Who do you think you are?
Aug. 19th, 2012 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfield"Stop the bus, I wanna be lonely
When seconds pass slowly and years go flying by
You gotta stop the us and get off here"
- Ben Folds Five, "Jackson Cannery"
I am in Rochester this weekend, along with my brother, nominally to celebrate my mother's recent birthday, but more pointedly to get the nuclear family back together for a controlled nuclear family explosion.
While this house (and this town) will always retain that abstract quality of "home," with every passing year it seems a little less familiar and a little more like a museum where you can reach out and touch the artifacts. The permanent collection is priceless but some of the new installations are jarring.
Part of that permanent collection is a 30-gallon Tupperware tub in my old bedroom closet, brimming with deeply personal memorabilia – childhood journals, newspaper clippings, homework projects, birthday cards, folded love notes, yearbooks, awards, certificates, ticket stubs, programs, signed photos, commemorative glassware, dried flowers, aborted poems, abandoned essays, elaborate doodles and generally all manner of post-adolescent byproduct.
Every couple of years or so, when I am home, my mother gently asks me to downsize my residential footprint by marking some of these items for deletion. And naturally, the necessary review of these items pulls me into a pinwheeling time vortex – an acid flashback without the acid.
These totems are fascinating because they are like the edge-and-corner pieces in the puzzle of one's life story. They bind temporary and ephemeral emotions to a concrete and tangible time and place. We use these environmental boundaries to interpolate and complete the rest of the picture.
But they are also dangerous, for two separate but equally important reasons:
They are fundamentally incomplete. In and of themselves they represent a tiny fraction of our experience. But as the only tangible evidence of our experience they take on way more importance than they were ever intended to bear, like a fossil record.
They are fundamentally affected by our perception of them. Time bends and warps our recollections, retroactively altering our reaction to these items and imparting a deeper meaning that was never there to begin with, like an impressionist painting.
Our brains are very adaptable and powerful instruments, capable of fashioning vivid memories from these tiny clues. But that doesn’t mean that the brain is correct. Our personal history is extremely malleable, perhaps even more so than the personalities we build on top of them.
I also had occasion this weekend to visit with some old friends – star witnesses to my personal history – who happened to be passing through town. Naturally and appropriately, most of this conversation was of the small-talk variety, focusing on basic things like work, family and friends in common. Despite long distances and delays between us, we generally fell into our familiar, pleasant rhythms. It was nice.
But the personal anthropologist in me, the one hip-deep in 20-year-old English papers and ticket stubs, wished he could have asked a more darkly analytical question: who are you?
Because I know who they were. That comprehensive knowledge was the basis for the friendship and love that will probably last forever. And I know what they do, because social media networks inform me of both the Major Life Events and the meaningless minutia that dominate their lives. But what remains unavailable and inscrutable is not the personality but the person who has evolved. I want to hear about the choices and values that define who they are now.
“My life is an illustration and testament to the power of hard work.”
“I am a Christian.”
“Everything I do is for my family.”
Something like that.
It’s not important, necessarily. It won’t change my affection for these people, but it’s interesting, because I can’t stop thinking about time, and how it changes everything.
Some quantum physicists have theorized that existence can be characterized not as a universe but as a multiverse, in which all time, space, matter and energy is happening infinitely and at once. Hypothetically, this means that every period in every sentence of every love note from every girlfriend is being written right now, which means that it is always and unstoppably being written.
There is something heartbreakingly romantic about that.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is solipsism, the metaphysical assumption that not only is every moment fleeting, it does not even actually exist outside of your own perception. Every period in every sentence of every love note from every girlfriend was actually put there by your subconscious mind.
There is something cold and frightening about that.
But under the multiverse hypothesis, not only is the past constantly repeating, but the present and the future is as well, meaning that there really is nothing you can do about it. Under the solipsism hypothesis, at least you have some small measure of control over what happens next. It may be subconscious, but it’s something.
The Capital-T Truth probably exists somewhere between these two extremes. But it would seem to me that the essential dichotomy at the center is whether our memories are alive and enduring, or whether they are the product of our agency and imagination.
Surrounded by these artifacts and eyewitnesses of my own evolution, I want desperately to believe in the former but I am overwhelmingly compelled to believe in the latter.
It takes a lot of effort to keep the past alive. Perhaps that is for the better.
The universe wants us to be present. It wants us to know – to decide – who we are. Who are you?
When seconds pass slowly and years go flying by
You gotta stop the us and get off here"
- Ben Folds Five, "Jackson Cannery"
I am in Rochester this weekend, along with my brother, nominally to celebrate my mother's recent birthday, but more pointedly to get the nuclear family back together for a controlled nuclear family explosion.
While this house (and this town) will always retain that abstract quality of "home," with every passing year it seems a little less familiar and a little more like a museum where you can reach out and touch the artifacts. The permanent collection is priceless but some of the new installations are jarring.
Part of that permanent collection is a 30-gallon Tupperware tub in my old bedroom closet, brimming with deeply personal memorabilia – childhood journals, newspaper clippings, homework projects, birthday cards, folded love notes, yearbooks, awards, certificates, ticket stubs, programs, signed photos, commemorative glassware, dried flowers, aborted poems, abandoned essays, elaborate doodles and generally all manner of post-adolescent byproduct.
Every couple of years or so, when I am home, my mother gently asks me to downsize my residential footprint by marking some of these items for deletion. And naturally, the necessary review of these items pulls me into a pinwheeling time vortex – an acid flashback without the acid.
These totems are fascinating because they are like the edge-and-corner pieces in the puzzle of one's life story. They bind temporary and ephemeral emotions to a concrete and tangible time and place. We use these environmental boundaries to interpolate and complete the rest of the picture.
But they are also dangerous, for two separate but equally important reasons:
They are fundamentally incomplete. In and of themselves they represent a tiny fraction of our experience. But as the only tangible evidence of our experience they take on way more importance than they were ever intended to bear, like a fossil record.
They are fundamentally affected by our perception of them. Time bends and warps our recollections, retroactively altering our reaction to these items and imparting a deeper meaning that was never there to begin with, like an impressionist painting.
Our brains are very adaptable and powerful instruments, capable of fashioning vivid memories from these tiny clues. But that doesn’t mean that the brain is correct. Our personal history is extremely malleable, perhaps even more so than the personalities we build on top of them.
I also had occasion this weekend to visit with some old friends – star witnesses to my personal history – who happened to be passing through town. Naturally and appropriately, most of this conversation was of the small-talk variety, focusing on basic things like work, family and friends in common. Despite long distances and delays between us, we generally fell into our familiar, pleasant rhythms. It was nice.
But the personal anthropologist in me, the one hip-deep in 20-year-old English papers and ticket stubs, wished he could have asked a more darkly analytical question: who are you?
Because I know who they were. That comprehensive knowledge was the basis for the friendship and love that will probably last forever. And I know what they do, because social media networks inform me of both the Major Life Events and the meaningless minutia that dominate their lives. But what remains unavailable and inscrutable is not the personality but the person who has evolved. I want to hear about the choices and values that define who they are now.
“My life is an illustration and testament to the power of hard work.”
“I am a Christian.”
“Everything I do is for my family.”
Something like that.
It’s not important, necessarily. It won’t change my affection for these people, but it’s interesting, because I can’t stop thinking about time, and how it changes everything.
Some quantum physicists have theorized that existence can be characterized not as a universe but as a multiverse, in which all time, space, matter and energy is happening infinitely and at once. Hypothetically, this means that every period in every sentence of every love note from every girlfriend is being written right now, which means that it is always and unstoppably being written.
There is something heartbreakingly romantic about that.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is solipsism, the metaphysical assumption that not only is every moment fleeting, it does not even actually exist outside of your own perception. Every period in every sentence of every love note from every girlfriend was actually put there by your subconscious mind.
There is something cold and frightening about that.
But under the multiverse hypothesis, not only is the past constantly repeating, but the present and the future is as well, meaning that there really is nothing you can do about it. Under the solipsism hypothesis, at least you have some small measure of control over what happens next. It may be subconscious, but it’s something.
The Capital-T Truth probably exists somewhere between these two extremes. But it would seem to me that the essential dichotomy at the center is whether our memories are alive and enduring, or whether they are the product of our agency and imagination.
Surrounded by these artifacts and eyewitnesses of my own evolution, I want desperately to believe in the former but I am overwhelmingly compelled to believe in the latter.
It takes a lot of effort to keep the past alive. Perhaps that is for the better.
The universe wants us to be present. It wants us to know – to decide – who we are. Who are you?
