You Contain Multitudes
“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck.” (Douglas Hofstadter. I Am A Strange Loop. p.251)
A couple of years back I watched All That Jazz, a wonderfully existential and loopy romp by Bob Fosse, and it prompted a conversation with a friend of mine about recursivity (in musicals, and in art in general).
Musicals are undeniably, unashamedly, self-referential. Because of that (or perhaps implicit in that) they are able to deal with larger than life (or large as life) questions. I had discovered a wormhole through which I very much wanted to travel. Artists consistently make work about making work (embedding narratives, utilising mise en abyme, nesting plays within plays); and it got me thinking: there must be something in these analogies within analogies. I woke up the next morning humming “maybe I’m just too recursive” to the tune of When Doves Cry — obviously some unconscious connections had been collaborating overnight.
I felt that Douglas Hofstadter’s non-fiction work I Am A Strange Loop might hold the answers to my questions about the importance of stories within stories. I found the book and went to the place I had bookmarked years before. The dialogue continued like that: I would read the book before dawn, scribble notes, type up thoughts, not quite work out what I meant by them, return to the book, and find the answer to my unformulated question.
I have, deep down in my secret heart, always loved musicals. For a short time, I believed I could turn I Am A Strange Loop into a musical (before I realised that had somehow already been done, a couple of times). I’ve expressed my devotion to musicals through adaptation and replica. When I was twelve I turned The Rocky Horror Picture Show into the abridged (and censored) Oh, Horror High! for the end of year high school showcase. At university I wrote, directed, and played in revues where we performed parodies of numbers from Cabaret, My Fair Lady, and Oliver. In my television series Retrograde (ABC TV), the final episode featured Sophie, played by Esther Hannaford (who, incidentally, starred as Carole King in the musical Beautiful), singing a remix of Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime (a proud moment, as Byrne himself had to sign off on it).
I have always been interested in adaptation (a word so useful it could describe all of the processes I’ve outlined above, and maybe everything else too). Right before the pandemic, I wrote a research proposal for an MPhil with the aim of examining how lyric essayists incorporate elements of traditional genres into their work, and in doing so extend and break formal conventions. The proposal was a two parter: 1) a genre study of the lyric essay (a hybrid form that utilises essay, poetry, memoir, and non-fiction science, philosophy, and psychology); and 2) a screen adaptation that hoped to translate not only the content but the unconventional form of one of the works, using examples of adaptations like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (adapted to a stage musical), and Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (adapted to television). The proposal was scuppered by COVID-19 decimating the humanities, and by me making a TV show instead, but here we are.
“And patterns can be copied from one medium to another, even between radically different media.” (p.257)
Figure 1 (below) is a photo of my dear and most soul-entwined friend’s right arm sleeve, bearing a tattoo of the Morton Salt Girl (Figure 2), which was inked in 2007 — the year I Am A Strange Loop was published (although I didn’t discover it until 2019).
Isabel got the tattoo when we travelled through the U.S. together after high school. When she got it she said “She’s just like you!”. You can see the likeness, perhaps, in Figure 3.
It wasn’t until p.145 of I Am A Strange Loop that I wondered, where is the box that the Morton Salt girl holds, in Isabel’s tattoo, that contains the Morton Salt Girl — who herself is holding the box of salt, the blueprint for herself (p.299)? The mirror mirroring the mirror is missing! (But of course — from the Morton Salt Girl’s point-of-view, there is only the box she’s holding, not one she’s in!)
Just as intriguing, where is the trail of salt falling from the box? Is it there, only faded, invisible… like, well, consciousness?
Isabel suggested I was like the Morton Salt Girl, and just like the Morton Salt Girl I am a strange loop.
In Figure 4. you’ll see that in 2023 I also got a tattoo of the Morton Salt Girl. A part of me now contains a part of Isabel (which of course contains a part of me, and so on…). Like embassies in foreign countries (p.260), we continue to exist in the world, even after we’re gone, so long as the other remains.
The world would be a better place if more people had a handle on Hofstadter’s ideas.
If stories within stories contain a blueprint for consciousness — the same way DNA contains its own blueprint (and how often we refer to creative projects as “our babies” or “our children”!) — then consciousness could be rehabilitated in the future.
Some of (or the sum of) a creator's consciousness is stored in their work, and that some of themselves lives on — with the potential to be reanimated.
If two key ingredients cohabitate for long enough (1) the code to some essence of consciousness, and (2) the means to decode and manifest that essence (i.e. AI) they may naturally select to evolve together.
Consciousness thrives, and replicates, but the coincidence of coexisting with the artificial means to resurrect creative products could secure its existence beyond the body that bore it out.
If that is the case, how much of the self would have to be encoded in a work to communicate “enough” consciousness that consciousness could be said to be preserved (pp.231-233)?
I may well be “a hallucination hallucinated by a hallucination” (p.323), but my tattoo frames that hallucination, hangs it up somewhere — and this is How We Live In Each Other (ch.17), and live on in the world: through friendship and love, and through story.