The Seamstress

Once again Maria Popova has ‘strung a knot in my mind’, to quote a favorite line from Bob Dylan’s “Restless Farewell.” Her website, brainpickings.org is a treasure-trove of articles on many of my favorite subjects and heroes, with each article being a written exposition on her passion for the words and ideas from the sharpest minds in literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, art, and poetry. And it’s all organically structured with links to other relevant articles that she has also written that further builds on her main theme. I’ve become so enamored with her site that I decided early on to become a monthly patron to help support her work, and with that support comes a weekly newsletter with newly added content. Well today I received a new notice and for the next two hours was lost in threads of her insights. This particular theme being a favorite topic, which is how we become who we are?

Her article centered on writer, Eudora Welty, and this is how she initiated the article, which shows Popova’s own talent for clothing complex ideas with well written prose.

‘To be human is to unfold in time but remain discontinuous. We are living non sequiturs seeking artificial cohesion through the revisions our memory, that capricious seamstress, performs in threading the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It is, after all, nothing but a supreme feat of storytelling to draw a continuous thread between one’s childhood self and one’s present-day self, since hardly anything makes these two entities “the same person” — not their height, not their social stature, not their beliefs, not their circle of friends, not even the very cells in their bodies. Somewhere in the lacuna between the experiencing self and the remembering self, we create ourselves in what is literally a matter of making sense — of craftsmanship — for, as Oliver Sacks so poignantly observed, it is narrative that holds our identity together.’

This idea of the self being fragmented isn’t a new one of course. I first learned of it from Carl Jung, whose view contrasted sharply against the notion of a single point of identity. He explained that instead of thinking of ourselves as of a single, cohesive self, it would be far more accurate to define ourselves as a collection of selves that he called ‘personas’, which can be thought of as ‘masks’ that we put on or take off depending on the social situation we find ourselves. For example, consider that while on a flight that you find yourself sitting next to a congenial, well-mannered older gentleman. You find him pleasant and speak with him in an easy, carefree manner. Then you witness the stewardess walk up and address the gentleman as “Senator”. At that point, at least for most of us, a different ‘mask’ would be slipped on due to his new status, and a subtle change would occur in the way we then conduct ourselves. If we ever achieve a level of personal control where there is no changing of our mask, in any situation, we will achieve what Jung termed ‘Individuation’.

But Jung’s ‘persona’ misses the mark here. His concept is structured within a social context and doesn’t capture the entirely mysterious process of maintaining a cohesive narrative purely inside our own mind. Just as Popova alluded to above, there is virtually no commonality between my 16-year-old self and this 58-year-old version. Aside from physical features, I am a completely different person in every way imaginable, yet there is a thread of continuity that my memory has woven together that allows me to remember that I used to be him. But the narrative coursing through that teenagers mind is completely lost to me now, if there ever was one. I have only glimpses, fragments, images really, that come to me like photographs, otherwise I have no other relationship to him. Regardless of how hard I may try, it is impossible to place myself back into any one of my earlier iterations and feel the same flow of thoughts. Those past versions are nothing but wisps of memory, which underscores the nature of Popova’s “seamstress” in constructing the cohesion that I identify with.

The idea of what constitutes our subjective model of ‘self’ has captivated me for the better part of the past 40 years now, and although I didn’t have the vocabulary or conceptual framework to describe it when I was younger, the investigation of it has consumed my entire adult life. Like most young people, my search originally ran through music, which in my case involved the lyrics of John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Roger Waters. Then, when my curiosities outpaced the substance that a song lyric could deliver, I branched out and began reading, eventually devouring a small library worth of books, books that teased and encouraged me into reconsidering all of the social norms I had grown up with, from the existential obsession in “Zen, and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, to the mysticism of Carlos Castaneda, and to the radical individualism of Tom Robins. From there I moved on to Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson, Campbell, Bellow, as well as others.

Perhaps I should pause here in order to set a slightly different course for this note, because mentioning my admiration for those particular authors without the relevant context will miss a key part of my story. I wasn’t intending to delve into a personal history here, but in order to establish the proper milieu for this theme of storytelling, as suggested in the title, and to demonstrate, however briefly, the profound transformation that overtook me at 19, a brief detour will need to be undertaken.

To stake a flag at the first inkling of my “self” awareness, the date springs easily to mind, December 8^th, 1980, and the death of John Lennon. Before that day, to say my house lights were dim now seems laughably understated. I was shallow, period. At the time I had only an elementary grasp of who I was or what that even meant. I had no curiosity to read or to learn. I held no convictions, had no principles that guided me, no introspection or vision of what my future self would resemble. Hell, I didn’t’ even realize that the question existed, let alone that it was waiting for a reply. I enjoyed drawing and liked art in a general sense, but I mostly saw myself as an athlete, and was consumed with sports of all kinds. I was a quiet, shy, and respectful kid, but there was little else going on, and I mean very little else.

But with Lennon’s death, something primal woke up in me and the doors that had concealed my true self were blown off their hinges. Everything inside of me screamed to learn more about the man, which I found odd because I had no interest in him before and only vaguely understood that he was even a “Beatle”, yet my every intuition implored me to learn more, and from there I soon became a little ball of intellectual curiosity soaking up everything I had willfully ignored before. What became readily apparent was that I harbored an insatiable thirst to learn, and especially to read, and from all of the eclectic material that began pouring in, an entirely new version of me was born.

There is an analogy that comes to mind that may illustrate just how lucid this change was for me. It comes from a scene in the early part of “The Wizard of Oz”, while the story is still presented in black and white, when just after the tornado had passed, Dorothy opens her door to step out only to see Oz for the first time, and with it discovers a world that she had never dreamed of suddenly before her eyes in stunning color. That is precisely how it felt.

I guess what I’m trying to convey here is that Lennon’s death caused an abrupt paradigm shift at the most fundamental level, but before the wrong assumption is implied there, this shift was not due to Lennon’s opinions suddenly coloring in the bare spots of my own, like some “paint-by-the-number” self-awareness kit, not at all. It was rather his fearless determination to walk his own path that affected me. He simply opened my mind up to another world, another way of seeing, and with it, Art, Music, Aesthetics, Philosophy, History and Psychology, among many other subjects quickly became obsessions.

Even at the time I clearly understood this was more than mere curiosity, but rather a distinct and clearly focused “I” had entered the room……and it had questions. Quite literally, I was one person before Lennon’s death, and another after. In the broadest sense, his death worked as a tuning fork that awoke the person I was always meant to become, or to borrow a favorite line from Saul Bellow’s “Henderson the Rain King”, Lennon’s death “burst my spirits sleep.”

In any proper definition of the phrase, my sense of self was born during that period. Had it been Paul McCartney killed and his choir boy simplicity instead of Lennon, I would have been completely unaffected and would have lived out a far different life than the one I live now. It was specifically Lennon’s example of a self-educated, free thinking, articulate individualist that was burning white hot and for the first time in my life, everything became acutely relevant. This awakening, for lack of a better word, cannot be overstated here. A vastly different “self” took hold, and it has been the only voice rattling around in my head ever since.

In one simple but clear example of this shift, I recall when Tennessee began to offer personalized license plates. Other states had the option already, but Tennessee had just adopted the policy, so as soon as it was announced, I knew that kind of self-expression was too good to pass up, so I began thinking about what I wanted to convey. Most of the examples that I came across were the typical personal initials or perhaps some amusing acronym of one kind or another, but none of that would work for me. I had to select the perfect expression of who I was, or at least what I stood for, in seven alphanumeric characters or less. If I was going to ‘personalize’ my car and advertise to the good people of Nashville what the driver behind the wheel actually considered important, then options had to be evaluated and decisions made. My choice?

IF6WAS9

For those not familiar, this is the title to a Jimi Hendrix song from his “Axis Bold As Love” album. Lyrically, the song expresses this very concept of being a true individual and to have the courage, as the song boldly declares, to “fly my freak flag high”. Here is its second verse, followed by its final existential declaration.

If the 6 turn out to be 9
I don’t mind, I don’t mind
And if the mountains fell into the sea
Let it be, it ain’t me
Cause I’ve got my own world to live through
And I ain’t gonna copy you

I’m the one that’s going to die when it’s time for me to die
So let me live my life the way I want to

Of course, that is just a single example among hundreds that I could offer, but it should provide a quick snapshot into the self-awareness that suddenly sprang up during this time and how intensely different I became, because this type of razor-sharp individualism was simply not present before, not at all, and it permeated everything in my life. In fact, it was at this time that I began to write down my thoughts in small pocket-sized note pads that I always carried with me. I still have them, in fact, nearly 40 years later, and reading them now certainly causes a flush of embarrassment at the preening profundities expressed by that young man, but the evidence, or perhaps if I can be generous to him, the beauty of those initial attempts at self-expression have proven to be the embers that ignited the ragging fire that is still burning.

******

“We are living non sequiturs seeking artificial cohesion through the revisions our memory, that capricious seamstress, performs in threading the stories we tell ourselves about who we are”.

******

With this line from Popova, it could be said that with Lennon’s death I began an apprenticeship to become that “capricious seamstress”, for I developed a lifelong obsession (this journal) for stitching together all the threads coursing through my mind with the hope of stitching together a worthy tapestry to call my own. For the first time in my life, I was fully aware and understood who I was and had a reasonable idea what that entailed.

Of course, the paradox with that awakening is much harder to reconcile and comes at the expense of learning there is no such thing as a self, at least not in the pedestrian version we all know so well. It’s a disconcerting idea for anyone with a strong attachment of it, and even more difficult to relinquish, but the evidence is compelling….which must always be our master value. It’s an observable fact, for instance, that there isn’t a central, locatable point in the brain where a “self” can be. There is not a place among the billions of neurons to find where I could say, “Ah, there I am”. In other words, there is no puppeteer sitting in my brain manipulating the strings of my actions and thoughts, but only an awareness of my moment-to-moment engagement with the world.

Just to be clear on this point, all the relevant research points to the conclusion that the ‘self’, and by that I mean the image we hold of ourselves, as being a psychological “construct”, built from many different and interconnected mental processes that we are completely unaware of. We feel like a unified whole, but that is an illusion, an incredibly complex illusion, but an illusion just the same. When attempting to whittle down my own backstory, I concede that I had zero input into my genetics. I did not choose my parents or my siblings, or the community or social class that I was born into, and like everyone else, once a level of self-awareness eventually came on-line, I found that I was in possession of an identity that I had little to no hand in creating. The whole messy process underscores this notion that our self-image is tightly bound to a vast cohesion of memories and our emotional relationship to them. Sam Harris put a finer distinction on this point when he described it this way.

“….you are not a thing, you are a process, a stream of actions and experiences.”

Over the past few years, Harris, a Neuroscientist and Philosopher, has been a huge influence on this subject, as well as other researchers, such as Neuroscientist, Anil Seth, whose TED Talk, “Your Brain Hallucinates Your Conscious Reality” is quite an eye-opening talk. Together they have infused me with many of the current findings and understandings of the illusory nature of the “self”, which only supports the existence of Popova’s seamstress in crafting the story we tell ourselves.

I recall an example from Harris’ book, “Waking Up”, for instance, where he described documented studies of patients who had undergone a brain procedure called Corpus Calloscotomy, where doctors sever the corpus callosum, the pathway that connects the right and left hemispheres. This extreme procedure is done for patients who suffer from acute seizers, which can be thought of as electrical storms within the brain, so the aim is to control the spread of the storm by cutting off its main pathway.

After the procedures, scientists soon discovered something quite bizarre as each hemisphere displayed unique personalities after the procedure, even displaying conflicting opinions and desires. It seems the result of the procedure effectively split the patients into two separate people, which begs the question, which was the original? But more importantly, if the self can be split in two so effectively by means of a medical procedure, then what constitutes a self in the first place. It follows that it can be nothing more than a complex cohesion (that seamstress again) of memory. Split the memories and you split the person, proving there is not a point of location in the mind for an independent self to be, forever debunking Descartes mind/body dualism in the process. The mind (consciousness) is not separate from the body, it’s an emergent property of it. Or as Richard Dawkin’s succinctly phrased it, “Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complex that it must include a model of itself.” 

But trying to define this feeling of selfhood through neuroscience doesn’t help me here at all. It doesn’t explain the real sweet spot of conscious awareness, which is the subjective ownership that I experience in the first person. Although I can accept the idea that I have no relevant input into how my subconsciousness performs all the necessary organizing, cataloging, pruning, and assigning degrees of importance to all the data flowing in through my senses, which in turn constructs the edifice of my experience, and I can even contemplate Anil Seth’s theory of a hallucinated reality, but none of it explains the absolute ownership I feel with this end-product, this bedrock of identity, this “I” that sprang out of me at Lennon’s death.

The philosopher Derek Parfit described an interesting thought experiment that perfectly exposes this dilemma of self-ownership. He imagined that a technology existed that can instantly transport you to a Mars colony for a bit of vacation, copying each and every atom in your body, a perfect copy with all your memories and experiences perfectly intact. Then you learn that once the new copy of you in completed on Mars, the earthly copy is disposed of. Simple, right?

Well, in his thought experiment, Parfit then introduces an interesting dilemma by suggesting that what if a mistake had been made, and that immediately after the perfect copy was completed on Mars, that a glitch in the process occurred and the Earthly copy did not get destroyed as was supposed to happen, and you find yourself still alive on Earth AND on Mars. Then imagine a technician walking over to explain the problem has been corrected and the Mars version of you is perfectly intact, therefore you, the earthly original must be destroyed as was originally planned.

Parfit’s point being that even though an exact copy, down to every atom, is alive and well on Mars, to destroy the Earthly ‘you’ would seem to be murder…because your self-continuity (your narrative) was never interrupted. The Earthly you IS you in a way the Mars version could never be, or so our intuition would scream.

It is this thought experiment by Parfit that exposes the tenacity we feel for the inner narrative coursing through our lives. The storyteller at play here is our conscious experience, of course, but riding prominently at the head of the column is ego. It is ego that stands at the Podium, conducting an intricate symphony of all our various threads of self. Thomas Metzinger, a brilliant German philosopher, sums this up quite succinctly in his book “The Ego Tunnel”, that I read just this past year.

“We are ego machines, but we do not have “selves”. We cannot leave the ego tunnel because there is nobody who could leave. The Ego, and its tunnel, are representational phenomena. They are just one of many possible ways in which conscious beings can model reality. Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format; a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world and the ego is merely a complex physical event, an activation pattern in your central nervous system.”

Metzinger is absolutely right, of course. It is clearly what the research shows, but as much as I agree with those findings, I want to step away from all the psychological and philosophical talk for the moment and get back to the poetic sensibilities of Popova’s “seamstress” and her gift at threading our various identities together, for that is where we actually live. There is a line from one of the truly great songs from the 70’s that seems perfectly relevant here. It is Steve Winwood’s “The Low Spark of High Heel Boys”. In one of its key lines is the lyric, “we were children once, playing with toys”, which should easily unmask any illusion we hold regarding the existence of our benevolent seamstress, for what is the relationship between the 58-year-old typing this sentence and the 8-year-old playing with his GI Joe toys in the bathtub if not a vanishingly thin thread of memory. 

Here are are a few lines from Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” that captures the point beautifully.

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the under-linen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.“

The elasticity we feel in our self-continuity is a remarkable evolutionary byproduct, if you stop to consider it, and is the likely key to understanding what separates us, experientially at least, from other life forms, for it is precisely the handiwork by our seamstress that creates the coherence and continuity that we identify with as individuals. Without the talent of that seamstress, our lives would have no narrative arch linking past to present, and therefore no relevant cohesion of identity that encapsulates the  depth of our lives. In other words, that silent seamstress is our true creator!

I want to end this note by including a paragraph from Popova’s new book, “Figuring”, that beautifully captures the bewildering collection of “selves” that we all carry around with us. In an exposition on Emily Dickinson, and the tangled relationships that colored her life and poetry, Popova beautifully articulates to war zone of at play. We assume that everyone sees us for who we believe ourselves to be, but that is demonstrably false. The reality is that everyone we interact with sees us through their own unique vantage point and their own predispositions, and therefore draws their own intuitive conclusions. Then through spoken and unspoken cues, they reflect back to us the person they imagine us to be. We then respond to their projection with a version of ourselves that feels appropriate. Popova brilliantly understands this misunderstood dynamic in describing Dickinson’s life.

“Her life was lived—as every life is lived—not by Emily Dickinson, but by many Emily Dickinsons. Lavinia’s sister was different from Austin’s sister, different from Susan’s almost—lover, different from Higginson’s cracked correspondent, different from the woman who silently tended to the orchids in the glass chamber of her winter conservatory, different from the ghost who sent Mabel wine and verses from the bedroom above Beethoven. They are not costumes donned with artifice for different occasions (Jung’s personas)—they are facets of a self, each illuminated when a particular beam hits at a particular angle. We are different people in different situations, each of our dormant multitudes awakened by a particular circumstance, particular chemistry, particular stroke of chance; each true, each real—a composite Master of our being”.

The upshot to all of this rambling is a bit of a paradox because the sciences are systematically deconstructing all the ‘selfhood’ models that we passionately cling to, ideas of  self’ that have defined our species over the past hundred thousand years, constructs that have built entire civilizations. With the recent emergence of neuroscience, even our romance for individuality begins looking for cover. For example, how much of our literature, just to concentrate one aspect of culture, is built from the compassion and empathy we feel for the personalities we encounter within their stories? At their triumphs and sufferings, hopes and dreams. How are we supposed to contemplate the tortured love story of Tolstoy’s “Ann Karenina” through the prism of an ‘hallucinated self’? How does that compute at all?

It is a questions that I am simply not smart enough to answer, but in admitting that, I will offer my own intuitions on the matter, and there I would point out that evolution has given us a small piece of biological magic, a pre-frontal cortex that provides us with a wide range of conceptual possibilities to consider. There I can imagine, curate, test, and experiment with all the new discoveries on offer without it fracturing my self-conception, and that works for me. There I can contemplate Anil’s ‘hallucinated self’ or Metzinger’s ‘biological data format’ without fear. Their ideas are brilliant and I agree with their research and logic….. but that is NOT where I live. It is not where any of us live.

The problem is simply that our scientific progress is outpacing the slow crawl of our evolutionary development. We just haven’t required these cognitive tools before, which is precisely why these new findings seem so nonsensical to our intuitions. Even if we accept that our core identities are nothing more than psychological constructs, bound together through highly complex binding processes, we must also concede that those mental constructs and binding processes are stumbling out into the world. They have “boots on the ground”, as it were, with faces, voices, and intentions that we can hardly deny. Reducing them to a “biological data format” only works in the lab, not on the pavement.

To that point, simply contemplate Picasso’s unnerving emotional reaction to the “Guernica” bombings, or Beethoven’s defiant gesture in writing his final, life affirming, 9^th Symphony while completely deaf. Consider them, and many others, and feel the true marvel of the ‘individual’ at work, of their passions, emotions, and psychological imperfections and yearnings, all melding together to scream their individuality to the world, all in utter defiance to the God’s of Determinism.

Make no mistake, I greatly value scientific rationale, but defining our selfhood as nothing more than a mere product of unconscious binding processes just doesn’t adequately address, not by a long shot, the sublimity, nor the gravitas of an individual life.