Last night I ended up going to bed almost an hour earlier than usual. I think I was bored. And, after I had read for about an hour, also usual, I no longer wanted to read, so I thought I should go to sleep, but my mind had other ideas. Sleep did not come and my mind whirred around like the cartoon Tasmanian Devil. At one point, though, a large number of “things” came “together.” It is hard to describe this event. It “sounded” as if a number of pieces (ideas, thoughts, approaches, … ?) clicked together. There was a sound associated with each these attachments, a click, much like the sound of a domino slapped on a table top or the sound of a Go stone slapped on a good kaya Go board. I am sure the sound was imaginary. (Aren’t all things you hear in your mind imaginary?)
I immediately started teasing apart all the myriad parts of this new construction, a little like the Starship Enterprise dropping out of warp drive at a new solar system. At first it is a thing in itself, then we notice that it is made of parts (planets and stars and …) and that each part has additional parts and that they are all part of the whole but we can only learn about them by getting closer.
One of the parts of this new construct was the title of this post. Actually it was the original quote (John Donne?) “No man is an island entire of itself.” But on closer inspection I realized it was the thought that this was not right, the exact opposite was closer to being true. The post title then snapped into my mind, with the use of “the flip side,” referring to songs on record albums also being part of the puzzle.
I apologize for jumping around like this, but this is what it is. Eventually all of the pieces and how they connect I will make known, but don’t expect the path getting there to be straight or even straightforward.
It all started midday yesterday as I was walking to the store. I noticed that I was whistling a song. I only do this when alone because, well, my whistling is atrocious and why callously increase human suffering? The tune immediately was desirable for a project I was working on. The project is creating a playlist in iTunes of songs for my partner to play after I die. The songs I am choosing are songs that make me think of her and my love for her. But I couldn’t remember the title of the song or how to find it. My go-to procedure to recover lost song titles is to hum or scat (dah, dee, dah, …) the song and she will tell me what the title is and will be able to sing it even. Me, I can’t remember the words of any song.
Actually, it is not quite true that “I can’t remember the words of any song.” I can remember the chorus of some songs (She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah; she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah; she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! See?) but the lyrics? Nope. The only song I know the lyrics of is “Happy Birthday.” I have learned the lyrics of a handful of other songs over the years (find the lyrics, write them over and over, read them, speak them, try to sing them), but they fade away shortly thereafter. It is as if they are written in faint chalk and there is this eraser which obliterates them to make room on the chalkboard for other stuff.
Why I cannot remember the lyrics to songs has puzzled me. The narrative I made up to explain it to myself was that I found songs, as a child, to be very powerful emotionally, so powerful I felt swept away. This still happened, no, happens as an adult. I remember when I was a young adult learning a new song and when it came up on a mix tape I was playing in my car while commuting, I got so emotional I had to pull the car over so I didn’t have an accident. I can tell you where I was at the time, what time of day it was, that the song was sung by Vonda Sheppard, that the song title was “You Belong to Me.” The lyrics? I haven’t a clue. I do have a mild impression that the lyrics seemed stupid, but…. Oh, it is on the list.
Why didn’t I just turn off the song? Good question. I developed a process that when I discovered such an emotionally charged song, I would play it over and over and over, often for hours to dull the emotional reaction through repetition. That seemed to work a little. So, I didn’t want to shortcut the process I was undertaking to learn how to deal with my emotions. My narrative, though, was that I found these emotional feelings so overwhelming as a child that I blocked out (or immediately erased from memory, or ?) the words whose meanings were causing me such turmoil and I trained myself so well, I still can’t hear song lyrics so that they stick.
Another piece of my mental construct then clicked into place (click): I have a life goal to “own my emotions,” that is when I have an emotional reaction, it is allowed to run its course without interference. Was this goal connected? I think so, but I hadn’t made the connection until just then.
I have been studying things like imagination, memory, and emotion lately, actually for a long time but also recently. I just bought a book entitled “The Male Brain” which is on that path. A couple of the pieces of the construct were clearly that males and females seem to be different in this larger regard (click). Harkening back to the Donne quote I think that all people are islands in and of themselves, not connected, certainly not connected by a nonexistant god, which I believe was Donne’s point. I think this is so not because our circumstances and our feelings and how we go through our lives are inherently different, but that we do not share our inner lives much at all.
I am old enough to remember sports figures being asked if they had consulted a psychologist or other mental health professional only to receive the puzzled response, “Why, I’m not crazy?” This attitude seemed to be shared with almost everyone else as I remember it. To consult a psychologist, you had to be sick in the head … crazy. And no one wanted to admit that because there are no visible signs of being crazy or being cured, so once slapped with that label, you were crazy forever. I remember feeling shame on my first visit to a psychologist. Today, of course, modern athletes have a team behind them: a physical trainer, a nutritionist, a financial advisor and a sport psychologist (who were smart enough to re-label themselves as “sport psychologists” and even “Performance Enhancement Specialists” rather than as just psychologists). So, maybe we are making progress.
Secretly, I think we all believe that we are inherently different inside, and those differences might not be acceptable to others, might even be abhorrent. It is hard enough to learn how to behave and speak around others, let alone to defend one’s inner life when we cannot see anyone else’s to make comparisons. I did not tell anyone about my inability to hear song lyrics. I was weird enough as a child I didn’t have to add to it. Other people sang songs at the drop of a hat. If it was “Happy Birthday,” I sang along.
(An Aside As I was proofreading this I thought of athletes who have microphones thrust into their faces frequently and end up saying embarrassing things, e.g. “The earth is flat” or “To hear a woman ask that question is funny.” Part of the inner life of these guys came out in an unguarded moment and those guys either become more guarded or get ostracized and even drummed out of their leagues.)
A consequence of this part of me is that I have to go on the Internet and look up the lyrics of all of the songs I place on that playlist for my partner. She hears the lyrics I do not. The voices on the songs I hear are just another set of instruments in an instrumental piece. (Consciously anyway, who knows about subconsciously? Possibly, my conscious mind hears the words and my subconscious wields the eraser.) The lyrics, though, may paint a different picture than the one I feel from the sounds and this is too important for me to leave just to feel. I am trying to share how I feel (at that point it will be felt) about her.
In my studies of imagination and emotions, I am reading a book now (How Emotions are Made) which points out that we now know that our emotional responses are constructed, that they are not hard wired into our brains. Our previous understanding of emotions was based upon the conjecture that emotions were the result of brain structures we are born with. After all, we are born being able to feel (our senses) and we have apparently a fear of falling hard wired in as newborns. We all seemed to have the same emotions and could recognize when others were feeling them, including being able to identify the emotion from facial expressions. Studies also showed that when exposed brains were subjected to minute electric voltages, memories flooded back as well as emotions. It now appears that the emotional responses that were electrically stimulated were memories of emotional responses. Brain scans show us that when people are feeling an emotion (disgust, joy, whatever) that no brain structures are consistently involved by many people. It now seems that we construct our emotional responses from our feelings and that each of us does it in a slightly different way. This is linked to our ability to imagine, a power mental tool. We don’t really interact with reality as animals do, directly, instead we create a facsimile of the world in our minds and then we can test it to see how it might respond before we act. Our emotions are similarly constructed as our imaginary world is.
But, why did I feel these emotions so powerfully (and still do)? Why did I decide to create such a powerful presence in my inner life, a place that allowed me no advice seeking? (“Ah, a Mystery it is.” Shut up, Yoda!)
I think men and women are quite different in this regard. Before you go off, my general belief with regard to men and women is that we are different, and the same. If we look close enough, we will find differences in physiology, behavior, attitude, whatever, but if we stop to consider the import of those differences, we come up with meh. We are so much alike, the myriad differences aren’t all that important. In this case, though, I find a stark contrast. Consider two young females who have just struck up a tentative friendship. What do they talk about? They talk about themselves, they talk about the other and how they were perceived before they became friends. They talk about their relationships with others, their likes and dislikes. If they are hitting it off, the discussions become more intimate. They share things that were embarrassing, even compromising. If these intimacy tests are passed (new found friend becomes bff), they end up having shared everything about their outer personal selves and they may then go on to share some of their inner selves. I don’t know that they do, it just seems logical. Men, on the other hand, wouldn’t be caught dead sharing such aspects of our lives. We are closer to being emotional cowards in this. We don’t talk about ourselves so much (unless it is to brag or flatter which are status tools), we talk about things. (“Oh, you’re a Chevy guy? I have always been a Ford guy.” “How’s that cordless electric lawn mower working out for you?”) Talk about what goes on in our heads, our fears that we will not be good enough to make the team, keep our job, satisfy our mates…? Over my dead body would I be caught in such a discussion with “the guys.” (I wonder if gay men are different in this respect. One can only hope so.)
In this sense, we are all islands, with our inner lives unknown except by the most intrepid explorers. While I think that “we” should take care of “us” (meaning all of us should take care of all of us politically and personally, e.g. a child in distress needs help, anyone’s), I still think that we have a long way to go before we are pushing the boundaries of what is possible for us. A start would be finding better ways to communicate things that are important.
Oh, and that song I couldn’t remember, the one I was whistling? It came to me about eight hours later. (I noticed the tune was playing in the background of my mind the whole time.) As I am now officially an old fart, I often work hard to remember things I think I should be able to remember. (Got to work out the memory muscles <imagine this said in Arnold Swartzenegger’s voice>.) That song was Memory from the musical Cats. Click. Now, if I only knew what the words were.
Postscript I went to the iTunes store and found the song Memory and downloaded it. After the prologue the song started and my eyes immediately filled with tears. There were words there, I distinctly remember “memory” as one and “moonlight” as another. The rest? Ah well, the work continues.