Given the amount I’ve written recently about the fallacies of nostalgia, and how the past is a curated museum rather than an objective fact, you’d think I’d know better than to Google the highlights of my past. Apparently, though, I’m as vulnerable to glittering illusions as anybody. This weekend, I searched a restaurant I once loved, a Fifties-themed diner I haven’t seen in over thirty years.
Only to discover that it no longer exists.
Having grown up peripatetic and rootless, I spent my youth walking away from people and places I once loved. On occasions, I remained in contact with certain important people for a while. However, it seldom lasted. Formerly momentous relationships retreated into the past, where they became frozen, like flies in amber. My perception of people and places I once would have lived and died for, sometimes haven’t changed in decades.
Over a year ago, following a motor vehicle breakdown, I spent almost 24 hours in relative isolation. I wrote about this at the time: the struggle of realizing that the world outside continues to exist, but my perception cannot keep pace. But, as I recall a Buddhist writer describing once, enlightenment isn’t permanent. The pressures of real life, with a constant barrage of supposedly urgent pressures, can force you to forget even life-changing realizations.
I like to think the world stays how it was when I walked away from it. That Honolulu’s Rose City Diner might still exist, with eager youths dropping quarters into elaborately reconstructed Wurlitzer jukeboxes while shooting toothpicks into the ceiling. That a young woman, with whom I constructed a detailed relationship in my head, remains as fresh-faced and optimistic as when I last laid eyes on her in 1992.
Like the Buddhist forgetting his enlightenment, I forget my insight that my mind and my world aren’t coexistent. When I insist the world remains constant after I walk away, I insist, on some level, that my mind controls things outside. Apparently it’s easy to forget that I don’t control reality, only my relationship with reality. I remain at the mercy of my mind, and my mind isn’t necessarily part of this world.
What, I’m forced to wonder, is my mind? Some neuroscientists insist the human mind is only the natural function of the brain; that is, the mind is what the brain does. But what, exactly, does the brain do? The more we discover about its capacities, the less we understand. Common analogies to computers fall flat, because the brain doesn’t simply process raw data; if that’s all it did, we couldn’t make leaps of inductive reasoning, or be irrational.
Our world exists, regardless of my perceptions. There are no “alternative facts,” neither for myself nor anyone; reality exists. Rose City Diner closed twenty years ago, and Sharon Maloney isn’t seventeen anymore. I have mental constructs of my world, which allow me to make sense of raw data. But these ideas exist entirely within my mind, which isn’t necessarily real. My belief that something still exists, doesn’t give it physical might.
My constructs only mean anything if I test them constantly against reality, and discard them when they fall short. This isn’t easy. Important philosophical notions and transcendent beliefs, learned young, often resist mere evidence, as anyone who’s revised or abandoned their parents’ religion knows. The belief that my mind preserves old places, or prevents old friends from aging, is pure magical thinking.
Surely I’m not the only person who struggles with this? The dichotomy between the belief that my mind isn’t circumscribed by my brain, that I make sense beyond mere biomechanical processes; but simultaneously, I’m trapped within my brain, dependent on my physical senses to provide raw data to make meaning. I am simultaneously greater and lesser than my body, limited and limitless. What does that make me?
Addiction, we now know, arises from an inability to forget the past, even when past influences are clearly maladaptive. What, then, am I addicted to? the beliefs I established thirty years ago, about people and places and how the world works, don’t apply anymore, if they ever did. Yet I retain these false idols with the vigorous jealousy of an opioid addict desperate to kill the pain, and for largely the same reasons.
Unfortunately, I have more questions than answers. Perhaps that’s best; if I’ve solved the important conundrums, what have I left to live for? I just wish, despite the evidence, that I didn’t have to relearn the same sad lessons constantly.
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