Bergson on Déjà Vu and the Memory of the Present
In the second refrain of “People Are Strange,” Jim Morrison sings again about faces appearing in the rain. The break in the accompaniment comes on cue, and this time a guitar note bends down and hangs across it. The first refrain gave the ear a good idea of when the break would come and what it would sound like. The band answers one of those expectations and unsettles the other.
In my doctoral thesis I used Henri Bergson’s account of déjà vu to describe the effect. I was interested in the way the faces in the song could seem like faces we had encountered before, even as Morrison sang about the loneliness of going unrecognized. Bergson’s question goes further. How can an entire situation, including our own part in it, feel as though it has happened already while it is still happening?
A past without a date
Bergson begins “Memory of the Present and False Recognition” with a person who is watching something or taking part in a conversation. The conviction of having been there before extends to the words the person is saying, the way they feel, even what they intend to do. A peculiar kind of certainty enters the scene. Somebody else at the table may look familiar because they resemble an old neighbor. In the experience Bergson describes, your seat at the table, the anecdote you are in the middle of telling and the impression that you have told it right here in just this way all come over together. Where in your life would you look for that first telling?
Bergson calls it “the past in general.” The moment has the character of something remembered, and there is nowhere in your earlier life to put it. His comparison is a second visit to the theater. You can recognize the play a scene at a time and locate your first visit by its surroundings. You sat farther back then, next to different people, with different things on your mind. Even as the lines come back, the difference between the two evenings makes it possible to place them. In false recognition, the surroundings themselves feel as though they are being repeated. The very details that might help date the memory have joined the impression of having lived it before.
Bergson asks us to consider when a memory first forms. Suppose it waits for a perception to finish. An afternoon with friends could be divided into lunch, a walk and dinner, or into conversations, one of which begins at lunch and carries on during the walk. Each division makes sense according to what we noticed or cared about. How would memory decide where one experience ended so that it could begin to preserve it? On Bergson’s account, memory forms while experience is taking place. There is no need for the walk or the conversation to reach a stopping point.
For this coexistence he uses a mirror. A hand and its reflection appear together. The hand can turn a handle and open a door. Its reflection is visible and has no such power. Bergson calls perception actual and the memory taking shape alongside it virtual. They concern the same event and belong to different orders of experience. If the memory of this conversation should become conscious as it forms, it would carry the character of the past from the outset. It would also keep pace with the conversation. The sense of repetition could extend to each fresh word, with no need for the whole exchange to have taken place before.
Why the next word feels decided
Normally our interest is a little ahead of the word being spoken. Bergson asks us to consider how we follow a sentence. We begin to make out where it is going before its final words are spoken, and we adjust our understanding as each new word arrives. We can do this while listening closely to the speaker. Concentrating on the sound of one familiar word, by itself, is a different kind of attention. Say it several times, or hold it in your ear a little longer than usual, and the word may begin to sound like an odd assembly of syllables. The passage through it toward a meaning has slowed.
By “attention to life” Bergson means our general orientation toward what we are about to do. An older memory can help with that. I remember a door sticking last time and give it a firmer push. The memory forming beside my present perception of the door has no comparable information to give me. I am already looking at the handle. Bergson imagines a brief slackening of that forward attention. The memory of the present, ordinarily kept out of awareness, catches up with perception. He offers this as a philosophical account of how the experience might occur, and calls his picture of the mechanism provisional.
The apparent foreknowledge follows from the persistence of that feeling. Each word of the conversation arrives with the character of something we have heard before. After several words arrive that way, we feel sure the next will belong to the same remembered exchange. If somebody interrupted and asked what the next word would be, we would have no word to offer. Bergson compares the sensation to beginning to recite a passage learned by heart long ago. As each word comes out, we feel we had it all along. In déjà vu, that sense of possession renews itself with each arrival, even when there is no passage to recite.
A century later, Anne Cleary and Alexander Claxton made versions of this distinction measurable. In a navigation experiment, a new route could resemble an earlier route the participant could not recall. People reporting déjà vu were more inclined to feel that they knew which way the next turn would go. Their predictions were no better than chance. The experiment gives the confidence and the knowledge separate measures. Bergson’s further claim, that every present forms its memory as it passes, is a philosophical inference from the character of experience.
The note that stays behind
In the first refrain of “People Are Strange,” the harmony at each of those breaks is B7, the dominant in E minor. My transcription puts a clipped high B on the second beat of the measure. For the next two beats the guitar goes quiet. In the second refrain the B comes in on cue, then bends down to B-flat. The lower note sounds through the end of the measure. The first refrain has taught the ear to expect the guitar to drop out at this point. This time Morrison sings the returning words against the note it is still holding.
A refrain gives us an actual earlier hearing to draw on. It is possible to say when we learned the pattern, and to play the two passages back and hear where they differ. That is one of the pleasures of the record. The band can build a sound out of the listener’s memory of an event less than a minute old, and make a change of one semitone register as an incident. In Bergson’s conversation, the supposed first hearing has no such place. It is as if everything, down to the one word that has just caught you by surprise, had come back exactly as it was.
Morrison sings in the second person. The faces come into view and it is your name that goes unremembered. The song gives you a small version of that estrangement. You know well the refrain and can still be surprised by what it does when you get there. Play the track again and you can listen to the first break with the bent note already in your ear. This time the two hearings really do belong to different moments, and you can go back to the instant when the difference became audible.
Sources
Henri Bergson, “Memory of the Present and False Recognition” (1908), in Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, translated by H. Wildon Carr (Henry Holt and Company, 1920), pp. 134–185, especially 134–137, 157–170, 173–184. Digitized Cornell University Library copy.
David Lăpădat, Interdependența poezie-muzică în creația lui Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison și Leonard Cohen, doctoral dissertation, National University of Music Bucharest, 2022, §2.5.4, especially p. 158 and the appendix transcription, pp. 289–291. The prose names the lower pitch A-sharp, and the score spells it B-flat.
The Doors, “People Are Strange,” Strange Days (Elektra, 1967). The Doors’ discography.
Anne M. Cleary and Alexander B. Claxton, “Déjà Vu: An Illusion of Prediction,” Psychological Science 29, no. 4 (2018), pp. 635–644. Journal article.
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