Everyday Madness. Lisa Appignanesi

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       1

      THE SMALL TRANSLUCENT bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.

      I couldn’t bring myself to move it or use it.

      When I finally picked it up, it was caked and slightly clammy to the touch, like perspiring, not quite healthy skin. I put my glasses on to make out the indistinct print on the front of the curve. For the first time I could see that, next to the stylized palm tree, vanishing letters spelled out Memory of Senses.

      I put the bottle back on the shelf. Quickly.

      Though I had rid the house of bagsful of clothes, unopened packs of tobacco, wires that belonged to defunct machines, and some of the other random leavings of life, I somehow couldn’t chuck that tiny bottle.

      Superstition.

      We all know the dead inhabit select objects. Even when we might also believe that they’ve gone to meet their maker or joined the elements in a field or river, or their everlasting souls have travelled up to Heaven to be judged by a supreme court at which angels bear witness to their deeds, good and bad, and eleven months of purgatory await.

       Superstition: from the Latin ‘over + stand’. A presence stands over us, one whom we fear or who might just bring us luck. Or perhaps, as in surveillance, that presence compounds security and fear. Cicero, that hoary old philosopher who, according to one of my school teachers, had intoned something about diseases of the mind being more common and more pernicious than those of the body, had considered the word to be a derivation of superstitiosi – literally those who are left over, the survivors or descendants. It is they who must perform the funeral rites for their dead. It is they who need superstition.

      One of my superstitions as a performer of funeral rites seems to lie in a miniature bottle of shampoo, latterly found to bear the name Memory of Senses.

      Had I unwittingly taken in that name well before noticing it? None of my senses had been behaving particularly well in the fourteen months, and rising, since he had died. My sight and hearing had all but abandoned the world. They were overrun, smothered by the assault from within. Maybe I had something in common with that other addled mourner, Hamlet, whose father’s untimely death alongside his mother’s way of grieving – curtailed too swiftly and sexually from his perspective as a son – sets up a fury in him that some term mad. He feels surveilled – by the state, by his father’s ghost, and most of all by his own watchful, overwrought self.