In the Joscha Bach/Lex Fridman interview I referred to two days ago, Dr Bach talks about deconstructing qualia. He mentions an experiment; stare at your face in a mirror for a long time, many minutes, and after a while that image so familiar to you starts to break down into geometries, colour, pattern.
This reminded me of something that happened to me in childhood, maybe aged nine or ten; in school learning about London from a geography textbook. The teacher talked on, but I found myself staring at the letters that formed the word 'London'. L-O-N... D-O-N. Where I was born, where I lived, where I was from. It was always London or Londyn, familiar, comforting; but all of a sudden, it was L-O-N... D-O-N. What is 'LON'? Who is 'DON'? Why does L-O-N... D-O-N look and sound and feel so strange?
This was a formative experience. It caused me to deconstruct other familiar words, starting with my name. Michael. MY-c'l. Michał. MEE - hau. The familiar transformed, broken down into fundamental particles, syllables, letters, sounds, characters. Shapes on a page. And familiarity disappears, replaced by strangeness.
Another transcendental experience – being in trouble in school. And yet, detached from the scene, almost out of body, everything is ultimately... fine. Intuition; and a consciousness separate from the ego and biological self.
Childhood skies – another thing. In the back garden at Croft Gardens, summer holidays in the early 1960s, one of those days when it was neither cloudless (rare) or fully overcast (often), but a contrasting sky of billowing white clouds against azure. Staring up at them, I'd notice that feeling of anomalous memories from another time and another place. My mind became unshackled from the here and now; there was, is, and will be Something Greater. To this day, the sight of such a sky will trigger a metaphysical response – qualia memories.
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| Such was my sky today; between Dąbrowa Duża and Machcin |
A recurring memory (or set of memories) from childhood relates to when we lived, briefly, near Newport, South Wales when I was around three. Much I recall, but this one relates to the journey there, along the A40 (this was before the M4 was built); the old road would wind through small towns and villages – and in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire – orchards. Walking around Jakubowizna, those memories come back strongly, but they also remind me that as a small child, the sight of those orchards set off anomalous memories of strong familiarity, those from where I knew not.
Many of my primary-school classroom flashbacks I now realise were triggered by the illustrations in the Janet and John books we learnt to read from. These were essentially anglicised versions of the American Alice and Jerry books, using the same illustrations. Two of them, called Days in the Sun, and The Five and Half Club, I still have; my mother would have read them with me at home as well; pencilled on a page of the former is the date 13.6.63, which meant I was five years and eight months old when I would have read it. The story is set on a ranch on the Great Plains, far from the Hanwell in which I was growing up, but the illustrations were instantly familiar. "I've been here!" I felt.
I mentioned to our teacher (Miss Debonnaire?) a picture that had caught my attention; a boy on horseback against the prairie and a big sky. She said that she'd been to America and the skies there looked quite different to our English sky. Bigger.
Here's an image (below) that really resonated with me; little did I know that this train was the iconic Burlington Zephyr streamliner, one of the first diesel passenger trains in America. And there's that sky again.
I have written a bit more about the aesthetics and preferences of familiarity in this post from 2017. Indeed, those aesthetics guided my development, that interest in America going back to childhood. One TV show I recall (BBC Radio Times archive says it ran from June to October 1963) was McHale's Navy, with Ernest Borgnine, a comedy set on a Pacific island in WW2. That also had a strong air of familiarity about it, the uniforms, the military base, the equipment. Again, I was five at the time.
[While on the subject of my childhood and potential past-life recollection, this is a strange memory that I feel must be shared here.]
The America of the 1930s, '40s and '50s was always there in my imagination; my aesthetic tastes guided by that era, whether it be Airfix kits of American military aircraft of the period, black-and-white Film Noir movies, Art Deco in its American form, morphing into Mid-Century Modern, the music, the novels... It all clicked, familiar, comforting, yet puzzling. And all this led me to do American studies at university.
From aesthetics to metaphysics? More soon.
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