Can One Become a Different Person?

Memory, Personhood, Paperwork, Rupture, Metamorphosis

1.

It has sometimes seemed to me that the moulting insect, as it looks back on its husk-like exuviae, must experience at least some dim twinge of pride, or optimism, or hopefulness, in its newfound lustrous excellence. Perhaps in such a moment it thinks, to the extent that it can think, of taking a new name, to mark what is in fact only one of several rebirths it can expect throughout its life cycle.

Can we really speak of rebirth here, or is that only the stuff of mythology, as of the radiant Phoenix, whose crest, Claudian writes, “shines with the sun’s own light and shatters the darkness with its calm brilliance”? I ask not only as amateur entomologist, but as a person who myself seem to have passed through more than one persona, while always remaining anchored, or perhaps trapped, in one and the same social identity.

There would be grimmer ways to put into language the quality of this seeming. It has often seemed to me, over the past few years, that I must have died in late March, 2020. We were trapped in a very small apartment in Fort Greene when the lockdown began. I was among the very first to come down with Covid (and I’ve had it three times since; or perhaps, as I suspect, “I’ve had Covid four times” is just the language we use, inadequately, to capture a vastly more complex virological, epidemiological, and social phenomenon). The Brooklyn Hospital Center, across the street, was filled beyond capacity, and had begun to store the sudden surfeit of dead bodies in refrigerated trucks, makeshift morgues parked along the sidewalk.

I know this sounds “crazy”, but I have not been able these past years entirely to shake the feeling that I, or some version of me, ended up in one of those trucks, alongside all the other chilled cadavers, and that whatever is still out here chattering in the world, still running on the treadmill at the gym, still resetting passwords, clicking on boats, and giving other such signs of what passes for “life” in the 21st century, is really only the product of some split that occurred at that moment, of a forking of the timelines of my different possible selves, of some great mistake in which, contrary to the normal flow of things, my memory got transferred to this other self, rather than getting extinguished along with the mortal body.

Students of philosophy will recognize, in this appeal to memory, the anchor of personal identity as articulated by John Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding of 1690. “[A]s far as… consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought,” Locke writes, “so far reaches the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now it was then.” I know I am still me, or ought to know, because I can remember, say, being six years old, and experiencing such rapturous admiration for our garbageman that I worked up the courage to go out one morning and ask him for his autograph (he declined). That was me. Wasn’t it?

The English philosopher remained agnostic about the metaphysical anchorage of this power of memory. Is it an immaterial soul, or only a special capacity of matter suitably organized? He does not wish to say. In this of course he differs from René Descartes, who anchors the self not just in thinking, but in the certainty that whatever thinks is a thinking thing, which as such cannot be a body, cannot be composed of parts, and therefore cannot be destroyed. But both philosophers are alike in their conviction that, whatever may be causing the continuity of my conscious experience, the fact that it is continuous, that I share one and the same consciousness with the child with the autograph collection, with the bottle-cap collection, with the insect collection —all pinned through their chitinous thoraxes to a styrofoam board I’d garnished with moss and acorns and other woodland effects—, can only mean that I have been one and the same person all along.

This is strange, given that, for one thing, the very word person can of course be traced back to its usage in Latin to describe the characters in a theatrical presentation — the dramatis personae, as also, often, the masks that these characters wore. Really nothing, if we remain true to etymologies, should be more changeable than personhood. The young Descartes himself, ironically, once declared Larvatus prodeo, “Masked, I advance” — you will notice here, in the Latin participle, the very same root that gives the name to one of the pre-adult phases of insect metamorphosis: the larva. Yet while in 1619 Descartes seems to have had an inkling of the perfect ease with which we pass in and out of different personae or larvae, by the time of his 1641 Meditations he ended up doing more than perhaps anyone else in the history of modern thought to banish all selves but the singular self, to reduce all ruptures and splittings to mere appearance, to mere “drama”, while recasting the “self itself” as a perfect monolith, a static and unchanging fact of the matter, as certain as the social security number that now accompanies you from cradle to grave, through all your drunken debauches and erotic ecstasies and profound “life lessons”, through your deepest sleeps and your full-anesthesia colonoscopies and even your months-long comas, whether you know it or not.

But modern European thought barely scratches the surface of what it is to be a person. For nothing, I want now to convince you, as the anthropological and biological records so abundantly attest, is more natural than to be reborn.