At about this time, I began an experiment to test the limits of my freedom in order to examine my actions to see if, at least in some sense, I could cause something to happen without it being attributable to another cause. To find if there was something I could really call ‘freedom’ in the things I did. I reasoned that I ought to be able to break the causal chain, or so I supposed. I wanted to impose my will purely and without reference to anything other than my will.
After sacrament meeting, if we were reverent and kept our fights, poking, fidgeting, and giggling, to a minimum, my father would take us out for an ice cream cone at the downtown drug store. We could have it dipped in a chocolate shell or plain. I thought to myself, can there be any easier test of free will than this? For surely it will be I that will choose the one or the other. So I made up my mind to decide the matter of which ice cream to get and then notice carefully through introspection what transpired in making that choice. So when we arrived I closed my eyes and with set jaw made my selection and then afterwards examined the case to see if I could determine why I chose what I did. But there were always reasons that seemed to determine my choice. Perhaps I had had two dipped cones in a row and to shake things up I would order a plain cone. Or perhaps, my sister or brother had both gotten a plain and wanting to buck the trend I would get a dipped. That decision, presented as free, always seemed to come from the situation at hand and was explainable completely by it. Does not an explanation imply a cause? And does not a cause imply another? Back and back until we are left with a long chain of events that rally the implication that I had nothing to do with it? I was simply stamping something as mine, which really had its roots in many, many priors and precedents (although these were not the words I would have used at age fifteen)?
Once during my experiments when I realized that a host of reasons suggested a dipped cone would be what I wanted, I broke from it at the last second, determined to do otherwise than the causes had led me to choose. So having made up my mind to get a dipped cone I suddenly demanded an undipped cone. I surprised those around me with the vehemence of my determination and the boisterous force of will that I shouted to avoid a dipped cone. As I was handed the naked ice cream, I felt a surge of pride and triumph that I had finally chosen differently than reason dictated. But just as I began a congratulatory lick of the prize obtained through my dogged agency, I realized that it was my very desire to push forward a free choice that had created a new set of causes and determinates. In my sudden change of mind, I had just followed another cause, this time the cause of my wanting to grab hold of a bit of freedom—a desire to do something pure as an agent in order to convince myself that agency made sense and was real. Sadly, even in this act, I had just followed a script, a strict outlining as closely anchored in inevitably as the motion of the wooden bird in my grandmother’s cuckoo clock at the stroke of midnight. I was a victim of causes over which I had little say. I was seriously disturbed by the notion that even in as uncomplicated act of choosing the kind of ice cream style I wanted, I could not tell if I had done it acting as a free agent. How could I hope that in the wild gyrations of more complex actions in the world that I could recognize a hint of freedom in the jumble of my situation—a mess of happenings that masked those determinate causes, but that in reality bent me to their will instead of my own? I wallowed in self-pity. I was nothing but a puppet strung tight to forces that I could never understand. Nor ever fathom to any depth. For most of that summer, I walked like a wind-up soldier around the farm, firm in the conviction that I was nothing but a mechanical toy clacking to rhythms not my own.
My family had a cabin in Atlantic City, Wyoming. Punctuating the tip of the Wind River Range, this almost ghost town embraced about twelve families that trapped for mink, otter, beaver, and muskrat, or mined for gold and silver. These lonely lands made up the upper reaches of what further downstream becomes the Sweetwater River. We usually rolled into town during the late autumn because the school break was conveniently timed to coincide with the deer hunt, but for us it was a good time to relax. The potatoes and alfalfa had been harvested, sold or stored, and we could put our feet up a little. Often winter arrived with us.
I remember after a summer of taking on the burden of being an automaton we arrived to the cabin in what amounted to a full-blown Wyoming blizzard. Drifts were wafting across the road like the foam of a tumultuous ocean wave mounting a beach, and as the windshield wipers tried to push the snow from the front glass of our spacious Olds wood-bodied station wagon, our worry rose in proportion to the shrinking visibility. To make matters worse, the inside of the windows were fogging up from our breath and my dad had to roll down the window and stick his head into the storm to see where we were on the road. He tried to clear the moist film from the windows with his bare hand as he navigated through the storm. Worse for us was that frigid air was pouring into the car like water from a broken sluice gate. When we pulled up to our cabin, our neighbor Phil—an old trapper of about seventy years old or so—after hearing about our ride in, welcomed us kids into his home while my parents went next door to light and stoke the big cast iron stove, prepare the beds with warm blankets, and get something simmering for us to eat—all to drive away the cold frosting of our bones.
Phil set us on his couch, covered us in a sheepskin blanket, and brought us coffee mugs filled with Nestlé Quik hot chocolate. He was a grand storyteller. While we waited for our parents to ready the cabin, he filled our heads with tales about the early days of trapping when he was a boy. He told us about a raging wolverine he’d once fought after picking up a trap with the wily beast still attached by the leg and dangling from the steel jaws passed out cold. It revived just at that moment. Phil showed us a long white scar that stretched from his elbow to his wrist. He said the devil had gouged him a good one and then he pointed at me and said, “I weren’t much older than you!”
The storm had passed by morning and there followed three straight days of bright late fall sunshine that melted the snow as fast as it had arrived. I told Phil I wanted to be a trapper when I grew up. Just like him. It seemed to warm him to me. Unlike my mother, he didn’t seem to notice that I was a girl and say that maybe trapping was not the proper way for a young lady to occupy her time.
He took me to his shed and we picked out a set of traps to start my new career. He showed me how to set a spring foothold trap. He told me that if I really wanted to get a muskrat, however, I ought to use a wire snare. He took me out along the edge of a pond not far from the cabins and showed me the muskrat holes and how to set a snare over the top. We placed them partially buried under the loose loam ringing the holes found abundantly on the slight manmade ridge surrounding the pond. He taught me how to tell if a hole was actually in use or if it had been abandoned. He showed me how to set the foothold trap along the path from their holes to the pond and cover it with leaves and grasses so it was invisible. He showed me how to bait it with a few drops of anise oil to attract its attention and lure it to the trap.
I was of two minds when it came to trapping. Part of me really wanted to catch a muskrat, take its fur, and make something useful from it. Maybe a purse or a wrap. I imagined myself coming to the trap, finding a muskrat with the trap folded over it, and running to Phil to show him what a grand trapper I had become.
However, part of me liked watching the little bare-tailed rodents swimming in the shallows, diving, and frolicking on the banks. I had no desire to do one of these creatures harm, nor did I want to find one with its leg crushed bloody and mangled. I would imagine its body tangled in the cold metal of the spring-loaded trap or its neck strangled in the cruel wire and it would always bring a shudder.
My confusion manifested itself in setting the traps only in those holes that looked neither quite abandoned nor undeniably in use. I found myself not burying the trap entirely but nevertheless setting it. I would be as stealthy as a ghost in approaching the hole, but as noisy as a heifer when I snuck away. It was as if my efforts were alternating between unde
rmining the successful capture of a muskrat and trying really hard to be a trapper like Phil. The two parts of me were at war.
One day Phil came up unexpectedly to check my sets. When he saw what I was doing, he looked at me and shook his head and said, “I reckon you can’t teach an otter to build a dam.” And he walked away. I was not sure if this comment was reference to my sex, my youth, or just a stubborn stupidity, but it cut me as wide open as if he used a skinning knife.
I went back and after lunch I knocked on Phil’s door. He answered and motioned me in. He had been sitting at his kitchen table cleaning some of his guns and so he sat back down and commenced with the job at hand.
I watched him for a while and then said, “I really want to be a trapper.”
He looked up and weighed me with his eyes and said, “Then do the things trappers do.”
“But at the same time I really don’t want to be a trapper.”
He looked at me for a while longer this time and said, “Well, it’s up to you.”
That did it. Poor Phil. I unloaded all my worries about free agency on him like a pile of bricks emptied from a dump truck. He listened, all the while cleaning his guns, running stiff round brass and copper brushes down the barrels, swabbing them out with fragrant oil that when mingled with the spent gunpowder gave off a pleasant, earthy scent. After scouring them with the rod, he would slap all the parts that he had spread out on the table back together into a working rifle or pistol. It took me about all his guns to lay it all before him. The pre-existence. The war in heaven. The stuff from the Book of Mormon about acting and not being acted upon. He was as patient as a saint, because I realize now that there was no reason to think he was a Mormon but he listened nonetheless. He put on a kettle as I was telling him about my worries about not being able to tell if I was the one choosing to get my cone dipped, or if it was just a long chain of events eventually leading to me doing one thing or the other. While I jabbered on, the water boiled and he poured us a pair of hot chocolates, throwing a spoon of instant coffee into his. While we drank it slowly, I continued to list my reasons for thinking there was no real freedom of action in the world.
When I finished he shook his head and said, “That’s a poser.”
He took our cups back to the kitchen and came back with a tall glass of Kool-Aid and a plate of Swedish almond cake that apparently someone had brought over earlier, because I knew from experience and word of mouth that Phil was not much of a cook.
He leaned back in his chair and put his hands on the back of his head and closed his eyes as if thinking hard about something. Finally, he opened his eyes and said, “I think you’re looking at it bass ackwards. Freedom to do sumpin’ ain’t just to do some nonsensical thing there ain’t no reason to do. No, we always have reasons, if the reasons to do something are crystal clear and easy then there usually ain’t no decision to be made. But it’s when you got several things pulling at you and the reasons are mixed up and uncertain that decisions get hard and you have to be the one to make the choice. Being responsible means you make a choice always a little in the dark and that’s what shows what kind of character you got. Freedom don’t mean there ain’t a pile of stuff going into it, you usually got reasons aplenty. Yeah, and after the fact you can pick out what they were. But it’s more like being on a river in a canoe. Sure you are on a river, sure there are rocks and logs defining what you got to do, but there sure as hell ain’t one way to shoot them rapids, but if you want to do it without sinking the damn thing, you got to make choices, sometimes bad ones and hopefully mostly good ones, that are going to decide if you make it to calm waters. It ain’t about choosin’ between two things that don’t matter a lamb’s ass like if you want your cone dipped—though as for myself I can’t imagine choosing an undipped cone if’n you have a shot at a dipped one, but I suppose that bears to your point that I don’t have a choice in the matter—but it’s the ones that run you to the edge, that make you step into the darkness and hope you land that jump you into your freedom. It’s when the causes are thick about you that you have to hitch on to one. Now that’s agency. Not choosing betwixt things but figuring where to aim your craft through what rapids you find yourself in. And that’s done caused you to choose what sort of person you want to be. Choose that and a pile of reasons sure do line up, thick and weighty. Seems to me you make a choice about who you are and what you are about, sure as we’s sittin’ here, but then that little stuff best be handled with a clear head and good reasons. You following me, Muskrat?”
I nodded. Pleased at my new nickname.
It was quite a speech. Longest I’d ever heard or ever would hear from his mouth for he was dead when we came back the next summer. I eventually came down on the side of letting the muskrats go. I chose that. Cause that’s the kind of person I wanted to be.
I can tell.
Then apparently years later the following is written on the back of this in pencil:
I think often of Phil’s words. That old Wyoming cowboy, a piece of driftwood, so smoothed by nature’s roughness that he attained the kind of wisdom usually reserved for bespectacled philosophers whose jaundiced eyes have peered into the depths of being with such ferocity that they can snatch something of their own making from other worlds to plant in this one.
I’ve thought long on agency and freedom and how it exists in a world made of atoms with set spin and charge and which prance though the world marching to cadences well described and circumscribed. And I cannot find place for both my sense of freedom and my sense that I follow paths outlined by those lively atomic bundles.
I think often of my Sunday School teacher and her claim that we came into this world from a heavenly one, not much different from this, except perhaps more spirit-tinged and holy. That I was placed here to do and walk in a destiny outlined by a kind, wise father whose own will had set my fated circumstance to my soul’s best advantage.
Yet I don’t feel placed. Plato’s vision of souls wandering too close to the mystical nets this physical world drags behind it and by such being captured in an accident of proximity seems to be closer to the mark. Not saved for the last days so much as being more cautious and careful about peering into the bemattered world that I did not go early. But finally bending too near this glorious place and being sucked into this thick material like the others. And no less randomly.
I was recently given a new book to review by New Yorker Cartoonist William Steig, called Abel’s Island2. It’s supposed to be a children’s book. Far from it. It is an apt exploration of existence and meaning for any age.
The book opens with two Edwardian mice having a playful day picnicking and playing croquet. However, a storm arises and through a series of accidents Abel is lost in the ravages of a storm.
Heaven knows how far he was hustled in this manner, or how many rocks he caromed off on his way. He did no thinking. He only knew it was dark and windy and wet, and that he was being knocked about in a world that had lost its manners, in a direction, as far as he could tell, not north, south, east, or west, but whatever way the wind had a mind to go; and all he could do was wait and learn what its whims were. (p. 10)
Because I was meditating on pre-existence and life’s relationship to freedom and determinism, this passage struck me hard. Indeed, is not that our common predicament? Facing the storm that happens along and tosses us in a world not of our choosing?
He is marooned on an island in the middle of a river with a current too swift to be negotiated by a mouse. Early in his adventure he notices a star he had formed a relationship to.
As a child, he would sometimes talk to this star, but only when he was his most serious, real self, and not being any sort of show-off or clown. As he grew up, the practice had somehow worn off.
He looked up at his old friend as if to say, “You see my predicament.”
The star seemed to respond, “I see.”
Abel next put the question: “What shall I do?”
The star seemed to answer, “You will
do what you will do.” For some reason this reply strengthened Abel’s belief in himself. Sleep gently enfolded him. The constellations proceeded across the hushed havens as if tiptoeing past the dreaming mouse on his high branch. (p. 32)
Here juxtaposed are the elements of freedom and determinism. The star (God?) sees, but cannot help. Abel has stepped out of its influence. “You will do what you will do.” Could be read as a claim about a determined course that might be said of a wind-up toy, but I read it by excising as unnecessary the final ‘do’ and see the sentence as an injunction toward freedom. That is why he finds his belief strengthened. He is out of the wind and into a world where he ‘will do,’ unlike the constellations, which proceed on their course.
Days pass and after several failed escape attempts, Abel realizes he may be here awhile, he wonders:
Was it just an accident that he was here on this uninhabited island? Abel began to wonder. Was he being singled out for some reason; was he being tested? If so, why? Didn’t it prove his worth that such a one as Amanda loved him? (p. 34)
Why was he there? It was an accident. Nothing more. Tossed by a careless wind he arrived. He must do what he must do, like the canoeist in Phil’s description of freedom; we are free to face the river, or life, with what resources we have, to accomplish what tasks have presented themselves in our confrontation with meaning and life.
Gilda Trillim Page 6