I Am a Strange Loop

While I was working on the last few chapters of I Am a Strange Loop, I reread our entire exchange, which was roughly 35 pages long when printed out, and although it was not great prose, it struck me that portions of it were worth including in the new book, in some form or other. My musings were extremely personal, of course. They were grapplings by a husband in profound shock after his wife simply went up in smoke for no reason at all. I decided to include excerpts from them here not because I wish to make some kind of grand after-the-fact public declaration of love for my wife, although there is no doubt that I loved and love her deeply. I decided to include some of my musings for the simple reason that they are heartfelt probings that struggle with the issues that form the very core of this book. Nothing else that I have written on the topic of the human soul and human consciousness ever came so much from the heart as did those messages to Dan, and even though I would like to think that I now understand the issues somewhat more clearly than I did then, I doubt that anything I write today can have nearly as much urgency as what I wrote then, in those days of extreme anguish and turmoil.

I decided that since my email grapplings have a different style from the rest of this book, and since they come from a different period of time, I would devote a separate chapter to them — and this is that chapter. In order to prepare it, I went through those 35 pages of email, which were often jumbled, redundant, and vague, and which included sporadic snippets on peripheral if not irrelevant topics, and I edited them down to about a quarter of their original length. I also reordered pieces of my messages and allowed myself to make occasional slight modifications in the passages I was keeping, so as to make the flow more logical. Consequently, what you see here is by no means a raw transcript of my end of our conversation, for that would be truly rough going, but it is a faithful boiling-down of the most important topics.

Although it was a dialogue, I have left Dan’s voice out of this chapter because, as I said above, he served mostly as a cool, calm sounding board for my white-hot, emotional explorations. He was not trying to come up with any new theories; he was just listening, being my friend. There was, however, one point in April of 1994 where Dan waxed poetic about what I was going through in those days, and I think his words make an excellent prelude to this chapter, so I’ll quote them below. All else that follows will be in my voice, quoted (in a slightly retouched form) from my email musings between March and August, 1994.

There is an old racing sailboat in Maine, near where I sail, and I love to see it on the starting line with me, for it is perhaps the most beautiful sailboat I have ever seen; its name is “Desperate Lark”, which I also think is beautiful. You are now embarked on a desperate lark, which is just what you should be doing right now. And your reflections are the reflections of a person who has encountered, and taken a measure of, the power of life on our sweet Earth. You’ll return, restored to balance, refreshed, but it takes time to heal. We’ll all be here on the shore when you come back, waiting for you.

The name “Carol” denotes, for me, far more than just a body, which is now gone, but rather a very vast pattern, a style, a set of things including memories, hopes, dreams, beliefs, loves, reactions to music, sense of humor, self-doubt, generosity, compassion, and so on. Those things are to some extent sharable, objective, and multiply instantiatable, a bit like software on a diskette. And my obsessive writing-down of memories, and the many videotapes she is on, and all our collective brain-stored memories of Carol make those pattern-aspects of her still exist, albeit in spread-out form — spread out among different videotapes, among different friends’ and relatives’ brains, among different yellow-sheeted notebooks, and so on. In any case, there is a spread-out pattern of Carolness very clearly discernable in this physical world. And in that sense, Carolness survives.

By “Carolness surviving”, what I mean is that even people who never met her can see how it was to be near her, around her, with her — they can experience her wit, see her smile, hear her voice and her laugh, hear about her youthful adventures, learn how she and I met, watch her play with her small children, and so forth…