The Black Mirror E-Book

Raymond Tallis

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In this beautifully written personal meditation on life and living, Raymond Tallis reflects on the fundamental fact of existence: that it is finite. Inspired by E. M. Forster's thought that 'Death destroys a man but the idea of it saves him', Tallis invites readers to look back on their lives from a unique standpoint: one's own future corpse. From this perspective, he shows, the world now vacated can be seen most clearly in all its richness and complexity. Blending lyrical reflection, humour and the occasional philosophical argument, Tallis explores his own post-mortem recollection and invites us to appreciate anew the precariousness and preciousness of life.

Leseprobe

Also by Raymond Tallis

Epimethean Imaginings

Reflections of a Metaphysical Flaneur

In Defence of Wonder

Aping Mankind

Michelangelo’s Finger

The Kingdom of Infinite Space

Hunger

Hippocratic Oaths

The Black Mirror

Fragments of an Obituary for Life

Raymond Tallis

ATLANTIC BOOKS

London

Copyright page

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Raymond Tallis, 2015

The moral right of Raymond Tallis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 84887 1 281

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 7 397

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 84887 1 298

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Dedication

To Julian Spalding – in friendship, gratitude and admiration

Acknowledgements

It is a pleasure to acknowledge the enthusiastic support of James Nightingale and Margaret Stead at Atlantic for this book, the scrup­ulous editorial work of Luke Brown and the guidance and inspiration of Toby Mundy over many years.

Contents

Overture: In the Beginning Was the Word

PART ONE | Ending

1 To the Sunless Land

2 Last Respects

PART TWO | Before

A Being in the World

3 Organic Accounts

4 Elements

5 Space: Senses

6 Space: Distance

7 Space: Partitions

8 Space: Closeness

9 Space as Theatre: Much Ado

10 A Space of His Own: Having

11 Semantic Space

12 Inter-space: Together & Apart

13 Inner Space: On an Extinguished Flame

Towards ‘The Late RT’

14 Auguries of Insignificance

15 Outliving

16 Limits

17 Tidying Up

PART THREE | After

18 Last Rites

19 Afterlife

Coda

Epigraph

Lucem demonstrat umbra

The darkness shows forth the light

Mutato nomine et de te fabula narratur

Change only the name and this story is about you

—HORACE

Overture: In the Beginning Was the Word

Death destroys a man; the idea of death saves him.

E. M. FORSTER1

Let us banish the strangeness of death: let us practise it, accustom ourselves to it, never having anything so often present in our minds than death: let us always keep the image of death . . . in full view.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE2

Death is nothing – a limit to the life it is not. Those whom we call ‘the dead’ neither enjoy their peace nor endure their loss. But if death were merely nothing, there would be nothing to be said about it and this book would comprise as many blank pages as the reader could tolerate. But death is less than nothing. It is an omni-ravenous zero. Like the God of certain theologies, death is defined by what it is not. Unlike that ‘apophatic’ God, however, it has a parasitic being, borrow­ing from what it subtracts or destroys, acquiring apparent substance by feasting on life. This book, therefore, is about what death takes away. It is an obituary, or fragments of an obituary, for life.

While death preys impersonally on the entirety of the living world, it is also deeply personal. Each journey from I-hood to thing-hood and onwards to loss even of thing-hood is unique. This transition from somewhere to nowhere, from someone to no-thing, is beyond the grasp of particular thoughts entertained by a particular person on a particular morning, afternoon, evening or night. Truly to think your extinction, you would have to become the equal in your thoughts of the sum total of yourself that is cancelled. So, while fear may be important, something deeper than fear stops us fixing our attention on our end. It is its inconceivability.

Fluency, that by dint of onward momentum precludes descent into the depths, is a constant temptation. ‘Death’ after all is a word we use lightly: ‘I cut him dead’, or (of an embarrassment) ‘I died a thousand deaths’ or (of a hangover) ‘I felt like death’. And there is no shortage of remarks attached to Impressive Names, apophthegms, obiter dicta, jokes (gallows humour for those for whom ‘gallows’ is just a word) or consoling, or monitory, reflections, ready-made phrases gesturing towards feelings that are actually unfelt and thoughts that are unthought.

Indeed, talking about death may be even more evasive than remaining silent. It is not difficult to assume a portentous voice that, drawing on the noise this side of the grave, purports to speak for the silence on the other. Or to seem to outsmart death by putting it in its place, usually by personifying it to rob it of its ‘sting’, to deny it its ‘victory’. Tell that to the – dead – Marines.

Actual dying and real bereavement expose the hollowness of these triumphs. Few aphorisms – and a few keystrokes are sufficient to liberate a torrent – sound good when uttered between retches, bracketed between groans or spoken in a world emptied by the loss of one’s life’s companion. Anything that does not pass W. H. Auden’s test – ‘something a man of honour, awaiting death from cancer or a firing squad could read without contempt’3 – is mere bling. But this is an impossibly high bar.

If death cannot be reached, even less tamed, by speech – and to attempt to think or speak of it sometimes feels like trying to breathe in a vacuum – what purpose could be served by a book devoted to it? Have we not, after all, been misled by the existence of a word into thinking that there is an item, a subject, a topic, to be discussed?

What is to be discussed is life. Lucem demonstrat umbra – ‘The shadow reveals the light’ – says it all. The unspeakable Nothing italicizes at least some of the Everything that is life. While death destroys us in fact, the thought of our non-existence may save us from triviality, from entrapment in secondary things – only tem­porally of course, but then life itself is a temporary matter. To be oblivious of death is to be only half-awake.

This is an implicit rejoinder to Spinoza’s assertion that ‘The free man thinks about nothing less often than about death, and his wisdom is the preparation not for death but for life.’4 The free man (and woman) who is preparing for life may think more deeply and, indeed, more freely by thinking about death. In order to live like a philosopher, it is necessary to die like one – that is to die in thought and in imagination before you die in body. Few, if any, can philoso­phize while panting for breath, or vomiting, and none while confused, or comatose. No argument or revelation will save me when, as will surely happen, I shall be utterly broken and my body will embark on a one-way journey to extinction. No sentence will reach to the bottom of my grief, my pain, or my nausea. And this is why Mon­taigne enjoined us to ‘banish the strangeness of death’ and ‘always keep the image of death in our minds and in our imagination’.

The attempt to see life from the perspective of death brings us close to the heart of the philosophical impulse. ‘Philosophy’, David Pears said, ‘originates in the desire to transcend a world of human thought and experience, in order to find some point of vantage from which it can be seen as a whole.’5 Death, or the idea of it, may seem to offer that vantage point – not as an Archimedean fulcrum, but as an imaginary outside which makes life (with all its outsides and insides) seem to be an interior, and ourselves to be exiles pressing our faces to a window, watching what is happening within. If to be a philosopher is to be an onlooker, the vantage point of death is the ultra ne plus of the philosophical viewpoint: you look upon your life from the virtual position of one who has outlived it. Death’s obsid­ian surface is a rear-view mirror reflecting the life that is now over. We stare at the darkness in order to see more clearly the life that we think of as behind us.

Such a perspective, liberated from the parochial interests of everyday life, is true to the strangeness of our being in the world. We forget this strangeness when there is so much living do to and living demands of us a responsible, focussed attention. How can I be astonished at the miracle of a Wednesday afternoon, of a city, of a conversation, when there is shopping to be unloaded from the car, a toddler walking towards a plug-hole with extended fingers, a clinic to be completed, and a thousand other things justly expecting our considered response?

And so The Black Mirror, which reaches out to death but cannot reach it, is about life. Hence the sub-title: Fragments of an Obituary for Life. Its ambition is to render one’s self, daylight, parts of the world, contre jour, to revivify the life we have lost in living, to express a deep gladness at being alive, mindful that

In the cold waters of Lethe you will remember that the warm earth meant a thousand heavens.6

If death disappears from sight for long stretches of this book, there­fore, this is not through oversight. Death is the viewpoint and the viewpoint is not part of the view, especially when that viewpoint is eyeless beyond even that of the mathematical representation of the world.

If I had had more courage, imagination and power of concentra­tion, this book would be more obviously what it is: a walk across a tightrope that has nothing to hook on to at the other side because there is no other side.

One does what one can.

References

1 E. M. Forster, Howards End.

2 Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 1580, M. A. Screech (ed.) 1991m, Book 1, Section 29, p. 96.

3 W. H. Auden, ‘In the Cave of Making’ (In Memoriam Louis MacNeice).

4 Spinoza, Ethics, 4, Prop 67.

5 David Pears, Wittgenstein, Fontana Modern Masters (London: Fontana Collins, 1971) p. 21.

6 Reiner Schurmann, paraphrasing Osip Mandelstam, ‘Brothers. Let Us Glorify Freedom’s Twilight’, quoted in Vishwa Adlur’s Parmenides, Plato and Mortal Philosophy: Return from Transcedence (London: Continuum, 2011).

PART ONE | Ending

One

To the Sunless Land

While of death, there is little to be said that is truly to the point, of dying there is too much. Nevertheless, if death is to help us to see the life that it subtracts, the unavoidable first step must be to look at the process of subtraction; at the journey to The Sunless Land.

Though it seems strange that something as undifferentiated as death should have routes or names, there are countless paths from the person to the corpse, so many fleurs du mal strewn in its way, so many ways of being put on notice that the end is coming from a definite direction, so many ways of experiencing and enduring the journey from the ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘you’ or ‘he’ to an ‘it’, from someone to something, which continues on to another road – to nothing in particular, nowhere in particular.

Different organs, or different afflictions of different organs, may take the lead; the processes may be visible or invisible, audible or silent, odourless or stinking. While death is certain, we rarely know in advance which of the thousands of pages of the medical text­books will describe the portal through which we will be expelled from the world. For we inhabit only the coastline of our body (and even this only patchily – when did you last have anything to do with the creases on the back of your neck or the down on the small of your back?). The object that goes under our name is, for the most part, as opaque to us as the rest of the material world. We note the reactions of our bodies as if we were external observers. We wonder at the tingling of our hands, the rumbling of our guts, and the twitching of our calves. We await the dripping of sweat as a message that we have done sufficient of the exercise that we hope might postpone our end.

The signals from the hinterland may be difficult to interpret. One day, as RT walked up a hill and felt a pain in his chest, a question formed in his mind: ‘Indigestion or angina?’ He could not differen­tiate between a minor discomfort and a harbinger of the possible end of his world. And once, when he was sitting on the toilet, reading the Times Literary Supplement, waiting to be distanced from the con­tents of his colon, he noted a dark spot on his thigh, and speculated idly as to its meaning. Would a sky-cancelling wing unfurl from this macule of darkness?

Death is a potent reminder that we do not live, fill, and animate the facts of our case. They are bigger than we are and smaller than our experiences. And the mode of our death often has little to do with the biographical facts, with the curriculum vitae: in dying we have to live out impersonal processes that are necessary for, but are far beneath, the lowest stratum of our person. The opaque philos­opher Jacques Derrida, the parliamentary sketch writer and delicious wit Simon Hoggart, the brave, visionary GP Anne McPherson, and the wife of a friend of a friend of RT had little else in common except that they were all fatally assaulted by a pancreas which broke out of its bounds and ransacked their bodies. Tennessee Williams’ death from choking on a cap from a bottle of eye drops seems to contain little of the Deep South – or his journey from the Deep South to international fame via Broadway.

The disconnection between our death and our life is cruelly underlined by those who die young, whose life story is broken off after a few preparatory sentences. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ we say. But it makes precious little sense at any age; that, for example, a man of 90, taking his usual stroll and looking forward to a pint of beer, should be felled by a clot in his lungs, and consequently be translated at once from a particular time, place, world, and life, to no time, no place, no world, and no life. Death is not a neat full stop at the end of the final sentence, of the final paragraph, of the final chapter, of a life. It is the profoundest of all interruptions.

Dying takes you deeper into the inscrutable, lampless hinterland of carnal being. More of your body becomes vocal, gatecrash­ing what it feels like to be you, though the ‘you’ is transformed to something more general than the you of your loves and hates, joys and sorrows, of your virtues and vices, your hobbies and duties, your CV. Dying is a mixture of subtraction – the breaking of links, the narrowing of scope – and of addition – more effort, malaise, pain, and nausea, more general noise attending daily life. Gilded memories or a roseate future are pushed to one side by an ever more obtrusive soiled present until the dying man expe­riences himself as a gobbet of carnal rubble in the waste bin of his world.

How death will come is uncertain; that it will come is certain. The necessity of our death follows from the nature of our life. We die because we are improbable. Something as highly structured as our body is at odds with the overall tendency of the universe. The beautiful order of our faces, our hands, our hearts, is won from a sea of disorder whose overall trajectory is towards dissipation.

The emergence of life remains, for this reason, a mystery. The increased complexity of what we call ‘higher’ life forms is an addi­tional mystery. Competition, selective pressures acting on mutations, only seem post hoc to explain the journey from prebiotic crystals, lacking even membranes, to men in suits and women in dresses, from mute RNA to individuals like RT who cultivated a sense of life’s little ironies. Even if consciousness and self-consciousness gave living creatures an advantage over the dimmer competition (and it’s not at all clear that they do) this would not explain why the material world should acquire consciousness, be conscious in parts of itself, as itself, self-aware to the point where it says ‘I’. (None of this, by the way, amounts to a case for an ‘intelligent designer’. The gaps in our understanding don’t add up either to the argument for, the job description of, or the shape of, something corresponding to the word ‘God’. God is not only laden with historical baggage: it is historical baggage.)

We are vulnerable because we are complex organisms – though some of our complexity is devoted to mitigating our vulnerability – and the physical world abhors such complexity. Less specifically, we are condemned to transience because we are the children of change. A restless universe gave rise to us and that restlessness is governed by law. It makes no exceptions. We cannot expect our birth to open up a parish in the material world in which the universe ceases to be restless and ignores its own laws. That by which we are swept into existence is that by which we are swept out of existence.

And, just to make sure there is no escape from extinction, we rely on the restlessness and laws to be maintained during our (long, short) lives in order that there shall be a finite, rather than infinites­imal, interval between the first cry and the last; the gap between the entrance and the exit called ‘my life’ should be a matter of years rather than nanoseconds. If the ordinary processes of the world were suspended for our convenience, then food and water and shel­ter would have no power to protract our being. The effectiveness of basic means to life belong to the Great Mechanism that is the universe, that unmakes us by the same means by which it makes us.

Ultimately helpless, we nonetheless take a hand in managing our mortality. Much of the business of our life, when we are not taken up with pleasures and diversions, serves the overriding project of postponing death, of fending off the accidents of nature, to which, being accidents of nature, we are prone, and with making the world a more hospitable place and our bodies more aligned to our personal narratives, to the lives we have chosen to live rather than merely the processes that make those lives possible.

The variety of postponements is astounding. Of course, we eat and drink, and shelter ourselves in clothes and dwellings. Under­pinning these basic activities there is a massive infrastructure of practices, skills, technologies, customs and laws. And postponement of death takes more indirect forms than securing nutrition, hydra­tion, and protection. Man is the precaution-taking animal. Hoarding and storing, barricading and padlocking, pacifying the natural world and regulating the human one, are just some of the many ways in which we try to make our lives nice, humane, and long as opposed to nasty, brutish, and short. We look to deflect not only the enemy without – wild animals, infestations, cold, heat, floods, storms, vol­canoes, and, most terrifyingly, our fellow men – but also the enemy within. Immunization, a balanced diet, exercise, moderation in pleasures, and pills and operations, are some of the conduits through which a vast amount of knowledge is mobilized, often via dizzyingly complex modes of cooperation, to arrest or postpone the various processes (visible and invisible) that make up the passage from our­selves to no one.

The appointment with extinction is postponed but not cancelled because the very process of living is inseparable from death. Most obviously, use wears out parts, toxins accumulate, and the mechan­isms of growth may produce growths. Accidents that make us happen will make us unhappen: we are composed of elements that otherwise have little to do with our lives. Life grows out of – and feeds on – death, though it is sometimes difficult to get life to believe this.

Indeed, death’s outriders are ignored or resented as mere inter­ruptions. Its every manifestation is at an impertinent angle to the ongoing stories of RT’s life; an anti-project getting in the way of his projects. The appointment with the doctor, the attack of vomit­ing, even the summons to the funeral of a friend, clash with the many businesses of life. But the invasions of irrelevance persist, the drumbeats get louder. Sooner or later, death becomes the main, overwhelming business and dying the only story. RT will turn to the left and It will be there with folded arms. He will turn to the right and It will be waiting with an implacable smile. All escape routes will be locked, barred and bolted and the keys – his dying body – will melt away.

The journey from the person to the corpse, from ‘I’ to ‘it’ may be a plummet or a long, winding, downward path, a howling descent through thorns, an exit from the world through an endless razor-wired fence.

Sudden death – however much we may wish for it as preferable to being racked by our own body – seems more shocking. It is a reminder that we are never at any time insulated by a guaranteed distance from the end of ourselves. Death has no obligation to serve notice. An ordinary Wednesday with no cosmological, apocalyp­tic or even philosophical pretensions may be the date when RT’s world is extinguished. The afternoon in which his life reached its total looked pretty much like its predecessor the week before whose main event was that he went shopping with Mrs RT and agreed, with slightly more warmth than the occasion called for, to take a taxi. Sudden death is doubly shocking because it allows no opportunity for farewells, for settling one’s affairs, for tidying up behind one, for saying that which has to be said, and concealing that which has to remain hidden.

And it can pounce from so many directions. You are abroad. For­getting that you are not in England, and preoccupied by something you are planning to say at the meeting you are due to address, you walk in front of a car, driven on what for you is the wrong side of the road, by someone who was also a little preoccupied. Or you are caught in the crossfire between two individuals bent on killing each other. Or you come into your spouse’s study and say ‘I have a terri­ble headache’ and those are your last words. On impulse you go for a late swim and are swept out to sea. The thousand conversations are broken off, never to be resumed. The photograph for which you impatiently posed turns out to be the last that was taken, and the smile an incomplete triumph over irritation at being told to smile, the last to be recorded.

The simplicity of sudden death mocks the exquisite, painfully constructed complexity of the life that it ends. Surely, we feel, it should take time to unpick all that was so carefully woven together: all that one’s parents, teachers, mentors, civil society, technology, sci­ence, and life itself put into enabling a world to be constructed which could navigate the Great Outside in which we find ourselves when we are pitched into our lives. The mismatch between the difficulty with which we are put together – the love, patience, and painstaking concern necessary for our flourishing – and the ease with which we can be torn into meaningless pieces is shocking. Think of all the many, minutely detailed anxieties RT’s parents had for him – Is he eating enough? What does that fever mean? Is he safe on that swing? Is he being bullied? Will he pass his exam? Will he get the job he wants? Will he be happy with Mrs RT? Is he going to be promoted? Can we help him to worry less about his child? All the care, nurtur­ing, vigilance, protection, education leads like a long upward slope to a cliff face. You have learned to ‘Keep away from the edge!’ but sooner or later, the edge, built into the very stuff of your lives, comes for you. A bang on the head and RT falls through all the storeys and stories of his life to a condition less than that of the lowest of the beasts, one that lacks even the order granted to a crystal.

There are modes of dying that, however distressing, seem at least to do justice to our complexity by removing those storeys and stor­ies one by one. Dementia – Jonathan Swift’s ‘dying from the head down’ – unscrambles all that we have received or have achieved in reaching our state as fully developed human persons. The learning curve points remorselessly downwards and we forget all that we knew, understood, and could perform: knowing-how goes the way of knowing-that. Occasional tatters of clearness reveal by default the personal universe dissolving in the thickening, ubiquitous inner fog. But mostly we are puzzled, lost, in an anguish of alienation. The person with whom we have spent decades in multilayered intimacy becomes a stranger inexplicably in our lives, looming, and lurking, as we grow ever stranger to them, though for them this estrangement does not puzzle because it has a general name – Dementia – and follows a general pattern: the tragic picking apart of all connections. The sufferer is the one least able to grasp that the changed and frightening and bewildering and frustrating and lonely world is an unchanged reality refracted through changes in himself. The word ‘Alzheimer’s’ that he may have used in the past means as little to him as do his once-beloved children. They are now nameless, without recognizable faces, and shorn of their lives – the lives he fostered and shared and the lives they have developed independently of him. He is the one least able to understand the link between the loss of the connectedness between his brain cells and his currently being called ‘Poppet’ (rather than ‘Professor’) by a carer, paid to care, whose fin­gers he is trying to break as she changes him out of his soiled pants. As RT is progressively leached out of the body that bears his name, it becomes a mobile gravestone marking his absence.

The demolition of the mind – and subsequently of the body – brick by brick, is hardly an attractive alternative to sudden death. And it is true that the description of any slow death ‘after a long illness’ (often ‘bravely borne’) is usually a euphemism. The battle against the processes that gradually picked him apart was not a fight chosen by the combatant; rather it was an intimate civil war within his body which he suffered more than he engaged. There is a pressure to go through Hell for others: ‘We are going to beat this together.’

The phrases – ‘long illness’, ‘bravely borne’ – allow us to look past the fear of pain, disability and disintegration, past the disappointed hopes, past the gradual withdrawal into the solitude of an ever sicker, limited, body. They look past the return of the constraints of toddlerhood, this time without a future to look forward to, past the days marked by the helplessness of childhood waiting while fitting into others’ busy lives (‘They have their own lives to live’); past the continuous dependency on others’ good will, and the burden of being a burden, however willingly shouldered; past the stripping off of all dignity. The tears of frustration, the incontinence and the impotent rages. These brave phrases allow us to forget the months doled out in painful seconds; the room, the chair, the bed, as a craft rising and falling on the swells of nausea; the walls closing in as every action becomes ever more difficult; the dreary routines of pressure-sore cleaning and re-siting drips, or eating food made inedible by a sore mouth and rebellious gut; the fatigue invading limbs, trunk, and head, such that every action is a race up a sand dune, until defeat is conceded; the slow closing down of the world to walls identical with the limits of the stricken body. These brave phrases gloss over the way breathing becomes an activity in its own right, not the presupposed, disregarded, background of everything he did. They look past the weary hours in the night of wakefulness alone in the darkness, cowering in anticipation of the lightning strikes of bones eating themselves, of pains that he cannot withdraw from, of shivering and sweating, or of chasing shadows that are transformed into evil spirits last encountered in the bedtime terrors of childhood. They overlook the pruning of possibility and shrinking of the world: the last holiday abroad, the last journey to London, the last shopping expedition, the last hour in the garden; the last time the stairs proved climbable, the last independent journey to the bathroom, or he could sit out in a chair or sit up in bed without assistance. Country-fast, city-fast, under house arrest, room-bound, chair-bound, bed-fast. Thus the landmarks of human being turned from becoming to begoing.

There are other, gentler routes, the road of frailty, of gradual, even painless attenuation. The downhill path of the ‘dwindles’ that single out no particular organ. The imperceptible diminution of strength such that he no longer simply sat down but lowered himself, or docked, into a chair and no longer leapt or even merely got up but raised himself by main force to a standing position in which he remained stooped towards the earth awaiting him. Dying of old age that does not hurt or feel sick or scream with terror. Doddery, tot­tery, yes. A little short-winded. Daily activities slightly more difficult. An increasing vagueness of mind and diffuse incapacity of body; a de-differentiation that anticipates the return to the journey, shared with the universe, towards thermodynamic equilibrium. And then, one day, a heart attack that passes almost without notice because the pain fibres serving the heart have themselves aged and have become a little less attentive.

Thus the journey from that spot on the skin, that pain, that lump, that cough, that mysterious weight loss, into a world whose hor­izons are drawn ever tighter, to the final collapse of the space that had been opened up by his awakening senses, to the point where he could no longer see or feel his hand in front of his face or see or feel that he could not see or feel them. RT goes down with the organism to which his life is fastened and which, failing, changes from a craft which enabled him to voyage across the world to the sea water in which he drowns; changes to a darkness in which the captain, the ship, and the ocean are all one. To the end of an ordeal that will not be over until he, too, is over, and consequently unable to feel the relief that his end will have brought.

Death cannot be avoided so RT hopes for an ideal death: out like a 100-watt bulb at the age of 100. Or fading like a summer evening with birdsong gathered quietly into nests and birds gathered into sleep, the darkness swallowing them all in safety. An end whose last words are: ‘Goodbye my darling. How lucky we are to have lived together, to have loved each other. And thank you, world, for hav­ing me’ – as the dark as well as the light is extinguished.

A death whose tragedy is blunted. But it is a tragedy nonetheless, for which we are existentially unprepared. We have been present since the beginning of time because we have never known – except by report – a time when we did not exist, never lived in a world uninhabited by ourselves. We cannot imagine everything being taken away from us, including the self who enjoyed, suffered, loved, loathed everything that has been taken away. We cannot conceive of the absence of ourselves.

Yes, we know objectively that the reasons we came into being are not sufficient to sustain creatures like us forever, even less the particular lives we lived and shared with those we loved. But we cannot think that we are truly finite and that we shall, after a life of incomplete meanings, cease to be. We hope that, at the very least, our lives will come to an appropriate end when all that we hoped to achieve will have been achieved, that the story will be rounded off, that all passion for existence will have been spent. That we will not be sent on our journey to dust, and to something less organized than dust, until the stories we started in our lives will have come to a satisfactory conclusion.

This will not happen. There are too many stories, too disorgan­ized, that have too many characters, interfering with each other, for any lived story (other than those that are committed to words) to retain its identity even through a charmed (that is to say uninter­rupted) journey from beginning to end. And there are new stories opening up all the time. In many cases, these are initiated by our­selves as we find new projects, new passions, new discoveries about ourselves and the world. The most cheering thought, however, is that the world lacks narrative neatness because it is too rich with abundance pouring in through the sides of any narrative.

And so all that remains to us is to step back and see the world that has been lost in its inexpressible, untidy richness. But first we need to reach the zero position from which the world can begin to be seen and life’s obituary to be written. To see what remains after RT has died. RT, therefore, must pay his last respects and circle round an item that, innocent of its discourtesy, will not reciprocate his gaze.

His corpse.

Two

Last Respects

Disrobe, RT, and look at yourself in the mirror. The image is of an earlier time-slice of the item that will be your corpse, a time slice that, unlike the later one, is looking back at you. Pinch the back of your left hand with the thumb and index finger of your right hand. What in future will be your corpse is pinching itself: the same fin­gers, the same arms. The face that facing yours is the one that will be exhibited to those who have come to pay their last respects. You are exchanging glances with the past tense of liquefying carrion or a handful of ashes.

Touch your neck and feel the bumping of the carotid artery beneath your finger, at once alien and deeply familiar, marking your personal time in an impersonal universe, signifying the living machine getting on with its business so that you can get on with yours. This is where, when the time comes, nurse or doctor will establish that you are pulseless and no longer an issue for yourself. Sit down and feel the pressure reporting the action and reaction of your buttocks and the seat: this is the weight of the body they will lift on to the trolley headed for the mortuary, a weight that will no longer be ‘my weight’.

The present ‘You’ and the future ‘It’ share so many predicates: the colour of the eyes, the sharpness of the nose, the shiny cranium, the scar in the sole of the foot. The flesh you are touching will remain you – the you who is presently looking at yourself, hearing the bird-song in the garden, the traffic passing in the road outside – so long as it is sufficiently close to parameters of physiological normality, parameters of which you have little inkling. After this, the ‘it’ that you are and are not will outlast you for a short while, and as ‘the body of the deceased’ be invested with the after-image of the extin­guished you, holding down a place in the material world for others to view. The body of the deceased will be yours – ‘my’ corpse – only in prospect, since in reality it will be no one’s, setting aside the legal fiction that it belongs to the State to which in a sense you belonged as a citizen while you were alive.

You come to it – this prospective, imaginary viewing of your corpse – from different places in your life. From an early morning in winter, a desk lit by an Anglepoise lamp; a summer’s thought in a meadow between glimpses of high clouds propelled by inaudible breezes processing from horizon to horizon, encircling wide skies; between patients on a seasonless ward round, when you are pre­occupied by words, charts, arrangements, responsibilities; looking past the drowsy head of a little child as the bedtime story comes to an end. You have tried to glimpse it from your childhood, boyhood, youth, maturity, parenthood, middle age, late seniority, where you momentarily thought of your end but could not sustain the thought because you were distracted by the multicoloured world that said ‘Look at me’ or because you had more pressing things to do.

Frustrated by your own inattention, you are tempted to sting yourself into sharper awareness by spelling out brutal truths that verge on insults, describing this body when it is no longer anyone’s body as ‘a carcass’, ‘meat’, ‘carrion’. Anything to remind the ‘he’ that is now of the ‘it’ that it will be. But still you visit your unselved future body only fleetingly. And you relish walking away, now as free as those who in your last illness, your final days and hours, will have come to see you, trailing fragments of the world they have temporarily set aside – the weather in the streets written on their cheeks, a briefcase stuffed with the day’s work, gossip, and a present (a novel that you will not finish); or, more dramatically, will have flown in from abroad, summoned by news of your decline. You imagine those legates from the great world converging on a small room, a hospital bed, staying briefly, and then diverging again into those wide open spaces from which, shrunk to your suffering body and the thin penumbra of care and concern and to-ings and fro-ings that surround it, you have involuntarily withdrawn.

The corpse you will become will be beyond all that. The tubes will have been withdrawn, the last futile tablets taken, the last reluctant mouthful of food, the last sip. Lying in stasis. While you are longer and more corpulent than you were the day you came into the world, life-soiled as opposed to new-minted, you are nonetheless as naked and as lacking in estate. Homeless, propertyless, wifeless, childless, friendless, jobless, thoughtless, breathless, pulseless, gazeless, and so completely sensationless as not be able to experience even numb­ness. Still.

Resting in peace but neither restful or at peace. Behind those closed lids there are no thoughts, dreams, or sleep. Soundlessly stiffening beyond the possibility of movement (a rigor reflected in the creases that can’t be smoothed out), inert beyond passivity, its immobility has none of the luxury of repose you once enjoyed.

Relaxation brings none of the deliciousness of relief from labour, from effort; it is no more at rest than a pebble is at rest. Its silence is beyond any lived silences; it is a solid, dense, unheard and ownerless silence; the thoughtless silence of the material world, out of shot of all ears; beyond the seemingly interminable chuntering, muttering, pondering, mumbling, puzzling, and rehearsing of the voice-over, which had footnoted his every waking hour; beyond the faintest susurrus of his quondam self-presence. The taciturnity of the dead is absolute; the analphabetic silence beyond even the Zs of sleep. An amnesia of perfect completeness that has forgotten that it was once RT; the craft has dissolved into the ocean on which it journeyed for so long.

All parts of his body – brain, eyes, and toenails – are now meta­physically equal. They have fallen together to the bottom of the ontological heap that places humans at the top, rocks at the bottom, and bricks, ants and trees inbetween, items that have in common an extensity that physics explores with a radically democratic gaze, allocating all things to a single mode of being, variously described by push-pull mechanics or by atoms that evaporate on closer inspection to mere numbers. The parts that were invisible to him, the below-stairs staff serving organic functions – hollow and solid viscera, pumps and bellows, bones and joints – are on a par with those that formed RT’s appearance, by which he was recognized – his face, and hands, and skin. All are carrion: the cheek with the crease across it that will never be smoothed out and the coagulated eyes behind the lids as much as the spleen or the intestine later being sluiced by a hose in the post-mortem room, where some of his mortal parts, donated to science, may be inspected by science.

Deserted by agency, RT suffers allcomers to do unto him what they feel is right. His arm, notwithstanding that it casts a shadow similar to the one it cast in life, does not rise unless they lift it; neither do his eyelids close without their gentle touch. And so they attend to him: the laying out, punctuated by the occasional asymmetrical kiss of warm sentient lips on a cold cheek insentient as stone, or a gaze as unreciprocated as that from a statue. He is not there to receive their tears. He is not there.

Before the formal viewing, there is the laying out, the last offices – ‘to ensure that the care you have given him in life is carried over into death’. Items that had not been an integral part of his body, though they had been assimilated into his being in the world, are removed and put into labelled bags. The spectacles that had sharpened the world he looked at have already been taken off. There is no hearing aid, though his final years might have been less irritating to others had he taken the trouble to make it easier for him to hear them. The teeth are his own. And his wedding ring, slipped off by the nurses, shares a polythene bag with his spectacles, locked up in the ward safe, before being transferred along with the last pair of pyjamas and that unread novel to the one who is now its owner.

And then the laying out proper – washing, oral hygiene, brushing his beard (his hair having long since deserted his cranium). This pas­sivity is not entirely new. The last few weeks of helpless dependency had brought to an end the years in which he had washed himself and, as both agent and patient, actor and substrate, had scrupulously absterged the encroachments of the environment and removed the adherent by-products of his body’s self-maintenance, the secretions and excreta necessary to ensure the dynamic equilibrium which had served him for so long. The hands, foxed with spots, that had washed each other, as well as the body of which they were the chief agent, had been washed by other hands, as he and they lost their grip.

An anal plug has been inserted to pre-empt posthumous bowel actions, though he would have felt none of the shame with which he had once been familiar when surprised by the contents of his own body. Being cleaned is no longer associated with a sickly sense of regression to babyhood. Unclothed, he does not feel his nakedness as exposure. Beyond self-disgust, he is not repelled by the putrid thing his body had started to become.

Even so, for the present, his body is treated with the reverence due to the person he had once been. His head is raised up with care, so that the pillows can be re-plumped. His arms are lifted and low­ered gently so that they can be folded across his chest and his hands clasped together, with supportive pillow at the elbows, reinforcing the image of a marmoreal stillness effacing the memory of the wild­ness and horror of the final hours and days. The chin is propped up to prevent the mouth falling open in a silent scream and the lips are coated with Vaseline to keep them moist, the nurse’s finger a proxy for the tongue no longer able to lick them. The eyes are closed with care – to conceal the emptiness of the gaze – without damaging the delicate tissues of those lids that had served up little doses of visual oblivion and wiped cleansing tears over weary hours.

Finally, the room is prepared for visitors. The sheet is smoothed out and the space around the bed bears no record of the hi-tech clutter that had surrounded him for so long. On the bedside table a vase of flowers, silently sipping water, withers next to him. He has said farewell to himself – though it was not ‘Goodbye, RT’ or a last kiss – but a gasped-for breath; now it is time for others to say farewell to him.

Those who enter see his head protruding from the snow-barrow of the sheets. His head had been itself in a way that that goes beyond the impoverished identity relation every item has with itself, as when a brick is a brick, though this, the capital of his body, no longer knows it. The head had been colonized by RT’s awareness to varying degrees at different times under different circumstances. It looked at, listened to, smelt, tasted, and touched itself. The gaze looked at the face and judged it as satisfactory or unsatisfactory. The ears enjoyed hearing the mouth whistling in a certain way. The nose inhaled the scent of sweat, secreted in response to exercise under­taken in order to postpone the present state, to dodge the invisible bullets, the emissaries of death. The tongue tasted the spilled blood from the accidentally bitten flesh. The hand felt itself, its opposite number, the beard it stroked, the small of the back where the itch was just out of reach. The toes had had a dimly sideways awareness of each other mediated by haptic glances, accentuated in tight shoes. A maculate pattern of warmths and coolths, a rash of cutaneous sensations, were co-present with aches and joys from below decks, rumours from the alien darkness within, that was and was not his darkness, and not a murmur from his brain.

Between these localized bodily self-revelations had been a contin­uum of low-level carnal consciousness into which they were located – something more intimate than a body image, more filled in than a mere body schema. The tingle in the toe, the chair pushing back on the buttocks reporting the weight of the torso, the buzzing in the ears, the vanishing point behind the eyes, had all been natives of the same country, united and yet scattered, one and many, in ways that defy understanding.

This hardly gets close to the condition of ‘being RT’s body’, to the mystery of the ‘em’ in embodiment. RT’s being RT’s body was more, much more, than this. Let us count some of the ways.

RT used his body as the servant of an agency whose chief and primary agents were his hands. Gripping, pushing and shoving are primordial examples but there were a million others including, most egregiously, his exploitation of the material properties of his body or parts of it: utilizing its weight by sitting on a suitcase to close it; shading his eyes from the now extinguished sun with the hands; or using his head to play peep-bo with a child. The highways and byways of his bodily agency – directly, or mediated via tools and speech – were legion.