I Am a Strange Loop (48 page)

While I was working on the last few chapters of
I Am a Strange Loop,
I reread our entire exchange, which was roughly 35 pages long when printed out, and although it was not great prose, it struck me that portions of it were worth including in the new book, in some form or other. My musings were extremely personal, of course. They were grapplings by a husband in profound shock after his wife simply went up in smoke for no reason at all. I decided to include excerpts from them here not because I wish to make some kind of grand after-the-fact public declaration of love for my wife, although there is no doubt that I loved and love her deeply. I decided to include some of my musings for the simple reason that they are heartfelt probings that struggle with the issues that form the very core of this book. Nothing else that I have written on the topic of the human soul and human consciousness ever came so much from the heart as did those messages to Dan, and even though I would like to think that I now understand the issues somewhat more clearly than I did then, I doubt that anything I write today can have nearly as much urgency as what I wrote then, in those days of extreme anguish and turmoil.

I decided that since my email grapplings have a different style from the rest of this book, and since they come from a different period of time, I would devote a separate chapter to them — and this is that chapter. In order to prepare it, I went through those 35 pages of email, which were often jumbled, redundant, and vague, and which included sporadic snippets on peripheral if not irrelevant topics, and I edited them down to about a quarter of their original length. I also reordered pieces of my messages and allowed myself to make occasional slight modifications in the passages I was keeping, so as to make the flow more logical. Consequently, what you see here is by no means a raw transcript of my end of our conversation, for that would be truly rough going, but it is a faithful boiling-down of the most important topics.

Although it was a dialogue, I have left Dan’s voice out of this chapter because, as I said above, he served mostly as a cool, calm sounding board for my white-hot, emotional explorations. He was not trying to come up with any new theories; he was just listening, being my friend. There was, however, one point in April of 1994 where Dan waxed poetic about what I was going through in those days, and I think his words make an excellent prelude to this chapter, so I’ll quote them below. All else that follows will be in my voice, quoted (in a slightly retouched form) from my email musings between March and August, 1994.

There is an old racing sailboat in Maine, near where I sail, and I love to see it on the starting line with me, for it is perhaps the most beautiful sailboat I have ever seen; its name is “Desperate Lark”, which I also think is beautiful. You are now embarked on a desperate lark, which is just what you should be doing right now. And your reflections are the reflections of a person who has encountered, and taken a measure of, the power of life on our sweet Earth. You’ll return, restored to balance, refreshed, but it takes time to heal. We’ll all be here on the shore when you come back, waiting for you.

The name “Carol” denotes, for me, far more than just a body, which is now gone, but rather a very vast
pattern,
a style, a set of things including memories, hopes, dreams, beliefs, loves, reactions to music, sense of humor, self-doubt, generosity, compassion, and so on. Those things are to some extent sharable, objective, and multiply instantiatable, a bit like software on a diskette. And my obsessive writing-down of memories, and the many videotapes she is on, and all our collective brain-stored memories of Carol make those pattern-aspects of her still exist, albeit in spread-out form — spread out among different videotapes, among different friends’ and relatives’ brains, among different yellow-sheeted notebooks, and so on. In any case, there is a spread-out pattern of Carolness very clearly discernable in this physical world. And in that sense, Carolness survives.

By “Carolness surviving”, what I mean is that even people who never met her can see how it was to be near her, around her, with her — they can experience her wit, see her smile, hear her voice and her laugh, hear about her youthful adventures, learn how she and I met, watch her play with her small children, and so forth…

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.

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.