I Am a Strange Loop

I keep trying, though, to figure out the extent to which I believe that because of my memories of her (in my brain or on paper), and those of other people, some of Carol’s consciousness, her interiority, remains on this planet. Being a strong believer in the noncentralizedness of consciousness, in its distributedness, I tend to think that although any individual’s consciousness is primarily resident in one particular brain, it is also somewhat present in other brains as well, and so, when the central brain is destroyed, tiny fragments of the living individual remain — remain alive, that is.

Also being a believer in the thesis that external memory is a very real part of our personal memories, I think that an infinitesimal sliver of Carol’s consciousness resides even in the slips of paper on which I captured some of her cleverer bon mots, and a somewhat larger (though still tiny) shard of her resides in the yellow lined notebooks in which I have, in the past few months of grieving, recorded so many of our joint experiences. To be sure, those experiences were already encoded in my own brain, but the externalization of them will one day allow them to be shared by other people who knew her, and thus will somehow “resuscitate” her, in a small way. Thus even a static representation on paper can contain elements of a “living” Carol, of Carol’s consciousness.

All of this brings to mind a conversation I had with my mother a few weeks after my Dad died. She said that once in a while she would look at a photo of him that she loved, in which he was smiling, and she would find herself smiling back at “him”, or at “it”. Her comment on this reaction of hers was, “Smiling at that photo is so wrong, because it’s not him — it’s just a flat, meaningless piece of paper.” And then she got very upset with herself, and felt even more distraught over her loss of him. I pondered her anguished remark for a while, and though I could see what she meant, it seemed to me that the situation was much more complicated than what she had said.

Yes, on the surface it seems that this photo is an inert, lifeless, soulless piece of paper, but somehow it reaches her, it touches her. And this brought to my mind the set of lifeless, soulless pieces of paper comprising the complete works for piano of Frédéric Chopin. Though just pieces of paper, they have incredible effects on people all over the world. So might it be with that photograph of my Dad. It certainly causes deep rumblings in my brain when I look at it, in my sister Laura’s brain, and in many others. For us, that photo is not just a physical object with mass, size, color, and so forth; it is a pattern imbued with fantastic triggering-power.

And of course, in addition to a photo of someone and the set of someone’s complete works, there are so many other cases of elaborate patterns that contain fragments of souls — imagine, for example, having many hours of videotapes of Bach playing the organ and talking about his music, or of James Clerk Maxwell talking about physics and describing the moment when he discovered that light must be an electromagnetic wave, or of Pushkin reciting his own poetry, or of Galileo telling about how he discovered the moons of Jupiter, or of Jane Austen explaining how she imagined her characters and their complex intrigues…

Just where comes the point of “critical mass”, when having a pattern, perhaps a large set of videotapes, perhaps an extensive diary (like Anne Frank’s), amounts to having a significant percentage of the person — a significant percentage of their self, their soul, their “I”, their consciousness, their interiority? If you concede that a significant percentage of the person would exist at some point along this spectrum, provided that one had a sufficiently large pattern, then it seems to me that you would have to concede that even having a much smaller pattern, such as a photo or my cherished collection of Carol’s “bonner mots”, already gives you a non-zero (even if microscopic) fraction of the actual person — of “the view from inside” — not just of how it was to be with them.

It was Monica’s third birthday — a joyous but very sad occasion, for obvious reasons. The kids and I, along with some friends, were at an outdoor pizzeria in Cognola, our hillside village just above Trento, and we had a beautiful view of the high mountains all around us. Little Monica, in her booster chair, was sitting directly across the table from me. Because it was such an emotional occasion, one that Carol would so much have wanted to be part of, I tried to look at Monica “for Carol”, and then of course wondered what on earth I was doing, what on earth I meant by thinking such a thought.