Jack Kerouac in Des Moines, Iowa on his journey west:
". . .[I] spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the smoky scene of the railyards. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."
From On the Road.
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When was the last time you felt a similar sensation, as Kerouac describes -- in which -- when you awoke -- or "came to" -- you either didn't know who you were or felt a stranger to yourself?
ReplyDeleteI can't recall ever waking up out of sleep and not knowing who I was or feeling a stranger to myself. I may have had those moments when awake but not upon waking. On the other hand, like many of us, I've not known where I was or thought I was somewhere else upon waking. I take that to mean that I have a relatively strong sense of who I am, (even though I often ask other people to characterize for me who I am, for confirmation?). I also take that to mean that I am greatly affected by place, so much so that when I've been completely absorbed in one place and then move to another, I'm still back in that other place.
ReplyDeleteThis brings up another thought - that place can be the language we speak. I remember traveling through Europe once and using the French and German that I knew. It would take me a couple of hours to switch from French to German after crossing the border into Germany and vice versa. Is that about switching between persons or places? So, how would you answer your own question, Brandon?
Maybe the sensation of waking up and feeling a stranger to yourself suggests an adamantine sense of who you are in relation to a particular place, a sense so grounded in that particular place, that once removed from it, all bets of conceived and felt identity are off. In other words, when you say that you can't recall waking up "feeling a stranger" to yourself, because of "relatively stronge sense" of who you are, maybe that strong sense is exactly place-based, and once you're unmoored from that place -- and "place" can be both broad and specific here -- then your identity begins to slip a bit, as if a kind of skin that you've lost a certain kind of weight beneath, and so a skin that slips off. As if you, or as if we -- are snakes, and the skin itself dictates the solid and the strange.
ReplyDeleteI don't think you can assume that my strong sense of self is "place-based." If it were, then why would I wake up in a new place and still know who I was? You still haven't answered your original question by sharing your own experience.
ReplyDeletePaul: I can’t recall ever not knowing who I was or where I was upon waking.
ReplyDeleteKaren:I think it is a valid answer. The fact that you can't recall ever not knowing who you were or where you were upon waking means that you have a clear mind. I don't mean clear in that it is empty, but clear in that it is uncluttered. I also think that people who move from place to place or are traveling are more likely to not know where they are upon waking.
Paul:I think you may be right about people who travel. I have moved from place to place very little in my life.
Okay, okay -- To rewind a bit: I think that the sense of waking up a stranger to yourself/oneself, in the Kerouacian sense, might have something to do with the rate of speed at which one travels, and the pure volume of "places" that one traverses in those travels, that gather into the psyche. To phrase it another way: it always takes awhile for me to really ingest and process a particular place -- sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes years. In the meantime, I have a whole catalog of "places" rattling around in my brain, any one of which could spring forth at any given moment into a greater sense of itself, and clarity. The more places that I have been, the more my brain is both colored and choked. With that being said, the possibility of waking up as a stranger to myself might be greater in proportion to (1) the number of places my self has traveled through, and (2) the rate (of speed) of that travel. It is very difficult, for example, to fully ingest and digest a BLUR, as it is very easy to lose one's self within one. Does that make any sense? I think that Kerouac's experience might have something to do with this ... given especially the latter of the two influences. On The Road is a blur of a book, however crystalline the experiences are of each moment within it, I think.
ReplyDeleteCertainly then, Paul's stability (being in one place for a good part of his life) would lessen the chance of waking up and not knowing where he was (which I imagine would be scary for him to experience if it happened all of a sudden now). And as Paul has told me, he likes to live by routine, so it would also be less likely that he would not know who he was upon waking. Maybe I need to rethink whether or not I have not known who I was upon waking and what Kerouac meant when he wrote it about himself. I agree with Brandon about needing time to process a particular place. Perhaps during that process our actions may become unfamiliar to us. We know who were are but we may be surprised by our emotions or behavior in this new place. Some of those emotions or behavior may actually change us, and we carry this change, even if imperceptible, to the next place. Is Alice's experience in Wonderland analogous? She knew who she was, that is she knew her name and she knew she was somewhere she'd never been before, but she took actions, such as drinking from a bottle of liquid, that changed her in some way. And she kept taking risks and she kept changing and she always knew that something was different from when she first fell down the rabbit hole.
ReplyDeleteWe also have to take note of the fact that when Kerouac had his experience on the road of not knowing who he was when he woke up in Des Moines it was near the beginning of his epic travels. He hadn't traveled so expansively up to this point, and he seemed to want to get lost as he wandered - lost from the responsibility of his most-recent college days, lost from any responsibility for that matter. He wanted to reconsider who he was in this transition between his "youth" and his "future."
ReplyDeleteI have had one experience where I awoke and did not know who I was, where I was, indeed, I did not know what I was. It was a post anesthesia experience. When the recovery nurse asked "do you know where you are?" I responded by saying "I don't know who or what I am, much less where". It was like a blank page with a cursor in the top corner ready to be writtien upon. It was not frightening, it was almost nothing. Of course, that disapated with oxygen and time. I don't think it related to place, just intoxication. Many times I have awoken and not known where I was. Mostly it was during travel, in a different bed, different walls and windows and it is disorienting, not really scary. It has even happened at home. It takes a minute, maybe only seconds to recover the information my brain holds. Perhaps it would even be fun to start over and make a new place and time with my blank mind, to go on from there. Maybe that's where our brain goes when it's memory fails with age? I hope not. It wasn't profound, almost like a mini trip. My thoughts aren't as deep as yours.
ReplyDeleteNance
Nance, your thoughts add something new to the discussion. I like the idea of making a new place and time with a blank mind, and that perhaps that happens when our memory goes. Of course, that would only be desirable if we imagined we were in a good place. I also thought the idea of not knowing "what" you were made me chuckle. Could you have been a fish or a horse?
ReplyDeleteOne time, at the beginning of a much-needed vacation, I flew to San Jose, Costa Rica to visit with Kelly and Brandon who had been living in CR. The first morning, upon awakening, I opened my eyes and saw Kelly in the other bed, but I couldn't remember her name!!!! That WAS scary!