I, too, am a strange loop

I don't expect to be amazed in the doctor's office,* reading the magazines. I don't expect to be amazed by a magazine I actually subscribe to, but haven't read yet. (I will, promise, even if they are stacked up accusingly with all the rest.).

Yet: amazed. This interview Matt Gonzalez did with IU prof Douglas Hofstadter in Indy Monthly took up a single page. I can't stop thinking of it.

Short excerpt: "We copy. We absorb. We are so profoundly influenced by other people that we become partly another person. A part of that person remains inside other people after the brain of that person has perished."
Read the rest here. He wrote a book called "I Am a Strange Loop." Which I must now find and read.

I have tried to write about this. I have tried to write about memory and loss and the brain's desire to recreate the missing, the brain's often inaccurate rendering of people/places/events. I have felt the presence of those whose physical presence is impossibly gone, whether by death or distance. I have mimicked and copied and absorbed into my brain. I don't know how successful I've been, but I've tried to write it down nonetheless.

Hofstadter's words linked my ideas together in a new way. Not unlike when I read Don Quixote, which took approximately 8 million years,** and I came across the line that would become an epigraph for my novel. I actually sat up in my chair and said, "Ha HA!" I thought to myself, THAT is why I've been reading this book. To find that line.*** Which makes me think books are a way to copy and absorb and become what has perished, which is the past. And we read and write through the filter of the present. For the future. Loop-de-loop.



*A wrist X-ray for what is likely tendonitis. Waste of a day off.
**Two.
***I fear you'll be disappointed, here in this context-free setting. Read Cervantes yourself and find the line that does the same for you. When you find it, you may not say "Ha HA!" Perhaps you will harumph quietly, or a single tear will trickle down your cheek. Maybe you will sit silently in shock. But the moment will be yours, and that is the worthwhile thing.