Читать книгу What it Means to be Human - Robert Rowland Smith - Страница 22

Given his aphasic state, Colin’s medical file lists ‘Dementia’ next to ‘Multiple Sclerosis’. Whilst those categories might work on paper, in the flesh they can’t be told apart. The dementia is merely extending the process of effacing Colin’s identity begun long ago by the MS, just as the MS itself picked up the work of erasure that had commenced in his psyche at an early age. It is as if the gift of presence, which is what makes life life, was fumbled at his birth. It broke as a glass sphere brimming with light would break. I remember that in the wheelchair period, he would simply sit at home, with the lights and the heating turned off to save money, as if he needed no more sustenance than the objects around him. As if he saw himself as something other than alive.

In this doleful example, we come across perhaps the deepest sense of what it means to be a human. Having a fate, as we all do, means being vulnerable. It calls us away from others and into a future that we can never completely predict. In extreme cases, like that of Colin, it can even separate us from who we are. I say this because Colin’s self has come so close to being scrubbed away that there’s nothing for him to reflect on. It’s as if there is not even an interchange between a conscious and an unconscious self. There’s nothing for an unconscious to split off from and no ocean for the shipwreck of his self to sink into.

Is that a good or a bad fate in the end? Perhaps that is the wrong question. It is more a matter of how we play the hand we are dealt. Where others might have reinvented themselves after losing their job, or, as I suggested earlier, summoned their inner resources to keep the MS at bay through diet, exercise and will, my father appeared to let fate take its course. But then, all that he had known from a young age was his life being directed by others. His real tragedy was that he never developed a sense of his own agency. The capacity for self-determinism was always going to be weaker than the forces acting upon him. The final irony, if that is the right word, is that he appears to be happy at last.

Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.

Niklas Luhmann