A few years ago, an old friend of mine sent me a picture of herself and me at a high school dance. The picture was alarming not only because the kid in the picture was not the graying, significantly heavier self that I have become, but because I didn’t recognize myself at all. That is not to say that I didn’t know that I was looking at an older picture of myself, but that I had no association at all with whatever ideas that person held, or how he oriented himself to the world. I didn’t “recognize” him in any meaningful way at all. That is not to say that I didn’t have memories of high school, the bulk of them pleasant, but that that picture simply didn’t fit into the “stories” that created the integrated model of the person I remembered myself as having been.

 

The fact that the brain attempts to find patterns and make associations without our necessarily intending it to do so, any more than we “intend” to breathe or keep our hearts beating, has been pretty well documented over the past few decades. The classic examples involve optical puzzles of some sort. Like many things that appear to be revelatory, this is not an observation that is new at all. There is, as the sage says, “Nothing new under the sun.” Case in point: in Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape, ” a man replays tapes of himself that he has made on an annual basis for most of his adult life. In some of the recordings, he, of course, comments on his reactions to yet other, previous, tapes.  He makes the same comments we all would be likely to make under such circumstance–he becomes sentimental in some places and in others he derides his earlier self as and idiot and a naïve fool, etc. But other things happen as well. He can’t recall the meanings of words he had used glibly early in life, “viduity” being the most salient. The most notable moment occurs when the older Krapp hears a younger version of himself discuss an epiphany of sorts he had had, one in which “all was made clear,” and laughs derisively about it. In other words, the older man sees no revelation at all, only a posturing fool.

 

It is pretty clear that Krapp’s impulse in creating these tapes has to provide himself with some sort of narrative explaining the “progress” of his life culminating in an organized conclusion of some sort. The fact is, though, that the tapes, unlike the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, aren’t subject to editing. They represent an accurate “picture,” if you will, of Krapp’s concept of self in time, and illustrate clearly that the real unedited stories of our lives don’t really have plot or, most of the time, causal connections that lead anywhere, really.  The photographs we like to keep, which we sentimentalize–e.g the one on my dresser in which I am holding my newly born son in the hospital–capture only physical images. Krapp’s tapes are an attempt to go a step further and retain the “psychological” images of himself, but like the photograph that the old friend sent me, they wind up being images he doesn’t really recognize at all.

 

Well, mostly. What Krapp does return to over and over again is one episode of himself and a lover in a boat prior to the end of their affair. This he listens to over and over without commentary. It is clearly a significant memory, but it is one that he recalls from somewhere else than his formally conscious self. It’s significance comes from the same place, in other words, as the parts that control our breaths and our heartbeats. Clearly the moment has meaning, but it is one that he cannot really articulate. It goes deeper than even he really understands. The upshot of all of this is that an honest appraisal of how I have become whom I have, does rely mostly on the fundamental choices I made, but the bulk of those are ones over which I really exercised little organized and anticipatory control.  In the story I tell myself of who I am, however, I make all the pieces fit into a wonderful narative that I have embraced as truth and that assert a personality and order to everything.

 

And it all works well, until I am confronted with a Sadie Hawkins Day photograph and the person in it bears no relationship to the person my narrative requires me to have been. And I have never really been able to talk about that picture on my dresser because what it means comes from a place far deeper than any story I could fit it into. And it proves that the “I” of my narrative itself is just another manifestation of a “self”, it you want to call it that, for which there is no real, rational order.