Before I came to Wyoming, I’d heard that alumni of the JHSE program said that the program was life-changing. I think now, several weeks after my return home to the city, I see what those alumni meant. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote in Yellowstone, when I first realized this:
I’m beginning to see why others said this was life changing. I see now that I am dynamic and fluid and constantly changing, like all things. I’ve met many friends here, and how wonderful, how strange it is that one day, I can be laughing hysterically with them over dinner and the next evening we can be crying. How fragile human connection is: two weeks ago I had no idea who these people were and now I know them better than I’ve known some of my childhood friends; in two weeks I’ll never see them again and they’ll fade into memory. How delicate and how intangible our history is; I had no idea what a caldera was until today and yet a few of them have completely changed the history of our earth. How sublime all things are: I feel as though I want to know everything and nothing.
I want to learn about all things about science and history, all miniscule details and stories -- how mountains and valleys came to be, how forests were raised and were razed, how the Clark’s nutcracker’s spatial memory allows it to remember the over-10,000 locations where they hide seeds in the winter; but also I want only to feel the wind and someone else’s skin. I want this visceral living in the moment drowning in sensation drinking everything in.
The ephemeral nature of this place and my own life makes me favor the latter but something deep within me craves the first. I wonder about desire and interest and curiosity: what in my blood makes me wonder? What in my blood and DNA and bones? What makes me interested in what I am interested in? If I knew everything there was to about someone -- all the memories, all the thoughts, and every code in every chromosome of DNA -- would I be able to predict the way they questioned the hue of the sky?
How can evolution explain the complex, the computer-like structure of our DNA? Why is it that all things come symmetrical and why are we so afraid of odd numbers? How can something as complicated as cellular respiration be inside of us? And how come it took so long to become aware of it? How will all things we do today affect the future? (I think of DDT.) How to raise self awareness? How are all things intricately interconnected?
It makes me sad that this place this moment this memory this emotion is so fleeting; but the transient characteristic makes it all the more valuable, I guess.
Everything is raw and dynamic: the weather the place the landscape the people the emotion. Thinking of the future and the past and the present -- the history of the geological landscape and the people who used to live here the animals and plants and their stories -- makes me realize that my life now is so brief and inconsequential compared to what I’ve learned. Even with pictures and videos and writing and technology, there’s no way to capture the feeling of being here.
I think that this place will be soon run over with pollution and development and traffic; there’s a ball of emotion in my chest, inexplicable like a rushing wave.
I look down to my right. There is a beachy shore by Slew Creek where a family was moments ago. Perhaps they were here eons ago. To my eye their trace is unidentifiable. There’s nothing left of them except for my memory: the shore is sandy and the wind is blowing just as it was an hour, a year, a millennium ago. How will I be forgotten?
I think of Betraying Spinoza: time is such an abstract concept. How am I the person that I was before? Does that girl still exist? I think of time again and the petrified wood, the forests here, I think of life and death and how nothing really matters. I think of my high school literature class, and how we listened to A Day in the Life by the Beatles. Those are all memories now; when I read this again this will be memory too. I think of Daniel Kahneman; he thinks that there are two selves: the experiencing self and the remembering self. How will these two sides of me feel this? In the end, Kahneman claims, the remembering self is the one who makes decisions. In the end, the remembering self is all that matters.
From Blacktail Butte to Yellowstone valley, the history here -- the wolves the people the stories uncovered, the native Indians and their untold struggles, the wolves our fear the change the desire the greed the land the landscape -- is so unbelievably rich. I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge in my four weeks here.
I think again back to the sublime; I mentioned we often find the sublime in obvious things: the earth’s history, super volcanoes and mountain ranges and constellations. But there is also sublimity in the smaller things: in the individual story of each grain of sand, in the perfect slope of a sugarbowl flower, in the saliva of an insect that cultivates galls on the Blue Spruce.
Reflecting back on my first journal entry, I think my mind hasn’t changed: my memories of the Tetons have become this large blur, this large swath of fond memories and it’s hard to distinguish one from another. I’m beginning to think that this rush is unstoppable again and it’s hard to find the peace, to enjoy one single moment.
And now, even after returning back from the Tetons, life in the city has become a speeding train and I’m clinging on, lost of all the peace that I experienced in the Tetons. I crave that peace again
It makes me sad that all memories blur. Every time I reaccess memories, every time my remembering self reflects back on my experiences, in my brain, neurons refire and the memories change. Every time I think back of a time in the past, it isn’t really there anymore, even in my mind. There’s something romantic about that, for me, in that time heals all things and time makes all big things small. Time is gone when it’s gone.
I try often to remember moments with clarity, like crystals, but it’s hard to draw upon memories for me sometimes. I’m not sure if it’s because of technology or not. (You know, in Plato’s Phaedrus, the philosopher Socrates detested writing, for he thought without the practice of remembering works of literature, the brain would grow soft and idle. When the typewriter was invented, people thought that printed word would do the same. The Internet may have done this, some would argue, but it also rewires the way we think, the same way the typewriter rewires the way we write.)
In this case, I rely on technology -- photos and writing and typing -- to keep memories the same. The problem there is that photos and writing and typing can never capture the full experiencing self, and like this, my experiencing self slips between my fingers like I’m trying to hold onto water.
I know that I can’t hold all memories that I have, as easily as holding them in the palm of my hand, but I want to keep them, like a collector keeps stamps or coins or postcards. I don’t want my memories to change, though they will become well-worn and idyllic and loved, or for them to blur. As my memories reshape, as I remold them as I grow and learn, how will I become different? Am I the same person who came into the Tetons?
I can’t answer these questions now, but stay tuned! I will post more reflections, soon.
An excerpt from Betraying Spinoza:
IV
Identity Crisis
Personal identity: What is it that makes a person the very person that she is, herself alone and not another, an integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be—until she does not continue any longer, at least not unproblematically?
I stare at the picture of a small child at a summer's picnic, clutching her big sister's hand with one tiny hand while in the other she has a precarious hold on a big slice of water-melon that she appears to be struggling to have intersect with the small o of her mouth. That child is me. But why is she me? I have no memory at all of that summer's day, no privileged knowledge of whether that child succeeded in getting the watermelon into her mouth. It's true that a smooth series of contiguous physical events can be traced from her body to mine, so that we would want to say that her body is mine; and perhaps bodily identity is all that our personal identity consists in. But bodily persistence over time, too, presents philosophical dilemmas. The series of contiguous physical events has rendered the child's body so different from the one I glance down on at this moment; the very atoms that composed her body no longer compose mine. And if our bodies are dissimilar, our points of view are even more so. Mine would be as inaccessible to her—just let her try to figure out The Ethics—as hers is now to me. Her thought processes, prelinguistic, would largely elude me.
Yet she is me, that tiny determined thing in the frilly white pinafore. She has continued to exist, survived her childhood illnesses, the near-drowning in a rip current on Rockaway Beach at the age of twelve, other dramas. There are presumably adventures that she—that is that I—can't undergo and still continue to be herself Would I then be someone else, or would I just no longer be? Were I to lose all sense of myself—were schizophrenia or demonic possession, a coma or progressive dementia to remove me from myself—would it be! who would be undergoing those trials, or would I have quit the premises? Would there then be someone else, or would there be no one?
Is death one of those adventures from which I can't emerge as myself? The sister whose hand I am clutching in the picture is dead. I wonder every day whether she still exists. A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether? But if my sister does exist, then what is she, and what makes that thing that she now is identical with the beautiful girl laughing at her little sister on that forgotten day? Can she remember that summer's day while I cannot?
Personal identity poses a host of questions that are, in addition to being philosophical and abstract, deeply personal. It is, after all, one's very own person that is revealed as problematic. How much more personal can it get?
Sources:
Betraying Spinoza, by Rebecca Goldstein
Is Google Making Us Stupid? By Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic, July/August 2008
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