A friend who regularly gob-smittens me with brain and high wit found herself struggling with stammer recently when the talk turned to Dunedin music.
I tried to open a few doors, but after walking around the entire house twice and finding nothing, I gave up. She opened her palms helplessly and said, I don't know what anything is.
I don't know what anything is. What a delicious phrase! Not just because I had finally scored an intellectual point, got one over her, as they say deep in the bowels of philosophical discussion, but because this is a phrase that is so utterly honest.
I nearly fell over in admiration and awe. How often, after all, do we use dishonesty as a survival tool in conversation? All the time.
You walk into a friend's house and he has a painting above the mantelpiece that looks like four oysters crushed into a plate of custard.
Who did that, you ask. Me, he replies. It's beautiful, you reply. And the friendship continues, stronger than ever.
But give me someone who speaks his or her mind any day of the week.
What seared me to the quick as I walked away from the cafe where my friend had admitted a toothbrush meant more to her than Dunedin music was that I don't know what anything is, either. By the time I got home, I had dug up so many anecdotes to this effect that I just wanted to crawl into the dog kennel and never come out.
Fortunately, we don't have a dog kennel. But I was hurting.
The inability to recognise people from facial characteristics was a column topic last year. On that occasion, not knowing what anything is, I announced I had discovered a new medical condition, and would be expecting a Nobel Prize in medicine for doing so.
The phone ran hot that day, I can tell you. The condition is called prosopagnosia, you buffoon, they said, for goodness sake, do some research before you write. Everyone else does.
They were right, this thing had been around for centuries, presumably invented by someone called Prosopagno, probably eastern European.
Of course, discovering something second or third does not lessen the discovery. I could, for example, discover how to split the atom without looking up Google for the method. It would not make me a lesser human, it would just mean I was slower.
Prosopagnosia has afflicted some pretty famous people. The neurologist/writer Oliver Sachs, for example, gets his brothers mixed up all the time because of prosopagnosia, ironic in view of the great strides Sachs has made in researching the relation between music and mental dysfunction.
Brad Pitt is another notable with prosopagnosia, not quite as big a brain, but famous as a fish, let's be quite clear about that.
Last Tuesday,
I walked along the main street for two blocks with someone I did not recognise but knew I knew. We talked about wasps.
The Ida Valley came into the conversation after a while and I said we had a place in the Ida Valley as well. Of course you do, he said, I am your neighbour. I have probably chatted with this man
1200 times. Imagine having prosopagnosia and not knowing what anything is as well! My lot is a sorry one indeed.
What is the answer for us poor prosopagnosiacs? I have decided on a very simple solution. Like the character Silent Bob in the five interrelated Kevin Smith movies, I shall never speak.
How can I mis-recognise someone if I never admit it in words?
It will be like the tree that falls in the forest that makes no sound because there was no-one there to hear it fall.
I shall communicate forthwith using only a wry smile and a raised eyebrow. I shall become Silent Roy. Nobody will know if I know them or if I know what anything is.
I will be given the benefit of overwhelming doubt and I will be respected enormously as a result. Silence! You can't beat it as a conversational weapon.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
