First cousin once removed
In 2013 at the Melbourne International Film Festival I watched the greatly moving documentary, First cousin once removed. It centres on the later life and dwindling light of Edwin Honig – American professor, poet, playwright and translator of Portuguese and Latin literature.
Honig, who has since passed away, is the subject of a deeply personal but necessarily invasive study of Alzheimer's disease by his first cousin, film maker Alan Berliner. Berliner documents his revered cousin's degenerative condition, contrasting the confused and childlike mental state of his final years, with the cognitive gusto of his earlier creative and academic life.
Naturally ethical questions arise, but Berliner takes them on and tackles them with honesty, unpicking issues as best he can. Just as medical science has a need to push boundaries to identify, develop and test theories, I do feel that by exposing Honig in this light we have something to learn.
I recall an article from the 23 May edition of the London Review of Books. Mike Jay's ‘Argument with myself’ takes a look at Suzanne Corkin's book Permanent Present Tense: The man with no memory and what he taught the world. The remarkable life of that man, Henry Gustave Molaison, is a story that would not be out of place in a science-fiction text, but the “rolling thirty-second loop of awareness in which he lived” is fact. From the age of 27 after brain surgery to ease his epilepsy, Molaison was unable to form new memories, nor recall those from the past. He lived without memory.
These two lives prompt me to think about my memory and memories. At Fi's 31st birthday dinner I wrack my brain to recall what I did to celebrate 31. No, I have no memory of it at all. We use the word ‘unmemorable’, and perhaps that was it. But the delineation might suggest that memory is conscious, memories only formed if proactively ‘committed’ to memory. But that's not the case. For we remember horrors we'd often love to forget…
…Which makes me wonder whether life without memory could be in some way freeing. Jay states of Molaison: “In many respects he displayed the serenity and detachment promised by the Buddhist ideal of living in the now, freed from regrets about the past or anxieties for the future.” And in First cousin once removed, as Honig looks out on the trees beyond his window for hours on end, Berliner considers “the transcendent state of nothingness”.
I don't think Honig's legacy of creative output and intellectual fervour is done harm by the film, if anything the empathetic and considered HBO production adds to it, and for anyone with memories of a loved one struggling with Alzheimer’s, it offers helpful reflection. Molaison's legacy meanwhile has taken a more scientific trajectory with “digital images of his disfigured hippocampus featured in almost every standard work on the neuroscience of memory” and “2401 slices” of his brain available for further study.