I Am a Strange Loop

There is no doubt that the patterns that will be sparked in my brain by watching those videos — the symbols in my brain that will be triggered, reactivated, resuscitated, brought back to life for the first time since she died, and that will be dancing inside me — will be just as strong as when they were sparked in my brain when she herself was there, in person, actually doing those things that are now merely images on tape. The dance of the symbols inside my brain sparked by the videos will be the same dance, and danced by the same symbols, as when she was right there before me.

So there’s this set of structures inside my brain that videos and photos and other extremely intense records can access in such a profound way — the structures in me that, when she was alive, were correlated with Carol, were deeply in resonance with her, the structures that represented Carol, the structures that seemed, for all the world, to be Carol. But as I watch the videos, knowing she is gone, the fraudulency will at once be being revealed and yet be deeply confusing me, because I will be seeming to see her, seeming to have revived her, seeming to have brought her back, just as I do in my dreams. And so I wonder, what is the nature of those structures collectively forming the “Carol symbol” in my brain? How big is the Carol symbol? And most importantly of all: How close does the Carol symbol inside Doug come to being a person, as opposed to merely representing or symbolizing a person?

The following should be a much easier question (although I think it is not actually easier). What was the nature of the “Holden Caulfield symbol” in J. D. Salinger’s brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield — but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn’t as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if only a “miniature” one. You couldn’t ask for a richer representation, a richer mirroring, of one person inside another person, than whatever constituted the Holden Caulfield symbol inside Salinger’s brain.

I hope the overall set of ideas here sounds coherent to you, Dan, even though what I have said is certainly made up of lots of incoherent little threads. It is terribly hard to articulate these things, and it is made far harder by the interference of one’s deep emotions, which wish things to be certain ways, and which push to a certain extent for the answers to come out on that side. Of course it is also precisely the strength of those desires that makes these questions so intense and so important in ways that wouldn’t have happened if tragedy hadn’t struck.

I must admit that I feel a little bit like someone trying to grapple with quantum-mechanical reality while quantum mechanics was developing but before it had been fully and rigorously established — someone around 1918, someone like Sommerfeld, who had a deep understanding of all the so-called “semiclassical” models that were then available (the wonderful Bohr atom and its many improved versions), but quite a while before Heisenberg and Schrödinger came along, cutting to the very core of the question, and getting rid of all the confusion. Around 1918, a lot of the truth was nearly within reach, but even people who were at the cutting edge could easily fall back into a purely classical mode of thinking and get hopelessly confused.

That’s how I feel about self, soul, consciousness these days. I feel as if I know very intimately, yet can’t quite always remember, the distributedness of consciousness and the illusion of the soul. It’s frustrating to feel myself constantly sliding back into conventional intuitive (“classical”) views of these questions when I know that deep down, my view is radically counterintuitive (“quantum-mechanical”).

Post Scriptum

Long after this chapter (minus this P.S.) had been put together in final form, it occurred to me that it might be tempting for some readers to conclude that in the wake of Carol’s death, her deeply depressed husband had buckled under the terrible pressures of loss, and had sought to build some kind of elaborate intellectual superstructure through which he could deny to himself what was self-evident to all outsiders: that his wife had died and was completely gone, and that was all there was to it.