AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human

What’s so very challenging about a family business is that two systems have to be reconciled. A family system has to be reconciled with a business system. At Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., the partners in the triangle, Colin and David, were not partners in the way that most colleagues might be, for the simple reason that one belonged to the family and the other did not. Strictly speaking, the former half-belonged to the family and the latter did not belong. I’m not sure it would be possible to chart this system, because Colin stood at once closer to, and further from, the shared goal understood as the family’s commercial interests, while also standing above, below and on the same level as David.

Systemically, it was a mess, and I think it had an impact on Colin’s soul. All his soul could have known was confusion. It might be pushing it to say that his MS was the direct result of this scrambling of his soul knowledge – being deprived of the chance to see a clear whole – but I find it hard not to draw at least a metaphoric parallel between the neurological misconnections in his body and the eccentric wiring in the system of the family business. In both cases, there’s a tragic failure of coherence.

Frenemies

Although David Cooke turned into, or was turned into, Colin’s nemesis, I do recall a period when one or two faltering attempts at a friendship were made by my father. It must have been a big deal for Colin, because although he came across as gregarious, handsome and jocular, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he had no friends. Life consisted of his office, our home and the commute between the two termini. I have more fingers on one hand than the number of times I remember my parents going out for the evening, and I have no recollection at all of any friend making a visit. The double bed in the commodious spare bedroom remained cold from 1970 when we moved in, right the way through to 1983 when we moved out.

I say the attempts were faltering, as if they could have been otherwise. But how could they, given that clash of the two systems, family and business? Even without such entanglements as those affecting Rowland Smith & Son Ltd., work friendships are rarely without complications. You don’t become friends with somebody through work unless the work was there in the first place to bring you together. The work provided the environment in which you met, and both of you will have gained entry to the organisation on the understanding that you would contribute to the shared goal. Work is the context of your friendship. So when you meet outside work as friends, the most you can do is to put that context in brackets. You can’t erase it altogether. Even if you never talk shop, your awareness of each other as co-workers remains in the back of your mind.

Why is that a problem? The presence of a shared goal acts like an alloy, thinning out the friendship’s integrity. Obviously, friends often do come together to perform a shared task, like putting up a tent or cooking a meal. The point is that the friendship doesn’t depend on such tasks in order to survive. That’s how friendships differ from relationships in the workplace, where the lack of a goal leaves people at a loss as to what to do. It is also how friendships resemble family relationships: both are an end in themselves. Friendships should consist in no more than that horizontal line between two people, with no tip of the triangle representing a goal. That horizontal line is also the line of equality. No friendship will be authentic if there’s any inkling of one friend feeling superior or inferior to the other. Both positions are bad for the soul.

The test comes when one of the friends quits the organisation. The deeper the friendship, the longer it can survive without the binding of work. We know we were never really friends if we lose touch soon after one of us has moved on. Needless to say, Colin and David did not remain friends in the wake of Colin’s sacking. Even when working together, the friendship never got off the ground. Ulterior motive was too much in play. For Colin, befriending David would have been, at least subconsciously, a way of neutralising a potential threat. For David, currying favour with another Rowland Smith could only bolster his position. The most they could have ever been to one another was ‘frenemies’.

What’s in a name?

The biggest stumbling block, therefore, was the name. Like a bell, my father’s surname had a resonance in Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. that David’s did not. Until Colin was removed, that is. Then the roles reversed. David became an honorary Rowland Smith, while Colin – sidelined from business and family alike – effectively forfeited his name. An acquired namelessness, like a reverse baptism, was one of the many facets of his plight.

But we shouldn’t let the peculiarities of the Colin/David scenario lead us into thinking that having different names is always a problem in friendships. Quite the reverse. Like marriage, friendship is exogamous. It involves making a bond with somebody outside the family. That requires you to choose a friend with a different surname. I mean by different surname ‘coming from a different lineage’, even if the actual word – Jones or Patel or Blanc or Diaz or Khan – is the same. If it were really the same family name – the same patronymic or matronymic, to give it its technical title – then you would be making friends with somebody from your family, which is unnecessary. Unnecessary because the bond already exists. If we think of friendship as the reducing of the otherness of other people, or as making the strange familiar, then in a family this labour of familiarisation has been done in advance. It’s implicit in the word ‘family’. Regardless of how much you like the person, befriending a family member is ever so slightly ingratiating. Ingratiating because superfluous.

It cuts the other way too. The superfluousness of befriending a family member gives us an excuse not to make an effort. With friends there’s always a subtle pressure for that effort to be made. I am not saying that one shouldn’t bother to be friendly with family. But ‘friendly’ is different from ‘friends’. Family is a blood system, friendship water. Although the two can be mixed, they are intrinsically different. Mixing them evokes a subtle sense of aberration.

So Colin and David did not remain friends after the former left the company. Whether Colin’s departure in 1979 really helped the business to recover is debatable. In 1983 Rowland Smith & Son Ltd. was sold to a Dutch enterprise. The following year Colin’s father, my grandfather, died.

Incurable souls

Over time, Colin’s metaphorical namelessness has become all too real. Now when I visit him, he’s not sure what his own name is, let alone mine. Addressing him in his fleece top, sweat pants and Velcro slippers – he hasn’t worn shoes for fifteen years – I ask, ‘Am I Robert?’ Sometimes he shakes his head. Other times he says yes. Or rather he whispers yes, because that’s the best his un-exercised larynx can do. His mouth hangs open most of the day, revealing the few teeth that are stuck like plugs of dark sap onto his gums. It’s an effort for him to close his mouth in the way that enunciating syllables requires, so the ‘y’ and the ‘s’ at the beginning and end of the word ‘yes’ barely have any definition. The lack of consistency in his replies suggests that he just doesn’t know who I am. He’s guessing. It seems that I, his only son, have become a stranger.

Often he won’t reply at all. But then, language consists of more than words. Whenever I appear, his face lights up. After this initial burst, he will zone out, adrift in some time outside time. But during it, he is stirred. He may not be recognising me as Robert; he may not even be recognising me as his son. But that he is recognising somebody is beyond dispute. Only recognition could trigger such elation. I smile back and, for those first few seconds, we are communicating.

We are communicating, but as to what underpins the communication, I cannot say. It’s not just he who is unsure about me. To be frank, even though I know rationally that he is my father, being with him is so strange that I feel it like a vertigo. That’s partly because I’m in a state of protracted shock, both about his disease and about being related to him as its victim. But it is also because that disease has refashioned him to such an extent that I’m not sure who he is either.

If we can communicate despite having no normal basis for it, it’s possible that something else is going on. Not only is the mutual strangeness no bar to communication, it might even be what allows a more immediate form of communication to take place. When two people know each other well, or are each sure of who the other person is, the quality of the communication can actually decrease. How so? The familiarity causes us to rely on our inner picture of that other person, rather than seeing them as they truly are. We become too habituated to properly notice. But, as when a wave recedes and leaves the pebbles on the beach gleaming, when the familiarity recedes and we become strangers once more, we see the other person afresh.

It is more like an encounter between two souls than two selves. Souls don’t need to know in the way that selves do, because in the realm of the soul everything essential gets communicated in advance. When two souls come together they ‘always already’ know each other. That is why, for example, the process of falling in love is instantaneous, and why a new couple will often attest to the uncanny feeling of having known each other before. Their souls arrived at the love-place ahead of their selves.

The key condition for this soul knowledge to occur, therefore, is the dislodging of the mask of the self. In Colin’s case, it was knocked from his face for him. He certainly didn’t ask for it. Like most of us, his preference would surely have been for a life of presence, identity, connection and value, for the embroidery of the self to weave its threads until it had assumed the form and colour that most people are able to enjoy. And yet it’s precisely because his self grew so threadbare that his soul was able to shine through in large smooth patches. Perhaps that’s what’s so jolting about visiting Colin and seeing the other incurables drooling in their food, or hearing the unidentifiable sounds they make echoing down the long, wide parquet corridors. It’s the absence of selves and, in their place, the presence of their naked souls.

Happiness

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

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The Dream of Three Daughters (#ulink_ae3b2ae0-170e-51e3-86cc-ff6b666814e6)

But who are these three sisters and why must the choice fall on the third?

Sigmund Freud

In the small hours, the bedside phone is ringing. I am a light sleeper, but on this night of all nights I’m beyond reach. As the calls rain in, I sleep through. Maybe my unconscious is detaining me because it knows that this will be the start of a new life.

What wakes me in the end is not the phone, though it is crouching just inches from my ear. There is a thumping at the door. As my unconscious releases me, I find myself on the edge of a bed in an unlit flat in Oxford, the phone ringing, the door booming, not knowing which to answer first.

Based on some dim argument about presence trumping absence, I opt for the door, for responding to the person who is actually there rather than the remote entity at the other end of the telephone wire. Besides, I know what the phone call is about. As for who’s behind the door, I have no idea.

It is a policeman. He is tall and burly, and has a ginger beard. My guilty conscience tells me that he has come to arrest me. But no. He starts saying something about people trying to reach me on the phone. Members of my family have been trying to get hold of me, he repeats, ringing the receiver off the hook. As a last resort they have phoned the police station in Oxford, to send a policeman round to wake me up. Is he annoyed or amused? The phone continues to ring. I am still naked.

I head back into the bedroom to pick it up. It is Simone’s aunt, Lydia. Simone has gone into labour. It is bang on the due date. We decided it was best to have the baby in London, as there was family near by, while I set up our new flat in Oxford. So Simone is staying with another aunt, Jo, in Primrose Hill. Yesterday evening, when Simone and I spoke on the phone – she in London, I in Oxford – she assured me that no birth-giving was in the offing. Hence perhaps the depth of my sleep. Now Lydia is forcing information at me down the line, and I am trying to drink from the fire hose. Simone is in the obstetrics department at University College Hospital, on Huntley Street, in Bloomsbury, London. Lydia gives detailed instructions on which entrance to use. I can’t picture the place or take it in. To me, a suburban boy, central London is a black box.

How to get from Oxford to London at three in the morning? There will be no trains to Paddington station at that hour. I don’t have a car. The only alternative is a taxi, but I’m unemployed and have literally no money. The idea of taking a taxi to London is preposterous. I wouldn’t take a taxi into town, let alone from city to city. The cost defies calculation.

After due dithering, I decide to call Simone’s parents’ house. I explain that I can’t get to the hospital, and ask to borrow the money. But I call with trepidation. I am the student dropout whom they have met only twice. At the first meeting, almost a year ago, I was just the summer fling. The second meeting was at Waterloo station, where the parents greeted us off the train. Simone was heavily pregnant with my child, and I was looking everywhere except into their eyes. I’m convinced that, to them, I’m the layabout who sponged off their oldest daughter in Perpignan and got her pregnant. My credit rating isn’t high. But in this hour of need, as ever, they are gracious. They are active members of their Catholic church and do good in the community. The money is pledged. I look for my cheque book. I know the cheque will bounce, but that won’t come to light for a few days. I fumble through the Yellow Pages, hands now shaking, and call a minicab firm.

As soon as I inform the driver of my mission, he steps on it. He drives like the wind. I have never been driven so fast in a car. He says that if the police stop us, they’ll understand. They’ll probably put you in the squad car and drive you themselves, he joshes: blue lights flashing, sirens blaring.

With the M40 behind us and the Marylebone flyover bearing us aloft through west London like a toy car on a toy bridge, and now passing Euston station, the driver asks me for directions. I know the name of the hospital. I know the street. But no more. He is from Oxford: London’s not his manor either. The well in the driver’s-side door has no A to Z. Smartphones are yet to be invented. And so, having reached London in about forty minutes, we get mired in the squares and one-ways of Bloomsbury for as long again. It is like being in a maze. He’s looking out the driver’s side, I’m looking out the passenger window; both of us are scrutinising the buildings for signs.

At length, we locate the red-brick hospital, gloomy as a castle in the 5 a.m. light. I write out the cheque for forty-three pounds only, slam the door shut, and bound up the stone stairs. Simone is on the bed, pushing hard. The baby comes, a purple and white larva, slippery and warm and as charged with life as a battery. This is the creature we have been referring to as ‘Sweet Pea’ for all the time that she has been furled up like a fern in the womb. Her very first act in the world is to sneeze, to blow away the prehistoric goo and enter human time.

What does it mean to bring new life into the world? How is the act of birth connected to the act of sex that preceded it? Obviously there is a biochemical chain of cause and effect, but the two events can feel so unrelated that they might as well have occurred on different continents. How can we make sense of taking up a new place in the schema of generations? For at that moment, when Sweet Pea came out of the tunnel and in the light became Anna, Simone was no longer just a daughter but also a mother. I was no longer just a son but also a father. Although Simone and I were both young – just twenty-two – we found ourselves instantly elevated one branch up the family tree, as if on a genealogical ski lift. I felt the sense of being caught in the onward rush of life. That is part of what it means to be a human being, and it is the answer that this chapter will develop.

There is a supplementary question, concerning our relationship to the unknown. I touch on this question because in that room in UCH as the dawn was coming up on an early autumn day in London, with the baby arriving in all its hotness and strangeness as if down a chute from Venus, I felt as if I knew nothing at all. Or rather, the experience was so enveloping that any understanding was blocked.

Down and out in Oxford and Croydon

I had met Simone at a summer job in July 1986, the year before Anna’s birth. We were both working at a call centre for British tourists who run into difficulties abroad. We the staff, most of us language students, would liaise with the local services overseas. We would speak French, Spanish or Italian on the tourists’ behalf whenever their rental car had a prang or someone broke a leg. Simone had finished her degree and was about to take up a one-year teaching position at the University of Perpignan, in the south of France. I had completed two of the three years of my English degree at Oxford, and was disaffected. I couldn’t engage. My plan – my non-plan – was to throw in the towel.

There was another reason for my lowness. Some months earlier, I had broken up with my girlfriend of three years, Astrid. Actually, she had broken up with me, and I was still smarting. In an old Mini, Astrid drove down from Birmingham to Oxford with her identical twin sister to deliver the news. We faced off like actors on set in my high-ceilinged ground-floor room, with me trying to persuade her to stay. While the sister waited in the car, we had the best sex that we had ever had. The sex didn’t change her mind. It was a closing ceremony.

I wanted a girlfriend to fill the gap. To redeem myself, in fact. When Astrid left me it felt like I had failed. By finding somebody else, I would prove that I wasn’t a failure. I would show Astrid that I was a worthy boyfriend and that she had made a terrible mistake. And so I dated a physiotherapist who had done an ultrasound on my knee after I’d dislocated it, not for the first time, playing cricket. It was the reactivation of a longstanding injury – no pun intended – which, later in life, would make it impossible for me to walk down stairs without pain. I sat in my underwear at the John Radcliffe Infirmary as she smeared the paste around my patella. She pressed the cold metal head against my skin. We caught each other’s eye. But when I cooked her dinner, she claimed to have had a big lunch and left most of it. That seemed to stand for something. We didn’t see each other again.

Earlier that term there had been a party in the house, in my friend Simon’s room next door to mine. I had been dancing with Elizabeth, Simon’s supposed girlfriend. After the party had wound down and I had gone back to my room, she knocked on my door and got into my bed. I told her that I couldn’t betray Simon. Once I had denied her three times, she walked out and wouldn’t speak to me again. She left her sweater in my room, an oversized magenta V-neck by Oscar de la Renta that I kept for years.

That bed was a red futon given to me by Uncle Rowley, my father’s half-brother and my godfather. Though he was now living on a farm in remotest Suffolk, we were still close. The futon was a twenty-first birthday present. But it must have been jinxed because every time a girl got in, the prospect of sex got out. There was a chaste American, Sylvia, with whom I’d been flirting. Though she was keen to lose her virginity, I didn’t want the responsibility of taking it. There was Poppy, the girl from the library, who spent much of term away from Oxford mucking out horses on her parents’ farm. She just wanted to cuddle. There was Bronwen, the dark Welsh beauty, who lived in the house itself, on the top floor, and came downstairs to spend an entire evening on my accursed futon, smiling and twisting her hair, before going back up to bed. And there was Kate, one of my best friends. After going drinking one night, we ended up sleeping in my room, she on the futon, me on the floor. In the dark we started talking about sex. I let my hand brush against her thigh. Our heartbeats quickened briefly before we agreed to remain just friends. Aided by the alcohol, we fell asleep. Once again, the red of the futon had said stop.

So the girl situation was getting me down. But mainly it was Oxford University itself that was sapping me. The freedom it offered opened up like an abyss. Apart from checking in for a one-hour tutorial once a week, we were left to our own devices. Today it would be called ‘self-guided learning’ but I lacked the maturity to guide myself. I skidded off like a dud missile.

This second year was especially hollow. It was the first time I had experienced anything close to depression. My thoughts became bleak, my mood saturnine. I lived out of college in a huge and forbidding Victorian mansion on the Woodstock Road, the house where Astrid and I had our valediction. It always seemed empty, even when all twelve study bedrooms were occupied. That house still appears in my dreams, with extra passageways leading into derelict rooms and a basement like a crypt divided into cells, damp and cold.

I spent my days wandering the waterways of Oxford. The evenings found me alone in my room with a treasured Aiwa tape deck, dancing to Marvin Gaye and Talking Heads. I went to bed later and later. I did less and less work. Occasionally I would give in to my weakness for buying clothes, but I was on a student grant which always ran dry before the end of term. For everything else, there was MasterCard.