The Phases of You
Saint Augustine spent an entire book of his Confessions meditating on memory in his search for God. He talks about how memory is so vast and amazing for what it can retain and yet notes that it cannot contain the experience of being closer to God. For me, I would ask a simpler question: God, why is it not possible to hold you in my mind at all times-surely to worship something is to think of it always. It sounds naïve, but I lament that I cannot keep that which I hold most dear to me in my thoughts all of the time.
If you have been in love you may have experienced this feeling at first but usually we don’t panic about it like I imagine St. Augustine would. When you feel that flush of love for someone and realize they feel it back it is such a powerful feeling. You think of that person all the time, you text and talk whenever you have a spare moment. It isn’t possible to sustain, and I’m grateful for this, but I wonder why can’t we worship one another like this for any length of time?
It’s nice after the budding romance wears off and we begin to count on each other. We become comfortable in each other’s company. It’s perfect to simply be in the same room as one another and do separate things. Besides there are a lot of things we have to take care of, things that were established before you met the love of your life. The main obstacle to this is that you live in a body and that body has needs. There are many demands and they are too numerous to list because they include all of our chores, work commitments, and even a need to relax now and then. You wouldn’t make a very good partner if when you became enamored with someone you became transfixed, like Narcissus was transfixed with himself but with you with another.
The problem, if it is a problem, is that we are in this life for a finite amount of time. In that time we exist we are only conscious for about two-thirds of it. With this finite amount of consciousness we have a lot of things to take care of. The one I’m concerned with is the amount of time you spend to feel whole. For St. Augustine, this meant the time he was aware of his God, at different times for me, it has been the amount of time I spent thinking of the people I care for the most.
Lately I have been entertaining a new awareness in my struggle to feel whole. This is a struggle because I’ve accepted the conventional wisdom that people are inherently bad. There is a lot of evidence for that in the news. Thankfully, I’m not struggling every day to prevent myself from commiting crimes. But I do struggle with living up to be the man I want to be. This is simple things like, having a good diet, being a good friend, being productive, remembering my family, and just not debasing myself too much. When I fail at this I don’t ask myself for forgiveness, I usually just wince a little and try to be better. I feel like I have momentarily forgotten myself.
Given that we have so many things to direct our consciousness to and so little time in our lives, how do we organize when to spend our attention on the necessary things. In my life I do not allocate time in my calendar to “think” about things. Of course, no one does, it would be absurd. But I wish I also didn’t just exist from moment to moment being surprised at what will bubble up into my consciousness. There are so many important things to think about that I feel bad when I’m thinking of something important to me and something trivial dislodges that thought. It’s almost as if the mind has a checklist of things that need our attention over and over. When you check one of these things off, eventually the ink you used will fade and you will need to check it off again.
I wonder how complex our dopamine addiction is. For example I know my body will plead for coffee in the morning, my body pleads for sleep at night, food at meal times, et cetera. Does my brain also have the need to think on certain things every so often? Look at the idea that we follow a circadian cycle. The word comes from the Latin for “about the day.” Biologists use the idea of a circadian rhythm to map our daily urges so why not include our urges to think on certain things and people. It usually feels like missing someone.
All of nature lives to the recurring rhythm of a cycle, we have day-night cycles, seasons, moon phases, tides, years. These phases are described by science. I’m loathe to think that our personalities are also possibly described by science but I do like to entertain the idea of a block universe theory every now and then. The theory that all time past present and future only seem to exist to us because our consciousness occupies a certain moment of it. There could be someone located further in the future who sees the events occurring in our now, in their past. Like the idea of Laplace’s demon, the idea that there could be a consciousness capable of understanding all of the current events and predict how they will all unfold, essentially making our lives predetermined.
So maybe it’s our circadian rhythms, maybe it’s our brain chemistry, or maybe a block universe that determines what thoughts bubble up in our brains on a regular basis. However, even if it was possible to describe our every thought by science, the description would be sufficiently complex that we could never understand it. And if we are along for a ride as little time worms in this universe, we seem to feel like we have the freedom to be conscious of what we want, despite frequent interruptions. The phases of me remain a mystery, and so do the phases of you.
That our memories are a mystery was explored in Blade Runner 2049. Officer K played by Ryan Gosling comes to realize that his earliest memory is in fact a real memory. He reacts strongly to this knowledge because he has existed thinking it was something artificial. The realization that it is a real memory, that someone lived it, makes him feel like he has been living a lie and that he is a real person not a replicant. This brings up an interesting idea: memory is not life, it is an accessory to a good life, but it doesn’t replace it.
St. Augustine concluded that his God didn’t exist in his memories and yet his memory of God allowed him to be closer to God:
for I did not find You amongst the images of material things. I went on to search for you in the part of my memory where the emotions of my mind are stored, but here too I did not find you. I passed on to the seat of the mind itself-for this too is in the memory, since the mind can remember itself-but you were not there.
He says in our minds we are dependent on our memories to “remember ourselves.” Our memories contain “the seat of our mind”. Likewise, we depend on our memories of the people we care for in order that we continue to care for them. And all of the other people and things we care about have a place in our memories which our awareness can draw from at any time. But the memories are no substitute for the real objects of our love, or our God, or even ourselves.
Which is why grief is so harrowing. Put aside the realization it brings that we will cease to be, the loss of someone you know and love is too much loss for our minds to bear. Without being able to access someone on that frequent basis we must rely on our memories and we often we find that our memories are insufficient.
This loss is likely why we have an entire book by St. Augustine pining for his God. Death humbles you. I have gone through various states of believing in god. My most embarrassing time was the time I was a staunch atheist who looked down on people who clung to religion. It took only about 10 more years of the slings and arrows of life to change my opinion. I realized that life was so hard and the nights are long, therefore whatever you need to get through those nights is acceptable and even good.
I imagine that even a believer of some kind of afterlife has difficult moments, moments of doubt. That doubt, that fear about what happens after we and our loved ones die is probably one of our few universal traits. The worst part of my losing my Dad to cancer, before he died, was me worrying that he was afraid of dying. After he died I was in shock for about a week. Eventually, I felt the need to speak to him again like I used to speak to him, tick off the talk to Dad box. And so the greatest loss I felt was not being able to feel his presence. I would think of him in places we would go, at the river we’d fish, and sometimes, I could feel his presence, sometimes I could not. My friend recommended I try talking to him, like actually speaking out loud to my father. So I tried it. And at first I wasn’t used to hearing my voice by itself. That soon passed. I found I had a lot I wanted to tell my Dad. I told him many things I wouldn’t tell anyone else. The mystery in me did the rest.
