Moirae and Narrative

Here you find two photographs taken almost exactly two decades apart. These people are clearly related but in many ways both very similar and very different. Recent events have drawn me to what I have found both puzzling and interesting: those aspects of life that extend back through time and link us to other people.

There are the sorts of 'threads' that literally connect people, such as the relationship between parent and child. There are the threads that connect each of us to our 'previous selves'. There are the threads that simply touch others and run alongside for a while---then diverge. I suppose we can talk about these threads as representations of whatever counts as personal continuity.

Personal continuity is a tricky little beastie. It might simply be the whole psychological experience to date of being the same person as a moment ago. Of course, difficulties such as sleep, the effect of psychoactive drugs, and injuries that result in amnesia arise. We typically think we are the same person who went to sleep the night before. However, it is not incoherent to speak of someone 'being another person' after some kinds of traumatic brain injury. On the other hand, personal continuity can be conceived as simply the causal continuity of the organism from one moment to the next. Ignoring the normal problems inhering in the continuity of objects, attending only to the physical object that is the organism doesn't seem to get to the heart of the matter. What I would like to say is something like this: the threads that run through time—these representations of our lives—should be understood as our personal narrative; the story we tell of our lives.

If this makes any sense, the thread metaphor can help us to understand a number of things—the connection between these two people pictured here, for instance. One thread begins far sooner and winds through many others. The second thread began, ran parallel to the first, diverged quite drastically, and returned to a more or less parallel track. The origin of the second thread originates an intersection of the first thread and a third. Stories begin, make reference to other stories, and inspire even more. While the threads of life were said to be spun by the aspects of fate, the stories of our lives are told by us—to ourselves and to others in order to make sense of ourselves, others, and the relationships that exist. Our ability to understand ourselves involves understanding not only our own story but the stories that inspire ours and the stories we inspire. This suggests that what we are grappling with is a conversation extended in time. The conversation between the two pictured people above has had many different tones, plot twists, and discoveries. The very meaning of one story depends in large part on the other.

There are aspects of life that cannot be easily captured with the thread metaphor: changes in personality, for instance. I am thinking here of hidden aspects of one's life that one might not be willing to accept or be willing to let on to others. Accepting these aspects or revealing them to others certainly changes the quality of the thread—or perhaps some other dimension of the metaphor needs to be identified to represent these sort of changes. The narrative picture is quite different: in the same way that old stories, retold, can take on new meanings, so too can our lives be recast and in so doing reveal what we might want to call something like discovering or even re-inventing ourselves. All this having been said, we might find a profound theme in the story of our lives and bury it and try to integrate a discordant thread to replace it. This can go on for just so long before the whole becomes unintelligible. At that point, some very serious editing needs to be done.