south winds and handsaws

today, hamlet is our model for self-deception for fulfilling goals that we don't want to consciously admit we want to fulfill.

it's partly because we are made in the image of god that we occasionally allow ourselves the illusion of control, especially of those things that we create. and we manipulate this extrapolation of power, exploiting it for our personal ends, like every gift from god intended for our benefit, except that we misinterpret our benefit because we don't seek god's will first.

"i am mad but north-northwest. when the wind is southerly, i know a hawk from a handsaw." this is hamlet's arrogance coming to the fore. because he created his own appearance of insanity, he feels completely assured of his own power to control his creation. or at least, he is allowing himself the luxury of deceiving himself into that belief. but the truth is that he is losing his control, and moreover, using his own arrogance and confidence against himself in an effort to do what everyone wants to do: to let go and be out of control, to be free from responsibility and the burden of deliberation. to abandon necessity, and expectation, and all the pretenses and constructs of the world, and just be honestly screwed up.

it's the things that we won't admit to ourselves that take the most power over us even as we attempt to assert our own power over them. and, in the completion of the cyclical reasoning, the main thing we will not admit to ourselves is that we are often not as powerful as we let ourselves think. and in the end, the things to which we give power by believing we have power over them are the things that overtake us.

but as long as we have pretense, we plug on, pretending we know what we're doing, pretending we're in control as our own creations slowly assume more and more authority over our actions, in the end living primarily off our self-delusion, telling ourselves over and over that we can tell hawks from handsaws whenever we really want to, and sucumbing to the base truth underlying all of that, that we really don't want to know the difference most days.