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.
All of this suggests that each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way. But of course not all contributors are represented equally. Those whom we love and who love us are the most strongly represented inside us, and our “I” is formed by a complex collusion of all their influences echoing down the many years. A marvelous pen-and-ink “parquet deformation” drawn in 1964 by David Oleson (below) illustrates this idea not only graphically but also via a pun, for it is entitled “I at the Center”:
Here one sees a metaphorical individual at the center, whose shape (the letter “I”) is a consequence of the shapes of all its neighbors. Their shapes, likewise, are consequences of the shapes of their neighbors, and so on. As one drifts out toward the periphery of the design, the shapes gradually become more and more different from each other. What a wonderful visual metaphor for how we are all determined by the people to whom we are close, especially those to whom we are closest!
How Much Can One Import of Another’s Interiority?
When we interact for a couple of minutes with a checkout clerk in a store, we obviously do not build up an elaborate representation of that person’s interior fire. The representation is so partial and fleeting that we would probably not even recognize the person a few days later. The same goes, only more so, for each of the hundreds of people we pass as we walk down a busy sidewalk at the height of the Christmas shopping madness. Though we know well that each person has at their core a strange loop somewhat like our own, the details that imbue it with its uniqueness are so inaccessible to us that that core aspect of them goes totally unrepresented. Instead, we register only superficial aspects that have nothing to do with their inner fire, with who they really are. Such cases are typical of the “truncated corridor” images that we build up in our brain for most people that we run across; we have no sense of the strange loop at their core.
Many of the well-known individuals I listed above are central to my identity, in the sense that I cannot imagine who I would be had I not encountered their ideas or deeds, but there are thousands of other famous people who merely grazed my being in small ways, sometimes gratingly, sometimes gratifyingly. These more peripheral individuals are represented in me principally by various famous achievements (whether they affected me for good or for ill) — a sound bite uttered, an equation discovered, a photo snapped, a typeface designed, a line drive snagged, a rabble roused, a refugee rescued, a plot hatched, a poem tossed off, a peace offer tendered, a cartoon sketched, a punch line concocted, or a ballad crooned.
The central ones, by contrast, are represented inside my brain by complex symbols that go well beyond the external traces they left behind; they have instilled inside me an additional glimmer of how it was to live inside their head, how it was to look out at the world through their eyes. I feel I have entered, in some cases deeply, into the hidden territory of their interiority, and they, conversely, have infiltrated mine.
And yet, for all the wonderful effects that our most beloved composers, writers, artists, and so forth have exerted on us, we are inevitably even more intimate with those people whom we know in person, have spent years with, and love. These are people about whom we care so deeply that for them to achieve some particular personal goal becomes an important internal goal for us, and we spend a good deal of time musing over how to realize that goal (and I deliberately chose the neutral phrase “that goal” because it is blurry whether it is their goal or ours).
We live inside such people, and they live inside us. To return to the metaphor of two interacting video feedback systems, someone that close to us is represented on our screen by a second infinite corridor, in addition to our own infinite corridor. We can peer all the way down — their strange loop, their personal gemma, is incorporated inside us. And yet, to reiterate the metaphor, since our camera and our screen are grainy, we cannot have as deep or as accurate a representation of people beloved to us as either our own self-representation or their own self-representation.
Double-clicking on the Icon for a Loved One’s Soul
There was a point in my 1994 email broodings to Dan Dennett where I worried about how it would feel when, for the first time after her death, I would watch a video of Carol. I imagined the Carol symbol in my head being powerfully activated by the images on tape — more powerfully activated than at any moment since she had died — and I was fearful of the power of the illusion it would create. I would seem to see her standing by the staircase, and yet, obviously, if I were to get up and walk through the house to the spot where she had once stood, I would find no body there. Though I would see her bright face and hear her laugh, I could not go up to her and put my arm around her shoulders. Watching the tapes would heighten the anguish of her death, by seeming to bring her back physically but doing nothing of the sort in reality. Her physical nature would not be brought back by the tapes.
But what about her inner nature? When Carol was alive, her presence routinely triggered certain symbols in my brain. Quite obviously, the videos would trigger those same symbols again, although in fewer ways. What would be the nature of the symbolic dance thus activated in my brain? When the videos inevitably double-clicked on my “Carol” icon, what would happen inside me? The strange and complex thing that would come rushing up from the dormant murk would be a real thing — or at any rate, just as real as the “I” inside me is real. The key question then is, how different is that strange thing in my brain from the “I” that had once flourished inside Carol’s brain? Is it a thing of an entirely different type, or is it of the same type, just less elaborate?
Thinking with Another’s Brain
Of all Dan Dennett’s many reactions to my grapplings in that searing spring of 1994, there was one sentence that always stood out in my mind: “It is clear from what you say that Carol will be thinking with your brain for quite some time to come.” I appreciated and resonated to this evocative phrase, which, as I later discovered, Dan was quoting with a bit of license from our mutual friend Marvin Minsky, the artificial-intelligence pioneer — copycats everywhere!
“She’ll be thinking with your brain.” What this Dennett–Minsky utterance meant to me was roughly the following. Input signals coming to me would, under certain circumstances, follow pathways in my brain that led not to my memories but to Carol’s memories (or rather, to my low-resolution, coarse-grained “copies” of them). The faces of our children, the voices of her parents and sisters and brothers, the rooms in our house — such things would at times be processed in a frame of reference that would imbue them with a Carol-style meaning, placing them in a frame that would root them in and relate them to her experiences (once again, as crudely rendered in my brain). The semantics that would accrue to the signals impingent on me would have originated in her life. To the extent, then, that I, over our years of livin
g together, had accurately imported and transplanted the experiences that had rooted Carol on this earth, she would be able to react to the world, to live on in me. To that extent, and only to that extent, Carol would be thinking with my brain, feeling with my heart, living in my soul.
Mosaics of Different Grain Size
Since everything hung on those words “to the extent that X”, what seemed to matter most of all here was degree of fidelity to the original, an idea for which I soon found a metaphor based on portraits rendered as mosaics made out of small colored stones. The more intimately someone comes to know you, the finer-grained will be the “portrait” of you inside their head. The highest-resolution portrait of you is of course your own self-portrait — your own mosaic of yourself, your self-symbol, built up over your entire life, exquisitely fine-grained. Thus in Carol’s case, her own self-symbol was by far the finest-grained portrait of her inner essence, her inner light, her personal gemma. But surely among the next-highest in resolution was my mosaic of Carol, the coarser-grained copy of her interiority that resided inside my head.
I Am a Strange Loop Page 35
