We went to London, to visit the Wellcome Collection, where the venue was holding an exhibition about Identity - 8 rooms and 9 individual stories in those rooms, looking at things like DNA fingerprinting, gender and sexuality, race and prejudice and twins.
The room that interested me the most in the exhibition was Samuel Pepys room, showcasing extraordinary diaries of an extraordinary human being, Clive Wearing. Clive Wearing was a successful musician who suffers a very bad case of amnesia, which started in 1985, causing him to be left in a world consisting of just a moment, with no recollection of the past or a future to look ahead to. His intellect is virtually intact, he perceives his world like any other, but as soon as he perceives it, its gone for him, fading away... like in a time vacuum... trapped like a prisoner.
Wearing thinks he has been awake for about two minutes, thats why he records the fact when he has woken up, and that he should write it down, like telling the world it is something important that must be acknowledged. In the diary he writes, 'I am now completely awake for the first time', and the whole diary is filled entries saying almost the same thing, of his first awakeness. He looks back, and he denies that he ever wrote in the diary, saying he was unconscious when he wrote in it, and that NOW is the time he is truly awake, that why he crosses out previous entries, saying that he had no knowledge of the book at all, claiming that he has never even seen the book before.
One of the things that characterizes Clive Wearings day is that he continually makes entries in the diaries, but it is of no intention to keep the diaries, it is in a compulsion, just to note down the event of him waking up, which is momentous for him. Also, as he writes a new entry down, he underlines the 'first time', because as he doesn't remember the previous entries, hes saying something about ego, about identity, 'I know now, I know this moment now, I have no memory of the previous entry, and you have to take notice of that', the pages of the diary have been written in a frenzied way, to say it is really important to take notice of this, just like how a prisoner would scratch the fact of his existence on the wall, saying that he was there, and he was alive then, and the world has to know this, and thats what Clive does with his diary entries, as he is the best eye witness for his condition.
Illustration by Tim Durning.
What's amazing about Clive Wearings illness is that, he is still able to remember how to play the piano, sing and recognize music, like it's engraved in his brain. It's just like how they say, you'll never forget how to ride a bike, same thing but with music!
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