Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

‘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.”

‘ “A rainforest?”

‘ “Sort of. I was walking along with some other people in single file. You know what I mean?”

‘ “Were they the kind of people you wouldn’t like to be cornered by at a party?”

‘ “Definitely, it was us. Then I started turning into …” (What would it be this time? A bird, a lizard, a moth, a yam … no, it was…) “… a twig! Isn’t that amazing?”

‘ “Amazing.”

‘Yeah, amazing. I was so absorbed by my mounting irritation that I simply hadn’t noticed the person who was walking in front of me along the forest path. But, coming out into a clearing for a moment, a clear shaft of bright light penetrated the forest canopy and struck the path. Suddenly I saw a young girl, bathed in bright light, her lissom figure edged with gold. She turned to face me. She was wearing the traditional Ur-Bororo garment — a long shapeless grey shift. She glanced for a moment into my eyes; hers were filmed over with immobility, her hand picked and fidgeted at the hem of her shift. She made a little moue , brushed a fly off her top lip and said, “I dreamt last night that I was hairball.”

‘At that precise moment I fell in love. The girl’s name was Jane. She was the daughter of one of the tribal elders, although that was of hardly any real significance. You must understand that by this time I was pretty well conditioned by the Ur-Bororo’s aesthetic values and to me Jane appeared to be, if not exactly beautiful, at least very appealing, in a homely, comfortable sort of a way. She was in many ways a typical Ur-Bororo, of medium height, with a rather pasty complexion and mousey hair. Her features were rather lumpy, but roughly symmetrical, and her mouth was tantalising, downturned by an infuriatingly erotic expression of sullen indifference.

‘Our courtship started immediately. There are no particular guidelines for courtship in Ur-Bororo society. In fact the whole Ur-Bororo attitude to sex, gender and sexuality is muddied and ambiguous. At least formally, pre-marital sex, homosexuality and infidelity are frowned on, but in practice the Ur-Bororo’s sexual drive is so circumscribed that no one really minds what anyone else gets up to. The general reaction is simply mild amazement that you have the energy for it.

‘All day the kingfishers dived in and out of the glistening brown stream. And the Ur-Bororo stood about in the shallows, perfectly motionless for minutes on end, scrutinising the water. From time to time one of them would bend down and with infinite languor pull out a fish. I soon grew bored and wandered off with Jane into the undergrowth. We strolled along side by side, neither speaking nor touching. The midday sun was high overhead, but its rays barely penetrated the forest canopy two hundred feet above us.

‘Gradually, the strangeness of the situation began to impinge on my idle consciousness and I started to look around at the forest, as if for the first time. I had paid attention to the natural world only insofar as it had a bearing on the life of the Ur-Bororo, but now I found myself taking the alien scene in in an aesthetic sense, with the eyes of a lover. And a pretty dull and unexciting scene it was too. You didn’t have to be a botanist to see that this area of the rainforest was exceptionally lacking in variegation as far as flora and fauna were concerned. The dun-coloured trunks of the tall trees lifted off into the sky like so many irregular lamp standards, while the immediate foreground was occupied by rank upon rank of rhododendron-type shrubs, none of which seemed to be in flower. It was a scene of unrivalled monotony — the Amazonian equivalent of an enormous municipal park.

‘I knew that Jane and I were straying towards the traditional boundary of the Ur-Bororo lands, but neither of us was unduly concerned. Although the neighbouring tribe, the Yanumani, were notorious as headhunters and cannibals, their attempts to engage the young Ur-Bororo men in ritual warfare had been met in the past with such apathy on the part of the Ur-Bororo that they had long since given up trying. There was neither the sense of danger nor the beauty of nature to augment my sense of erotic frisson and after an hour or so’s walk it entirely died away. I wondered what I was doing walking in the middle of nowhere with this rather sulky, drably dressed young woman. Then I saw the fag packet.

‘It was an old Silk Cut packet, crushed flat and muddy, the inked lettering faded but still sharply legible, especially in this alien context. But I didn’t have long to marvel at its incongruous presence, I could already hear the distant whine of chainsaws. I turned to Jane.

‘ “White men?”

‘ “Yes, they’re extending the Pan-American Highway through here. The estimated completion date is June 1985.” She tugged and picked at her hem.

‘ “But aren’t you frightened? Aren’t you concerned? The coming of the road will destroy your entire culture, it may even destroy you.”

‘ “Big deal.”

‘We turned round and started back to the river. That night as Jane and I lay together, her leaden form cutting off my circulation and gradually crushing the life out of my arm, I made a decision …’

There was the sound of the front door closing and my wife came into the room. She was carrying her bicycle lamps and wearing an orange cagoule.

‘What, still talking? Has James been calling, darling?’

‘No, not a peep out of him all evening.’

‘Good, that means he hasn’t done it. I’ll get him up now and then put him down for the night.’ She turned to Janner, ‘James is going through a bed-wetting stage.’

‘Really?’ said Janner. ‘You know, I wet the bed right up until I went to Reigate.’ And they were off again. Janner seemed to sense no incongruity at all in moving directly from relating the high drama of his sojourn with the Ur-Bororo, to discussing the virtues of rubber sheets with my wife. I squeaked back in the vinyl of my armchair and waited for them to wind one another down. I had to hear the rest of Janner’s story, I wouldn’t let him go until he had finished. If necessary I would force him to stay until morning.