Sailboats and salamanders
And the perplexities of the recursive self
Some early mornings like this one I awake from an emotionally traumatic nightmare, wondering at the puzzling meanness that my self inflicts on … myself. Why!? This subdivision of the selves, sometimes at odds with each other, is a real mind field (pun:bad :: resistance:futile 😩). On such mornings I lie in bed wishing I could escape the self I’ve been assigned, and swap consciousnesses with a caged amphibian. Beg your pardon? Not your go-to coping mechanism for psychological distress? There's a wonderful Cortázar short story that inspires this method. A man visiting an aquarium in Paris1 looks long into the eyes of a captive axolotl (a species of mesoamerican salamander whose name demands stories and legends) and, contemplating its cruel confinement, spontaneously exchanges identity with the little being, and in so doing imprisons himself in its little body. Whoopsie!
The story poses an unsettling question on the transferability of identity - and who is who after the exchange. Might you have already jumped unwittingly from mind to mind, species to species, over the course of your life? The problem with identity swapping is that if the memories, instincts, and priors that comprise a phenomenological “self” are stored deeply in the the physical medium sustaining it (they seem to be), the former “you” mightn’t necessarily come along for the ride. On transfer, you’d just become this new identity entirely, and unlike in Freaky Friday or the aquarium in Paris, you’d retain nothing of your former self. Then, did anything really happen? It's sort of a circular thought experiment that other Hollywood productions have probably already explored more expertly than I can.
Body swapping aside, what about the persistence of a single identity in its own assigned container? Dubious. No one with sufficient maturation could look back on their myriad former selves and disagree with Didion, who said it best (and good enough to be repeatedly quoted here2). “[We] forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.” The people I used to be! Me, aboard Theseus’s ship as the acting captain, the crew, the boatswain and bilge pumper; the very vessel itself. Does even a barnacle remain from the prior voyages as we continually tend to our ever-dilapidating masts, sails, deck, and the rest?
A more visceral metaphor for our changey-ness can be found in the collection of apocrypha that masquerade as commonly-held facts. We are meant to believe that the human body cycles through all of its cellular material every seven years; regeneration as constant a process in animal physiology as it is in boat maintenance. While the specifics of the cell cycling myth are not strictly accurate, the point is. We shuffle off our mortal coil time and again in the course of our lives! And do emerge repeatedly from the chrysalides of ourselves, reborn for better or worse and leaving only castings of who we were in the wake of our metamorphosing.
As identity across time proves slippery as a salamander or a moth pupa, so does it de-compose if I freeze the frame on any given moment. Into seemingly infinite layers. The autonomic self that is the mere biological carriage for the mind, the conscious but uncritical self acting out a life, the critical self judging the value of those actions and course-correcting as necessary (the homunculus up there in the control room, poorly regarded by philosophers of the mind), and the metacritic seated one more level up, weighing in on the logical and moral soundness of those judgments and nudges. Evidently no limit to the number of these layers, these Matryoshka dolls. They call it infinite regress.
Perplexing! The mottled picture this chorus of selves makes seems to point to the irreality of any of them... illusory phenomena tricking one into feeling there is a one in the first place. So through time and without time the puzzle holds. The great game of self-consciousness played out in the arena of the mind with mysterious rules and mysterious players toward mysterious ends.
Even now I mostly just rehash the ideas of others, poorly and with little added originality. So it's not apparent there's a lot of “me” present as the word-assembler types characters across a screen. I'm just instantiating little flecks of other thinkers’ minds without their awareness. Freaky indeed. Then again, the forebears were likely doing the same when they passed these ideas along. And so on, back to that infinite regress. Starting to feel like a hollow echoing drum in here... But, losing myself for a moment in the act of shaping the thoughts; that's the great relief of the creative process. Losing myself for a moment in the act of shaping. The end was oblivion all along.
Freshman philosophy, where the fixity of identity was put under a microscope and subjected to leering and prodding, guided by essays on the matter from the most esteemed classical thinkers whose names I forget.3 I do remember delighting my professor with my own Socratic discourse on the non-essentiality of the self, written in the voices of Ground Control and Major Tom in conversation as the Major slips the bonds of earth’s gravity and of self, losing his present, his past, the very borders of his suit and his body, enveloped in the womb of space. Style over substance I'm sure, and probably not much style at that, but the bar wasn't particularly high in the lecture halls of freshmen electives. A+ stuff, and on to the arboretum! To read Borges4 or more Cortázar under a great magnolia tree.
Perhaps we maintain the continuity of identity - the self - mainly through the creative processes that drive humans. We imagine things, conjuring in our minds the shapes of unmade stuff. We then set about making them, until at some point something is realized. Some durable thing (an earring, a structure, a vessel, a hole) or some transient thing (a meal, a mood, a gasp or a laugh) that resembles well, poorly or somewhere in between, the imagined thing. An enterprise carried on the backs of our persisting selves. We who thought, endeavored to create, then stood at the other side taking in the result, measuring how well it fit its original conception. The blacksmith folding steel. The farmer threshing wheat. The writer’s study, the potter’s studio, the bookkeeper’s office, the preacher’s pulpit. These are the spaces where we hammer out, negotiate, tally and sum our identities. The dark rooms where we fix them onto film with silver and developing agents. Does the substance of self persist only so long as we are about our crafts and passions? Apparently god sustains theirself thusly as well. “See I am God: see I am in all things: see I never lift my hands off my work, nor ever shall , without end” said Julian of Norwich.
I think of my former self (or selves) as whole but incomplete; an apparent contradiction, but there it is. I think of my emerging self as a greater wholeness, a widening radius concentric with who I've been but describing a larger potential. A more complete self. But in deeper reflection I feel the wholeness I seek asking that the boundaries encircling it, no matter how expansive, be dismantled so that my identity might flow out unrestricted by self-confinement and find its own level. Sinking and settling in clefts and hollows. Pooling here and evaporating there. Steam off of a piping kettle, or sublimation off the crust of a settled snow, when the clouds clear and rays of sunlight play lambent on its surface. The pressure relief as the self becomes self-less.
Foreshadowing! Je serai à Paris la semaine prochaine!
That’s right; if you’ve been paying attention long enough you’ll recognize this as lazy pilfering from a vintage feelings post lost to history. Writ on a harddrive in a now-decommissioned dusty old GoDaddy server languishing in … a storage hangar outside Albuquerque? Or in the first of two nods to a certain cinematic triumph, frozen like a mosquito in jurassic amber.
Ok, betterhelp, I see you! Even though this light and informative Learning About Continuity Psychology article is very much giving ‘written by Gemini’.
No stranger to fantastic explorations of thought + consciousness + identity. If you aren’t up on Borges, do not pass go and do not collect $200! 🧐 Head straight to the library tile and collect Ficciones and dig in!
Good one Jordan! I once heard the expression; 'four selves ago'. I now regularly give myself grace or some times laughs as I refer to '4 Eli's ago' or '15 Eli's ago'. As in- "Haha of course I said/did that, that was at least 7 Eli's ago!"