The Passion of Anna (ingmar bergman, 1968)
"I try to busy myself with things I believe in. To live in line with some form of truth."
Come in, come in. Sorry, the place is a mess, everything is everywhere. Anyway, sit down and we’ll talk about how you are you.
What a drag it is to be you. You experience every moment, and with no relief whatsoever from time. In fact, time seems to make everything so much more difficult by grinding past, forcing you to endure every second of what you’re going through. Regardless of how busy or not busy it is, interesting or uninteresting. And then, once an experience is done and dusted and you’re on to the next, you almost immediately reshape the memory of that experience by cutting out all the dull parts, the bulk of the experience. And you are left with something like a pearl: detailed and unique, rough and smooth. And this pearl becomes the memory symbol of that experience for you. And you add it to a thread which is adorned with other pearls, and then you stand back and see that there are many threads running alongside each other, and each thread is covered with pearls, and you stand back further to see a mosaic of pearls laid out before you, and this mosaic is your life, all your memories, and a pattern emerges.
But of course it’s not ‘everything’. You’ve left parts out.
You’ve put together a story of carefully selected moments. Highlights, if you will. And then you look at the mosaic of pearls that you’ve put together and you say ‘this is me.’
And of course, you’re always you.
You’re always looking through the same eyes and experiencing things in that way that you’ve taught yourself to experience things.
But what if you were someone else?
You have been someone else, not just once, but multiple times. Your cells have regenerated completely a number of times. There is no cellular trace of the person that you were when you were born. You’re an entirely different person. Cellular regrowth takes place approximately every seven years, so if you’re reading this and you’re 14 you’ve just moved into your third persona.
The more astute readers amongst you will already know that this ‘seven years’ idea is not true in any way whatsoever. Some of those cells have a lifespan that stretches only into weeks, or even days. And then there are some cells that are with you from the first day to the last. But when did something being true or not get in the way of us talking about it?
This doesn’t mean that you’re not growing, changing, developing, evolving. You are. All the time. In ways that sometimes you can’t even notice.
Or how about if there was another you?
There kind of is. Bear with me here… You are inside you, and everyone you experience is someone else outside you. If that’s too much, think of it like you were a taxi driver, and all the people you experience were passengers. Then, to access the ‘other you’ simply remind yourself that to other people you are a passenger, and they are driving. And when you get in a taxi the driver is instantly comparing their new passenger to other passengers. Other yous.
Sometimes the passenger who was in the taxi before you had the same name, further blurring that distinction in the mind of the driver between one passenger and another.
Remember that time there was a passenger in your taxi, and then they left, and the next person to get in had the same name? Remember how you immediately linked those two people together in your head, regardless of how dis/similar they actually were?
What would be perfect is if you could stop being you for a moment and actually become someone else. Not on an intellectual basis, but on a physical basis.
As a child I was prone to headaches and adults would complain that I was ‘making a fuss’ and I so longed for a way to pick the pain up, like a wet sponge, extract it from my own body and place it into theirs so that they should experience the pain for themselves.
That would have been swell.
Anyway, where was I…?
I guess we have VR these days, so maybe we’re getting closer to the experience of being someone else. But does it? VR simply addresses what we see, but so much of life is made of what we feel.
But what do I know?
Maybe we’ll be able to sit in a cold room, and look at a VR desert, and not feel ourselves shiver with the cold of where we are, but swelter with the oppressive heat of where we see ourselves as being.
Only time will tell.
For now we’re at a point where we’re not quite sure which direction to go. There are many directions available to us, both as a species and as an individual. So many in fact that it can all feel somewhat daunting. Possibly the best thing to do is to choose between a small number at each step and then grow from there. Instead of doing nothing in the face of an infinite number of paths, just look at two, and then choose between them. And then do the same the next time. And then again. And again. Each time choosing between two different paths. And it is in this way that we can tackle the infinite.
Of course, at some points we will find ourselves stuck. Unable to move. Walking back and forth, back and forth, with the impossibility of it all. At times like these we often fall back onto our routines or our habits. We undertake actions that make no sense given the circumstances, but executing that action provides us with some kind of solace.
Everyone needs solace.
You’re immersed in the cool silent calm of a café, looking out onto a street where people are walking past. You have a vantage point here. You can see them, but they can’t see you. It’s cold today, and most people who pass are wearing muted colours. Something about the light on this particular day means that the colour red stands out to you. Looks different. Every time someone passes wearing red your complete attention is stolen. Here comes one of them now. And your breath catches in your throat as you realise that there is a photograph on your table of this very person, at this very moment. You look down at the photograph and see that you have spilled something onto it: liquid and crumbs. You don’t want to damage the image so you very carefully brush at the mess with a napkin. By the time you look back up the subject has gone. You’re dissatisfied with the turn of events here and crane your neck left and right to find them. You rub your hands together to combat the cold, and it is only at this moment that you realise that you are no longer sequestered in the café, but are in fact outside, peering in, through the window. You can see the silhouette of a figure looking back at you. Normally you would want to be able to see the face, but this time you know full well whose face that is, and you thank the Gods that it is hidden from you. Instead you turn and leave, wrapping your red scarf tighter around your neck and wondering what on earth it was that you were just thinking about. If only you could remember…
Come in, come in. Sorry, the place is a mess, everything is everywhere. Anyway, sit down and we’ll talk about how you are you.
What a drag it is to be you. You experience every moment, and with no relief whatsoever from time. In fact, time seems to make everything so much more difficult by grinding past, forcing you to endure every second of what you’re going through. Regardless of how busy or not busy it is, interesting or uninteresting. And then, once an experience is done and dusted and you’re on to the next, you almost immediately reshape the memory of that experience by cutting out all the dull parts, the bulk of the experience. And you are left with something like a pearl: detailed and unique, rough and smooth. And this pearl becomes the memory symbol of that experience for you. And you add it to a thread which is adorned with other pearls, and then you stand back and see that there are many threads running alongside each other, and each thread is covered with pearls, and you stand back further to see a mosaic of pearls laid out before you, and this mosaic is your life, all your memories, and a pattern emerges.
But of course it’s not ‘everything’. You’ve left parts out.
You’ve put together a story of carefully selected moments. Highlights, if you will. And then you look at the mosaic of pearls that you’ve put together and you say ‘this is me.’
And of course, you’re always you.
You’re always looking through the same eyes and experiencing things in that way that you’ve taught yourself to experience things.
But what if you were someone else?
You have been someone else, not just once, but multiple times. Your cells have regenerated completely a number of times. There is no cellular trace of the person that you were when you were born. You’re an entirely different person. Cellular regrowth takes place approximately every seven years, so if you’re reading this and you’re 14 you’ve just moved into your third persona.
The more astute readers amongst you will already know that this ‘seven years’ idea is not true in any way whatsoever. Some of those cells have a lifespan that stretches only into weeks, or even days. And then there are some cells that are with you from the first day to the last. But when did something being true or not get in the way of us talking about it?
This doesn’t mean that you’re not growing, changing, developing, evolving. You are. All the time. In ways that sometimes you can’t even notice.
Or how about if there was another you?
There kind of is. Bear with me here… You are inside you, and everyone you experience is someone else outside you. If that’s too much, think of it like you were a taxi driver, and all the people you experience were passengers. Then, to access the ‘other you’ simply remind yourself that to other people you are a passenger, and they are driving. And when you get in a taxi the driver is instantly comparing their new passenger to other passengers. Other yous.
Sometimes the passenger who was in the taxi before you had the same name, further blurring that distinction in the mind of the driver between one passenger and another.
Remember that time there was a passenger in your taxi, and then they left, and the next person to get in had the same name? Remember how you immediately linked those two people together in your head, regardless of how dis/similar they actually were?
What would be perfect is if you could stop being you for a moment and actually become someone else. Not on an intellectual basis, but on a physical basis.
As a child I was prone to headaches and adults would complain that I was ‘making a fuss’ and I so longed for a way to pick the pain up, like a wet sponge, extract it from my own body and place it into theirs so that they should experience the pain for themselves.
That would have been swell.
Anyway, where was I…?
I guess we have VR these days, so maybe we’re getting closer to the experience of being someone else. But does it? VR simply addresses what we see, but so much of life is made of what we feel.
But what do I know?
Maybe we’ll be able to sit in a cold room, and look at a VR desert, and not feel ourselves shiver with the cold of where we are, but swelter with the oppressive heat of where we see ourselves as being.
Only time will tell.
For now we’re at a point where we’re not quite sure which direction to go. There are many directions available to us, both as a species and as an individual. So many in fact that it can all feel somewhat daunting. Possibly the best thing to do is to choose between a small number at each step and then grow from there. Instead of doing nothing in the face of an infinite number of paths, just look at two, and then choose between them. And then do the same the next time. And then again. And again. Each time choosing between two different paths. And it is in this way that we can tackle the infinite.
Of course, at some points we will find ourselves stuck. Unable to move. Walking back and forth, back and forth, with the impossibility of it all. At times like these we often fall back onto our routines or our habits. We undertake actions that make no sense given the circumstances, but executing that action provides us with some kind of solace.
Everyone needs solace.
You’re immersed in the cool silent calm of a café, looking out onto a street where people are walking past. You have a vantage point here. You can see them, but they can’t see you. It’s cold today, and most people who pass are wearing muted colours. Something about the light on this particular day means that the colour red stands out to you. Looks different. Every time someone passes wearing red your complete attention is stolen. Here comes one of them now. And your breath catches in your throat as you realise that there is a photograph on your table of this very person, at this very moment. You look down at the photograph and see that you have spilled something onto it: liquid and crumbs. You don’t want to damage the image so you very carefully brush at the mess with a napkin. By the time you look back up the subject has gone. You’re dissatisfied with the turn of events here and crane your neck left and right to find them. You rub your hands together to combat the cold, and it is only at this moment that you realise that you are no longer sequestered in the café, but are in fact outside, peering in, through the window. You can see the silhouette of a figure looking back at you. Normally you would want to be able to see the face, but this time you know full well whose face that is, and you thank the Gods that it is hidden from you. Instead you turn and leave, wrapping your red scarf tighter around your neck and wondering what on earth it was that you were just thinking about. If only you could remember…