Call Me Maybe: You Were Within, But I Was Without
Image taken from https://catholicherald.co.uk/why-you-should-read-st-augustines-confessions-this-year/
How can something be in our memory before we come to know it? Both Carly Rae Jepsen and St. Augustine take up this question in very different mediums, yet convey strikingly similar ideas.
In this post, I would like to describe the parallel between Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and St. Augustine’s Confessions Book X and how that parallel can contribute to our understanding of our memory. Additionally, I would like to put forth a brief argument as to why this particular account of memory and recall most accurately maps onto our lived human experience.
Before drawing the parallel between Carly Rae Jepsen and St. Augustine, I must first set out the definitions of two critical terms in this discussion. Those terms are to miss, and to recall. To miss is a twofold experience; moreover, the experience of missing requires (1) noticing the absence of X, and (2) feeling regret or sorrow about no longer being able to enjoy the presence of X. To miss also requires memory and recall. To recall is to bring a memory (Y) back into one’s overt consciousness, and the essence of recalling includes sending Y back to a place. I use the language “back” in reference to a proper return, and the word “place” for the location of memory in the mind. I see the act of recall as returning Y to that proper and regarded place in the memory. The memory can potentially include an infinite number of finite things and as such, pieces of the memory (such as singular memories like Y) must be brought back to a kind of “active” and readily accessed consciousness. Reminding one’s self of a memory (Y) is not simply an act of recall, but it is an extension – an entire realm of mind.
I argue that to miss necessarily entails a partial act of recall because to miss is to notice the absence of X (or instead, the subject of memory Y) and feel sorrow about no longer being able to experience X (or Y). Missing is an involved cognitive process as it requires the individual who experiences it to be aware of the thought. It then follows that, when one misses X or the subject of Y, one recalls their perception of it and experiences a feeling that prompts them to notice it and feel regretful. In this activity of memory, either X or Y is brought to the readily accessible level of consciousness where it is something that one can think about promptly.
It is important to preface the parallel between “Call Me Maybe” and Book X of The Confessions with this discussion of what it truly means to recall and to miss because these concepts set the foundation for drawing the parallel.
In Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” she sings, “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad.” With this verse, she makes the assertion that before she encountered her love interest in the song, she had been missing him already. How is it that Jepsen can miss someone that she has never met? This is a puzzling feeling that, for some reason, does resonate with our own experiences. There have indeed been times that I have missed something that I have never experienced. But, if we accept the account of recall and missing that was put forth in the first section of this article, it seems implausible that we can miss something that we have yet to be introduced to.
Though it seems implausible, under a particular account of the memory (one that closely reflects the Platonic account), it does seem plausible that we can indeed miss someone who we have not met yet. Indeed, if we accept a somewhat Platonist framework for recollection and memory, it can follow that humans come to know certain things which could not have been learned from an experience resulting from perception by our senses. In other words, all learning is recollection and recollection is the idea that each individual possesses ideas in an innate way in the soul.
If we grant this account, then what follows for Jepsen is that the essence of her love interest lived in her consciousness and the budding prospect of realizing a relationship with a potential love interest spurred the recollection and subsequent missing of the feeling that she had already known. Because Jepsen is human and humans often misunderstand our feelings and what they truly mean, she most likely equates the present experience of knowing her love interest with the feeling she already had in her (innate) memory of how a love interest makes one feel. Thus, she nearly equates the two by saying that she had missed him before he came into her life.
This narration of the experience of recollection and the subsequent missing of things that we have never come to know is not unique to Jepsen. In fact, St. Augustine’s view of what it means to miss, the act of recall, and what each means for our faculty of memory in Confessions Book X – I believe – can supplement this account.
In 10.27 of The Confessions, St. Augustine writes, “Late have I loved you [...] You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself.” Instead of a human love interest per se, St. Augustine writes this of God. He suggests that he did not recognize that he did not have to search in the exterior in order to find God, as God was always within him. Following our previous assertion of how our memory functions, all of the knowledge that is out there is already available innately to us. We do not have to go anywhere external for new knowledge. In this way, we never add new knowledge; we only see things in a new light. Additionally, we know all already, but we are not able to uncover it until we use the appropriate tools or undergo the essential experiences. St. Augustine went through a process in order to uncover God in his memory in an act of recollection and, in Book X, is asking how he came to know God.
To draw the parallel, St. Augustine and Jepsen describe a point in time when they experienced the feeling of missing something that they had not come to know yet. St. Augustine, in Book X, is at a point in his life when he can recognize that although God was in his memory, he searched outside himself for God because he was mistaken about the process of acquiring knowledge. He searched for X without knowing that X was already in his consciousness (and memory). Jepsen’s verse begs a parallel question of how we recall X without having ever experienced X. Both of these experiences resonate with me as part of my experience of exercising my memory.
“Call Me Maybe” frequents a position as the favorite song of a few philosophy professors that I know and to me, it is no surprise that this is such. Carly Rae Jepsen puts forth quite the Augustinian assertion – that she missed X before even knowing X. This is an experience that is difficult to describe as it does not fit into the contemporary scientific view of the memory that much of society holds today. Though difficult to describe, we cannot negate its presence in our lives – it is a feeling that most (if not all) of us have experienced. The accounts of the memory and acts of recollection put forth by St. Augustine (elaborated on from Platonism) seem to be the most appropriate accounts if we want to incorporate this common human experience into our conception of the memory.