The week of cool and even cold nights warming to hot days with bright sun ended Saturday. The sky foretold change with high wispy clouds dimming the afternoon. Sunday brought gray sky and by mid-morning, rain. Rain was tentative at first, stopping to allow the forest to exhale smoky mist. I took a second look to make sure it was not the smoke of fire. Then rain settled in and for the day and night, and this morning, as I begin to write (Monday), light rain continues to fall and the mountains are a smoky, dull green. The sky above is a hard, irregular ceiling of white and shades of gray. The feeling of season continues to shift as we approach September.
It seems that I have time on my mind if not on my hands, though I do see time on my hands: scars. Just on my left hand: the time I cut my thumb at Camp Pemigewasset when I was nine; the time I nicked the base of my index finger with a chain saw when I was in my late teens (a lucky escape); a ragged scar coming downtime center of my palm from the hand surgery I had four years ago; a blackened middle fingernail from a hammer blow two weeks ago; a scabby line on my palm from the slip of a hand saw one week ago. This kind of memory written into the cells of my hand. The permanent scars are the oddity, for skin cells are replaced (rebuilt) every 16 months or so, and with the scars recalled: memory. Of course, that is just my left hand, and I could recount many tales of other scars and aches of which the lingering pain in my ribs and shoulder is most recent. From a molecular standpoint, my entire body rebuilds itself every some number of years (seven seems to be the popular number). After my death and the shedding of flesh, DNA memory will linger in my bones as well as scattered in my descendants. Eventually my bones will disappear, or, perhaps, turn into stone and last a while longer. These carry a sort of memory too, a morphology, a shape and structure that tells of my place among the forking paths of evolution.
It is at first disconcerting to think of our bodies as not being the same stuff, the same material, all our lives. Materially, we are successive copies of ourselves, though it is not neat as that. Like most other things in the natural world, the boundary between one self and another is fuzzy, occurring gradually, a gradient of change as cells copy themselves. At least between birth and death. And, of course, there is our growth, maturing and aging that presents us with change between these two thresholds. Again, like other things in nature, we are at once the same and different all along the line of our lives. It is memory that binds things, whether in our skin, muscles, brains, DNA code, or written words, paintings, music, photos.
What remains the same, if not the physical stuff? We have a sense of continuous being, a sense self, but how do we pin it down?
The philosopher Hegel, who has a reputation for incomprehensibility, outlines the problem in his discussion of consciousness and sense certainty from the Phenomenology of Mind: the world perceived through our senses appears to be the most immediate and certain way of knowing things: we see something before us here and now. Our certainty disappears, however, as we try to lock onto particular here and now: now immediately fades into the past, and what I see here disappears the moment I turn around: seeing first a tree, then a house, different heres.
What brings continuity to our sense impressions? I do: consciousness brings order to the shifting sands of movement in time and space. For Hegel, this I also collapses into contradiction when we must choose between a plurality of possible Is. This is enough of Hegel for most people, so let’s put him aside.
What is this thing myself? What does it mean to be conscious? The psychologist/philosopher Williams James (also a Tamworth, New Hampshire summer visitor) responds in a way that may be surprising to some. In Does Consciousness Exist? from Essays in Radical Empiricism, he answers his titular question with an emphatic no — if what we mean by consciousness is that some entity stands apart from the outside world and represents objects in a separate inner space. This is the old problem of philosophy that Hegel tortures through, and one that I constantly evoke and skate (on thin ice) in my own discussions of ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ For James, consciousness is not a entity, a thing. Instead its a “field” or “function” between subject and object, between inner and outer. While subject and object seem to be two things, they are one reality formed in the intersection of two lines, one a “personal biography” of the subject, the other, a “history” of the object at hand. James uses the example of an individual perceiving a room in a house. This temporal intersection, however, can’t really located precisely because, as Hegel showed us, when we point to it, it vanishes. If it is a field, however, perhaps we can find fuzzy edges, a diachronic ecotone of sorts.
More modern understanding of the brain and memory can help us out. Neuroscience recognizes three types of memory: a. immediate or sensory memory, which is almost photographic, lasting 300-500 milliseconds; b. short-term memory, with less information, but lasting 10-15 minutes; c. long-term memory, lasting days, months, years or a lifetime. If we bring these types of memory into the picture, we can see that any intersecting point along a personal biography will include two time horizons that encompass past and future formed by a radius in the present. They have, respectively, a 300 millisecond fuzzy edge (sensory memory) and a five minute fuzzy edge (short-term memory).
A third time horizon is more complex. If we are centered on the present, the fuzzy edge must stretch between the indeterminacy of days to years. If birth and death form the edge of an absolute diachronic horizon for brain memory, then we cannot draw a neat diagram of concentric circles because the present moves inexorably into the future: the center of the circle shifts (the present), but the periphery is formed by a fixed diameter, our birth and death. How do we track the present within this final horizon?
Imagine life as a pond. On one shore, there is a portage where we slip in a canoe. The leading edge of the canoe is the present, which from the moment it touches the water is moving forward with momentum from an initial push. We are headed towards a second portage at the far side of the pond. Let’s assume that even without paddling, this initial momentum keeps us moving. Friction from the canoe and the water slowing us down (an analogue for entropy), so we must paddle. The bow ripples never overtake the bow of the canoe, and always dissipate or fade before reaching the stern of the canoe.
I am the paddler, sitting at the front of the canoe and paddling strongly enough to keep the canoe moving. My vision, almost photographic, and lasting 200-500 milliseconds, takes in the scenery, and some of these images push forward into the full length of the canoe, a 10-15 minute time span of short term memory. My repeated paddle strokes, and perhaps some outside storms or other events that affect the pond, also ripple out into the larger, full span of the pond, long term memory. I reach the far shore, and as I pull out my canoe, I glance back for a glimpse of the final interference pattern, the past recaptured.
I am born, have lived fifty-one years. I find myself in a room, now. I call it the Curious Gourds Studio. It is located in a small building that I named the Welch House twenty years ago, both for the mountain that the house faces, and for my daughter’s middle name (or was it the other way round?). I can tell you many things about this room; I have intersected with its history many times. There are windows, and directly outside there is a plumb tree.
James makes no mention of a tree, but I can imagine one outside his imaginary house. For Hegel, there is no real distinction between house and tree, in the end they are just different instants of “here” at an indeterminate “now,” props. But I see this plumb tree, have seen it (will see it?); I have dwelled here, often on. Hegel would not approve, for I have confused a thing that is here for me in the impossible here and now, with the thing in itself. James would be more forgiving, I think.
The tree was planted by my wife, Jenny, after my son, Ben, was born. It has grown to be lovely, and one year, the second year after our return from Costa Rica, it supplied us with bushels of sweet plumbs. I first objected because it blocks my view of Welch Mountain, but it has become familiar and I am now fond of it. The tree and the house are almost the same age, along with my son. What is different about the tree and the house? What is the same?
Both tree and house are constructed and tended, using material which can be determined to be made up of such and such. Some may balk at the notion of “constructing” a tree, but that is what the in our cells do, build a living thing from amino acids using “code” (memory?) located in DNA. Cultivated plumb trees even have a human hand behind them as they are bred and selected. Both also confront entropy, as do we all. The house needs painting, a new roof. The front steps have begun to rot away. Mice make home in the walls (we need a cat). Too many years without care and the house will return to the forest leaving some memories behind in a cellar hole, the house’s equivalent of left over bones. That is what happened to most of the forty-odd houses that once populated the Sandwich Notch Road, along with the inn and Tavern, and three school houses. Now we are down to two of the original forty, and the many hundreds of acres of pasture are down to about ten acres, mostly here on the Sandwich Mountain Farm. Stone walls remain, another skeletal trace.
On the other hand, what the plumb tree needs is sun, water and nutrients from the soil. There is some human intervention with fertilizing, pruning and mowing around the tree, but largely it takes care of itself. One the great joys of exploring the land around Sandwich Notch is finding old apple trees and even whole orchards still surviving (sometimes barely) after more than 100 years and the return of the forest.
It’s a question of the type of constructing and tending. The plumb tree is mostly self-tending; the house requires someone to tend it. Without a human being around, the house will immediately start its decline. I don’t know how a cultivated plumb tree would fair competing against a forest, not as well as an apple, I think, but more successfully than a house. Perhaps the better example would be to point to one of the hemlocks on the hill. These are the giants the current forest around the farm, and they are definitely not here because of us. Right now I see these only in my memory. They are not present to me as the plumb tree is, though for you both are conjured in your imagination as you read these words.
In the end the Welch House, the plumb tree and hemlocks on the hill will all pass. There will things left behind, memories. For the hemlock, it is not only its DNA finding a place in a future forest — if it escapes disease and climate change. I have just mentioned it here, and writing is a sort of memory. Perhaps the hemlock will make its way into another essay or a story of mine, or perhaps someone will read this blog and think of their own hemlocks and write something themselves.
The plumb tree will have a shorter memory, I fear: like the apple, its not really meant to be here. It is by its lonesome, and it will someday succumb to the forest. It’s hard to say how long the house will be around, but certainly as long as there is a human tender. There is something strange about its continuity in comparison to living things: since it is not constantly rebuilding itself on a cellular and molecular level, it is always made up of the same stuff, more than any living thing is. That is, until we stop tending. Like the hemlock, the house has appeared in this writing, and their are other personal biographies that have intersected its historical line
The experience of self is constantly on the move. My life covers a territory, and that tended trail eventually loops back and no one else will walk it. Or will they?
—
It is Thursday and I am now on the other side of Sandwich Notch, in Tamworth. Not even this writing can escape the tumbling along of different heres and nows. Coincidentally, driving through the Notch I heard that the tree that figured so famously in Ann Franks diary had fallen. A different tree, a different house, a different history, a different personal biography. A journey across one pond that behind, on the far shore, someone left a dairy: memory.
This date also marks when H.A. Rey died, August 26, 1977. And the day my parents were married, August 26, 1941.