I Am a Strange Loop

This idea of “seeing Monica for Carol” led me to a vivid memory of Old-Doug and Old-Carol (or if you prefer, “young Doug and young Carol”) sitting on the terrace of the Wok, a favorite Chinese restaurant in Bloomington, way back in the summer of 1983, gazing at an adorable little dark-haired girl of two or three who was walking around in a navy-blue corduroy dress. We weren’t married yet, we hadn’t even broached the topic of getting married, but we had often talked very emotionally about children, and both of us were yearning to be co-parents of just such a little girl ourselves. This was a shared longing, for sure, even if only implicit.

And so now, eleven years later, now that our daughter Monica in fact exists, can I finally experience for Old-Doug that joy that he was dreaming of, longing for, back in 1983? Can I now look at his daughter Monica “for Old-Doug”? (Or do I mean “look at my daughter for him”? Or both?) And if I can validly claim to be able to do so for Old-Doug, then why not just as validly for Old-Carol? After all, our yearning for a shared daughter that long-ago summer evening was a deeply shared yearning, was the exact same yearning, burning simultaneously in both of our brains. Thus the question is, can I now experience that joy for Old-Carol, can I now look at Monica for Old-Carol?

What seems crucial here is the depth of interpenetration of souls — the sense of shared goals, which leads to shared identity. Thus, for instance, Carol always had a deep, deep desire that Monica and Danny would be each other’s best friends as they grew up, and would always remain so when they were adults. This desire also exists or persists in a very strong form inside me (in fact, we always had that joint hope, and I used to do my best to foster its realization even before she died), and it is now exerting an even greater influence on my actions than it used to, precisely because she died and so now, given that I am her best representative in this world, I feel deeply responsible to her.

Along with Carol’s desires, hopes, and so on, her own personal sense of “I” is represented in my brain, because I was so close to her, because I empathized so deeply with her, co-felt so many things with her, was so able to see things from inside her point of view when we spoke, whether it was her physical sufferings (writhing in pain an hour after a sigmoidoscopy, her insides churning with residual air bubbles) or her greatest joys (a devilishly clever bon mot by David Moser, a scrumptious Indian meal in Cambridge) or her fondest hopes or her reactions to movies or whatever.

For brief periods of time in conversations, or even in nonverbal moments of intense feeling, I was Carol, just as, at times, she was Doug. So her “personal gemma” (to borrow Stanislaw Lem’s term in his story “Non Serviam”) had brought into existence a somewhat blurry, coarse-grained copy of itself inside my brain, had created a secondary Gödelian swirl inside my brain (the primary one of course being my own self-swirl), a Gödelian swirl that allowed me to be her, or, said otherwise, a Gödelian swirl that allowed her self, her personal gemma, to ride (in simplified form) on my hardware.

But is this secondary swirl that now lives in my brain, this simulated personal gemma, anything like the real swirl, the primary swirl, that once lived in her brain and is now gone? Is there Carol-consciousness still somewhere in this world? That is, is it possible for me to look at Monica “for Carol” and, even in the tiniest degree, to become Carol seeing Monica? Or has that personal gemma been finally and totally and irrevocably obliterated?

A person is a point of view — not only a physical point of view (looking out of certain eyes in a certain physical place in the universe), but more importantly a psyche’s point of view: a set of hair-trigger associations rooted in a huge bank of memories. The latter can be absorbed, more and more over time, by someone else. Thus it’s like acquiring a foreign language step by step.

For a while, one’s speaking is largely “fake” — that is, one is thinking in one’s native language but substituting words quickly enough to give the impression that the thinking is going on in the second language; however, as one’s experience with the second language grows, new grammatical habits form and turn slowly into reflexes, as do thousands of lexical items, and the second language becomes more and more rooted, more and more genuine. One gradually becomes a fluent thinker in and speaker of the other language, and it is no longer “fake”, even if one has an accent in it. So it is with coming to see the world through another person’s soul.