Memory/Loss

By Crispin Sartwell

Let us contemplate together the case of "Philip Staufen."

A man in his twenties wakes up in a Toronto hospital in November 1999 with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Someone delivered him to the emergency room with a broken nose and filled out his admission card with the name Philip Staufen and the birthdate June 7, 1975. He had no identification. His diagnosis: post-concussion global amnesia.

On his release, he faced a variety of legal entanglements. He could not work legally because he did not have a birth certificate or a social security number. He wound up living on the streets and collecting about $500 per month in welfare.

A linguistics expert, listening to his accent, concluded that he is British, probably from the Yorkshire region. Several people offered him free tickets to go to Britain or Germany (because of his German last name) to try to connect with his past. But he can't go to Europe - or for that matter leave the country at all - because he cannot obtain a passport.

Last November, Staufen moved to Vancouver, because it is warmer than Toronto in the winter. He loves opera and reads Latin. He lives in a boarding house with - as he put it in a court affadavit - "violent and vulgar people." He begged "to be set free" from Canada. He is described as severely depressed.

We might put it this way: he must travel in order to find out who he is. But he can't travel until he finds out who he is. A typical bureaucratic Catch-22, we might say, though a particularly onerous one.

But then again, *who is* "Philip Staufen," really? Let's say he traveled to Yorkshire and met a woman who said she was his mother, that this was the house in which he grew up, etc., but that he had no memory of any of it. Would he have found out "who he is"? Can you *learn* who you are by hearing someone else describe a life you don't recognize?

Who we are is largely a matter of what we remember. The continuity of a person over time is a continuity of experiences and relationships in memory: where we're from, who we've loved. If Staufen can't get that back, maybe he can't recover his self. If that stuff isn't back there somewhere, maybe there's no self to recover.

Is human identity formed by memory, so that in losing your memory you lose yourself and become someone else? What Staufen is left with are the vestiges of a personality: what he has left to hang onto is opera. The man must be mourning his own death.

I hope he gets to go to Yorkshire, if that's what he wants. But what if his self is not waiting for him there? What if he can recover it only out of his own head?

The real task facing Philip Staufen is likely to be forging his own essence: making a self to become. He has to begin again to be. And maybe he has to stop committing himself to his own legal limbo and begin to commit himself to a life he can invent in Vancouver. The courts have offered him a work permit, but he has refused on the grounds that he just wants to leave.

Perhaps he should accept the permit and get to work.

Identity, memory, and history are burdens as well as opportunities. Sometimes I wish I could forget who I am, what I've done, where I've been. It's possible that if Staufen begins to remember, he will wish he hadn't.

Unlike the rest of us, Philip Staufen can invent himself. In fact, he has no choice but to invent himself, and Vancouver is as good a place to do that as anywhere.

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