My phone tells me it's raining outside. And yet I see sunshine streaming through the trees. I go out to empty the cat-litter trays. As I approach the hedge at the front of my działka, *PAFF!* – there it is, that old, familiar sense of exomnesia, that moment of recognition, of anemoia. I know this, this precise feeling in response to what I am experiencing. But not from this lifetime.
The orchard, the fence, the lane, the field and distant houses beyond it, the sky... I often felt this feeling in our back garden in Hanwell as a child, knowing of a place to which I had never been. This morning, I feel as I felt then, a soothing sense of continuity of consciousness, a thread of congruence, unbroken, bittersweet remembrance with a sense of regret, like when you sup the last drops of a good cup of coffee.
Qualia memories have this characteristic – entropy forbids you from physically reliving those moments.
I have experienced this throughout my life, consistently, from earliest childhood. It comes unexpectedly, triggered by a particular quality of light, a configuration of clouds, the arrangement of trees and buildings in a landscape, the smell of the air, a sound; congruence. It's not déjà vu, that sensation of having previously experienced the present moment, though it is similar
It's not I have been here before; it's I have been before. And the abiding question I have is who is meant by 'I'?
And the feeling has – and always has had – a distinctive flavour, an atmosphere, a klimat. It carries with it for me usually a sense of America, roughly between the 1920s and 1950s. Small-town U.S.A. An emotional recognition of the texture of reality, as it might have been experienced by someone living there at that time. How can I possibly know what reality felt like in another place, in another lifetime? I can't. Yet the feeling persists, and has persisted in a consistent, familiar form across my seven decades.
As a child, I visited Poland with my family in the summers of 1961 and 1966, and we went several times to Stella-Plage on the French coast in the late '60s and early '70s. Each country had its own unmistakable atmosphere. Communist Poland felt totally different from the France of les Trente Glorieuses, its years of post-war economic expansion. I experienced both as qualitatively different from West London, still rather drab and grey in the early 1960s.
I can summon these atmospheres today. Not simply memories of individual places, people or events, but a kaleidoscope of sounds, smells, sights, tastes and feelings that together recreate something of the experience of being in those places at those particular moments in history. The smell of a café-tabac – newsprint and coffee, fresh baguettes in a boulangerie, a kiosk Ruchu, a klatka schodowa in an old kamienica. Air thick with the smell of low-octane exhausts. The France of 1967 felt different from the Poland of 1966; London in 1965 felt different from both. And these distinctions were apparent to me as a small child, long before I knew much about economics, politics, history and society.
It was about the feel of the place in time. The texture of its reality.
See if you can conjure up the smell of your childhood home. Or the atmosphere of a particular street on a particular afternoon, long ago. The sensation can return to you with astonishing clarity, but try putting it down in words, and all you can produce are some generalised associations. A few bars of music, a particular cloud formation, the sight of a familiar object can summon precise memories of those qualia experienced long gone.
The qualia memories of experience survives within your consciousness. Something that can be recalled, sometimes they can be summoned voluntarily, sometimes they are triggered by a smell or a sound – or sometimes they just spontaneously pop into your mind in an overwhelming, unexpected instant.
What has fascinated me since childhood is that I appear to have an analogous – and anomalous – sense of a world that I never experienced during my present lifetime. This manifests itself in exactly the same way, but fainter and less frequently. Flashbacks, anomalous qualia memories back to a time and place beyond the experience of this biological container.
And here's the question I wish to develop further; if there is persistence of consciousness across biological containers, as it were, how does this work? If we separate ego from consciousness entirely, there can be no identity assigned to that consciousness. If we assume that consciousness is primary, and that in our present forms consciousness is present and observing through the biological vessel or vehicle that we currently are – what of the before? What of the after?
This time two years ago:
Started the day well?
[Before cats, before heart attack]
This time ten years ago:
The rich get richer – hence Brexit and Trump
This time 11 years ago:
Respect for pedestrians' lives? Not among Polish MPs
This time 14 years ago:
Autumnal gorgeousness in Warsaw
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