When am I leaving this place?

Words by Bryn Davies and Drawings by Tom published in JoCP Memory, 2022

“It may be that what makes the forgotten so weighty and so pregnant is nothing but the trace of misplaced habits in which we could no longer find ourselves. Perhaps the mingling of the forgotten with the dust of our vanished dwellings is the secret of its survival.”

— Walter Benjamin, “The Reading Box”, A Berlin Childhood around 1900

Let’s imagine a world in which the capacity of memory is unevenly distributed across social classes. The poorest live within tiny, almost momentary loops. Their condition is like being on a playground roundabout where every complete turn gives a new and isolated panorama. The memory of the rich freely circumnavigates long vistas and grand estates of recollected time. All the rest of us live somewhere between these two terrains. The time we’ve lived spirals out from us at different rates. Our relation to time is as precarious, as given to falling from us, as all our other kinds of relatedness. We can be displaced in time, as in geography.

Survivors of brain injury — people whose cognition and embodiment have been affected by traumatic accidents or neurological illness — live out this heightened displacement in time. Some experience significant amnesia and are often further dislocated from history through their dependence on a welfare system that is itself forgetful of the origins and cultures of the people in its care. Survivors are also disproportionately likely to come from communities already made precarious by oppression, with more to obscure their collective histories. Like everything else, memories are very unevenly distributed in our society.

One standard neuropsychological test for orientation in time asks a patient to state the day of the week, month, time of day, and year. Imagining this exchange — between the professionally-oriented assessor and someone required to pinpoint their lostness on the blankest of maps — might be one way of picturing the ‘homogenous, empty time’ that haunts Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history. We could picture someone who always knows the answer to those questions, who we still sense to be lost in time — even that a perfect declarative orientation might be a kind of lostness, a sign of patternless life. Orientation in historical time is not something neuropsychologists tend to assess, though it might matter deeply to their patients.

Others might always get those questions wrong, but they have a relation to time which feels like searching. Tom was like that: he died in June this year at the age of 54, after living for decades with something called Korsakoff’s Syndrome. Korsakoff’s is a form of acquired brain injury that arises through malnutrition and alcoholism, and its most distinctive effect is a profound and irreversible amnesia. Tom’s incapacity for forming new memories makes him hard to describe: he was at the far end of what I could once have imagined a person to be like. In the five years I knew him, he never learned my name or anyone else’s. He couldn’t tell you where he lived, or what he had done in the morning, or might do later, and he had very little agency over these parts of his life. When he tried to remember the names of his nine brothers and sisters, he would say, “John — Mary — Margaret — Patrick — Mary — John — ”, before breaking off with a puzzled smile, sensing that he had something wrong, feeling a trace of the circle he had made of their names. The length of nine names was a distance he couldn’t cross. He couldn’t tell you anything about the time between the onset of his illness and his present life. It was as if all that time had fallen apart inside of him, and remained in him only as a tangle of broken and unusable things. He seemed to be enclosed in a tight loop of time, beyond which lay the edge of his world. You could feel that just in talking to him, you might fall off this edge with him. He made the world feel full of edges, even at its centres.

Sometimes it felt as if his presence was tidal, drawn in and out by a strange moon all his own, leaving a strandline of recurring questions, a scoured deposit of what lived or drifted inside him.

“What age am I now? When am I leaving this place? Am I not going to prison? Do you know me?”

One minute he would be lucid, sceptically engaged with what was in front of him, only to fade again, his gaze becoming unfocused and powdery, his mind pulled back somewhere others couldn’t follow. Standing with him, I would feel the ground between us shift and subside — like watching the backwash of a wave that’s broken onto the shore withdraw underfoot so that you overbalance and rock back onto your heels. These were standstills in which everything seemed to be moving.

Tom’s cigarettes gave one kind of structure to his hours and days, a second pattern of breath overlaid onto his own but reaching deeper into him. He repeated his date of birth like a spell. But even what was most intimately known to him could lose its charm, becoming a formality, a lesson learnt by heart, almost a fragment of someone else’s life. He said to me once, after telling me his name for the thousandth time, “That was my name, wasn’t it — that’s what I had to write when I went to sign on.”

Tom was displaced geographically and temporally. His medical history made a strange parallel with the erasure and coerced assimilation experienced by his native itinerant community in England. He was from an Irish Traveller family which had moved into council housing in East London in the 1980s. As one Traveller recounts, pitches made available by local government at this time were “broken-down, left-over, temporary-permanent places”, often on blitzed ground, next to landfill sites or on wasteland. Travellers were routinely “searched and degraded and dragged out on the road” by police, and faced ignorance or hostility from services and settled communities. They often had little choice but to enter council accommodation despite the loss this inflicted on their ways of life. Like many others, Tom’s family had scattered under the atomising conditions of urban settlement, and he became estranged from them. Without interventions from family, community or state, Tom’s alcoholism and malnutrition must have deteriorated; for Korsakoff’s to have developed, his treatment is likely to have been delayed after he was already critically unwell. Irish Travellers remain one of the most neglected cultural groups in the UK. Suicide rates among Travellers are five or six times higher than for the general population; they are twice as likely as settled people to suffer from a long-term health condition. 1 in 5 Traveller mothers will experience the loss of a child.

With all this in mind, Tom’s forgetfulness looked like an artefact of social neglect, emblematically charged with the wider fortunes of his culture. His medical history included the material loss of a way of life: he vacated his life in concert with its evacuation from outside. As the critic Eric Griffiths writes, “It is not how our minds have changed that estranges us from our yesterdays but the altered physique of daily life and our infatuation with our own technologies.” Tom was born in the 1960s, when “the mass production of cheap disposable plastics and other domestic items, and the mechanisation of agriculture changed the lives of Irish Travellers profoundly and undermined the basis of their rural economy”. There is a poignancy to the list of things traditionally sold or repaired by Travellers a generation before Tom’s birth — “rush-mats, lace, delph, gallons, tin candles, blessed pictures” — each term casting a fragile, unconnected light on a habitat lost to our hands and eyes. Tom’s dispossession was full of losses that no rehabilitative work could hope to return to him.

Tom’s amnesia also felt mirrored by the forgetfulness of the system of care on which he came to depend. This world, stripped of old forms of dwelling and roaming, is administered by a transient pageant of council workers, private care home operators, and exploited agency staff, often in broken-down, left-over, temporary-permanent places. Tom lived in a care home near the marshes, on the strip of deprived communities that tracks the deindustrialised floodplain of the river and gives the illusion of an edge to the city. His home was minutes away from several of the Travellers’ sites ‘cleared’ in 2012 — some still awaiting resettlement — and from the council estate where his family had moved, the only address he could still remember aloud. Like his name and date of birth, this was another fact that he repeated as if it had once carried the power to return him there. He remained convinced, mistakenly, that his old flat had been torn down.

Tom had a genius for clowning and could pull a comic turn from his body like someone pulling flowers out from their sleeve. With persuasion from support staff, he made drawings, some of which were printed as cyanotypes which illustrate this essay. He laughed at these as he made them, but never recognised them as his own if he was shown them afterwards. His pictures are often, like this one, of creatures that are almost or more-than-human, humanly shaped but with a detailed elaboration — arms sprouting on arms, teeth on teeth, fingers on fingers — that makes them strange and particular, images of creatures outgrowing themselves. In one sense, this is a forgetful art: every new elaboration becomes a centre from which to start again. But this forgetful element is guided and supported by the whole immediately visible scheme of the drawing.

Narrative arts, like singing a song or telling a story, lack that holding element of an instantly perceptible structure. They give us, differently, the risks and pleasures of losing our way. Tom had a beautiful singing voice, full of throwaway grace, and sang old songs about migration, longing for home, and travelling in dreams; songs which replay the temporal loops of human wishes, our tendency to be anywhere but where we are:

“Crazy dreams linger on, as I face an empty dawn,

With no end to it all can I see -

But I’ve surely reached the end

I dreamed I held and kissed her as in the days of yore

‘Ah Jonny, you’re only joking me, as many’s the time before’”

Songs were one of the ways Tom played with time — one of his recurring jokes was to begin a song and drag it out ever more slowly until the lyric curdled into a fading yowl. He would look at you and laugh, as if testing the simultaneity, the concurrence, of the song, his singing body, and his audience. As if to ask again: Do you know me?

The psychotherapist D. W. Winnicott wrote that “play is the alternative to sensuality in the child’s effort to keep whole.” If his compulsive smoking was a kind of sensuality, Tom’s playfulness was another way of keeping whole and keeping time. He gathered lost time into the instant of comedy, like the master-thief in the Brothers Grimm story who proclaims the rapture, traps a churchman in a sack, and pretends to drag him to heaven, telling him that the puddles are wet clouds. Lots of Tom’s jokes had this composite air of redemption and trick, like when he mischievously pretended to have one of the seizures that frequently left him ragged and depleted. “The transformation of a shattering experience into a habit— that is the essence of the play.” During one of his seizures, he was holding a cigarette. It broke between his fingers as he convulsed, and the flecks of tobacco lined his palm.

For me, Tom asserted the persistence of a more fractured and textured historical time than we’re often given to know. He taught me that an alienated concept of time — or at least, the absence of real lived memorialisation of particular histories — constrains the care of people living with amnesia and all that it takes away. Access to history, which includes the future, is one thing to ask for in any emancipatory project for cognitively different people: this would mean a transformed present.

As I got to know Tom, I kept returning to a sense of a person as a landscape or an ecology: something within which there is never only one ‘time’ for us to be oriented to. When our agency falters, there is less to distract us from the erosive or formative forces at work on us, the glacial and massive drift of our change. Our self-protective attachment to strict divisions between health and illness blinds us to the changeful landscapes around us and inside us. What was lost in Tom was lost in the way a habitat or a hospitable climate is lost. He was home to forms of life that are becoming rare in the world, and his strength was to improvise new kinds of shelter from the material of his dispossession.

The ‘apathy’ which is often included in clinical descriptions of Korsakoff’s might be related to this operation of life within a transposed time, as remote from us as ours is to other forms of life.

I pictured him standing at a shoreline.