Heroes Not Zombies

John Barry died this week. When you hear just some of the film soundtracks he composed you can’t fail to be impressed. His music is instantly recognisable, not least the Bond film music, Born Free and Out of Africa.

You could argue that through his music, John Barry will live on. Last week, in Scotland (and elsewhere), we celebrated the birthday of Robert Burns. He died in 1796 but in some way, he’s still around. His words, his ideas, the feelings and experiences which were unique to his life, continue to be accessible to us many years on.
I was recently reading about Lacan’s concept of the three realms, or worlds, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. It occurred to me that there’s something in that model which helps us to understand death (and therefore life) differently. If the Real is all that is, as it is, unfiltered and unprocessed, then it doesn’t take much thought to understand we can never fully know the Real. We process the Real through our sensory organs, our bodies and the activities of our brains, and in so doing, we experience only a small fraction of the totality of all that is at any given moment.

We only experience a small fraction because, first of all our sensory organs are only able to detect portions of reality (bees for example are able to see ultraviolet portions of the electromagnetic spectrum which our eyes are unable to detect, and dogs can hear tones well outwith our detectable range), secondly we only become aware of a portion of what comes through our sensory organs (we can’t pay attention to EVERYTHING at once), and, thirdly, we then use language and other ways of naming and symbolising all of that information to interact with it. From this perspective, each of us experiences a Symbolic world – our abstracted, selective, processed part of the Real.
Enough of that for now…….taking this model though we can see that there are two ways to die. There is the death of the physical body, and there’s the death of the Symbolic self. In the cases of Barry and Burns, the Symbolic self lives on well beyond the death of the physical body.
I recently saw a patient who is clearly experiencing these two deaths the other way around. Due to a progressively degenerative disease, this person has become unable to continue working in a job which gave them a powerful sense of who they were, and with further decline they have become housebound and socially isolated. Bit by bit, they’ve experienced a death of the Symbolic self, whilst the body lives on, albeit in significantly deteriorated form.

A way forward in this situation is to encourage and support reconnection to others, to Nature, to the sense of “emerveillement” which is always possible in the here and now. In so doing, the hope is to re-invigorate the Symbolic self – our personal experience of reality.

We do die twice, but it’s possible to nurture and to develop the Symbolic self, at least to the point of physical death, but with sufficient creativity, to well beyond that particular event.