Personhood

and the point at which it just drops away

'Win a prize in one hundred shots or less' says a sign in the arcade shooting gallery. My friend Emma carries the ‘less-fewer’ correction in her muscle memory. She’s a purist in that way. In the spring I watched her at the kind of dinner where it's fine to get dead drunk because you do it in a civil way, ordering champagne, three cocktails, wine, then whiskey or Amaretto. Bottled water all the while - we weren’t paying. On Emma’s left was a milky, Southern boy called Abe Anders McCallister, who had the manner of a mud-whittled human in a creation myth and was travelling around the world with too much of Texas to notice the new parts. One whiskey had him drunk enough to feel homesick but not admit it. Instead, he said he missed guns. This boy loved to say 'Less guns does not equate to less killings.' There’d be a 'Less guns does not equate to less killings' whenever a European looked like they might set down their fork. Everyone could see her wince, but it wasn’t the tirade that had my friend seething and mixing the dregs from her wall of glassware, it was the 'lesses' of Abe Anders McCallister. She might want to reinvent herself one day or go into witness protection, but with two words I could pick Emma from a crowd of replicants. 

Since that dinner, I’ve looked for everyone’s ‘less-fewer’ threshold, the JENGA block that underpins their person. Abe either kept his hidden or hadn’t developed one yet. He justified a lot of his character with a scan of his 23andme test results, explaining traits away as ‘very Finnish’ or ‘quite settler-like.’ I wonder what he’d be capable of if, under the archway of Hastings Old Town arcade, I could convince him he wasn’t a person. If he'd wheel around and send one hundred shots or fewer across the carpet until everyone here, from the slot machines to the sea, where three heavy tankers are hugging the French side, lay dead. I continue down the esplanade.

In 1923 Simone Weil got on a ship that size, one that swung North before here and left her in Liverpool. Then she went to London and spent her last summer writing La Personne et le Sacré and other pamphlets for the Free French movement. She wrote that personhood is just the sum of parts, and any sum can be subtracted back down to zero. For Simone Weil, there is no ‘less-fewer’ tipping point. A person is already a fake, scattered thing, an aggregation of facts in a void. In La Personne et le Sacré she constructs a man out of eye colour, height and opinions. Then, with her words, she stunts his growth, knocks out his memories, and says ‘for my last trick I’ll pluck out his eyes: he’s still him.' I think of Emma with her steadfast grammar and her eyes that are so pretty she buys blue clothes to match. Then I push my sunglasses back and take the underpass to the shopping centre. In the basement of Waterstones, I find her favourite book. The quote on the back cover says Stoner is ‘the life story of an unremarkable man who emerges from it not only as an archetypal American but as an unlikely existential hero, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper.’ An archetype, a hero, and a figure. The quote on the front cover says ‘this is the best book you’ll never read.’ So I let it be. I let it be a thing that differentiates me from her, and I take the escalator out. 

Priory Meadows shopping centre was built in a basin where the mouth of a river should be. Its car park floods every winter. On a map of this coastline, you can see each seaside town has a blue ingrown hair tucked behind it. Te Awa Tupua became a person in 2017 when New Zealand legally acknowledged their river's physical and metaphysical elements. Its body and its soul. Now the Ganges is a person too, but only in Uttarakhand, not in Bihar, Jharkhand, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, where it flows through the holy city of Varanasi and passes 400 bacteria sweating tanneries in Kanpur, or in Himachal, and Haryana, and West Bengal. Perhaps in these states they know a person could be polluted just as easily. There’s also the Klamath, who flows to the ocean from a lake in Oregon, the Vilcabama, Man Menor, and Altrato. Lake Erie’s personhood is constructed on its 'right to flourish.' The lawyers of each of these waterways cite Te Awa Tupua as a precedent. There are legal journals dedicated to the river’s two spokesperson system, one Maori, one not. A miles-long seven-year-old with two heads and three mouths. 

If the tankers have moved it’s imperceptible. Simone Weil would say that rights cannot bestow personhood because rights, like the rest of the false collective, can be stripped away. You can be denied your right to flourish, and your right to move freely. She said a slave with no rights is a human non-person, which makes a slave the opposite of a river in New Zealand, and leaves everyone existing fragiley on this beach somewhere in between. I walk along the concrete where a river should be until I am standing at the end of the town pier and think of rivers with no mouths and men with no eyes. Then, to put this away, I pretend that this is not an evening on the Hastings Pier. It is March 2019, and I’m watching the sunset from the docks of Lake Erie.

A crowd is heading down the quay to the water, a big crowd, spouting from the alleyway between two of Cleveland’s dockhouses. Their leader is a man in navy overalls. Into a microphone that’s too delicate for him, he yells 'They’re giving lives away. They’re killing babies, now they think they can invent a person. Dead babies on their hands. Dead people on their hands.' A news team waits on the quay. Their camera operator is a Mexican who's only been in Cleveland for two months and he's squinting at the crowd because he's never had to account for a sunset reflecting off water. In Mexico City, everything is shot against one shade of dust. No matter what he does, their faces are just an overexposed mass, like a smear on the lens. Then the crowd glitches in anger and rears up until it flows over the man and his camera, and still more are coming from the alleyway. 'I'll show you a person. I'll show you a person.' But at the end of the quay, a little bit of fervour drops away. They don’t know how to be angry at a lake. In the crowd, a woman with rope burns on her hand cups her stomach through the lining of her pro-life bib. She screams the call and response with the rest, the megaphone answered by a wave and another wave, but the responses sound muted, like her head's underwater. She thinks how Erie would be a nice name. If it turns out to be a girl.

Back on Hastings Pier, the service is bad. I go inland a little way to read that in 1967, Lake Erie was so polluted that it was pronounced dead. That means it took half a century for the dead thing to be acknowledged as a person, a corpse, a wet, fifty-two-year-old miscarriage hyperventilating on the surface of North America. As I walk I write sentences in my head. Sentences that all breathe at the same pace and have no contaminants.

At the most Westerly end of the beach, stands a row of black wharf buildings. One is a fishmonger with a 'Caught Here Today' sign. Every night the fish travel three hours to a sorting factory in Portsmouth and three hours back in an ice-lined truck, although this does not make the sign a lie. Next door is a gallery full of silver seabird sculptures. Next door to that is a chippie with bunting and free hot drink refills. Their tea cistern is a waitress's whole job. The ‘less-fewer’ test of this town is suspended, in a formalin bath, on the floor of the last wharf. You could swap the side of the sea but I’d know Hastings by the conger eel in the fisherman’s museum. As a child, I grew too fast to have heights penned on the wall. I tracked my growth in distance gained on the conger eel each summer holiday. 

In 2013 a conger eel bit a diver in the face off the coast of Connemara. The Irish newspapers identified Jimmy Griffin as a man with twenty years of deep sea experience and a popular bakery on Galway’s main shopping street. The English newspapers said that the eel was six foot one. They also called the attack unprovoked. The reporters might have got six foot one by calling up Irish conger experts and asking them to estimate backwards from the circumference of the hole in the diver's face. It’s more likely that, lying in a bed in University Hospital Galway, Jimmy himself reported 'six foot one' out of the side of his mouth that wasn’t gaping into ear canal. In the darkness at a depth of twenty-five metres, he can't have registered much more than an attacker, about his size and strength, with a sharp object, and an intention. I stand by the tank for a long time and then go out around the museum’s one-way system and search Conger eel on Wikipedia. It says their binomial name is 'conger conger' and that 'the life histories of most conger eels are poorly known.'