If you see me sitting still it's not a replica of my corpse, I'm regenerating my brain, explains Sandi Toksvig
I’ve been thinking of regenerating my brain. I don’t suppose it will take long. I was awakened to the thought by a piece of driftwood and the Thames River Police. Occasionally, as I sit at my desk, the police boat roars past and its wake causes my houseboat to shake as if it feels suspected of whatever crime is afoot or afloat. I don’t suppose there is as much water-related crime as there used to be.
When the force was first founded in 1798 there were some 33,000 workers plying a river trade of which the authorities estimated that about 11,000 of them were “on the game”. I can only imagine it was a slow game as this, the first police force in the country of any kind, managed to catch criminals by simply rowing about.
As they bombed past this week a piece of driftwood banged into my boat and made me think about crime and the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who died this week in 1832. Jeremy assisted with the founding of the London riverine constabulary at a time when having police at all was considered to be something reserved for feckless foreigners. It was fine for France or even Greece, countries the British rather presumed to be awash with people who required apprehending, but it was not required at home.
Bentham is an interesting man who rather confirms the notion that predicting the future is a parlous business. Back in 1776 when the Americans were revolting, he wrote a paper in which he declared “the age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection”.
With the smugness of hindsight we now know how ignorant we are. Scientists have had to build what is in effect the world’s largest underground salad spinner in Switzerland, the Hadron Collider, in order even to try and understand the basics.
Certainly we have little idea how the brain works. It was today in 2003 that an Arkansas man called Terry Wallis spoke for the first time in nearly 19 years. Wallis was not intentionally hermit like. He had been in a car accident in 1984 which left him in what seemed a persistent vegetative state with virtually no chance of recovery. Many years of coma later, he unexpectedly said “Mom” and has carried on talking ever since. Scientists believe that Terry’s brain may have actually regenerated itself; that it has very gradually “developed new pathways and completely novel anatomical structures to re-establish functional connections, compensating for the brain pathways lost in the accident”.
The great thinker Bentham himself cannot have known that thinking itself can be re-established once damaged. Instead he came close to positing that we could pretty much close the chapter on science, thus leaving us time to sit about and contemplate morals. Sadly, history shows us that having the time doesn’t necessarily mean one’s thoughts will be moral.
Back in 1099 there was a hermit living on the Mount of Olives. I don’t know what his name was. Let’s call him Frank. I would have thought “hermit basics” involved a dedication to silence but Frank couldn’t keep his mouth shut. It was today in 1099 that the leaders of the First Crusade are said to have visited him to seek advice. If Frank had to speak at all, the sentence “I’ve been living alone with all these olives for years, try my salad” would have been fine but instead he urged the crusaders to assault Jerusalem.
This they did enthusiastically, massacring and pillaging on a such a grand scale that the ripples still echo today. If Frank had spent less time contemplating criminal activity and a bit more perfecting, say, a tapenade recipe, the world would’ve been a better place.
What turns some minds criminal is a subject for debate and may help make the criminal intriguing. It was today in 1962 that the world woke up to the news that three convicts had used spoons to dig their way out of the infamous prison Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. Bank robber brothers Clarence and John Anglin and armed robber Frank Morris managed to tunnel their way out, before departing the rock island on a raft made of driftwood and raincoats. No one knows if the three criminals made it to the mainland. It is most likely that the ne’er-do-wells drowned but, in a pleasing tribute to police patience, the FBI are apparently still looking for them.
Bentham is easier to track down. A seated replica of his corpse is preserved in a glass display case at University College, London. It is said that there was an occasion when Bentham was replaced by a simple card which read: “Gone on holiday”. In fact he was undergoing restoration work following a rumoured beetle invasion, and who among us has not at some time concealed the true reason for an absence?
It made me think that perhaps, although I lack beetles to blame, I too need a break. Perhaps I could make a raft of my driftwood and an old mac. How lovely to sit upon the Thames eating tapenade while thinking improving thoughts and waving at the police as they scoot past. If you should see me sitting silently upon the river, please don’t speak. I’m busy regenerating my brain.
0 comments:
Post a Comment