The other day, I discovered an alarming possibility. No, worse: an alarming fact.
I have an old friend, a consultant radiologist, who for years has been sending me clippings from the British Medical Journal. She knows that my interest tends towards the ghoulish and the extreme. In my memory – that place where degradation and embellishment overlap – I have filed away cases of patients who exploded when a heated scalpel ignited their bodily gases, and others from the early days of the MRI scanner when internal metal stitches were shot like shrapnel into soft flesh. These stories are sometimes accompanied by photos: for instance, of a man who grew his toenails to such a curling length - several metres, as I recall - that for years he had been unable to walk. Then there is the medical profession’s everyday task of removing unexpected objects which have been swallowed – like bags of nails - or forcibly indulged up the rectum. (In the old days, popular anal self-implants were miniature busts of Napoleon, a habit which doubtless added patriotism to pleasure.) And a case I particularly remember, of a man who had been fitted with a tracheostomy tube. When he went for a check-up, doctors were baffled by yellowish stains around the hole into which the tube was fixed. It turned out that the patient was a desperate smoker who, unable to inhale through his mouth any more, discovered that if he took out his tube, the cigarette fitted perfectly in the hole; all he had to do was light up and inflate his lungs. Men (and most of these bizarre activities were undertaken by men) can be most ingenious, even - or especially - when it goes against their own best interests.
The most recent clipping sent by Dr Jacky had, appropriately enough, a literary heading: ‘Proust and madeleine: Together in the thalamus’. Naturally, I read on. ‘Madeleine, you will recollect, was not the love of Proust’s life but a biscuit that, when dropped into tea, created an involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM).’ The report’s source was the journal Neurology Clinical Practice, and its subject a forty-five-year-old man who had suffered a left posterothalamic haemorrhagic stroke. The consequences were much more extreme and particular than the gentle jolt Proust (and his fictional narrator) received from a madeleine – which is not exactly a ‘biscuit’, rather a plump little cake moulded in the fluted shape of a pilgrim’s scallop. The patient disclosed that ‘tasting apple pie would trigger memories of all the pies he had ever tasted; they would be experienced in proper chronology and would rush into his mind like a cascade’.
As I said, my first reaction was one of alarm: imagine such high-speed assaults by forgotten memories, a historic avalanche roaring across your perception of the present, tearing up your very sense of yourself. And, as a friend pointed out, what if the triggering experience was not as life-affirming as eating an apple pie? What, he said, if you farted, however quietly, and were then presented, in chronological order, with every single fart you had ever let loose? And so on – you can provide your own examples without difficulty. Imagine the exhausting thought – or sight – of a few thousand bacon sandwiches flashing through your consciousness (and would their quality and difference, plus your reactions to them, be replayed as well?).
I am now in my mid-seventies, and like most older people am sometimes bored by myself – by which I mean my repetitious remembering of thoughts and deeds and, especially, opinions. (And those who never bore themselves, who continue to be publicly entertained by their own lives and their repeated anecdotes, are usually the worst bores on the planet. Men again, on the whole.) But the frenetic, assaulting boredom of high-speed IAMs is, for the moment anyway, unimaginable. Wouldn’t it make you want to kill yourself?
