Thou shalt clap

If getting into life is hard, getting out can be even harder

When you comment on a post on The Endless Chain, you reveal a little about yourself. You give an indication of the kinds of things you agree with, and the kinds of things you don’t agree with. You say what you think and invite a discussion. Sometimes you get one, and sometimes you don’t. I can count on one hand the people who comment on The Endless Chain, and I can count on one finger the people who post on it.

The stated aim of The Endless Chain is to provoke thought, and thinking is not writing, nor is it commenting, nor is it discussing. Thinking is reflecting, and the trend has distinctly shown itself in recent times on all social media (and whether The Endless Chain is social media or not is a matter of what you think) to transform slowly into a place that people think about rather than contributing to. Because contributing can provoke negative reactions that are hurtful, insulting, negative and counterintuitive, and slowly we are learning to recede from active forums instead of taking part in them, because passively we risk less of ourselves whilst still retaining a level of participation.

Whilst I can count on one hand the commentators on my posts, I would certainly need to remove my socks and shoes to count those who regularly read what I write. That tells me, without having their comments to judge by, that many of those who regularly read the posts on The Endless Chain do so out of continuing interest. There are those who come, and those who hook off and decide they’ve read enough. There are those who complain—yes, complain—that I write too much. There have been those who unsubscribed because my articles distract them from their work. If there are those who unsubscribed because they thought I was bigoted, then they never told me as much.

There are subscribers to this blog who pay, and I am very grateful to them. And there are those who, because they have the choice, don’t; and I am grateful to them as well. A paid subscription is like attending a concert and clapping at the end, and an unpaid subscription is like attending a concert and not clapping at the end. The paid subscriber and the unpaid subscriber both access the concert according to the terms on which the tickets are distributed. One claps, with their wallet; and the other doesn’t, just as had been agreed when the ticket was distributed.

Thank you, clappers and non-clappers. As Ronnie Barker once said during an episode of his series Porridge, set in a prison, “Clapper? …. Clapper … that rings a bell.”

There is a controversy going on in some places on this earth as to when life begins. In Alabama, life begins when the egg and the sperm combine to form the embryo, and that is now posing a difficulty for those who have IVF treatment in order to realise their dream of a child.

I have friends who have undergone such treatment and have brought wonderful children into the world: fine, strong, healthy, sensible, hard-working, handsome young men who will contribute to their society just as their parents have. But, as things are developing in Alabama and elsewhere, these friends would have encountered much greater difficulty in spawning these offspring there, because of the philosophical and legal issues that swirl around the embryos that are created in the course of IVF treatment but are not nurtured to childbirth. We live in times when the old question of when life begins is still a matter of controversy. Even long before my own birth, I know that I had a stillborn uncle, who was a subject of great mourning and sadness back in the 1930s, but he did receive a name, at least, although he was not baptised.

Baptism is the moment at which the newborn child is admitted to the realm of the Lord, and to the realm of the state administrator. The child receives a name, and the name may die at the moment of birth, or may survive onto the cradle roll, or may be registered in the population register or may live for ever more in the consciousness of mankind, and which of those is its destiny can never be predicted with certainty, at any time of life.

But if the moment at which life begins can be hard to determine, the moment at which it ends can be all the more difficult to determine. Scientists now raise the prospect that corporeal and cerebral death may not coincide and indeed even cerebral death may not be the end of life as the subject knows it, even if his or her doctors are so categorically certain.

The French call board games, like Cluedo and Monopoly, jeux de société, and, for a large part, the society that we form part of, on the whole, runs according to a rule book that, while far more complex than that of a board game, is nonetheless a construct of those around us who deem what is proper and improper for us to do and refrain from in the course of our passage through what we call our lives. The French expression for a board game is perhaps a fortunate double sens applicable to the broader board game on which we are tokens doing the round from salary day to salary day.

Just as in the big board game of life, withdrawing from the game of Monopoly is allowed in three manners in the Parker/Waddington version of the jeu de société:

- the player can become bankrupt;

- the player can go to jail;

- the player can die in the course of playing the game.

In terms of the rules, and extrapolating them (for it is not expressly stated in the rule book), in the event of a Monopoly player’s death, the player’s entire assets are surrendered to the bank, and become available again for the remaining players—if they are still in the mood—to purchase from the bank. It might seem callous to continue a board game after one of the participants has died, but we do that with life itself, so why wouldn’t we do it when playing a board game? Because a board game is trivial?

When Leslie McKeown, lead singer of The Bay City Rollers, suffered the loss of his deaf father, he was persuaded by the other four members of the band to continue a tour they were on in Australia, as if his loss counted for nothing. It was a factor that would lead to the break-up of the biggest boy band the UK has ever known.

Suicide is the ultimate self-determination. We cannot exercise any control over our birth, but over our death we do have control. Whether through our habits, our lifestyles, our wealth and how we apply it to our healthcare, and our ability to decide to end our life, whether through an act felo de se or the act of euthanasia, where such is legally permissible. One option that many might welcome, however, is simply to quit the stage, much like Les McKeown wanted to do when his father died.

Death, however arising, is the one event that a state will acknowledge as terminating the subject’s liability to certain forms of taxation—but certainly not all—and society’s demands for payment of certain expenses—but by far not all. For some, death remains a cliff’s edge that, once the subject has passed it, constitutes a ground for regret: there was so much they wanted to say to the subject before they departed, whether apologies, or expressions of love, or desires, or joint projects, or holidays, meetings, laughter, and enjoyment, recriminations, settlements of old scores, burying of old hatchets. Death robs us of these opportunities, which remain as grounds for sorrow among the living, and have meanwhile dissipated into nothingness for the deceased.

But retirement, such as we use the term, is a word of very limited application. It is used to denote the end phase of life once one has given up regular work, and yet it doesn’t even mean that, for there are those who continue to work during their retirement, which is a grand oxymoron.

Retirement from life can only be constituted by death, and this is a great injustice. We do not have the choice, ordinarily, not if we play a jeu de société, to withdraw from work, and rely on the savings we have accumulated in order no longer to take part in the to’s and fro’s of the great social media mix that we once contributed to. Why we might want to do such a thing is not for the société to question. It is a voluntary act, the act of the subject themselves, felo de se. Yet, each year, the state’s taxman will come a-knocking at our door and exact tributes from us as contributions to the great jeu of which we no longer wish to be part. We must pay our social security contributions in order to secure our social status within a société that we wish to eschew: and yet that is an option that is denied us.

Great controversy surrounded Lord Lucan, who was almost certainly guilty of the murder of Sandra Rivett, and who some claim to have spotted since his mysterious disappearance in 1974 in places like Australia. He is one of the few persons known to have disappeared from public and official view and never been seen again (aside from those listed here). I wonder if he continued to be taxed where he ended up. Whether he was lonely. Or whether he was blissful, whether at having escaped incarceration for his acts, or at having escaped his life as one of the Clermont set. He was declared dead in 2016, but the state doesn’t usually let its subjects go so easily.

The social security/pension jeu de société is one that we are destined to play, as we move our token around the great board of life, and one that we may withdraw from in only one of three ways: bankruptcy, jail, or death.

If we were to rewrite the Ten Commandments today, there would not be ten, there would be eleven, and the eleventh would be:

Thou shalt clap.