No Man A Quarantine Island by Charlotte Simmonds

This piece was performed by Charlotte Simmonds at the Crip the Lit event at Verb Festival 2020. Crip the Lit promotes, encourages and amplifies the work of writers with lived experience of disability. The provocation for the event was ‘Vulnerability’ - as we all know, it's a word of the times – but then, just to mix it up a bit, we threw in some random words which is how we got the intriguing session title of: Vulnerability, fluorescent islands and resilient teabags. Every writer has approached our theme in their own style. As you read the work (selected pieces published from the event) you might also catch those random words subtly inserted in some pieces and not so subtly in one...

I land here from a brand new womb, a brand new cervix, perhaps a lightly used vagina, but no second-hand, second-fetus womb for me, no, it is I who assails the rampart, parts the red sea, airs the port, planes the landing strip.

I land like no man has ever been an island before.

Sorry. I am no man in this strict 21st century definition of the word, I’m only a man in the all-embracing all-encompassing Germanic Teutonic Old English sense of the word.

Adrian says willpower is a muscle. You gotta exercise it. Go to the willpower gym. Get into motivational shape. But you need willpower just to go to the regular gym. He says to wear the same clothes every day like Steve Jobs. Says it’s how people like that muster willpower, by not having to decide what to put on in the morning. Just one less decision to waste your life on.

He asks if we’re geniuses. David seems unsure. I assert that we’re not, that genius is some kind of brain damage and we have a different kind of brain damage, not that one. That people like Marilyn vos Savant are geniuses, savant, it’s right there in her name. That people can get a particular kind of brain damage and then become a musical savant with perfect pitch. David says, “I don’t actually have perfect pitch, I’m just very fast at processing. Someone tells me to play an A and I go, ‘What’s in A? That Doors song is in A,’ and I hum the first note in my head, ‘Ah, that’s an A,’ and then I play it, but it all happens in real time.”

David feels like an underachiever. It seems like all his friends have Oscars or PhDs, but what good is a PhD I say, if you can’t get a job, can’t even get a cleaning job, a dishwashing job. What’s even the point. Success is paying the bills, taxes, contributing to the economy. Any schmuck can get a PhD, I say, not everyone can get a job.

Adrian thinks it’s good memory. He wants this kind of memory. He reads a book and forgets it. He says David remembers everything, even everything he reads. Asks if I’m like that. “People used to think I had a photographic memory,” I say, “but true eidetic memory isn’t really possible, and the kinds of people that have what’s closest to it, again, it’s some kind of brain damage.” David says, “But when I remember things from books, I’ve often read that book several times.”

So what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul? Well, for the whole world, you can get an awful lot resoled.

I tell Adrian that in general people have to encounter information 12 times before they remember it. I tell Adrian that if he read every book he reads 12 times, he’d remember them too.

But Adrian wants to know if I’ve ever taken an IQ test, says I might be a genius, but I don’t know about it. I tell him IQ tests are bunk, that they’re biased, that there isn’t really a good way of measuring these kinds of things, that they can only measure particular kinds of intelligence and that the kinds of intelligence they measure aren’t necessarily valuable, that the people who create such tests and the people who buy into them don’t necessarily value other people. He wants to know if I’ve taken one though, what the number is. I am silent. It’s all bunk. I landed before and I’ll do it again.

“It’s isolation,” David says. “It’s easier to cultivate weird genius superpowers when you live alone. Now that I live with someone else, I don’t disappear into that world as much. I have to interact, engage, there’s things to ask about.”

Adrian is what they might call a ‘genius’ in human interaction. I’d sell my whole island for that.