice is an illusion: the whale at sea follows the same routines; its self interest prevents any real freedom. It moves in lockstep with the comfort of the environment and the prevalence of the prey. It is not free of its nature. This is the illusion of free will. It’s the belief of freedom in theory, with its absence in practice. And that belief can be best described as feeling... “free willy”.

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J: Those things were a great invention (motioning to sliding document shelving unit machine). What a great space saver.

N: Yeah. You're being serious, right?

J: Yeah.

N: I agree. The computer though, that's the ultimate space saver.

J: The BRAIN.

N: Yeah.

[elevator door opens]