Soul-shards

A while ago, I was talking to my sister-in-law Gwen about Egypt. She, like many others, was trying to get to the bottom of its magnetic pull on me. We talked in circles… actually more like figure 8s or overlapping squiggly lines… and came to no palpable conclusions.

Sure, it’s the people, the culture, the atmosphere, the music, etc etc… I could go on all day. But why is the pull there? Where does it come from? And why is it so indefinable?

Then she told me about soul-shards, which I still don’t fully understand despite googling it numerous times. The concept was conceived by mathematician Douglas Hofstadter in his book, I am a Strange Loop, where he talks about a day he saw his mother grieving over a photo of his recently dead father, lamenting that the photo had no meaning, that it was just a useless piece of flat paper with dark spots on it. He instinctively disagreed with his mother, and used the analogy of Frederic Chopin’s piano sheet music to tell her how he felt in an attempt to bring her a tiny degree of comfort:

In the living room we have a book of the Chopin études for piano. All of its pages are just pieces of paper with dark marks on them, just as two dimensional and flat and foldable as the photograph of Dad – and yet, think of the powerful effect that they have had on people all over the world for 150 years now. Thanks to those black marks on those flat sheets of paper, untold thousands of people have collectively spent millions of hours moving their fingers over the keyboards of pianos in complicated patterns, producing sounds that give them indescribable pleasure and a sense of great meaning. Those pianists in turn have conveyed to many millions of listeners, including you and me, the profound emotions that churned in Frederic Chopin's heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin's interiority – to the experience of living inside the head, or rather the soul, of Frederic Chopin. The marks on those sheets of paper are no less than soul-shards – scattered remnants of the shattered soul of Frederic Chopin. Each of those strange geometries of notes has a unique power to bring back to life, inside our brains, some tiny fragment of the internal experiences of another human being – his sufferings, his joys, his deeper passions and tensions – and we thereby know, at least in part, what it was like to be that human being, and many people feel intense love for him.

Why are we drawn to certain music, certain people, certain places? Why do some places make us feel alive and uplifted, while others leave us unaffected or even numb? Why do some things tear at our hearts and never let go? Maybe there’s something to this soul-shard theory, and if so then Egypt has sprinkled her soul-shards over me with reckless abandon. I think they must be in the Nile water.