The Number 86: A Humean Tragedy

A psycho-philosophical drama for David Sanderson, Arts Correspondent of The Times

by Paul Martin Freeman (May 2025)

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.  I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perceptions.  (David Hume: A Treatise on Human Nature, vol I, p 534)

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‘Twas on the 86 at Chadwell Heath
While on his way one fateful day to Stratford
That S, a noted journalist from Leith,
Beheld a sight that left his spirit shattered.
–
Observing people by the staircase round him,
He had the strangest feeling all were dead.
And afterwards the memory would hound him
And fill him with a sense of utter dread.
–
He fancied that their minds were somehow vacant
As though their very souls had upped and left;
Yet in the face of this they seemed complacent,
Their lives of meaning seemingly bereft.
–
They had the look of robots or machines;
Automata without a conscious core;
Assembled lumps of empty cells and genes:
Appearances of men, but nothing more.
–
And S reflected on this awful scene
And wondered if he, too, had lost his soul;
And what, indeed, would such an absence mean
If where his soul had been were just a hole.
–
His mirror though provided no assistance:
It only showed his old familiar face
With nothing indicating its persistence
Nor intimating something out of place.
–
And so our hero set about attempting
To see this soul or self of his inside;
And at this nightly, Somnus’ charms neglecting,
Aurora’s light would find him bleary-eyed.
–
Unable now to work, he took retirement,
Applying himself in earnest even more;
And like a monk in self-imposed confinement
On family and friends he shut the door.
–
Now, S had thought the task before him easy
To find what he assumed he knew the best;
Indeed you’d say, his mood was bright and breezy
When first this new pursuit he had addressed.
–
For what did man perceive if not himself
Of whose existence merely thinking proved?
While nothing was more certain than the self:
A truth since Descartes no one had disproved.
–
Yet when he set about investigating,
Like old Macbeth, he found to his dismay
An unexpected revelation waiting
There blocking on the blasted heath his way.
–
He noticed when he looked inside himself
He’d stumble on some feeling or perception,
But never would he find the self itself:
The object of his search and introspection.
–
Hence, love or hate he’d see, or pain or pleasure,
And feelings of the like of every kind;
Yet though he might persist in his endeavour,
No feeler of those feelings could he find.
–
This odd and unexpected revelation
Quite took our honest Scotsman by surprise.
It filled him with unusual consternation
As reasonably the reader might surmise.
–
Indeed, our hero now began to panic:
The very thing he’d feared he’d found was true;
He went from bright and breezy straight to manic,
Beside himself with what on earth to do.
–
He’d lost his self on which his world depended
And with it all contentment disappeared.
As when Iago fond Othello’s ended,
Irrational thoughts of every sort appeared.
–
His waking hours became a constant nightmare;
No purpose, sense or meaning could he find.
All avenues appeared to lead to nowhere
As S began to slowly lose his mind.
–
Without a self, he couldn’t get a passport,
Nor credit card, nor job, nor bank account.
They wouldn’t let him board on public transport—
On every side the problems seemed to mount!
–
But where in God’s creation had he lost it?
He tries to focus now and racks his brain.
Perhaps he’d left it on a train or dropped it,
Or—Heavens!—even flushed it down the drain!
–
The teeming possibilities were endless
With each successive one appearing worse.
He paces up and down, confused and restless—
Not Cain himself endured so cruel a curse!
–
His searches now at Newham rubbish dump;
He looks at home through every drawer and shelf;
He roots around his local petrol pump,
But cannot find the thing he calls himself.
–
Deranged, he hunts in Beckton sewage plant;
He sifts the Thames’ befouled polluted shore;
He goes where others loathe to go or can’t
Yet nowhere finds that vital missing core.
–
The passing weeks and months provide no answer
Nor any clue to where it’s disappeared.
Reproached, it seems, by life and people’s laughter,
His world is bleak, untenanted and weird.
–
At length, he leaves his home on Chadwell Heath;
Like ancient Lear, he wanders now a tramp.
At night he lies in fields with chattering teeth
Or begs a bed at Romford travellers’ camp.
–
As Hamlet found his life forever shattered
On learning of the murder from the ghost,
He left behind his own and all that mattered
Because he couldn’t find what mattered most.
–
He’d lost his world and everything he’d owned
Yet hadn’t found that precious thing he sought.
He trudges on—distraught, despised, disowned,
His every dream and longing come to naught.
–
And on and on and on he trudges now—
This torment of unreason never ends!
No peace his tragic loss will S allow
Who into bottomless despair descends.
–
In time though, after many years of suffering,
He thought he’d try the 86 again.
He hides when boarding then, ashamed and shuffling,
Evades the driver’s eyes behind some men.
–
He looks about, uncertain why he’s there;
He’s feeling weak—he fears he’s going to fall!
He senses people starting now to stare:
No place to go, he’s up against the wall!
–
With flashing images from long before
He edges down the bus’s crowded aisle.
He keeps his gaze directly on the floor
Yet can’t contain a melancholy smile.
–
Then suddenly he’s back at Chadwell Heath!
It’s once again that awful, dreadful day!
He’s standing by the staircase underneath
Reliving what has never gone away!
–
He finds a place to sit and settle down
And starts enjoying those long-forgotten sights:
The mums and dads with kiddies on the town;
The burly blokes with purple hair and tights.
–
But then he looks again with close attention
And grasps at last the truth that now is plain.
The self, he sees, is just a loose convention
That stops us all from going quite insane.
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