The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

by Will Self

  ‘Where have you been, Janner? Have you been in the Amazon all this time? I found a record you’d written the sleeve notes for. Have you been collecting more failed chants? Are you married? I am. Are you going to give me any facts, or only more theories?’ Janner was gobsmacked. When we’d been at Reigate I’d hardly ever answered back. My interjections had been designed purely to oil the machinery of his discourse. He became evasive.

  ‘Um … well, just resting up. Yes, I have been away. Pretty boring really, just some fieldwork, due to publish a paper. I’m doing some teaching at Croydon for the moment. Living here in Purley. That’s it, really.’ He stopped in the centre of the pavement and pointed his hardened drip of a nose at the ground, I could hear the discreet burble of mucus in his thorax. A train from Victoria clattered across the points at Purley Junction. I could sense that Janner was about to slip away from me again.

  ‘I did a bit of research of my own, Janner. I read up what I could about this tribe, the Ur-Bororo. Seems that some kind of foundation exists for anthropologists who are prepared to do fieldwork on them. The man who set it up, Lurie, was an eccentric amateur. He gifted his field notes to the British Library, but only on the condition that they remain unread. The only exceptions being those anthropologists who are prepared to go and carry on Lurie’s fieldwork. Apparently, the number of recipients of Lurie Foundation grants were also to be severely restricted. Since Lurie set it up in the Thirties there have only been two – Marston and yourself.’

  A double-decker bus pulled away from the stop across the road. For a moment it seemed poised in mid-acceleration, like some preposterous space rocket too heavy to lift itself from the earth, and then it surged off up the hill, rattling and roaring, a cloud of sticky diesel fumes, heavier and more tangible than the earth itself, spreading out behind. Janner spat yellow mucus into the gutter. In the late afternoon light his mouth was puckered with disapproval like an anus.

  ‘I suppose you want to know all about it, then?’

  ‘That’s right, Janner. I’ve thought about you a lot during these past ten years. I always knew you’d do something remarkable, and now I want to know what it is – or was.’

  He agreed to come to my house for dinner the following evening and I left him, standing in the High Street. To me he seemed suspiciously inconspicuous. His nondescript clothes, his everyman mien. It was as if he had been specially trained to infiltrate Purley. I bought my ticket and headed for the barrier. When I turned to look back at him he had reverted entirely to type. Standing, back against a duct, he was apparently reading the evening paper. But I could tell that he was carefully observing the commuters who thronged the station concourse.

  The following evening Janner arrived punctually at 7.30 for dinner. He brought a bottle of wine with him and greeted my wife with the words, ‘I expect you’re quite a toughie being married to this one.’ Words which were met with approval. He took off his gaberdine raincoat, sat down, and started to play with James. Janner was a big hit. If you had asked me beforehand I wouldn’t have said that Janner was the kind of man who would have any rapport with small children, but as it was he was such a success that James asked him to read a bedtime story.

  While Janner was upstairs my wife said to me, ‘I like your friend. You’ve never told me about him before.’ Dinner was even more of a success. Janner had developed a facility for companionable small talk which amazed me. He displayed a lively interest in all the minutiae of our lives: James, our jobs, our garden, our mortgage, our activities with local voluntary groups. All of it was grist to the mill of his curiosity and yet he never appeared to be condescending or merely inquisitive for the sake of gathering more anthropological data.

  After dinner my wife went out. She had an evening class at the local CFE. Janner and I settled down in the living-room, passing the bottle of Piat d’Or back and forth to one another in an increasingly languid fashion.

  ‘You were never like this when we were at Reigate,’ I said at length. ‘Then all your pronouncements were weighty and wordy. How have you managed to become such an adept small-talker?’

  ‘I learnt to small talk from the Ur-Bororo.’ And with that strange introduction Janner launched into his story. He spoke as brilliantly as he ever had, without pausing, as if he had prepared a lecture to be delivered to a solo audience. It was, of course, what I had been dying to hear. All day I had feared that he wouldn’t come and that I would have to spend weeks searching the launderettes of South London in order to find him again. Even if he did come, I was worried that he would tell me nothing. That he would remain an enigma and walk out of my life, perhaps this time for good.

  ‘The Ur-Bororo are a tribe, or interlinked group of extended families, living in the Parasquitos region of the Amazon basin. In several respects they closely resemble the indigenous Amerindian tribes of the Brazilian rainforest: they are hunter-gatherers. They subsist on a diet of manioc supplemented with animal protein and miscellaneous vegetables. They are semi-nomadic – following a fixed circuit that leads them through their territory on a yearly cycle. Their social system is closely defined by the interrelation of individuals to family, totemic family and the tribe as a whole. Social interaction is defined by a keen awareness of the incest taboo. Their spiritual beliefs can be characterised as animistic, although as we shall see this view stands up to only the slightest examination. Perhaps the only superficial characteristics that mark them out from neighbouring tribal groups are the extreme crudity of their manufacture. Ur-Bororo pottery, woodcarving and shelter construction must be unrivalled in their meanness and lack of decoration – this is what strikes the outsider immediately. That and the fact that the Ur-Bororo are racially distinct …’

  ‘Racially distinct?’

  ‘Shh …’ Janner held up his hand for silence.

  In the brief hiatus before he began to speak again I heard the low warble of the doves in the garden, and, looking across the railway line that ran at the bottom of the garden, I could make out the crenellations and chimneys of the row of semis opposite, drawing in the darkness, like some suburban jungle.

  ‘It is said of any people that language defines their reality. It is only through a subtle appreciation of language that one can enter into the collective consciousness of a tribal grouping, let alone explore the delicate and subtle relationships between that consciousness, the individual consciousness and the noumenal world. Language among the Amerindian tribes of the Amazon is typically supplemented by interleaved semiological systems that, again, represent the co-extensive nature of kinship ties and the natural order. Typically among a tribe such as the Iguatil, body and facial tattooing, cicatrisation, decoration of ceramics, lip plugs and breech clouts will all contribute to the overall body of language.

  ‘What is notable about the Ur-Bororo is that they exhibit none of these semiological systems. They aren’t tattooed or cicatrised and they dress in a uniform fashion.’

  ‘Dress?’

  ‘Shhh …! Lurie penetrated to the reality of the Ur-Bororo and was horrified by what he found. He locked his secret away. Marston lived among the Ur-Bororo for only a few months and ended up suspicious but still deceived by them. It was left for me to uncover the secret springs and cogs that drive the Ur-Bororo’s world view; it was left for me to reveal them.’

  Janner paused, seemingly for effect. He took a pull on his glass of Piat d’Or and drew out a pack of Embassy Regal. He lit one up and looked around for an ashtray. I passed him a small bowl, the kind you get free when you buy duck pâté at Sainsburys. This he examined with some interest, turning it this way and that in the yellow light of the standard lamp, before resuming his tale.

  ‘The basic language of the Ur-Bororo is fairly simple and easy to learn, for a European. Neither its syntax nor its vocabulary is remarkable. It refers to the world which it is intended to describe with simple literal-mindedness. The juxtaposition of subject-object-predicate, in its clear-cut consistency, would seem to reflect a cosmology marked by the same c
onceptual dualism as our own. This is deceptive. I learnt the basic language of the Ur-Bororo within a couple of months of living with them. As we moved around the rainforest the elders of the tribe took it in turns to tutor me. They would point at objects, mimic actions and so forth. When I had become proficient in this workaday communication they began to refer to more complex ideas and concepts.

  ‘I may add at this stage that their attitude towards me during this period was singular. They were not particularly amazed by me – although to my certain knowledge I was only the third European they had ever met – nor were they overly suspicious. It wasn’t until months later that I was able to adequately characterise their manner: they were bland.

  ‘To begin with, the conceptual language of the Ur-Bororo seemed quite unproblematic. It described a world of animistic deities who needed to be propitiated, kinship rituals that needed to be performed, and so forth. The remarkable thing was that in the life of Ur-Bororo society there was no evidence whatsoever of either propitiation or performance. I would hear some of the older men discussing the vital importance of handling the next batch of initiates: sending the adolescent boys to live in an isolated longhouse in the jungle and arranging for their circumcision. They would talk as if this were imminent, and then nothing would happen.

  ‘The reasons for this became evident as I began to accurately decipher their conceptual language: the Ur-Bororo are a boring tribe.’ Janner paused again.

  A boring tribe? What could that mean?

  ‘When I say that the Ur-Bororo are a boring tribe, this statement is not intended to be pejorative, or worse still, ironic.’ Janner pushed himself forward in his chair, screwed up his eyes, and clenched his hands around the edges of the coffee table. ‘The Ur-Bororo are objectively boring. They also view themselves as boring. Despite the superficially intriguing nature of the tribe, their obscure racial provenance, their fostering of the illusion of similarity to other Amazonian tribes, and the tiered structure of their language, the more time I spent with the Ur-Bororo, the more relentlessly banal they became.

  ‘The Ur-Bororo believe that they were created by the Sky God, that this deity fashioned their forefathers and foremothers out of primordial muck. It wasn’t what the Sky God should have been doing, it should have been doing some finishing work on the heavens and the stars. Creating the Ur-Bororo was what might be called a divine displacement activity. Unlike a great number of isolated tribal groups, the Ur-Bororo do not view themselves as being in any way the “typical” or “essential” human beings. Many such tribes refer to themselves as “The People” or “The Human Beings” and to all others as barbarians, half-animals and so forth. “Ur-Bororo” is a convenient translation of the name neighbouring tribes use for them, which simply means “here before the Bororo”. The Ur-Bororo actually refer to themselves with typically irritating self-deprecation as “The People Who You Wouldn’t Like to be Cornered by at a Party”. They view other tribal peoples as leading infinitely more alluring lives than themselves, and often speak, not without a trace of hurt feelings, of the many parties and other social events to which they are never invited.

  ‘I spoke earlier of a “deeper” conceptual language, spoken by the Ur-Bororo. This is not strictly accurate. The Ur-Bororo have a level of nuance that they can impart to all their conceptual beliefs and this more or less corresponds to the various levels of inflection they can place on their everyday language. To put it another way: the Ur-Bororo speak often of various religious beliefs and accepted cosmological situations but always with the implication that they are at best sceptical. Mostly the “nuance” implies that they are indifferent.

  ‘By extension every word in the Ur-Bororo language has a number of different inflections to express kinds of boredom, or emotional states associated with boredom, such as apathy, ennui, lassitude, enervation, depression, indifference, tedium, and so on. Lurie made the mistake of interpreting the Ur-Bororo language as if “Boring” were the root word. As a result he identified no less than two thousand subjects and predicates corresponding in meaning to the English word. Such as boring hunting, boring gathering, boring fishing, boring sexual intercourse, boring religious ceremony and so on. He was right in one sense – namely that the Ur-Bororo regard most of what they do as a waste of time. In fact the expression that roughly corresponds to “now” in Ur-Bororo is “waste of time”.’

  Janner paused again and contemplated the empty glass he held in his hand.

  ‘Do you want a cup of coffee?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, er … Yeah, OK.’

  ‘It’s only instant, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  Out in the kitchen I looked around at the familiar objects while I waited for the kettle to boil. The dishwasher that had been our pride and joy when we were first married, the joke cruets shaped like Grecian statues which I’d bought in Brixton Market, James’s childish daubs stuck to the fridge with insulating tape. I felt as if I had been looking at these things every day for a thousand days and that nothing had changed. And indeed this was true. Never before had the familiar seemed so … familiar. I returned to the living-room, shaken by my epiphany.

  We sat back in our chairs and the next few moments passed in companionable silence as we used our teaspoons to break up the undissolved chunks of brown goo in our coffee mugs. Eventually Janner began to speak again.

  ‘I had lived among the Ur-Bororo for nine months. I hunted with the men and I gathered with the women. At first I lived with the adolescent boys in their longhouse, but then I built a hut of my own and moved into it. I felt that I had gained about as much of an insight into Ur-Bororo society as I wanted. I had grown thin and sported a long beard. The Ur-Bororo had ceased to approach me with banal conversational sallies about the weather, which never changed anyway, and began to regard me with total indifference. They were well aware of what it was I was doing among them and they regarded the practice of anthropology with indifference as well. They have a saying in Ur-Bororo that can be roughly translated as, “Wherever you go in the world you occupy the same volume of space”.

  ‘As each new day broke over the forest canopy I felt the force of this aphorism. Despite the singular character of the Ur-Bororo I felt that on balance I might as well have never left Reigate.

  ‘I had written up my notes and knew that if I returned to England I would be in a position to complete my doctoral thesis, but I felt a strange sense of inertia. Actually, there was nothing strange about it at all, I simply felt a sense of inertia. There was something wrong with the forest. It felt senescent. Cascades of lianas coated with fungus fell fifty, seventy, a hundred feet down from the vegetable vaults and buttresses. The complicated twists and petrified coils reminded me of nothing so much as an ancient cardigan, lightly frosted with flecks of scalp and snot, as its wearer nods on and on into the fog of old age.

  ‘The Ur-Bororo profess to believe that a spirit inhabits every tree, bush and animal – all living things have a spirit. The sense in which they believe this is ambiguous; it isn’t a positive, assertive belief. Rather, they are content to let the hypothesis stand until it is proved otherwise. These spirits – like the Ur-Bororo themselves – are in a constant state of blank reverie. They are turned in upon the moment, belly-up to the very fact of life.

  ‘It may have been my imagination, or the effect of having been for so long away from society, but I too began to feel the presence of the rainforest as one of transcendent being. The great, damp, dappled room was unfinished and unmade. Somewhere the spirits lay about, bloated on sofas, sleeping off a carbohydrate binge. All days merged into one long Tuesday afternoon. I knew I should leave the Ur-Bororo, but just when I had finally made up my mind to go, something happened. I fell in love.

  ‘It was the time in the Ur-Bororo’s yearly cycle when the tribe decamped en masse. The object of their excursion was to catch the lazy fish. These listless and enervated creatures live exclusively beneath a series of waterfalls, situated on the tributary of
the Amazon which forms the northern boundary of the Ur-Bororo’s territory.

  ‘The tribe moved off in the dawn half-light. As we walked, the sun came up. The jungle gave way to a scrubland, over which rags of mist blew. It was a primordial scene, disturbed only by the incessant, strident chatter of the Ur-Bororo. It was a fact that never ceased to astonish me, that despite their professed utter boredom, the Ur-Bororo continued to have the urge to bore one another still further.

  ‘On this particular morning – just as they had every other morning during the time I had spent among them – they were all telling one another the dreams they had had the night before. They all chose to regard their dreams as singular and unique. This provided them with the rationale for constant repetition. In truth, you have never heard anything more crushingly obvious than an Ur-Bororo dream anecdote. They went on and on, repeating the same patterns and the same caricatures of reality. It was like a kind of surreal nursery wallpaper. “And then I turned into a fish,” one would say. “That’s funny,” would come the utterly predictable reply, “I changed into a fish in my dream as well, and today we’re going fishing.” And so on. Strict correspondence between dream and reality, that was the Ur-Bororo’s idea of profundity and as a consequence they placed only the most irritating interpretations on their dreams. As far as I was aware the Ur-Bororo had no particular view about the status of the unconscious – they certainly didn’t attach any mystical significance to it. On the whole the impression their dreams gave was of a kind of psychic clearing house where all the detritus of the waking world could be packaged away into neat coincidences.

  ‘While I listened to this drivel I gnawed the inside of my cheek with irritation:

  ‘ “I dreamt I was in a forest.”