music, memory, non-existence (final post -- published March 1, 2012)
the final post on my 2012 blog: published march 1, 2012
Above: Kolkata, India
Music and memory have always been closely intertwined for me. I almost always have a handful of songs that I relate to whatever is going on in my life at the present moment. Later, when months have passed, when there is rain instead of snow, when I’ve moved to a different city, when I’ve gained new friends and when I am reading different books – in short, once the present moment has ceased to exist anywhere but in my mind – those songs remain inseparably connected with the memory.
I’ve just started playing Suspension by Mae. I never listen to Mae anymore, at least not very often. But whenever I do, I think my brain must re-commence almost the same chemical reactions that nurtured some of the wonderful emotions I experienced in the early portions of the summer of 2005. I was dating a girl named Sarah at the time. I was seventeen years old and she bought me a fish as a gift for our “one month anniversary.” We were getting ready to spend a month abroad in Germany with our class – in a small, heart-shaped town in northern Bavaria. I spent an inordinate amount of time back then reading Michael Crichton and Chuck Palahniuk. I remember I used to get up at seven in the morning just so I could sit and watch the leafy shadows that the rising sun made on my bedroom door while I listened to Mae and read Survivor. I took a picture of those dark shadow-leaves, of that bright white sunlight surrounding them, of those branches as they moved up and down in the wind on my door.
I came across this passage in Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre while I was reading the book the other day. Somehow it managed to raise some of my hair.
I looked anxiously around me, he writes, the present, nothing but the present. Furniture light and solid, rooted in its present, a table, a bed, a closet with a mirror, and me. The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all.
Only the present moment actually exists in any real, tangible way, it seems to me. The future exists only as conjecture, prediction, theory. Tomorrow does not currently exist at all. Neither does yesterday, though. The past, I think, only exists in memory, connected sometimes with this music. The person I was back then no longer exists at all – cells have divided and died, neural networks have changed here and there, new beliefs and concepts and experiences have generated a significantly altered consciousness. That person is somehow dead – he cannot think, he cannot feel, and he has nothing to say anymore. I feel a powerful, personal, blending connection with him, as I know I am descended directly from him – but I also know he does not exist any more than most of my other ancestors exist.
So perhaps I cannot feel exactly what he felt back then when I listen to Mae right now. Because the person who experience those things, and those events themselves, no longer can be found anywhere outside of my head, outside of the heads of those who were there, outside of the heads of those now reading about it. This is not to deny the objective fact that these events did indeed take place, and that these feelings did exist at the time, and that a real, existing, matter-of-fact human being named Andrew Jelinek experienced all of those things. There was, in fact, a time when he was the present, and he existed; there was a time when I, his descendent, was the future, and I – the specific person writing this – did not exist yet. But now I live, and he is gone. He of course did not die so much as transform into me. His experiences and actions affect me and influence me and in many ways play a determining role in how I behave and think – but they are not me. They are memories inside my head. And in the coming years, as new experiences mount and people come and go, as cells divide and die, as the thoughts and concepts that dominate this head transform and mutate, I must also give way to my descendents.
Eventually, though, a far stronger transformation will take place. At least for now, I am in some biological sense the same organism as that presently non-existing Andrew – we share the same genetic information, transcribing the same DNA into RNA, translating that same RNA into very much the same proteins in our ribosomes. Although even then, I must venture at least to guess that, given the changes in countenance, mood, personality, and belief, the ribosomes in our brain cells must have altered their protein production. Either way, this organismal continuity, however wonderful it seems to me as a Great Ape with a survival instinct, must end forever, and it is only a matter of time before the animal that is me becomes a memory itself, just like the summer of 2005.
The narrator in Nausea is writing a history book about some dead person named Rollebon. He was no more, writes Sartre. No more at all. If there were still a few bones left of him, they existed for themselves, independently, they were nothing more than a little phosphate and calcium carbonate with salts and water.
I can imagine my funeral someday. Actually, I often imagine my funeral. A good friend, I hope, will be there, perhaps glancing at my corpse. But what are they looking at? Are they looking at me, the person who is writing this right now? Or are they just looking at a dead body? A dead body – containing still some of the chromosomes and skin cells, but harboring none of the feelings, none of the thoughts, none of the emotions, none of the dreams, and none of the dire personality flaws that constitute me as I write this. At that time, I will not exist. None of the neurons in my brain will be firing. My cells in my brain won’t be producing any proteins, any hormones. If you hug me, if you kiss me, if you tell me you love me, there won’t be any oxytocin that nurtures affinity toward you on my account. You will find quickly there is no me to hug. There will just be a boring, dead, decaying clump of organic matter. My corpse will exist for itself, independently. My friend will not be looking at me. And these passions I have will exist nowhere but in your imagination, your memory.
For some reason it is disturbing to me that those moments of the summer 2005 are not only moments of the past, but rather are also moments that simply do not exist. That moment when Sarah was carrying that goldfish tank with the blue pebbles and the “No Fishing” sign up to my front door, and I saw her through the window – that moment did happen, yes. But that moment, those feelings, those thoughts I had in that second, that brain configuration in my head that experienced what was happening – none of it exists anymore at all.
Sometimes, when I think about the non-existent past, I want to cry. Because no matter how wonderful it was, I know that I cannot go to it – it is nowhere to be found. It’s just something to talk about, something to remember.
Still, I like that I can listen to music and at least bring some notion of the existence of those events into the present. At least I can try, however imperfectly, to replicate some of the emotions and thoughts of the past, so as to make it exist again, so much as it can exist again. Because these feelings, these chemicals inside my head – they are real, they exist, and I like them. I can only hope, wishfully, foolishly perhaps, that once I cease to exist forever, someone somewhere might read something I’ve written and imagine me and try her best to recreate my thoughts and bring something of me, as best as she can, back into existence.