Robert Fergusson (5 September 1750 – 16 October 1774)

How we remember the dead tells us a lot about who we are as a society. Who we remember, tells us even more. Being a creator of words adds to the complexity. We are not merely worlded by the city we live in, or our neighbours who share the dwellings around us. We are not merely worlded by the words we use, our manner of pronouncing, the lilt and tone of our voice. We are not merely worlded by our forebears, who carry us into a life full of complexity and embodied history. We are worlded by our imaginations, by our flights of fantasy, by our means of escaping where we are. 

Robert Fergussion died aged 24, having sustained a head injury. After a period of care, first at home and then in a place of Bedlam, he passed away. His mother, who tried to care for him, had said he had become insensible. 

Try to imagine Robert’s mother, caring for the body of her son, a son she no longer recognised as such. The body of Robert had become unworlded, while it still moved and breathed. Robert’s mother could no longer speak to her son. She could no longer chastise him, tell him off for his carelessness, for his larking around.

Then, once Robert had passed, when in her grief, she recalled the memory of her son, she may not have been able to settle. Did she think of the baby in his cot, still to master the power of words? Did she think of the schoolboy, the prankster, disrupting the normal state of things with a joke? Did she think of the scholar, torn away from his studies, following the death of his father? 

She could pick up his poems, reading them aloud and back to herself, just as others do, centuries later. Would she ever dare imagination, that his words would be reformed, distorted but remembered as they are now.




By Glenn Robinson

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