rel="nofollow" href="#u48253202-41db-5e1b-a7b2-050436045e0b">Credits
THIS IS A BOOK about the kinds of states that float somewhere between diagnosed madness and daily life. They are ordinary enough states and yet they are extraordinary. Without toppling us over into the register of specified mental illness, they can nonetheless hover close and scary. They are part of what make us individuals and not statistics, subjects for narrative, rather than objects for the sorts of studies that feed drug trials, corporations, advertising campaigns or state records. Humans are ample, often suffering beings. The machine model of cognition, of information processing, just isn’t adequate to our complexity.
I am the principal ‘case’ in what follows, though really only a woman whose husband has recently died. His death launches me on a journey. It’s not one that has an identifiable destination. Perhaps because of that the political and social atmosphere of the moment hover very close.
I have tried in the middle section of the book to investigate the ways in which our historical moment and the wider world could be understood as sharing a set of emotions with my own grieving state. Anger and loss are political, not simply personal feelings. They bleed into us collectively: the media and the social networks play their part. I have a hunch that the time we spend as and with ‘disembodied’ beings feeds into these dark feelings, too.
Sometimes they can be assuaged or at least counterbalanced by hope. Luckily that’s where I landed in the final part of this book.
I hope my children will forgive my exposure. I have tried to be circumspect. Their mother is a reliable enough person, but when it comes to writing, the writer steps in.
What I’m talking about now is a very ancient part of human awareness. It may even be what defines the human – although it [was] largely forgotten in the second half of the twentieth century. The dead are not abandoned. They are kept near physically. They are a presence. What you think you’re looking at on that long road to the past is actually beside you where you stand.
JOHN BERGER
THE SMALL TRANSLUCENT bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.
I couldn’t bring myself to move it or use it.
When I finally picked it up, it was caked and slightly clammy to the touch, like perspiring, not quite healthy skin. I put my glasses on to make out the indistinct print on the front of the curve. For the first time I could see that, next to the stylized palm tree, vanishing letters spelled out Memory of Senses.
I put the bottle back on the shelf. Quickly.
Though I had rid the house of bagsful of clothes, unopened packs of tobacco, wires that belonged to defunct machines, and some of the other random leavings of life, I somehow couldn’t chuck that tiny bottle.
Superstition.
We all know the dead inhabit select objects. Even when we might also believe that they’ve gone to meet their maker or joined the elements in a field or river, or their everlasting souls have travelled up to Heaven to be judged by a supreme court at which angels bear witness to their deeds, good and bad, and eleven months of purgatory await.
Superstition: from the Latin ‘over + stand’. A presence stands over us, one whom we fear or who might just bring us luck. Or perhaps, as in surveillance, that presence compounds security and fear. Cicero, that hoary old philosopher who, according to one of my school teachers, had intoned something about diseases of the mind being more common and more pernicious than those of the body, had considered the word to be a derivation of superstitiosi – literally those who are left over, the survivors or descendants. It is they who must perform the funeral rites for their dead. It is they who need superstition.
One of my superstitions as a performer of funeral rites seems to lie in a miniature bottle of shampoo, latterly found to bear the name Memory of Senses.
Had I unwittingly taken in that name well before noticing it? None of my senses had been behaving particularly well in the fourteen months, and rising, since he had died. My sight and hearing had all but abandoned the world. They were overrun, smothered by the assault from within. Maybe I had something in common with that other addled mourner, Hamlet, whose father’s untimely death alongside his mother’s way of grieving – curtailed too swiftly and sexually from his perspective as a son – sets up a fury in him that some term mad. He feels surveilled – by the state, by his father’s ghost, and most of all by his own watchful, overwrought self.
DEATH HAD COME suddenly for John. It wasn’t expected. Not by any of us. Even though he was undergoing an extreme new treatment, the details of which I can’t seem to rehearse. Even though he had been in treatment for the first time just a little over two years before, then again in that last year. Twice. We had carried on laughing and arguing and walking and watching too many thrillers on the telly, and life didn’t feel as if it were ebbing in any more definitive a way than usual. There was plenty of black humour and blunt speaking about mortality, but somehow these were jokes and quite unrelated to the real. On top of it all, he looked fit. Like himself.
So when the real came, it was utterly unexpected. A shock – like a wall toppling, knocking you down into rubble. Things smelt strange there, rot and ash. When you raised your head, skewed hallucinative vistas opened.
Part of the shock resided in the sheer corporeality of death. Nothing virtual there. The body turned to unresponding stone, massive, unforgiving, as it lay there on the raised bed in the intensive care unit. That unmoving body was more intractable than mere absence. It was stubbornly indomitable. It couldn’t be wooed, or bargained with, or budged. Certainly not by me. Not over months of remembering. It was just there. A blunt fact. Somehow it was also a reprimand: how had we let him die?
We tend to think of dead bodies as abject in their lifelessness. I should have felt sorrow and pity. I had earlier while he was still breathing, but now – perhaps it was fear, or panic, or guilt, or all of them at once – his sheer stony immovability carried a visceral threat. Was it the latent violence of so much shiny steel and the high-tech tools that brought murder to my mind?
The evening before, I had had a loud panicking exchange with a bullying emergency-room doctor, who wanted to operate instantly: he just wouldn’t listen when I said anyone from the cancer clinic would tell him that, given John’s non-existent immune system, he couldn’t be operated on. I was quietened by another
