I Am a Strange Loop

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 Frederic 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.

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 Godelian swirl inside my brain (the primary one of course being my own self-swirl), a Godelian swirl that allowed me to be her, or, said otherwise, a Godelian 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