General – The Aestheticist

The Fragments of our Personality: Confusion and Change

Where am I going? I don't quite know.
What does it matter where people go?
Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow-
Anywhere, anywhere. I don't know.

- A.A. Milne, When We Were Very Young

Whenever you’re minded to make a big change in your life – the desire to be more productive, say, or to quit drinking after years of abuse – it doesn’t take long to experience a sensation of still being tied down to old behavioural patterns, like echoes of the former self breaching the trenches of change that you’re trying to enforce on yourself.

Whether we put these echoes down to habit, learned behaviour, or sheer human weakness, the result is the same: the self that we convince ourselves has steadfastness or consistency turns out to contain cracks that run deeper than we might care to admit. It’s as though there are different selves competing for dominance over our behaviour that can be difficult to navigate, and they frequently raise the question of who we “really” are.

But change in our self, of course, occurs naturally. You might live for decades not noticing much of a change on a day-to-day basis, and yet find yourself at 70 not even recognising who you were at 20. Yes, you have vague recollections of what you were doing, but everything is shrouded in a shade; the memories are so strange and different that they might as well not be true. Sylvia Plath captures this sensation of ageing acutely in “Mirror”:

[...]
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Plath portrays it here as being inevitable, consistent, terrible, like a death of the former self and the anticipation of yet more change. I have written elsewhere about the falsehood of memories, so I won’t dwell on that, but this perceived decay of the self is closely related.

Such a sense of decay increases the more abrupt or intense the change is felt to be. The natural ageing process feels strong because of the sheer amount of time that has given rise to many small changes; deliberate attempts at change are a struggle because it works against “what we are used to”, as it were. But what if there is a quick, unintentional change?

Rapid change can happen when there are major turning points in life – losing a loved one, or getting laid off from a job we cherished – and this can feel like the opening of a rift. Beliefs formerly held to be true seem to be false; we are treading new ground and might perceive novelty as a threat. Recent memories of who we were just days ago may seem strangely distant. There may be anxiety or shame attached to the person we used to be; or, more positively, there might also be feelings of pride or accomplishment if we move beyond those versions of ourselves.

Change is of course transformative, but no matter if good or bad, it is always a messy process, simply because we are messy beings ourselves, with complicated relations to who we are. Trying to live with that confusion, and learning to cover the cracks with a lasting solution, is one of life’s great struggles.

It is therefore not surprising that one of the great themes of art is this struggle with the self. John Clare’s haunting “I Am!”, a poem written while he was incarcerated in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, is particularly apt:

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

Although the speaker here reaffirms a sense of his being, there is a clear sense of fragmentation and loss of self as he struggles to grasp what, exactly, he is. It ends on a note of death – though what really is sought for is peace by any means:

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

What we really feel when reading this poem is a yearning for an end to the confusion and strife, and a return to a more innocent time of persistence, clarity, and order – and be that in death.

Other works of art display the sense of unease and fragmentation without bringing in the yearning desire. Dalí’s The Burning Giraffe is a beautiful example of this:

Exploring the cracks in our self-image is likely a never-ending process, but it does highlight that our fractured personalities are a fundamental part of what makes us human. Reconciling the different parts of ourselves is a universal experience and a daily struggle. To take the words of John Addison out of context, “we are not human beings, we are human becomings.” The end-result might very well be one that we experience at the end of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land:

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
                  Shantih     shantih     shantih

Existing and Loving in Mark Strand’s Poetry

In the beginning of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, the titular character has tied himself naked to a chair in the dark, rocking back and forth, doing absolutely nothing beside. This is a kind of dream-state for him. He’s a dreadful solipsist, refusing ever to take any responsibility for himself or others, attempting to come as close to some form of non-existence as possible. Without taking a drastic final step, this is to him the height of being.

Of course this is the mindset of a fictional character, but that doesn’t mean there is no such thing in reality. There are enough people who just exist as they do, living from one day into the next, with no real sense of progression. This is perfectly justifiable. Mark Strand in his poem “Coming to This” captures the same sort of spirit in a couple that has become passive later on in their lives:

[…]
And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.

Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.

The obvious benefit of not tackling life head-on is a pure absence of pain. There is little loss since there is little of value; a valueless life can be the same thing as a painless life. And so even the end of life itself can be faced since it doesn’t matter either way. Suicide doesn’t become desirable, necessarily, but the whole question of whether that’s a valid way out receives a strange answer: “meh.”

But the stages one must progress through to reach such a state are many. I guess a sort-of switch-off of the self: if pain becomes overbearing and there is no way out of it, switching off the emotions is not an uncommon defence. After all, if I don’t feel anything, you can’t hurt me. It’s as simple as that. And it’s a life that by definition doesn’t risk anything – a life quite opposed to the drive most people feel in some form. Again, Strand writes beautifully on this in “Keeping Things Whole”:

[…]
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

It’s like an inner drive just to do stuff. This is in no way a celebration of the more frantic capitalism-driven burnout-culture we live in, but just an observation that humans, in general, wish to act, whether it be for pleasure, work, or just out of a stale sense of duty. The feeling of boredom is abhorrent: many people would do anything to avoid it. One of the strong reasons we may feel a proclivity towards addiction – including addiction to entertainment – might very well be the desperate need to have the feeling of doing something, even if it is an illusion. Without it, we don’t feel whole, as Strand says.

But the issue here is the question of how to act, of what to do, and how to keep on doing it. The world is a terrifying place and uncertainty governs every step. On this, Strand is also vocal. His “Black Maps” highlights the difficulty of finding the right path:

[…]
Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
[…]

And this is, in essence, part of the human condition. There is a drive in humans to keep going; to press on, always, to discover – to map things out – to produce, to create, always with the hope of filling the void of existence with something to do. I have written about this absurdity of existence before and Albert Camus’s solution in embracing this condition, though our concerns don’t end here. Strand actually offers a lovely view when facing one’s own existence along these lines in “Lines for Winter”:

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself-
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

This would of course remind us of a winter poem by Wallace Stevens, although the tone is much more negative – “The Snow Man”

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Both poems offer a vision of life with imagery relating to winter, both tackle the problem of existence, but while both contain the struggle to be and to act in the world, Stevens offers the more chilling nihilistic perspective, whereas Strand gives us a glimpse of the end – and that with an urge to love oneself.

And indeed therein may lie the secret. In a social media-driven society where the divination of one’s narcissistic tendencies is ubiquitous in one large slice of the world, and self-righteous self-contempt in another, finding a healthy balance of self-love and love for others can seem particularly difficult to achieve. A lot of it has to do with the struggle we have with our thoughts. As Hamlet says in Shakespeare’s play when telling his former friends what he thinks of his home, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.” There is no greater struggle – or more important struggle – than the struggle with one’s own self.

Murphy’s problem is, essentially, that he does not struggle with his self. His downfall comes when he works as a nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat hospital – a parody of Bethlem Royal Hospital – and struggles to keep afloat his solipsistic beliefs.

No – a life well lived would be one in which we act in a way that shows signs of improvement and growth in an effort to be content with what we have done. This isn’t measured by external achievement, but is very much a life that relies on our own journey with ourselves. And in the end, we may find satisfaction in meeting an end such as described by Strand in “In Celebration”:

You sit in a chair, touched by nothing, feeling
the old self become the older self, imagining
only the patience of water, the boredom of stone.
You think that silence is the extra page,
you think that nothing is good or bad, not even
the darkness that fills the house while you sit watching
it happen. You’ve seen it happen before. Your friends
move past the window, their faces soiled with regret.
You want to wave but cannot raise your hand.
You sit in a chair. You turn to the nightshade spreading
a poisonous net around the house. You taste
the honey of absence. It is the same wherever
you are, the same if the voice rots before
the body, or the body rots before the voice.
You know that desire leads only to sorrow, that sorrow
leads to achievement which leads to emptiness.
You know that this is different, that this
is the celebration, the only celebration,
that by giving yourself over to nothing,
you shall be healed. You know there is joy in feeling
your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen future,
so you wait, you stare and you wait, and the dust settles
and the miraculous hours of childhood wander in darkness.

Psychological Models, Transactional Analysis and a review of Thomas Harris’s ‘I’m OK – You’re OK’

Self-help vs Layman’s psychology

Among its many flaws, the issue with the money-grabbing and nefarious self-help industry is the fact that it will occasionally cherry pick – and sometimes even plagiarise – individual methods, statements, or concepts from superior works out there, which gives it an air of authority it simply doesn’t deserve. This is especially problematic when good publications introducing good concepts may then be mistaken for self-help books.

A mere rant against the self-help industry isn’t the point of this post. There are enough people who rage against it day and night, and rather than to add to the overwhelming tempest that tries to make a dent in the rocks, I’d rather use this space to point towards the use of psychological models and how they can – if properly understood – be helpful to any individual. Books that explain these concepts can be very useful.

Problems with psychological models

That being said, I understand completely if people take issue with psychological models. People rightly point out that they are ‘not scientific’. To use the most classical model of Freudian psychoanalysis, you don’t need to search far to find the difficulties. What exactly is the unconscious? Can we point to a place where it exists? What about the id, ego and superego? Freudian theories like the Oedipus complex sound neat but when you think about it, you’d be hard-pressed to find any solid proof for them. They are unfalsifiable, thereby unscientific.

The issue with all this is that the same can be said for many things we take for granted in everyday life – most importantly, the concept of selfhood. The self, too, cannot be traced back to any actual evidence. Of course Descartes had the idea of ‘I think, therefore I am,’ but scores of philosophers have criticised his finding – prominently among them Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. The issue here is that it presupposes the ‘I’: the only thing that can be said for the concept is that ‘thinking is being done’ – but who or what is doing the thinking is unknown.

But this sort of thinking can quickly lead into a state of nihilism from which there is no escape. If any central concepts that were taken for granted end up being illusions, we may find ourselves in the same mindset that Macbeth finds himself in when he hears that his queen has died. In that moment, he states that life ‘is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’: a lot of faff over absolutely nothing.

Your philosophy, my philosophy…

Thankfully, however, life is not merely a set of scientific truths. In fact, in everyday human experience, little is less relevant than scientific reality. Such a view is materialistic: you only accept what is scientifically verifiable, you only judge according to objective standards. And yet you don’t have an issue with concepts such as the self, although they hold no more validity than concepts that you would reject out of hand. You certainly behave in a way as though the concept of self were important to you – why else bother with education, family, a career?

William Blake, *Illustration from Europe – a Prophecy*

This tells us that materialism is a philosophy like any other, and rejecting materialism is not the same as rejecting science – not even a little bit. It just involves an acknowledgement that as humans we experience life as a set of interconnected meaning, and not as a set of objective experiences.

And this is where psychological models come in handy. Many of them might not be scientifically verifiable, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t useful. As the word model suggests, they aren’t a carbon copy of existence; they don’t point to anything specific. But they are representations. They are metaphors that we use to gain a greater understanding over ourselves, and thereby help us improve ourselves.

Transactional Analysis

One useful model I’ve learnt of recently is Transactional Analysis. It is a theory that was developed in the late 50s and 60s by Eric Berne and has its roots in Freudian psychoanalysis – although the core concepts deviate drastically.

The main premise of Transactional Analysis is the concept that each individual’s personality is split into three states, that of the Adult, Parent, and Child. At various times one of the three can become dominant, which then leads to a response along predictable lines that may or may not be pathological. That’s not to say that your consciousness switches between any of the three, but rather that your automatic response may deviate depending on which of the three parts of you is currently predominantly in ‘control.’

Image from https://www.simplypsychology.org/

The Child develops in the first couple of years of one’s life and consists mainly of feelings. This part of the personality is therefore usually triggered by feelings: when we are afraid or experience anxiety, but also when we’re in a playful mood and feel mischievous. We develop our Parent in our formative years by internalising dogmas that our parental figures say. Most conceptions of absolutes fall into this camp: believing that X must obviously be true, or that one should never do Y. Obviously the stronger the Parent is, the less freedom to act on our own behalf we have; a stronger Child would lead to frequent anxiety attacks or a lack of rational behaviour.

The Adult is the one who should ideally often be in charge since it is able to reason rationally and understands when their personality is leaning in one or the other direction. This doesn’t mean it’s cold to emotion – that might be more in the realm of a tyrannical Parent – just that it has mastered itself. Awareness of one’s Child and Parent – and realising that everyone’s behaviour falls along these lines – can lead to a strengthened Adult.

Why even bother with Transactional Analysis?

Transactional Analysis is particularly useful because it provides a framework that puts people on an equal footing. There is no concept of ‘I know this way of thinking and therefore can tell you what to do or think.’ Instead, it is collaborative: teaching it can give multiple people a common language in which to communicate ideas about ourselves in the knowledge that everyone functions, more or less, in the same way without building unnecessary hierarchies.

And yet it is only a model, and one of many. Its usefulness in therapy cannot really be overstated, but it wouldn’t be applicable to each case. Any case of addiction, for instance, can’t really easily be cured with it. Some people may find themselves being resistant to it – as individuals we have our own way of thinking, and this particular metaphor may not help the patient, or else, they may not be metaphorically inclined and can’t connect to models in general, and would prefer a more clear-cut method.

I’m OK – You’re OK

The strongest book I have read on the subject is Thomas Harris’s I’m OK – You’re OK. It is a lovely little gem of a book that was published in 1967. Unlike Eric Berne’s Games People Play which hasn’t aged particularly well (partly due to stereotyping and overly analytical takes on concepts), Harris’s book still holds its own.

Its purpose is to introduce the world to Transactional Analysis. Written with non-professionals in mind, the concepts are generally laid out in a way that is easy enough to understand, and yet the subject matter is treated in a clear, straightforward way with plenty of examples to make the point.

Parts of it do feel very much of its time. There is still a reference to parental figures slapping their kids as a normal way of punishing them (even if this is put down as the tyrannical Parent being in action), and it speaks of electroconvulsive therapy as a common way of treating certain conditions – and other things are generally uncomfortable (on a side note, electroconvulsive therapy is still in use, though only rarely).

But none of this really undermines the point of the premise, which is to teach people a method that can be a very helpful tool to people. At times Harris does tend to ramble on and go into too much detail regarding certain very specific examples, but by and large it flows neatly.

The title refers to four particular statuses of being that Transactional Analysis refers to – I’m Not OK – You’re OK; I’m Not OK – You’re Not OK; I’m OK – You’re not OK; and I’m OK – You’re OK. The theory is that we are all born in the first group, and in an ideal situation we would want to overcome that situation and reach the last group since that is harmonious and makes for a good attitude towards life.

This statement is based on the assumption that we are all born with an initial trauma: that of being born, leaving the warm comfort of the womb, and finding ourselves in a cold, unfeeling world that we don’t understand. We see the caregiver as OK since they – ideally – treat us well, but we don’t feel as though we ourselves are OK – and so the initial state, according to Harris, is that we need to behave in a way that we can approach being OK. Through the use of Transactional Analysis and a belief that we can all feel ourselves to be OK, Harris believes that we can all reach a status of equilibrium in which we accept everyone – including ourselves – as OK.

Towards the end of the book, Harris also becomes overly optimistic in his conclusions. According to him, if everyone were to learn Transactional Analysis, then the world would be a much better, safer and kinder place. Whether or not that is true cannot be said because it is simply impossible – it’s quite clear, at this stage, that it won’t ever be more than a good tool for some individuals to improve their own lives.

Nevertheless, credit where it’s due – it is certainly worth a read, and Transactional Analysis is well worth a consideration for anyone who has an interest in psychology and finding a framework that can be useful in thinking about oneself.

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How to Push a Boulder Up a Hill

Boulders and meaning

Do you ever find yourself pushing a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down before you reach the top? Do you perhaps wonder why you should put up with having a spinach smoothie rather than cereal every day when eventually you’ll wind up dead underground anyway? Or why you should bother hopping on one leg in a straight line just because a clairvoyant promised to give you a spoonful of yogurt at the end of it? Do you frequently yearn to find the justification for all these things, yearning for meaning, and yet finding the world giving you the silent treatment?

Fear not – although I certainly don’t have the answers. This situation just is, and some people might say this is what we call the human condition. We like to find reasons for existing; why do we put up with all the pointless, pernicious, and pestilent situations, conversations and ambitions when there’s no real justification for them at the end? And often you don’t succeed in your undertakings at all.

Failure is just as inevitable as working against it. It’s an eternal game. So in this life, marked by constant hunting, eating, working, fighting, loving, sleeping, running, jumping, arguing, learning, forgetting, coping, failing, succeeding, moping, hoping, losing, winning and so on, you’d better hope that the world can be held accountable at some point, and that it deems us worthy of a straightforward answer. Unfortunately, we end up having to wonder whether the world is a bad player that never reveals its cards, even when we have placed the last bet.

The big question of meaning

Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus writes about the importance of this very question (regarding existence, not whether Gaia is indeed a keen gambler):

I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
Albert Camus

This paradox puts a big question mark on everything. If you feel lost, find the suffering too great to bear, and find no meaning behind it whatsoever, you are liable to give up and die. Or, alternatively, if you have a cause that fulfils you to an endless extent you may find yourself giving yourself up for the cause. That we can find this sort of behaviour in countless ideologies and religions around the world need not be emphasised further.

It almost makes you want to transform into a cat and just enjoy a pleasant form of existence in which you not only don’t think, but literally can’t think in greater detail about any of this. Your life is the same, day in, day out, and your happiness is little more than the satisfaction of treats and going hunting for mice every once in a while.

But human beings are cursed with more defective brains than other animals, and as much as Blackadder may remind us that for most of us, all we can do is try and make a bit of cash, this approach only helps us to go so far.

A couple of suggestions to tackle meaning

So: what do we do? For Sartre the solution lies in the fact that “existence precedes breakfast”. Or it might have been “existence precedes essence”, but in any case, the point is that you are nothing before you are born, so anything that comes afterwards is arbitrary introjection based on your parents, teachers and peers. Therefore, Sartre recommends creating your own values and finding your own meaning. There is no truth out there, so you might as well create your own truth. It is basically making a fundamental choice about how to live.

The issue with this approach is that you are still infused by the ideas and attitudes of others. How can you truly become independent when your entire way of life is tied to that of others? How can you know that you really are an individual and doing your own thing? What if you fail to create your own values? Aren’t you still a slave to your circumstances and just trick yourself into believing you’re making up your own values?

An alternative approach to this is to follow an ideology that claims to have the answers. There are endless options to choose from, either spiritual or political. All claim to have knowledge that will set you free, or claim to be morally righteous, or claim to lead to a better world, in one form or another. This is essentially Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith – to trust in something to take you to that sweet bowl of chocolate and whisky at the end of the rainbow.

But is that really so simple? Religions are often founded by definition on the unknowable that comes after death; political ideologies often have a utopic vision of the future. When either of these necessarily fail to provide satisfactory results, you either close your eyes and double-down in your ideology; or else you go through a drastic change and embrace some other ideology.

So…. What now?

And all the while time presses on, you eventually run out of time, and then that’s it. Nothing knowable on the other side. Either it’s the endless void, or else everlasting life in some form or another – and god save us if it’s the latter, nothing is more terrifying than the prospect of endless time!

So we’re caught between a rock and a hard place. And yet we continue to push that boulder up the hill. Every day of our existence. At times it feels tougher, at other points easier. But aside from a few very tough moments in which it is very hard indeed even to get those feet out of bed and onto the ground, most humans do press on. Each day. As futile as it seems.

This is ultimately the human achievement and the solution that Camus proposes. To embrace the absurdity of human existence, and the reality that we cannot know, and yet we desperately want to know. Sisyphus is a mythological Greek figure who tricked the gods, came back from death twice, and was finally condemned for his insolence to push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down before reaching the top, thus starting an endless cycle of his labour. To Camus, he is the ultimate absurdist hero.

It’s only in the consciousness of his predicament that Sisyphus is really tragic. Ascending the hill with the boulder is a moment of utter triumph to him – the triumph to do great things against all odds and to be proud of one’s work. Sisyphus doesn’t mope and complain, he just gets on with it. And this is the key difference between Camus and Sartre, essentially. Sartre tries to find a way out of the absurdity of existence. Camus realises there is no escape, and so proposes to take life as it is – in all its absurdist glory. In so doing, he creates a truly life-affirming philosophy that embraces all of life’s aspects – no matter how silly and paradoxical they may occasionally seem.

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Memories and Falsehoods

It’s a sad truism in one’s life that a lot of our memories are partly fabricated by the mind. Of course there are disagreements as to the extent of this fact, and some people have better memories than others, but it still doesn’t alter the fact that, as one moves through life like a leaf in the wind, the mind tries to construct a coherent narrative and to give meaning to one’s stories.

The phenomenon surrounding the discrepancy between memory and reality is best explored, I believe, by giving an account of an experience I had myself in the confrontation between my own adulthood and the memories of my childhood. As such, this will be a lot more personal than my usual analytical approach to the subject.

It can feel like a bit of a shock when one realises that many details held so dearly regarding a particular memory can turn out to be a fabrication. Especially when they relate to things which we treat with great sentimentality – especially childhood memories, but also those relating to other key events: school graduations or failures, job losses or successful interviews, first moments in one’s relationships and so on. If you wake up to find none of it was ever real, what does that say about your life in general? The power of nostalgia cannot be underestimated.

When I was growing up my family and I moved around a lot. Between the ages of 3 and 11, I lived in 5 different places, often for no longer than a single year. Although I find it difficult to remember everything that happened in chronological order, I do have a lot of memories from that time. Most of the images and sounds are blurred and fuzzy, but it seemed quite natural to me to want to visit some of the places I hadn’t seen in years once I was an adult.

It’s just one of those things one does, I suppose. I was still living elsewhere at the time and had some business-related reasons to go down to the city, and the village where I lived when I was very little happened to be on the way. While I never would have sought to go there without any ‘sober’ excuse – perhaps out of shame in the knowledge that it was silly, or perhaps just because the idea only came to me when looking at a map – this seemed like a reasonable pastime.

And so it came that, after my business was concluded in the city, I finally went back to this haunt of my childhood just to figure out whether I could remember anything and whether things were still the way my mind portrayed them after all this time. I wasn’t expecting much at all; perhaps just to spend a couple of minutes driving to and fro and then leaving again.

It’s an odd experience living through such a moment. You’ll suddenly be confronted by a range of images; flashes of individual moments you believe you experienced long ago, calling out to you, grabbing your attention and pulling you inwards in a descent into nostalgia, for better or for worse. I immediately recognized the house we lived in – it was fairly close to the edge of the village – and the path I used to take when going to school. I also remembered other details, such as a playing ground we used to go to. It’s the same satisfaction you get when you desperately try to remember a fact, and then finally remember it after torturing yourself for hours. But there were differences, of course.

The most striking difference was the scale. Having been seven or eight years old when we lived there, my perception of everything would have deemed everything much larger than it really was. There was a climbing frame I remembered being so large that I was almost frightened to clamber up to its peak when I was younger; now I tower over it. What used to look like a fairly large place turned out to be a tiny, insignificant – if rustic and interesting – village.

Other things were just as I remembered them. There was a convenience store on my way to school; I had a friend with whom I used to play detective all the time, and we had gotten into our heads that the shop keeper was a villain in disguise. When we snuck in to uncover his devious plotting, he believed we were trying to steal sweets – not a very nice conversation to have. The shop was still there, fairly untouched – I don’t know if I would still have recognised the villain had I bothered to go inside.

But my most vivid memories of the place are attached to the school. It was the first time, I think, I was aware of myself as a proper human being when I started going there. Naturally still in a very primitive state and with more awkward confrontations with other people than one would like to admit as an adult, but for all sense and purposes, I thought I was a being separate from others with my own thoughts and my own little issues to put up with.

I remember quite clearly my first teacher; conversations between her and my mother in which I was told I was a hopeless daydreamer. My best friend with whom I used to play in the cemetery up the road (I was weird). The class mascot, a mouse glove puppet. Playing a silly game which involved pushing other boys off of a log– mainly played by older kids, but I held my own and was said to be ‘a brave one’.

I was struck by a sense of disappointment, however, when I approached the school – not because it had changed drastically, but by merit of the entire original building no longer being there. There was no open yard at the front with the school buildings in the background. It was just one big concrete block, closed off entirely to one’s view. I wasn’t even entirely sure whether this was a school anymore; from what it looked like it might not have been; there wasn’t any writing anywhere to indicate its use.

I parked the car nearby and tried to see if I could recognise anything, but it really looked as different as it possibly could have since I’d been there last. I walked around the block but there didn’t seem to be anything that remotely reflected what I believed it used to look like. It might as well never have existed.

The shock, I suppose, isn’t so much that ‘things had changed’. That’s inevitable, of course, and I wouldn’t have expected everything to remain the same. The shock must have been the realisation that the disappearance of the school meant I could never try and test my memories against reality. My mind was robbed of the opportunity to see whether it had been right or wrong – or, to be a bit more cynical about it, to reconstruct my memories in a way in which it felt nostalgia and convinced me that I had been right all along.

What it does call into question is the validity of my memories. There’s a difference between knowing from a neurological perspective that one’s memories are often false, but another one to experience a breakdown of one’s certainty as a result of being confronted with drastic change after many years of absence. Seeing the old school gone should not have been too surprising, but my mind did experience it as such – evidently the change triggered something in me. I was robbed of the chance to test myself, to validate myself, and so the certainty broke away.

Essentially the ‘narrative’ as painted by the brain as to the validity of one’s memories is fragile, no doubt due to a subconscious awareness that much of it is fabricated, but the subconscious tries to cling on to the fabrication for as long as possible. And, considering one’s personality is largely based on this fabrication, on this culmination of memories which gives us our life experience and thereby our learned behaviour, it follows that it takes very little indeed to create a crisis in even the strongest personality. Not being able to validate this grounding in my memories was like knocking against the pillars of a building to test its firmness. In the end, it takes us to an end of humanity. As Wallace Stevens says in the first section of ‘The Rock’:

It is an illusion that we were ever alive,
Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves
By our own motions in a freedom of air.

Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.
It is no longer air. The houses still stand,
Though they are rigid in rigid emptiness.

Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain.
The lives these lived in the mind are at an end.
They never were . . . The sounds of the guitar Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken
Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.