The Black Mirror

Fragments of an Obituary for Life

Raymond Tallis

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781782397397
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Libre albedrío y determinismo en filosofía

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.

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. ...