Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

‘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.