Nothing to Be Frightened Of (29 page)

Did my mother question the manner in which I might carry her on when I published the “bombardment” of filth that was my first novel? I doubt it. My next book was a pseudonymous thriller of significantly higher filth-content, so I advised my parents against reading it. But my mother was undeterrable, and duly reported back that parts of it “made my eyes stand out like chapel hatpegs.” I reminded her of the health warning. “Well,” she replied, “you can’t just leave a book on a shelf.”

I doubt she viewed her two sons as the future hod-carriers of family memory. She herself preferred retrospection. She liked us best—as she did most children—between the ages of about three and ten. Old enough not to be “mucky pups,” but still to acquire the insolent complications of adolescence, let alone the equality and then surpassingness of adulthood. There was nothing, of course, that my brother and I could do—short of a tragic early death—to prevent ourselves committing the banal sin of growing up.

Chapter 53

On the radio, I heard a specialist in consciousness explain how there is no centre to the brain—no location of self—either physically or computationally; and that our notion of a soul or spirit must be replaced by the notion of a “distributed neuronal process.” She further explained that our sense of morality comes from belonging to a species which has developed reciprocal altruism; that the concept of free will, as in “making conscious decisions from a little self inside” must be discarded; that we are machines for copying and handing on bits of culture; and that the consequences of accepting all this are “really weird.” To begin with it means, as she put it, that “these words coming out of this mouth at this moment, are not emanating from a little me in here, they are emanating from the entire universe just doing its stuff.”

Camus thought that life was pointless—“absurd” was indeed the better word to choose, richer in characterization of our lonely position as beings “without a reasonable reason for being.” But he believed that nonetheless we must, while here, invent rules for ourselves. He further said that “what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport”—specifically to football, and his time as a goalkeeper for Racing Universitaire in Algiers. Life as a game of football, its rules arbitrary yet necessary, since without them the game simply couldn’t be played, and we would never have those moments of beauty and joy which football—and life—can bring.

When I first discovered this comparison, I applauded it like a fan from the terraces. I was also, like Camus, a goalkeeper, if a less distinguished one. My last ever game was for the
New Statesman
against the Slough Labour Party. The weather was miserable, the goalmouth a mudpatch, and I lacked proper boots. After letting in five goals I was too ashamed to return to the dressing room, so drove, sodden and dispirited, straight back to my flat. What I learnt that afternoon about social and moral behaviour in a godless universe came from two small boys who wandered round behind my goal and briefly studied my flailing attempts to keep the Slough Labour Party at bay. After a few minutes, one observed cuttingly, “Must be a stand-in goalie.” Sometimes we are not just amateurs in our own lives, but made to feel like substitutes.

Nowadays, Camus’ metaphor is outdated (and not just because sport has become a zone of increasing dishonesty and dishonour). The air has been let out of the tyres of free will, and the joy we find in the beautiful game of life is a mere example of cultural copying. No longer: out there is a godless and absurd universe, so let’s mark out the pitch and pump up the ball. Instead: there is no separation between “us” and the universe, and the notion that we are responding to it as a separate entity is a delusion. If this is indeed the case, then the only comfort I can extract from it all is that I shouldn’t have felt so bad about letting in five goals against the Slough Labour Party. It was just the universe doing its stuff.

The expert in consciousness was also asked how she viewed her own death. This was her reply: “I would view it with equanimity, as just another step, you know. ‘Oh, here’s this—I’m in this radio studio with you—what a wonderful place to be. Oh, here I am on my deathbed—this is where I am . . .’ Acceptance I would say is the best that could come out of this way of thinking about things. Live life fully now, here—do the best you can, and if you ask me why I should do that—I don’t know. That’s where you hit the question of ultimate morality—but still, that’s what this thing does. And I expect it to do it on its deathbed.”

Is this properly philosophical, or strangely blithe, the assumption that Acceptance—Kübler-Ross’s fifth and final mortal stage—will be available when required? Skip Denial, Anger, Bargaining, and Depression, and just head straight for Acceptance? I am also a little disappointed by “Oh, here I am on my deathbed—this is where I am” as the Last Words of the future (still preferring, for instance, my brother’s “Make sure that Ben gets my copy of Bekker’s Aristotle”). Nor am I quite sure I entirely trust someone who calls a radio studio “a wonderful place to be.”

“That’s what this thing does. And I expect it to do it on its deathbed.” Note the demise here of the personal pronoun. “I” has mutated to “it” and “this thing,” a switch both alarming and instructive. As human character is being rethought, human language must be rethought with it. The newspaper profiler’s world of character description—a fixed spectrum of adjectives, illustrated by some gamey anecdotes—occupies one end of the spectrum; the philosopher’s and the brain scientist’s—no submarine captain in the turret, and all around a sea of loose associativeness—the other. Somewhere in between lies the everyday world of doubting common sense, or common usefulness, which is also where you find the novelist, that professional observer of the amateurishness of life.

In novels (my own included) human beings are represented as having an essentially graspable, if sometimes slippery, character, and motivations which are identifiable—to us, if not necessarily to them. This is a subtler, truer version of the profiler’s approach. But what if it isn’t, actually, at all the case? I would, I suppose, proffer Automatic Defence A: that since people imagine themselves with free will, built character and largely consistent beliefs, then this is how the novelist should portray them. But in a few years this might seem the naive self-justification of a deluded humanist unable to handle the logical consequences of modern thought and science. I am not yet ready to regard myself—or you, or a character in one of my novels—as a distributed neuronal process, let alone replace an “I” or a “he” or a “she” with an “it” or “this thing”; but I admit the novel currently lags behind probable reality.

Chapter 54

Flaubert said: “Everything must be learnt, from talking to dying.” But who can teach us to die? There are, by definition, no old pros around to talk—or walk—us through it. The other week, I visited my GP. I have been her patient for twenty years or so, though am more likely to run into her at the theatre or concert hall than in her surgery. This time, we are discussing my lungs; the previous time, Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony. She asks what I am up to; I tell her I am writing about death; she tells me she is too. When she e-mails through her paper on the subject, I am at first alarmed: it is full of literary references. Hey, that’s
my
territory, I think, in a sub-murmur of rivalrous apprehension. Then I remember that this is normal: “When faced with death, we turn bookish.” And happily her points of reference (Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Milosz, Sebald, Heaney, John Berger) rarely overlap with mine.

At one point she discusses Fayum portraits, those Coptic images which strike the modern eye as intensely realistic representations of individual presences. So they doubtless were; but they were not painted to decorate the walls of this life. Like those Cycladic figurines, their purpose was entirely practical and funerary: they were to be attached to a mummified corpse, so that in the next world the spirits of the dead would be able to recognize the new arrival. Except that the next world has turned out, disappointingly, to be the same world, with a few more centuries added on, and its presiding spirits and portrait-scrutinizers have turned out to be us—a very junior version of eternity.

It must have been a strange collaboration, between a sitter preparing for death and an artist elaborating his or her only representation. Was it practical and businesslike, or edged with lachrymose fearfulness (not just about dying; also about whether the image would be accurate enough for the sitter to be recognized)? But it suggests to my GP a parallel, modern, medical transaction. “Is this,” she asks, “what is required of doctor and [dying] patient? If so, how does one find the moment to start?” At which point I realize that, perhaps to our mutual surprise, she and I have already started. She, by sending me her reflections on death, to which I shall respond with this book. If she proves to be my death-doctor, we shall at least have had a long preliminary conversation, and know our areas of disagreement.

Like me, she is a nonbeliever; like Sherwin Nuland, she is appalled at the over-medicalization of dying, at how technology has shunted out wise thoughtfulness, so that death is viewed as shameful failure by patient as well as doctor. She argues for a reconsideration of pain, which is not necessarily a pure enemy, but something the patient can turn to use. She wants more room for “secular shriving,” a time for a drawing-up of accounts, for expressions of forgiveness and—yes—remorse.

I admire what she has written, but (just to get our terminal conversation going early) disagree with her on one key subject. She, like Sherwin Nuland, sees life as a narrative. Dying, which is not part of death but part of life, is the conclusion to that narrative, and the time preceding death is our last opportunity to find meaning in the story that is about to end. Perhaps because my professional days are spent considering what is narrative and what isn’t, I resist this line of thought. Lessing described history as putting accidents in order, and a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this: a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact; where children on the whole grow up to bury their parents, and become parents in their turn; where, if we are lucky, we find someone to love, and with them a way to live, or, if not, a different way to live; where we do our work, take our pleasure, worship our god (or not), and watch history advance by a tiny cog or two. But this does not in my book constitute a narrative. Or, to adjust: it may be a narrative, but it doesn’t feel like one to me.

My mother, whenever exasperated by the non-arrival or malfeasance of some goofy handyman or cack-handed service engineer, would remark that she could “write a book” about her experiences with workmen. So she could have done; and how very dull it would have been. It might have contained anecdotes, scenelets, character portraits, satire, even levity; but this would not add up to narrative. And so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another—a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed—rather than a story. Or (since I meet my GP in concert halls) there is no proper announcement of theme, followed by development, variation, recapitulation, coda, and crunching resolution. There is an occasional heart-lifting aria, much prosaic recitative, but little through-composition. “Life is neither long nor short—it merely has longueurs.”

So if, as we approach death and look back on our lives, “we understand our narrative” and stamp a final meaning upon it, I suspect we are doing little more than confabulating: processing strange, incomprehensible, contradictory input into some kind, any kind, of believable story—but believable mainly to ourselves. I do not object to this atavistic need for narrative—not least since it is how I make my living—but I am suspicious of it. I would expect a dying person to be an unreliable narrator, because what is useful to us generally conflicts with what is true, and what is useful at that time is a sense of having lived to some purpose, and according to some comprehensible plot.