I Am a Strange Loop

hiding?

I looked more carefully, and of course took the envelopes out and tried to shake it out from between them, but still no dice. And finally, on checking, I found that each envelope on its own was empty. So what in tarnation was going on?

An Out-of-the-Blue Ode to My Old Friend Epi

To you, my astute reader (and surely an old envelope hand, to boot), it is probably already obvious, but believe me, I was baffled for a minute or two. Eventually it dawned on me that there wasn’t any marble in there at all, but that there was something that felt for all the world exactly like a marble to this old marble hand. It was an epiphenomenon caused by the fact that, for each envelope, at the vertex of the “V” made by its flap, there is a triple layer of paper as well as a thin layer of glue. An unintended consequence of this innocent design decision is that when you squeeze down on a hundred such envelopes all precisely aligned with each other, you can’t compress that little zone as much as the other zones — it resists compression. The hardness that you feel at your fingertips has an uncanny resemblance to a more familiar (dare I say “a more real”?) hardness.

An epiphenomenon, as you probably recall from earlier chapters, is a collective and unitary-seeming outcome of many small, often invisible or unperceived, quite possibly utterly unsuspected, events. In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale illusion created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.

Well, I was so charmed and captivated by this epiphenomenal illusion of the marble in the box that I nicknamed the box of envelopes “Epi”, and I have kept it ever since — three decades or more, now. (Unfortunately, the box is falling apart after such a long time.) And sometimes, when I take a trip somewhere to give a lecture on the concepts of self and “I”, I’ll carry Epi along with me and I’ll let members of the audience reach in and feel it for themselves, so that the concept of an epiphenomenon — in this case, the Epi phenomenon — becomes very real and vivid for them.

Recently I headed off to give such a lecture in Tucson, Arizona, and I took Epi along with me. One of the audience members, Jeannel King, was so taken with my Epi saga that she wrote a poem about it, translating it with poetic license into her own life, and a few days later she sent it to me. I in turn was so taken with her poem that I asked her for permission to reprint it here, and she generously said she’d be pleased if I did so. So without further ado, here is Jeannel King’s delightful poem inspired by Epi.

Ode to a Box of Envelopes

(For all who have lost their marbles…)

by Jeannel King

A box of env’lopes on the floor —

I want to shift them to my drawer.

I squeeze inside — there’s something there!

I look inside — there’s naught but air.

I squeeze again and marble find.

Is this a marble of my mind?a

Determined now, and one by one,

out come the env’lopes — still no plum!

For closer views of each, I must

brave paper cuts and motes of dust.

In tips? Or env’lope forty-six?a

My marble, whole, does not exist.

Then coarse-grained Mother whispers, “Nell,

you keep this up, you’ll go to hell!”

To which Dad counters, “Mind yer mopes!

Let Nell seek God in envelopes!”

So envelopes lie all around

as I sit, vexed, upon the ground.

My marble’s lost, but in my core

could there, perhaps, be something more?a

For more than parts this whole has grown:

No single part doth stand alone.

In parts, the marble simply mocks.

Intact, I think, I’ll keep this box.

No Sphere, No Radius, No Mass

Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of my epiphenomenal marble was how sure I was that this “object” in the box was spherical and how confidently I would have provided an estimate of its diameter (about half an inch, like most marbles), as well as described how hard it was (as compared with, say, an egg yolk or a ball of clay). Many aspects of this nonexistent object were clear and familiar tactile phenomena. In a word, I had been sucked in by a tactile illusion. There was no marble anywhere in there — there was just a statistical epiphenomenon.

And yet, it’s undeniable that the phrase “it felt just like a marble” gets across my experience far more clearly to my readers than if I had written, “I experienced the collective effect of the precise alignment of a hundred triple layers of paper and a hundred layers of glue.” It is only because I called it a “marble” that you have a clear impression of how it felt to me. If I hadn’t used the word “marble”, would you have been able to predict that a thick pack of envelopes would give rise, in its middle, to something (some thing?) that felt perfectly spherical, felt like it had a size, felt extremely solid — in short, that this collective effect would feel like a very simple, very familiar