I Am a Strange Loop (52 page)

Although I have been depicting it somewhat cynically, representational universality and the nearly insatiable hunger that it creates for vicarious experiences is but a stone’s throw away from empathy, which I see as the most admirable quality of humanity. To “be” someone else in a profound way is not merely to see the world intellectually as they see it and to feel rooted in the places and times that molded them as they grew up; it goes much further than that. It is to adopt their values, to take on their desires, to live their hopes, to feel their yearnings, to share their dreams, to shudder at their dreads, to participate in their life, to merge with their soul.

Being Visited

One morning not long ago I woke up with the memory of my father richly pulsating inside my cranium. For a shining moment my dreaming mind seemed to have brought him back to life in the most vivid fashion, even though “he” had had to float in the rarefied medium of my brain’s stage. It felt, nonetheless, like he was really back again for a short while, and then, sadly, all at once he just went poof. How is this bittersweet kind of experience, so familiar to every adult human being, to be understood? What degree of reality do these software beings that inhabit us have? Why did I put “he” in quotation marks, a few lines up? Why the caution, why the hedging?

What is
really
going on when you dream or think more than fleetingly about someone you love (whether that person died many years ago or is right now on the other end of a phone conversation with you)? In the terminology of this book, there is no ambiguity about what is going on. The symbol for that person has been activated inside your skull, lurched out of dormancy, as surely as if it had an icon that someone had double-clicked. And the moment this happens, much as with a game that has opened up on your screen, your mind starts acting differently from how it acts in a “normal” context. You have allowed yourself to be invaded by an “alien universal being”, and to some extent the alien takes charge inside your skull, starts pushing things around in its own fashion, making words, ideas, memories, and associations bubble up inside your brain that ordinarily would not do so. The activation of the symbol for the loved person swivels into action whole sets of coordinated tendencies that represent that person’s cherished style, their idiosyncratic way of being embedded in the world and looking out at it. As a consequence, during this visitation of your cranium, you will surprise yourself by coming out with different jokes from those you would normally make, seeing things in a different emotional light, making different value judgments, and so forth.

But the crux of the matter for us right now is the following question: Is your symbol for another person actually an “I”? Can that symbol have inner experiences? Or is it as unalive as is your symbol for a stick or a stone or a playground swing? I chose the example of a playground swing for a reason. The moment I suggest it to you, no matter what playground you have located it in, no matter what you imagine its seat to be made of, no matter how high you imagine the bar it is dangling from, you can see it swinging back and forth, wiggling slightly in that funny way that swings wiggle, losing energy unless pushed, and you can also hear its softly clinking chains. Though no one would call the swing itself alive, there is no doubt that its mental proxy is dancing in the seething substrate of your brain. After all, that is what a brain is made for — to be a stage for the dance of active symbols.

If you seriously believe, as I do and have been asserting for most of this book, that concepts are
active symbols in a brain,
and if furthermore you seriously believe that
people, no less than objects, are represented by symbols in the brain
(in other words, that each person that one knows is internally mirrored by a concept, albeit a very complicated one, in one’s brain), and if lastly you seriously believe that
a self is also a concept, just an even more complicated one
(namely, an “I”, a “personal gemma”, a rock-solid “marble”), then it is a necessary and unavoidable consequence of this set of beliefs that
your brain is inhabited to varying extents by other I’s, other souls,
the extent of each one depending on the degree to which you faithfully represent, and resonate with, the individual in question. I include the proviso “and resonate with” because one can’t just slip into any old soul, no more than one can slip into any old piece of clothing; some souls and some suits simply “fit” better than others do.

Chemistry and Its Lack

For me, the best illustration of the idea of better and worse fits or “resonances” between souls is musical taste. I will never forget what happened, thirty-some years ago, when a pianist friend praised Béla Bartók’s second violin concerto to the skies and insisted that I get to know it. This was an act of reciprocation for my having introduced to her, a few years earlier, one of the most stirring pieces of music I knew — Prokofiev’s third piano concerto. At that time, she had resonated to the last movement of the Prokofiev in an incredibly powerful way, a fact that seemed to signal that we were on much the same musical wavelength; therefore, I took her passionate endorsement of Bartók’s second violin concerto with great seriousness. To egg me on, she said that Bartók not only used her favorite chord from the Prokofiev over and over, but he used it
better.
Say no more! I instantly went out and bought a record of it. That evening, with high anticipation, I put it on and listened carefully. To my disappointment, I was utterly unaffected. This was very puzzling. I listened again. And then again. And again. And again. Over a couple of weeks, I must have listened to that highly-touted piece a dozen times if not two dozen, and yet nothing at all ever happened inside me, except that a fifteen-second section somewhere in the middle mildly engaged me. You could call this a blind spot — or a deaf spot — inside me, or else, as I would prefer, you could just say that the “fit” between my soul and Bartók’s is extremely poor. And this has been corroborated many times over with other Bartók pieces, so that now I am quite confident about what will (or rather, won’t) happen inside me when I hear Bartók. Although I like a few small pieces (based on folk songs) that he wrote, the bulk of his output doesn’t speak to me at all. And so my sense that this friend and I had a lot in common musically was greatly reduced, and in fact our friendship subsided thereafter.

After writing that paragraph, I grew curious as to whether a thirtyyear-old memory might be revealed invalid, or whether in the meantime my soul might perhaps have opened up to new musical horizons, so I went straight to my record player (yes, vinyl), put the Bartók violin concerto on once again, and listened to it carefully from beginning to end. My reaction was totally identical. To me, the piece just seems to wander and wander, never getting anywhere. Listening to it, I feel like a magnetic field bashing headlong into a superconductor — cannot penetrate even one micron! In case that’s too esoteric a metaphor, let’s just say that I’m stopped dead, right at the surface. It makes no sense at all to me; it is music written in an impenetrable idiom. It’s like looking at a book written in an alien script. You can tell there is intelligence behind it — maybe a great deal! — but you have no idea what it is saying.

I recount this rather gloomy anecdote because it stands for a thousand experiences in life, involving what, for lack of a better word, we call “chemistry” between people. There just is no chemistry between Bartók and me. I respect his intelligence, his creative drive, and his high moral standards, but I have no idea what made his heart tick. Not a clue. But I could say this of thousands of people — and then there are those for whom the reverse holds equally strongly. For instance, there is no piece of music in the world that means more to me than Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, written within just a few years of the Bartók concerto. (In fact, to my bewilderment, I have even seen the two mentioned in the same breath, as if they were cut from the same cloth. They might have some superficial textures in common here and there, but to me they are as different as Bach and Eminem.) While the Bartók rolls off of me like water off a duck’s back, the Prokofiev flows into me like an infinitely intoxicating elixir. It speaks to me, soars inside me, sets me on fire, turns up the volume of life to full blast.

I need not go on and on, because I am sure that every reader has experienced chemistries and non-chemistries of this sort — perhaps even relating to the Bartók and Prokofiev violin concertos in exactly the reverse fashion from me, but even so, the message I am trying to convey will come across loud and clear. Music seems to me to be a direct route to the heart, or between hearts — in fact, the most direct. Across-the-board alignment of musical tastes, including both loves and hates — something extremely rarely run into — is as sure a guide to affinity of souls as I have ever found. And an affinity of souls means that the people concerned can rapidly come to know each other’s essences, have great potential to live inside each other.

Copycat Planetoids Grow by Absorbing Melting Meteorites

As children, as adolescents, and even as adults, we are all copycats. We involuntarily and automatically incorporate into our repertoire all sorts of behavior-fragments of other people. I already mentioned my “Hopalong Cassidy smile” in first grade, which I suppose still vaguely informs my “real” smile, and I have dozens of explicit memories of other copycat actions from that age and later. I remember admiring and then copying one friend’s uneven, jagged handwriting, a jaunty classmate’s cool style of blustering, an older boy’s swaggering walk, the way the French ticketseller in the film
Around the World in Eighty Days
pronounced the word
américain,
a college friend’s habit of always saying the name of his interlocutor at the end of every phone call, and so forth. And when I watch a video of myself, I am always caught off guard to see so many of my sister Laura’s terribly familiar expressions (they’re
so her
) flicker briefly across
my
face. Which of us borrowed from the other, and when, and why? I’ll never know.

I have long watched my two children imitate catchy intonation-patterns and favorite phrases of their American friends, and I can also hear specific Italian friends’ sounds and phrases echo throughout their Italian. There have been times when, on listening to either of them talk, I could practically have rattled off a list of their friends’ names as the words and sounds sailed by.

The small piano pieces I used to compose with such intense emotional fervor — a fervor that felt like it was pure
me
— are riddled, ironically, with recognizable features coming very clearly from Chopin, Bach, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Scriabin, Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, Poulenc, Mendelssohn, Gershwin, Porter, Rodgers, Kern, and easily another dozen or more composers whose music I listened to endlessly in those years. My writing style bears marks of countless writers who used words in amazing ways that I wished I could imitate. My ideas come from my mother, my father, my youthful friends, my teachers… Everything I do is some kind of modified borrowing from others who have been close to me either actually or virtually, and the virtual influences are among the most profound.

Much of my fabric is woven out of borrowed bits and pieces of the experiences of thousands of famous individuals whom I never met face to face, and almost surely never will, and who for me are therefore only “virtual people”. Here’s a sample: Niels Bohr, Dr. Seuss, Carole King, Martin Luther King, Billie Holiday, Mickey Mantle, Mary Martin, Maxine Sullivan, Anwar Sadat, Charles Trenet, Robert Kennedy, P. A. M. Dirac, Bill Cosby, Peter Sellers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Jesse Owens, Groucho Marx, Janet Margolin, Roald Dahl, Françoise Sagan, Sidney Bechet, Shirley MacLaine, Jacques Tati, and Charles Shultz.

The people just mentioned all had major positive impacts on my life and their lives overlapped a fair amount with mine, and thus I might (at least theoretically) have run into any of them in person. But I also contain myriad traces of thousands of individuals whom I never could have met and interacted with, such as W. C. Fields, Galileo Galilei, Harry Houdini, Paul Klee, Clément Marot, John Baskerville, Fats Waller, Anne Frank, Holden Caulfield, Captain Nemo, Claude Monet, Leonhard Euler, Dante Alighieri, Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, James Clerk Maxwell, Samuel Pickwick, Esq., Charles Babbage, Archimedes, and Charlie Brown.

Some of the people in the latter list, of course, are fictional while others hover between the fictional and the real, but that is of no more import than the fact that in my mind, they are all merely
virtual
beings. What matters is neither the fictional/nonfictional nor the virtual/nonvirtual dimension, but the duration and depth of an individual’s interaction with my interiority. In that regard, Holden Caulfield ranks at about the same level as Alexander Pushkin, and higher far than Dante Alighieri.

We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of
us
as ever it was of someone else (though that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with). Although my meteorite metaphor may make it sound as if we are victims of
random
bombardment, I don’t mean to suggest that we willingly accrete just any old mannerism onto our sphere’s surface — we are very selective, usually borrowing traits that we admire or covet — but even our style of selectivity is itself influenced over the years by what we have turned into as a result of our repeated accretions. And what was once right on the surface gradually becomes buried like a Roman ruin, growing closer and closer to the core of us as our radius keeps increasing.