Red Enlightenment by Graham Jones

Author:Graham Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914420207
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2023-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

ETHICS

My dad’s health had already been deteriorating for a number of years, but at one point the decline appeared to accelerate. Not long after, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, an incurable degenerative condition which would eventually, he was assured, end in his death. The doctors could not say whether it would be a year or a decade, only that they would try everything they could to make the descent as comfortable as possible.

Week by week his body was shutting down one capacity after another, making walking slow and painful, then chewing and swallowing difficult, then his breath no longer strong enough to force a sound from his clarinet. He never lost his sense of self or his sense of humour, but they did come under sustained assault. As his relations to the world were stripped away, the work and interests that his identity were formed around became impossible, and his internal desired bodily image fell into irreconcilable conflict with its painful reality.

His voice was getting weaker and raspier by the day. Eventually it would be gone altogether, to be replaced with one of those vocal machines he always associated with Stephen Hawking. As a technology nerd he was strangely unfazed by this, even intrigued, and began experimenting with text-to-speech synthesis he found online for his own amusement. But the fact that it would not be his own voice was difficult to accept. I had seen how recent developments in machine learning had enabled recorded voices to be rapidly turned into a far more convincing replica, so I came up with a plan. I would film him telling me his life story, something he had already been keen to do, giving us the audio material to later be transformed into his new synthetic voice.

Not knowing how much time we had, I sat down with him as soon as we had the chance. He talked about growing up in a condemned house in a Staffordshire village during WWII, whose crumbling outer walls they could poke their fingers through. About his sympathy for the German POWs in a nearby field who carved little wooden toys for him and the other children. About getting drunk on Cherry B wine with army pals and waking up with a tattoo he regretted for the rest of his life. About his scrapes with death, like the freak accident when a vehicle he was travelling in overturned, injuring him badly and crushing his friend to death. I had never heard this story before, and he realised while fighting back tears that it was something he had never recounted to anyone.

My dad died sooner than expected, in the first wave of Covid-19, only a few months after I recorded those interviews. His condition had not killed him, but made him far more vulnerable than he would have been. His voice never left him, and we never made his vocal doppelgänger. As much as I would give to talk with him again — the real him —

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