eros, logos: Probability

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Probability

Probability is a funny thing. It doesn't work the way we'd think it does, and the gambler's fallacy amongst others shows this to be so. Flip a coin, what is the probability of it landing heads up? 50 percent, you'll say, or one in two. Suppose it comes up heads 10 times in a row? What is the probability now of it coming up tails? Greater, lesser, the same?

For some time now it has been hard for me to write here. I was aware of feeling more and more constrained. Some of these pressures were external. I was aware of the presence of malice directed towards me and those close to me, that sort of malice that seems so well-fostered here in the ether, and results in so many blogs going dark.

Some pressures were internal; I became aware of a reluctance on my part to write.
(This sort of self-exposure is not easy to do. Perhaps there is a sort of internal time limit to it.)

I have wanted to stop writing; my lover has not let me. He has done everything possible to encourage me, and to give me strength in the face of those external pressures, at no small risk to himself. But I became aware that part of my reluctance came from a reluctance to reveal too much. I felt naked, flayed, my secret heart exposed. Sometimes I felt transparent, my ribcage cracked and opened up, peeled back and on display, pinned like the frog I refused (on principle) to dissect in biology class or the picture of the sacred heart in my grandmother's bedroom. The whole world could see my heart, and this tangle of thorns.

I closed up.
I wrote obliquely of the emotional terrain within when I wrote of it at all.
I became aware also that there are things I want and need to write that I could not let him read. I felt this distance between my self and what I wrote. It would not be accurate to say I write "for" him; something about writing here for me requires that I pretend no one will read it at all, and that I write for myself alone--but it has become true that I could not evade the awareness of him qua reader. I have feared hurting him.

I could not evade the awareness of real danger either, the danger of someone reading and recognising him, even in this shadowy form.

But something has changed. There are many forms of fidelity; one of them is to one's self and to truth. Know thyself, commanded the Oracle.
In writing here I have been constructing and spinning a narrative of my life, some aspects of it, always as much as I could reveal. Not much, as it happened, not enough. Fear has kept me from writing as bravely as I would most like to write.

Something has changed for me; something in me is changing.
I don't yet know what it is or how much.

I have told my lover not to read me.

I have thought about it: to go on, to not go on.
I think, turning the coin over and over.

"How do I know what I think, til I see what I say?" Thoughts are not complete until expressed; this is something I have known, and learn anew in writing the narrative of my life here.

I flip the coin of my life, this narrative; it rises, shining and spinning. I wait to see which way I'll fall.

comments are closed.

update: link fixed

posted by O @ 06:00