Writing for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens is further documenting his own battle with oesophageal cancer. It's a distressing article, and like any intimate portrait of illness and breakdown, its full of anger. Where is the quiet contemplation and acceptance of death that we've come to expect in palliative, medicalised views of mortality?
And what does it mean, as a philosopher, to confront death? Finitude, the end of being, the processes of reality, are all stark themes in Philosophy, but how often do we confront them in a real sense? In what might be deemed a phenomenological sense? It's a bit like Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk (which has stayed with me for a long time and never fails to dissolve me). How often do we confront that which we study in others? And what does it change?
Hitchens' tackling of Nietzsche (what does not kill us only makes us stronger) is not all that in depth but it works to provide a platform for a number of alternately clever and moving insights. Perhaps that is the proper word - insight. Seeing in. Is this what illness allows? We experience the processes we never knew we had only in breakdown? S Kay Toombs' The Meaning of Illness sets this up beautifully but the real question is how far can we go to track the radical embodiment that comes about with certain types of illness. The traditional planes of time and space go out the window, our voice leaves and pain consumes, utterly. What are our media? Where is our medium?
This is perhaps the most distressing concern for Hitchens,
"I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking."
For Husserl, and Heidegger, we think with our pen, or with our hands on the keyboard. Or we signal with eye movements, voice boxes - perhaps meaning will out. It always will. For Elaine Scarry, "the voice becomes a final source of self-extension; so long as one is speaking, the self extends out beyond the boundaries of the body, occupies a space much larger than the body.” Hitch overplays this dimension, and of course that is his right and indeed, his privilege, but it can't be so hopeless, it just can't. We mean to ourselves. We signify through everything.
These pathologies, intimate discussion of one body breaking down and dying, like Sontag's Swimming in a Sea of Death, are eloquent and elegant momento mouri. But how does text get between life and death? They are chilling, calculated and distressing. But are they better than fiction?
Beckett's characters wait to die while he (anecdotally) did the same. They are not the same thing but do they serve the same function? Did Beckett write his, in another voice?
"Decidedly it will never have been given to me to finish anything, except perhaps breathing. One must not be greedy." (Malone Dies)
After the end.
