The infinite self

May 28, 026

Photo by Jowita Jeleńska on Unsplash

I am larger, better than I thought; I did not know I held so much goodness.—Walt Whitman

Yesterday I wrote about memory being the very ground of our being. I’d like to stay with that thought a little more. In yesterday’s blog I chose the metaphor of shuffling—shuffling memories like shuffling cards—because I study shuffling, and in some ways our memories are like a pack of cards—the hands we’ve been dealt, the hands we’ve played, the hands that came to us randomly for good or for ill.

In card magic we talk about a stack—a number of cards prearranged somewhere in the deck to achieve a certain outcome. The concept is borrowed from gambling, which is where we get, “The odds are stacked against you.” But memory doesn’t work like that. No, our memory works like a million face down cards that are constantly turning face up, one or more at a time, almost like being at the blackjack table.

They can pop up seemingly out of nowhere, like a sense memory. My grandmother’s house in Canada smelled of a certain Palmolive bar soap unavailable in the U.S., and my siblings and I still talk about it. If we encounter it anywhere else in our travels, it transports us back in time to that magical place we visited 40, 50, 60 years ago. When the house was sold several years ago, the new owners flipped it and my brother found the Zillow pages online. We could see that whole interior was all new, but what we all wondered was whether the contractors had uninstalled that immortal fragrance. That’s the power of a sense memory, and that card can turn up out of nowhere.

We have memories we deliberately call up, too, from trying to remember the new password we hastily made up to unlock our laptop to what we got for Christmas in 1993. Those are the cards we go searching for, turning up card after card, often encountering other passwords and magical holidays along the way. (They can suddenly point elsewhere, too, and before you know it you are on eBay seeing if anyone is selling a Super Nintendo.)

We have memories we would like to bury deep in the deck but that keep turning over on the table. Memories that come tumbling at us, prompted by some other event, not unlike when I learned to spring cards from my hand by watching Bill Bixby on the 1970s TV drama, The Magician. Memories we cherish and call up again and again, those winning hands that carried the day and won the pot.

But here is what I want to leave you with. All these memories, all these cards, give us an infinitude beyond comprehension. A deck has a mere 52 cards, but the number of combinations it can have after shuffling boggles the mind. That number is 52 factorial (52!), which equals 52 x 51 x 50 x 49, and so on. It exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the entire observable universe. If every person that ever lived shuffled a deck of cards once every second, we would not come close to repeating an exact sequence. In fact, every time you thoroughly shuffle a deck, its sequence has likely never existed before in human history.

Now think of the thousands and thousands of memories we walk around with, carrying our unique massive deck in our heads. Think of the combinations of memories we experience daily as they shuffle about, informing our decisions, our moods, our lives. In a sense they are what make us us. And they are a possession beyond compare. We are infinite.