Tallis - The kingdom of infinite space a fantastical journey around your head

The Kingdom of Infinite Space

R AYMOND T ALLIS was Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester until 2006. A poet, novelist and philosopher, he was listed by the Independent in 2007 as one of fifty Brains of Britain. In 2005 Prospect magazine named him as one of Britains top 100 Public Intellectuals. Tallis was also elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience, and holds honorary degrees from the universities of Manchester and Hull for his work in philosophy. The Raymond Tallis Reader was published in 2000 by Palgrave Macmillan, and his most recent work, Hippocratic Oaths, was published in 2004 by Atlantic Books.

Praise for The Kingdom of Infinite Space

Reminds us of the glory of human beings. Jane OGrady, Guardian

Ray Tallis is one of the hidden treasures of British intellectual life The Kingdom of Infinite Space is a book to make you laugh, cry, yawn. It might even make you use your brain. Kenan Malik, Sunday Telegraph

Tallis wants to challenge the prevailing notion of the brain as the lone site of consciousness. Deliberately challenging the orthodoxies of our day, he wants to remind us of what an astonishing range of stuff goes on in our heads besides neural activity. Lynne Truss, Sunday Times

[A] fascinating examination of the head that part of our anatomy with which we most identify and which, Tallis, argues, is so much more than just the brain The book is much more than a compendium of the bizarre. Tallis is fascinated by our psychological relationship between the head and the location of the self. Why is it that we instinctively locate the self just behind the eyes and perhaps above our mouths? Some of the most memorable writing is reserved for the end of his (and our) story, when aging and decay sets in and not only the body but the mechanisms intended to repair it break down. Michael Simkins, Mail on Sunday

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2008 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright Raymond Tallis, 2008

The moral right of Raymond Tallis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The author and publisher would gratefully like to acknowledge the following for permission to quote from copyrighted material:

Ignorance in The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin 1964 reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber for the author; The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera, Milan Kundera 1988 reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber for the author; The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot, T.S. Eliot 1963 reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber for the author; Dante Alighieri in The Penguin Book of Italian Verse edited by George R. Kay, George R. Kay 1958 reproduced by permission of Penguin; First Night in Nights In The Iron Hotel by Michael Hofmann, Michael Hofmann 1983 reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber for the author; Little Gidding in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot, T.S. Eliot 1963 reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber for the author; Tonight at Seven-Thirty, section X in Thanksgiving for a Habitat, in Selected Poems by W. H. Auden, W. H. Auden 1968 reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber for the author; I Am Not a Camera, in Selected Poems by W. H. Auden, W. H. Auden 1971 reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber for the author; Skin in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin 1988 reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber for the author.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84354 670 2

eISBN: 978 1 78239 526 3

Designed and typeset in Monotype Dante by Lindsay Nash

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

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To Ben

Jedn z mch nejdrach hlav

Sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the infinite and the nothing.

Pascal, Penses

Contents

Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful for the support and enthusiasm of Toby Mundy at Atlantic without whom I would not have written this book: it is his idea. It has been wonderful to work again with Louisa Joyner, whose brilliant editorial skills have transformed this book, not the least by giving the author a better understanding of what he was trying to achieve through it. Latterly she was joined by Emma Grove who had a crucial role in bringing the manuscript to its final form. Finally, it is a pleasure to acknowledge the superb copy-editing by Jane Robertson. What luck to have been published again by Atlantic and again to work with such a team.

My greatest debt is, as always, to Terry, my wife.

Foreword

The Kingdom of Infinite Space owes its existence to Toby Mundy of Atlantic Books. He had suggested that I should write a book on the body, which would encompass biology and philosophy. The more I thought about it, the less manageable the topic seemed and the greater the danger that philosophy would be buried under biology. I was scratching my head as to how to deliver on his suggestion when it occurred to me that the answer lay under my fingernails. I would confine myself to the head.

Why the head?

Well, of all the items in the world, my head is the one that seems closest to me, in the rather difficult sense of being what I am, or (not quite the same thing) what I feel myself to be. And yet my relationship with my head is not at all straightforward. I am linked in different ways to different parts of it; and I have different links at different times to the same parts. Yes, I am my head (in a sense that proves extraordinarily difficult to characterize). But I also own it, speaking of it as I do now as if it were a possession. And I suffer it, enduring aches and pains that seem to have nothing and everything to do with me. I use it, manipulating it, sometimes quite crudely, as if it were a kind of tool. I present it. I judge it. I know it. I disown it. And so on.

All very baffling. My head and I is a more problematic marriage than anything that August Strindberg or Edward Albee could have dreamed up. In this regard, however, my relationship to my head is no different from the muddled, even tortured, relationship I have to my body as a whole; indeed, it is the same relationship put in capitals. Which is I why I have chosen to write about the head: it is an entre into the peculiar human condition of being a conscious and self-conscious, self-judging, agent in an organic body. I want to think into the muddle of embodiment. And I want to celebrate the mystery of the fact that we are embodied, rather than fall in with the venerable tradition of being rather sniffy about it.

Many writers, following the example of Plato, have seen the body as a kind of prison, a cognitive disaster, a humiliation, or some kind of moral disgrace. I, on the other hand, while I do not believe that we are immortal souls, unhappy lodgers accidentally trapped in 70 kilograms of protoplasm, equally reject the notion that we are entirely identified with our bodies. The standpoint of this book is neither religious nor scientistic, but humanistic.