Self

* Edited to say that this post is a bit of a ramble and even I'm not entirely sure if it makes any sense. And I wrote it so that probably says something!

I commute to work. It is about an hour's drive from my house to the office and, obviously, the same back.

If I am on time, I listen to the morning news. 

If I am late (which I generally am) I listen to the discussion programme that follows the news. Whilst driving as speedily as I dare. 

I've blogged about this programme before here.

On Monday, one of the guests was a gentleman called David Eagleman. A neuroscientist by profession, he has written a book entitled Sum as in 'cogito ergo sum', a series of forty mutually exclusive imaginings of the afterlife. 

I think to myself. Hey hey hey, this book could have been written specifically for me.

He . . 

(a) is a neuroscientist - my undergraduate degree subject and still of interest to me

(b) studies how the human brain perceives time, which is a fascinating topic

and (c) has written a book about the afterlife, a topic which kind of preoccupies me at the moment. 

Where Georgina might be? 

Or even what she might be?

David Eagleman's book has been ordered from Amazon but it hasn't been delivered yet. So I have to confess that I have not yet read the text I'm about to blog about. This may well be a bad thing. I might have to come back and revise substantially after I've actually read the essay in question. I may well have the wrong end of the stick. However, this has never stopped me before. 

Moving on - in this particular imagining of the afterlife the deity is pondering the issue of what age to make people who have entered this hypothetical paradise. He, or she, tries an afterlife solely composed of young people (this rapidly degenerates to a vapid world of sexual pursuits) and goes back to the drawing board pretty sharpish.

The deity eventually decides that, in order to have a properly organised afterlife, all our 'selves' at different ages will have to co-exist simultaneously. So not only will your eighty five year old self be hanging about in the afterlife, they will be there in the company of your five year old self. And yourself as a baby. And yourself as you are now however old you happen to be. In my case, thirty one very shortly.

What the deity did not consider was the illusion of continuity that makes us imagine that we are, and always have been, and always will be, the self same person. We have the same name, we have the same history, we construct little fictions in order to make ourselves believe that the child we once were (and the child we can, or believe we can, remember being) is continuous with the person that we are today. But are we? In Mr. Eagleman's opinion our brains have changed so much with the passage of years that, when the differently aged versions of ourselves meet, they might not even necessarily like one another. Let alone suffer a flicker of recognition to pass amongst ourselves. 

In the essay, when the deity thrusts all the different aged versions of you together it transpires that they have less in common than he or she thought, and less in common than they themselves (yourselves?) had imagined. Your 'selves' fall out, become irritated with, and disorientated by, one another. And so the selves drift apart. They get together once a year and the older versions of you tell endless stories whilst younger versions of you run around, the older 'you's pinch the cheeks of the younger 'you's. But once a year is enough.

I suppose it makes sense. Do I seriously think that all these people are me? Are continuous? 

I know they are all of the same person. A person now known as Catherine W.

As a baby.

As a four year old.

As a sixteen year old.

As a twenty something.

As a twenty nine year old pregnant (eeep that now seems totally unbelievable) woman.

Do I seem them all getting along? Nope.

For starters, pregnant me isn't going to like the glass of beer twenty something me is holding.

And sixteen year old me? From the look in her eye, NONE of the other selves will like her and she won't like them. Hell, I'm a little frightened of her. And she's me? Yikes. For the record, I'm looking at an old boyfriend in that photograph. And no, dear reader, I did not marry him. 

Does that little girl dressed up as a nurse have anything in common with me now?

Really? 

No, I don't think so. 

I can't remember being her. Although I can remember the bumpiness of the wood chip wallpaper in the background.

The baby me? The baby me that looks quite wise in that photograph? 

Did I say wise? 

No, you see absolutely nothing in common at all. 

That self is as lost to me as that small body is, as that pregnant body is, as that happy smile of my twenties is.

I lived inside those bodies once, my thoughts fizzled about inside those brains once. But. No longer.

The only one I feel anything in common with is that sulky sixteen year old. She seemed to know that something was a-brewing. Something  . . . .difficult to handle. 

But if this hypothetical version of the afterlife should happen to be the truth? And why not? It seems as likely as any other version as far as I am concerned. What about my Georgina?

She only has one self.

She only occupied one small, sadly very finite, body. 

Georgina is not many selves. She will never look back and see a stranger. 

Because the expanse of her life is too small. 

But a little expanse of time? A tiny, failing body?

These things don't make Georgina's life unfinished, incomplete or unworthy.

All of us will be failed by our bodies sooner or later.

In the grand scheme of things, our lives are only small.

We strive to make them appear big and momentous. Perhaps they are? Perhaps they aren't?

It's all a question of scale. 

It's all a question of belief.

What I can't decide is, if that just might, make Georgina blessed. In a very peculiar, small way. 

To have some sort of strange, discrete, compact, sad unity amongst herselves in a hypothetical afterlife.
Not for her that bewildering multiplicity of faces and bodies.
Not for her the internecine war between the various stages of Georgina.

She has a purity which I can never hope to obtain.

Clutch at straws with me. Will you?

Because straws are all I seem to have left at the moment.