The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  But understanding must work both ways. After 7/7, Mehdi Hasan complains, the Muslim community was subjected to ‘unprecedented scrutiny’. But wasn’t that an inevitable response to ‘unprecedented outrage’? Where else, if not in the Muslim community, were we to look for explanations of a phenomenon that gave itself Islamic credentials and cited Islamic grievance as its motive? Yes, this was an arrogation of religious affiliation the terrorists had no right to claim. And yes, the scrutiny must have been demeaning and frightening for Muslims, the majority of whom should not have had to apologise for what they had not done. But everyone was demeaned and frightened. The dead should not have died for what they had not done either.

  Mehdi Hasan’s narrative separates the doer from the deed, forever finding baddies somewhere else. The scrutiny to which Muslims were subjected is seen as a driving force of terror, no matter that that scrutiny was itself provoked by terror. In this way is time inverted to change the dynamic of cause and effect, to remove the responsibility for their actions from those who act, and to apportion blame to everyone affected by a crime except the criminal. The British government, Mehdi Hasan continues, still scattershooting culpability, ‘helped turn Libya into a playground for jihadists’ – as though the playground can be held responsible for the playground bully, as though space creates what happens in it.

  As a narrative, this is no more convincing than Cameron’s hymn to British values. It might give comfort to people whose favourite fairy story it already is, but it is dangerously alienating of those who prefer more sophisticated reading and dangerously indulgent of those who don’t. If a narrative of them-and-us lies at the heart of ISIS’s recruitment success, how does the story Jeremy Corbyn and Mehdi Hasan tell slow that recruitment down? Whom will it deter? And whom, on the other side, will it persuade? But that’s rhetoric for you: it cares only to hear itself speak. And so we are left still waiting for a story we can all believe in, and meanwhile the butchery goes on.

  Happy now?

  Just back from a few days’ holiday in the sun, the intended calming effects of which were vitiated more than a little a) by the fact of there being more sun back home and b) by the hotel’s piping music in all its public places – niggling tunes that snagged the ear and sank the heart. Imagine ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ synthesised through the nostrils of a depressed camel from 8 a.m. until midnight and you have still not approached the torment of it. One particular melancholy repetition of sounds – I suspect Bedouin in origin, for no other reason than that it suggested long uneventful nights in the desert and the disappointments of another insufficiently spiced tagine – entered my brain on the first morning of my stay and remains with me a week later. The word for a tune that lodges in this way is an earworm, said to be borrowed from the German Ohrwurm, but it could just as easily be a corruption of earthworm, for that is exactly how it feels – as though an earthworm has invaded your head and is slowly and with a circular motion burrowing through your occipital lobes looking for whatever it is that earthworms eat, all the while humming to itself.

  ‘It is quite a common thing,’ Edgar Allan Poe wrote in a story called ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, ‘to be annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of some ordinary song, or some unimpressive snatches from an opera.’ And that was long before we possessed the technology to disseminate that annoyance simultaneously to millions. It surprises me, I have to say, that we expend so much energy fulminating against surveillance, convinced that governments employ phalanxes of spies (all as airless as Edward Snowden) to catch us doing what we have already posted videos of ourselves doing on Facebook, yet tolerate almost without demur the far less justified (and far more mentally damaging) intrusiveness of music – not just the fact of it wherever we set foot, but the assumption of it as something we cannot live without.

  The phenomenon of the earworm is the subject of scholarly investigation at Goldsmiths, University of London, but don’t get your hopes up. Far from proving scientifically what common observation teaches, that the earworm is ruinous to our mental health, and recommending that its means of transmission should therefore be proscribed or at least made subject to periodic moratoria – even one month of silence in every three would help – the team at Goldsmiths is uncritical, and might even be said to be upbeat, about its effects. Writing about it in the Sunday Times recently, Lauren Stewart, reader in psychology, said of Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’ – a bit of earwormery that appears to have been composed with the express intention of being such – that ‘it lights up all the areas that matter in the brain’.

  It is not for a layman to disagree with a psychologist about which areas in the brain matter, but my brain is my brain and I can say on its behalf that ‘Happy’ lights up no part of it whatsoever. What, not even when Pharrell Williams gets the world dancing in the streets, spinning on its heels and singing ‘Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth’? No, reader, not even then.

  Leaving my own brain out of it, I am not sure I am convinced by Lauren Stewart’s argument on behalf of anyone else’s. ‘The repetition inherent to music like this is enjoyable,’ she says – which to my mind immediately raises some of the questions she should be answering about the nature of enjoyment – ‘because listening to music causes us to unconsciously make predictions about how a melody will continue. When these predictions are confirmed, the result is a cerebral high that can be as potent as any expected reward.’

  If a cerebral high is what you get when you guess correctly where a tune of unsurpassable banality is going next, you might wonder what you have to do to get a cerebral low. But if that’s how brains work – getting excited because the next popcorn tastes the same as the last – then that’s how brains work, in us as in a hamster, but is it not a wonder, in that case, that we have ever been able to compose or listen to a melody that is not a masterwork of predictability?

  I wrote with enthusiasm in this column, years ago, about the work being done at Liverpool University by Professor Philip Davis on the demands which reading Shakespeare makes on our brains. Shakespeare is good for the brain because of the strenuous exercise to which reading him subjects it. The more syntactically baffling a Shakespearean line, the more parenthetically distracting his thought, the more grammatically violent his expression, the more work the brain has to do to understand. Wonderful indeed, as registered by the electroencephalogram to which it is wired, are the brain’s acts of cognitive athleticism, its leaps and urgent modulations, as it strives to keep up with what’s challenging it. No easily attained ‘high’ here at having the predictable confirmed. What excites the brain in these experiments is precisely what it can’t predict. So if we are to talk of parts of the brain ‘mattering’, surely the parts that Shakespeare reaches matter more.

  Fair’s fair – Lauren Stewart is addressing an earworm, not Cymbeline. And it’s not her job to moralise about brains being lit up by drivel. But there are times when even the brain needs ticking off for being easily satisfied. The question of the earworm’s function is one she knows she cannot dodge. One theory she is testing is whether it acts as a ‘kind of sonic screensaver for the mind’, triggering ‘vigilance as to our environment’. An entirely unscientific, but better, explanation is that earworms warn us of the perils of listening to Pharrell Williams, of our slavish cerebral willingness to lapse into mental nothingness, of the necessity to free ourselves from the terrible, often cynical, tyranny of the tune.

  A self-effacing man

  My wife’s uncle died last week. Her only uncle, which made him special, though he was important to us in other ways too. Everyone who dies is remembered for his sweetness of temper, but that truly described him. We found him hard to locate, so self-effacing was he, so accommodating and yet so locked away, as though by showing concern for others he didn’t have to show himself. He was already getting on a bit when I met him, so I missed the deeds and misdeeds of his early and middle years that might have explained him. Right up until his death he ha
d a glamorous companion, a Frenchwoman, herself cloaked in a degree of mystery. They went on cruises together in their eighties and must have cut quite a dash, she black-haired and painted as though for the last cocktail party on the planet, her eyes as jet as Cleopatra’s, her ankles as slender as a young girl’s, he in a blazer and a yachtsman’s trousers, with a touch of David Niven about him, only with a more nautical moustache.

  People who’d known him all his life were no less mystified. Did he have a secret life? In international politics? Espionage? Love? Once, as a man of eighty, he flattened a thug a quarter of his age who attacked him in the street. The police warned him against further acts of pensioner ruffianism. We live in insane times. We can no longer flatten thugs with impunity. It’s a union thing: only thugs themselves are allowed to do the flattening. But he laughed it off, leaving us to wonder how this elegant, well-mannered elderly gentleman had the strength and know-how to do what he had done. Had he been trained in the martial arts? Could he kill with his little finger if he chose? Was he from Krypton?

  He was on the management boards of hospitals, appointing senior staff, dispensing money and advice, counting eminent surgeons among his friends, though none could help him when he needed them most. But there was always a suggestion of some other mission.

  Myself, I loved him for the calm he exuded, for his air of being a disinterested amateur in the job of life, for his refusal to sit in judgement on anybody, and because his being my wife’s uncle rubbed off on me. I like other people’s relatives, which isn’t to say I don’t like my own, but about other people’s you experience none of the vexed loyalties of consanguinity. In his company I too felt an amateur in the job of life. Had I been closer to him in age I’d have enjoyed going cruising with him, sipping cocktails while his Frenchwoman beat her eyelashes at the captain.

  His final illness was shockingly sudden but mercifully brief. He’d been in hospital about three weeks when my wife rang to say he’d asked for me. He was deteriorating but insistent and she felt I should get over right away. Why me in particular? Perhaps to tell me to love and look after his niece. But he knew I already did. Perhaps he wanted everybody close to him around his bed, the more especially as his partner was ill in another hospital herself, a separation which, the longer it continued, was taking on a tragic complexion.

  He began making scribbling signals in the air the minute I arrived. His voice was gone, his throat ruined by the cancer. He was wired up to a barrage of screens that monitored every breath he struggled to take. The day before, he’d worn everybody out by persisting in raising an arm and lowering it again, pointing to the nurse and growling out a word that seemed to begin with an H. ‘Helpful?’ we’d tried. ‘Hopeful? Hospital? Happy? No, not happy – hateful, heartfelt, hopeless?’

  He’d grown exasperated with our stupidity. ‘H – h – hi – hi …’

  ‘Him,’ we tried, ‘hill, hymn, hirsute, hibiscus, hispid?’

  He raised his arm again, pointed to the nurse, and then made a moustache with his other hand.

  ‘Hilary? Hildegarde? Hitler? Hitler!’

  He smiled, nodded, and fell back on his pillows.

  His nurse was as bossy as Hitler, was his point. A joke. All that effort for a joke. My father had been the same when he was dying. Making one more joke was all he cared about. Hearing laughter one last time. Men and their jokes! Some men will go to hell for a joke.

  We knew, anyway, that whatever he wanted me to write about was going to be hard to decipher. We must have spent three hours on it. Eventually we made out the word ‘police’ and the word ‘destruction’. That he could get out ‘destruction’ after the trouble he’d had (or we’d had) with ‘Hitler’ only went to show how fiercely he felt about whatever he believed had been destroyed. His health? Himself? We didn’t doubt it. But then why ‘police’? There are no cancer police. There is no one who will apprehend and punish cancer for you, and if there were such a person he’d probably tell you to leave it alone, that cancer, too, has human rights. So did he feel he’d been the object of criminal neglect? If so – and neglect is always possible in an age of hurried doctors and crowded hospitals, and he a man who knew about hospitals – it didn’t tally with the praise he’d been expressing earlier for the care he had received. What then was I to say to the police? Who or what had been destroyed? And why did he need a writer to tell them?

  Seeing me bemused, he sought another word. ‘Am-mo. A-am-amo.’ He settled on that. ‘Am-mo.’

  Amo, amas, amat? Was he trying to tell us who he loved? We thought we knew who he loved. No, he shook his head violently, rattling the tubes in which he was enmeshed. ‘Amo, ammmo …’

  Ammo. Ah – ammunition! Those gathered around him exchanged looks. Was the truth finally about to come out? Was I to tell the police about the ammunition, before it destroyed half of London? But whose ammunition, and where was it?

  He gave up on us and fell asleep. Three hours later, he died. Leaving me with a job to do, but not knowing what. I expect to go on wondering forever. Amo. Ammo. Or was he teasing to the end? ‘Am only joking’ – was that he was saying? ‘Am only pulling your leg.’

  We know nothing. Neither of our going hence nor our coming hither. My wife’s uncle was the only person I’ve ever met who seemed contented with that thought. The loveliest of men, mystery or no mystery.

  When enough’s enough

  Though never much given to heroising, I did, when I was sixteen, heroise a Regency dandy who killed himself because he could no longer be bothered doing up his buttons. I would act likewise when the time came, I thought. Wasn’t I half bored to death already? I saw myself writing the suicide note and then being too bored to finish it. ‘Goodb …’ I’d write. I imagined with satisfaction my friends and family puzzling over what I was trying to tell them.

  By what means my existential dandy did himself in, I can no more remember than I can his name, but I like to think he died swallowing buttons. A good suicide should be death by what you no longer want to live to do. Or know about.

  So if you’re up to here with loud music, you should put on your worst clothes, talk your way into a club for fourteen-year-olds and go to sleep by one of the speakers. If you can’t any longer live in a world of mad cyclists, just wait at a traffic junction for the lights to say it’s safe to cross, and cross. If you’ve exhausted your interest in the rituals of dining, reading reviews, making reservations and checking bills to see if service is included, book a table in Mayfair and choke publicly on caviar, refusing with your last words to leave a tip. Alternatively, fill the bath with Krug, float your duck and go under. Sex the same – though the precise manner of death by sex must be left to individual predilection. I know how I want to go – that’s all I’m saying.

  This hasn’t been a good week for dying by whatever means. We don’t need to have known much about Peaches Geldof while she was alive to feel the infinite sadness of her in death. This is a story of unimaginable grief all round, tragic in a way that makes us reach for analogies beyond the accidents of personality and profession. To speak of the House of Atreus might be going too far, but it does seem as though, here again, the gods have some score to settle.

  That Peaches Geldof gave birth to a son on what would have been the anniversary of her mother’s birthday and that she chose to call him – strangely for a boy – Phaedra, only adds to the sense of fatality. ‘It’s all in the saga,’ as D. H. Lawrence wrote when he heard that Rupert Brooke had died. ‘O God, O God, it is all too much of a piece: it is like madness.’

  If we didn’t already know how damaging to a child is the premature death of a parent, especially if that death smacks of recklessness or despair, we certainly know it now. To say we don’t belong to ourselves is not to say anything original or even necessarily true. But have children and your life is no longer yours to play with. Whether that should make me reconsider my admiration for the dandy who could no longer be bothered dressing must depend on his paternal status. But I assume him to ha
ve been without offspring. If he’d had a child he would surely have got him to help with the buttons.

  As for the eighty-nine-year-old woman who recently killed herself at the Dignitas assisted suicide clinic, and identified herself simply as Anne, the question doesn’t apply. She had no child on whom the fact of a mother’s not wanting to live would lie forever like a curse. Which leaves us free to consider the virtue of her actions without the distraction of consequence. And you won’t be surprised to hear me say, reader, after what I have said already, that her decision to put an end to a life that no longer interested her strikes me as entirely admirable. Upsetting – for it is no small thing to feel that existence has lost its savour – but impressive in its clear-sightedness, its lack of fuss and its independence of spirit. This was the Roman way, before Christianity rhapsodised the indignity of suffering.

  It is not our business to agree with her or not. The world is full of people who will tell you they have never experienced a day’s boredom in their life, from which one can only conclude that they have never experienced a day’s imaginativeness either. Their opinions are irrelevant anyway. Distaste for life is a private matter. It is impertinent to list all the activities you enjoy, all the fun times you have, all the useful contributions to society you make and all the bollocks you enjoy watching on television, as though another person must want to live as you do. It also risks a stinging reproof. ‘What, you call what you have a life?’

  Anne’s point was that she had lived interestingly and indeed ‘adventurously’ already – she had been a Royal Navy engineer and, after that, an art teacher – but at eighty-nine found life alien and dull. One can pick and choose from the menu of instances of contemporary pointlessness she left behind. Yes, right about the robotic nature of the modern world, with screens replacing genuine interaction, but no, a supermarket ready-meal needn’t be so terrible. What’s important, though, is that we have people who swim against the current, no matter that the effort finally wears them out. Where everybody is an enthusiast, we should make heroes of those who, on principle, demur.