The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

Understanding the Ur-Bororo

When I first met Janner at Reigate in the early Seventies, he’d been an unprepossessing character. He was a driven young man whose wimpy physical appearance all too accurately complemented his obsessive nature. His body looked as if it had been constructed out of pipecleaners dunked repeatedly in flesh-coloured wax. All his features were eroded and soft except for his nose, which was the droplet of wax that hardens as it runs down the shaft of the candle. There was also something fungoid about Janner, it was somehow indefinable, but I always suspected that underneath his clothes Janner had athlete’s foot — all over his entire body.

You mustn’t misunderstand me, in a manner of speaking Janner and I were best friends. Actually, that is a little strong, it was rather that it was us against the rest — Janner and I versus the entire faculty and the entire student body combined.

I suppose I now realise that my feelings are not Janner’s responsibility and they never were. He just had the misfortune to come along at that point in my life where I was open to the idea of mystery. Janner took the part of Prospero; I gnashed and yowled — and somewhere on the island lurked the beautiful, the tantalising, the Ur-Bororo.

Not everyone has the opportunity to experience a real mystery in their lives. I at least did, even if the disillusionment that has followed the resolution of my mystery sometimes seems worse than the shuttered ignorance I might otherwise have enjoyed. This then is the story of a rite of passage. A coming of age that took ten years to arrive. And although it was my maturity that was at issue, it is Janner who is the central character of this story.

I can believe that in a more stimulating environment, somewhere where intellectual qualities are admired and social peculiarities sought after, Janner would have been a tremendous success. He was an excellent conversationalist, witty and informed. And if there was something rather repulsive about the way catarrh gurgled and huffled up and down his windpipe when he was speaking, it was more than compensated for by his animation, his excitement, and his capacity for getting completely involved with ideas.

Janner and I weren’t appreciated by the rest of the student body at Reigate. We thought them immature and pathetic, with their passé, hippy hair and consuming passion for incredibly long guitar solos. I dare say they thought nothing of us at all. We were peripheral.

You guessed it; I was jealous. I didn’t want to be sectioned off with waxy Janner. I wanted to be mingling my honeyed locks with similar honeyed locks to the sound of those stringed bagpipes. I wanted to provide an ideal arterial road for crabs, but I wasn’t allowed to play. It was the students in the arts faculties who were at the centre of most of the cliques. If, like me, you were reading geography and physical education, you were ruled out of court — especially if you didn’t look right, or talk right. Without these essential qualifications I was marginalised. At school my ability to do the four hundred metres hurdles comfortably under fifty seconds had made me a hero; at Reigate it was derided.

Ostracised by the cliques that mattered I found Janner, and I’ve lived to regret it. If only I’d poached my brain with psychotropics! Today I could be living a peaceful life, haggling with a recalcitrant DHSS official in rural Wales, or beating a damp strip of carpet hung over a sagging clothesline outside some inner-city squat. Janner cheated me out of this, his extreme example bred my moderation. At nineteen I could have gone either way.

I cemented my friendship with Janner during long walks in what passed for countryside around Reigate. Even at that time this part of Surrey was just the odds and ends that had been forgotten in the clashes between adjacent municipalities. The irregular strips of grey and brown farmland, the purposeless concrete aprons stippled with weeds and the low, humped downs covered with sooty, stained scrub. We traversed them all and as we walked he talked.

Janner was an anthropology student. Now, of course, he is The Anthropologist, but in those days he was simply one student among several, five to be precise. Quite why Reigate had a department of anthropology was a mystery to most of the faculty and certainly to the students. Hardly anyone knew about the Lurie Foundation, who had endowed it, and — even I didn’t know until years later — why.

During the time Janner and I were at Reigate (you could hardly say ‘up’ at Reigate) the department was run by Dr Marston. He was a striking-looking man. To say he had a prognathous jaw would have been a gross understatement. His jaw shot out in a dead flat line from his neck and went on travelling for quite a while. Looking at the rest of his face the most obvious explanation was that his chin was desperately trying to escape his formidably beetling brows. These rolled down over his eyes like great lowering storm clouds. Add to this two steady black eyes, tiny little teeth, a keel for a nose, and a mouth trying to hide behind a fringe of savagely cut black beard, and you had someone whose skull looked as if it had been assembled in an attempt to perpetrate a nineteenth-century hoax.

To see Dr Marston and Janner talking to one another was to feel that one was witnessing the meeting between two different species that had just discovered a mutual language. Not that I saw them together that often; Dr Marston had no time for me, and Janner, after his first year, was excused from regular attendance at the college and allowed to get on with his own research.

I think it would be fair to say (and please remember that this is a turn of phrase resolved solely for the use of the extremely opinionated and the hopelessly diffident) that during that year I received a fairly comprehensive anthropological education at second hand. Janner had very little interest in what I was studying. At best he used my scant geographical knowledge as a sort of card index, and when he was discoursing on the habits and customs of this or that isolated people he would consult my internal map of the world. For most of the time we were together I listened and Janner talked.

Janner talked of the pioneers in his field. He was in awe of the colossal stature of the first men and women who had aspired to objectivity in relation to the study of humankind. He talked to me of their theories and hypotheses, their intrigues and battles, their collections of objects and artefacts, and came back again and again, as we strode round and round the brown hills, to their fieldwork.

For Janner all life was a prelude to fieldwork. Reigate was only an antechamber to the real world. A world in which Janner wanted to submerge himself completely — in order to become a pure observer. He was unmoved by the relativistic, structuralist and post-structuralist theories of anthropology with their painful concern with the effect of the observer on the observed. Janner had no doubts; as soon as he got into the field he would effectively disappear, becoming like a battery of sensitive recording devices hidden in a tree. His whole life was leading up to this pure period of observation. Janner wanted to be the ultimate voyeur. He wanted to sit on a kitchen chair in the corner of the world and watch while societies played with themselves.

When Janner wasn’t telling me about infibulation among the Tuareg or Shan propitiation ceremonies, he was sharing with me the fruits of his concerted observation of Reigate society. Janner was intrigued by Reigate. He saw it as a unique society at a crucial point in its development.

Walking with him, up by the county hospital, or down in the network of lanes that formed the old town, I would squirm with embarrassment as Janner stopped passersby; milkmen, clerks and housewives. Janner encouraged them to talk about themselves, their lives, and what they were doing, just like that; impromptu, with no explanation. Needless to say they invariably obliged, and usually fulsomely.

As we passed cinema queues or discos on our interminable walks, or stopped off at cafés to eat bacon sandwiches, Janner would shape and form what he observed into a delicate tableau of practice, ritual and belief. Reigate was for him a ‘society’ and as such was as worthy of respect as any other society. It was not for him to judge the relative values of killing a bandicoot versus taking a girl on the back of your Yamaha 250 up the A23 at a hundred miles an hour; both were equally valid rites of passage.

After his first year at Reigate Janner moved out of his digs at Mrs Beasley’s on Station Road, and into a shed on the edge of the North Downs. It was his intention to get started as soon as possible on the business of living authentically — in harmony with his chosen object of field study — for by now Janner had fallen under the spell of the Ur-Bororo.

If it was unusual to study anthropology at Reigate, rather than some other branch of the humanities, it was even more unusual for an undergraduate student to nurse dreams of going to another continent for postgraduate field study. Dr Marston was well used to packing his charges off to Prestatyn to study the decline of Methodist Valley communities, or to Yorkshire to study the decline of moorland Unitarian communities, or to the Orkneys to study the decline of offshore gull-eating communities. Reigate was, if not exactly famous, at least moderately well known for its tradition of doing work on stagnating sub-societal groups. Dr Marston’s own doctorate had been entitled ‘Ritual Tiffin and Teatime Taboo: Declining Practices Among Retired Indian Army Colonels in Cheltenham’.

But that being said, Dr Marston himself had had a brief period of field study abroad. This was among the Ur-Bororo of the Paquatyl region of the Amazon. It was Marston who first fired Janner with enthusiasm for this hitherto undistinguished tribe of Indians. I have no idea what he told Janner, certainly it must have contained an element of truth, but Janner told me a severely restricted version. If one listened to Janner on the subject one soon found out that his information about the Ur-Bororo consisted almost entirely of negative statements. What was known was hearsay and very little was known; what little hearsay was known was hopelessly out of date — and so forth. I didn’t trouble to challenge Janner over this, by now he was beyond my reach. He had retired to his hut on the Downs, was seldom seen at the college, and dissuaded me, politely but firmly, from calling on him.

I did go a couple of times to see him. In a way I suppose I wanted to plead with him not to abandon me. For Janner, with his pipe-stem torso sheathed in the stringy tube of a sleeveless, Fair Isle sweater, and with his eyes wetly gleaming behind round lenses, was more than a friend as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t admit it to myself but I was a little bit in love with him. He told me that his hut was a faithful reconstruction of an Ur-Bororo traditional dwelling. I didn’t believe him for a second; anyone looking at the hut could see that it had been ordered out of the back of Exchange & Mart. Its creosoted clapboard sides, its macadamised roofing, its one little leaded window, the way the floor wasn’t level with the ground. All of these facts betrayed its prefabricated nature. Inside the hut we drank tea out of crude clay vessels. Once again Janner assured me that these were of traditional Ur-Bororo manufacture, but I couldn’t really see the point of the statement. By now I could see just by looking at him that he was lost to me. He no longer needed me as a passive intermediary between his mind and the world he studied. He had found his destiny.

I left the hut without pleading at all and cycled back to Reigate. I had accepted that from now on I would be alone. But it’s difficult to get that Wertherish in Reigate, certainly not when you’re lodging in a clipped crescent of double-glazed, dormered windows. My depression soon ate itself. Without Janner to talk to I was forced back among my fellow students. I made some other friends; I even had a girlfriend. It wasn’t that I forgot about Janner, that would have been impossible, it was just that I tried to construct a life for myself to which he wouldn’t be relevant. I succeeded in this, but it had its own consequences.

During the next ten years very little happened to me. Sure, I left Reigate and went to teach at a school in Sanderstead. I met, fell in love with, and speedily married the geography and PE teacher at a neighbouring school. We became owner-occupiers and a child arrived, who was small, well made and finished; and dreamy and introverted to the point of imbecility. We had friends and opinions, both in moderation. It was a full life, seemingly without severe problems. I had grown through my modest and unturbulent adolescence into a modest and unturbulent adult. I even gained a certain celebrity for my phlegm at the school where I taught, because I could face down aggressive pupils with indifference. Some of my colleagues became convinced that within me lurked quite violent impulses. This, I’m afraid, was far from the truth. The reality was that I felt padded, as if all the gaps in my view of the world had been neatly filled with some kind of cavity life insulation. I felt ludicrously contained and static. I saw events unroll around me. I felt, I emoted, but the volume control was always on. Somewhere along the line someone had clapped a mute on my head and I hadn’t any idea who, or why.

During this whole period I heard nothing of Janner. I knew he had graduated from Reigate with unprecedented first-class honours and, with Dr Marston’s blessing and a none too generous grant from the SSRC, had gone abroad to visit his precious tribe. But beyond that, nothing. The only evidence I had of Janner’s existence during that ten-year period was finding by chance, while looking absent-mindedly through a stack of World Music records, an album Janner had acted as ‘consultant producer’ for. It was entitled Some Chants from Failed Cultures. I bought it immediately and rushed home.

If I had hoped for some kind of enlightenment, or to recapture the rapture of our scrubland walks together, I was to be disappointed. The album was gloomy and perverse. The producers had visited diverse groups of indigenes around the world, remarkable only for their persistence in chanting to no avail. Here were the Ketchem of Belize with their muttering eructation ‘Fall Out of the Water — Fish’. The I-Arana of Guinea, disillusioned cargo cultists who moaned gently, ‘Get Me Room Service’, and many others too tedious and depressing to mention.

The gist of all these failed chants I gathered from the sleeve notes, written by Janner. The chants themselves were badly recorded and incomprehensible. After two or three plays the needle on our record player started to score twists of vinyl out of the bottom of the grooves — and that was the end of that. Janner’s sleeve notes, as far as I was concerned, were unilluminating and discursive. They told me nothing concrete about his involvement with the project and gave me no clue as to where he might be now. When I tried to find out more through the record company I drew another blank. Ha-Cha-Cha Records had gone into receivership.

I may not have found the friend of my adolescence, but the record had gravely unsettled me. I had assumed that Janner was by now safely ensconced in some provincial university’s anthropology department, his tremendous enthusiasm and drive winding down through the dreary cycle of teaching. But the record and its sleeve notes presented an alternative picture, a picture of a different Janner and a more unsettled career. The evening that I brought the record home I sat in the living-room for hours, using the time while my wife was at her class, to try and fathom Janner’s fate, with only the flimsy record sleeve to go on.

My son James didn’t help. He’d picked up a couple of the failed chants and as I put him to bed that night he said, in passable Uraic, ‘Lo! The crops are withering.’ Somehow, even among the cartoon stickers and the bright bendy limbs of bendy toys, this didn’t sound as incongruous as it perhaps should have.

Then, nothing. For another two years no word or sign of Janner. I didn’t pursue him, but I did go to the trouble of finding out about the Lurie Foundation, the body which I knew had part-funded Janner’s research into the Ur-Bororo. The secretary of the foundation was unforthcoming. He wrote me a letter stating the aims of the foundation in the barest outline: ‘To contribute to the understanding of the Ur-Bororo, a bursary will be provided for one postgraduate student every twenty years. Following his field-work the student will be required to lodge a paper of not less than 30,000 words with the Lurie Archive at the British Library.’ The letter was signed by Dr Marston. I spoke to a librarian at the British Library, but she told me that all the documents relating to the Lurie Foundation were held in a closed stack. I had reached a dead end.

Janner had represented for me a set of possibilities that were unfulfilled. Even after twelve years these wider horizons continued to advance beyond my measured tread. Occasionally, sitting in the staff-room during a vacant period, I would suddenly find myself crying. I felt the tears, damp on my cheek, and into my stomach came a bubble of sweet sentimentality. But my hands gripped the edges of the Education Supplement too tightly, held it too stiffly in front of my face. All around me the talk was of interest rates. From time to time a corduroy trouser leg loomed into view.

Then one day in late summer, just after the school sports day, I was walking down the hill towards Purley when something caught my eye in the window of a launderette. An etiolated, waxy-looking individual was having an altercation with a rotund, middle-aged woman. Voices were raised and it was clear that they were on the verge of coming to blows. I heard the woman say quite distinctly, ‘Coming in here and sitting staring at other people’s laundry, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Haven’t you got any laundry of your own to look at, you filthy pervert?’ She raised her hand to strike the man. As he turned to ward off the blow I saw his profile. It was Janner.

I stepped inside the launderette. Janner had evaded the first blow and was backing off to avoid a second. I touched him on the shoulder and said in my best disciplinary manner, ‘Would you step outside for a minute please, sir?’ The Protectress of Gussets was immediately convinced that here were the Proper Authorities. She surrendered her temporary deputy’s badge with good grace. Janner stepped outside.

And continued a conversation with me as if it had been subject only to an hour’s, rather than a decade’s interruption.

‘I’m living down here in Purley [a gurgle of catarrh] in a funny sort of a place. I’ve only been back from abroad for a couple of months. I was just observing this business of observing laundry. I’m convinced that the spinning circle of laundry has some of the properties of the mandala.’

We were by now heading down the hill at a brisk trot. Janner went on and on and on at length, trying to fit Purley laundering practices into a complex and highly unconvincing portrait of South London suburban society. He had lost none of his vigour. Any attempts I made to break into his monologue he interpreted as a desire to know still more. We fetched up by the station. Janner was still talking, still gesticulating.

‘You see, Wingate Crescent represents a kind of epicentre; in order to reach the High Street you have to describe a circle. The positioning of the four launderettes — Washmatic, Blue Ribbon, Purley Way and Allnite — is also circular.’ He stopped as if he had reached some kind of self-evident conclusion. I broke in.

‘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 conceptual 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.”

‘ “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.

‘Well, you must come again. You two seem to have such a lot to catch up on.’

‘We do, but next time you must come over to our place. My wife doesn’t know many people in Purley and she’s trying to get out of the house a bit more now that she’s had the baby.’

I sat upright with a jerk. What was that Janner had said? Wife? Baby? My wife had said goodnight and reminded me to lock up. She was padding quietly up the stairs.

‘Your wife, Janner, is it …?’

‘Jane, yes. Now if you keep quiet I’ll tell you the rest of the story.

‘I courted Jane for three weeks. This involved little more than sitting around with her parents, making small talk. The Ur-Bororo have an almost inexhaustible appetite for small talk. Like the English they preface almost all conversations with a lengthy discussion of the weather, although in their monotonous climate there is far less to talk about. So little in fact, that they are reduced to mulling over the minutiae of temperature, humidity and precipitation. Jane’s parents were affable enough characters. They seemed to have no objection to our marriage, as long as we were seen to observe the customary formalities and rituals. I was packed off to receive instruction from the shaman.

‘The shaman was uncharacteristically interesting for an Ur-Bororo. I suppose it was something to do with his profession. His shed was set slightly apart from those of the rest of the tribe. (You remember the shed I lived in when we were at Reigate. It was almost an exact replica of an Ur-Bororo dwelling shed, except of course that the Amazonian ones have rather rougher clapboarding and no window, only a square opening.)

‘ “Come in my dear boy, do come in,” he said. “So you’re going to marry young Jane and take her away from us are you?” I nodded my assent.

‘ “Well, I expect as an anthropologist that you know a little of our beliefs, don’t you? How we were created inadvertently by the Sky God. How we live our lives. How we practise circumcision and infibulation as cleansing rituals. How our young men undergo rigorous rites of passage and how our initiation rites last for weeks and involve the ingestion of toxic quantities of psychotropic roots; you know all this, don’t you?”

‘ “Well, in outline, yes, but I can’t say that I’ve ever seen any of you ever do any of these things at all.”

‘ “No. Quite right, jolly good, jolly good. That’s the ticket, you seem to have a good head on your shoulders. Of course we don’t actually do any of these things.”

‘ “But why? Surely you’re frightened of all the gods and spirits?”

‘ “Well, we don’t really believe in them in quite that way you know. We believe in their validity as er … examples, metaphors if you will, of the way that things are, but we don’t actually believe in tree spirits, good Lord no!”

‘The shaman chuckled for quite a while at the thought of such excessive religious zeal, and then offered me a cup of coya. Coya is a lukewarm drink made from the powdered root of the coya tree, it looks alarmingly like instant coffee, but the taste is a lot blander. I couldn’t be bothered to argue with this absurd figure. Unlike other tribes who have shamen, the status of the shaman in Ur-Bororo society is ambiguous and somewhat irrelevant. The shaman often sketched out the form of some of the rigorous rituals the Ur-Bororo nominally believe in, but hardly anyone even bothered to attend these mock performances. On the whole he was regarded with a kind of amused disdain. Although it was still thought important to have pale versions of the ceremonies performed for births, marriages and deaths.

‘I saw the shaman a couple more times before our marriage. He went through the tired motions of instructing me in the Ur-Bororo faith and also retailed me a lot of useless advice on how to make marriage work. Stuff about counting to ten when I got angry, giving Jane the opportunity to state her case when we had a disagreement, and all this kind of twaddle, the sort of thing you’d expect from an advice column in a fourth-rate women’s magazine.

‘The ceremony itself was held to be a great success. Twenty or thirty of us gathered outside the shaman’s shed and Jane and I joined hands while we all listened to him irritate us by wittering inanities in a high fluting voice. I can quite honestly say that I’ve never seen a drabber social occasion than that Ur-Bororo wedding ceremony. All of us in our grey tunics, standing in the gloomy clearing being comprehensively bored.

‘After the actual ceremony, the guests disported themselves around the clearing, talking nineteen to the dozen. Jane led me among them and introduced me to aunts, cousins and friends. All of whom I knew too well already. The aunts pinched my cheek and made fatuous comments. There was much ingestion of rather watery manioc beer, which was followed, inevitably, by the kind of turgid flatulence which passes for high spirits among the Ur-Bororo.

‘Jane has a brother, David, and the Ur-Bororo knew that I intended to take both of them back to England with me after the wedding, but they showed little surprise or emotion about it. They also knew that I was convinced that their society was doomed to extinction, but this too failed to exercise them. They had no particular feelings about the coming of civilisation and I found it impossible to rouse them out of their torpor. To be honest, I had long since given up trying.

‘Our departure was an unemotional experience. There were slight hugs, pecks on the cheek and handclasps all round. Jane seemed mildly piqued. As our canoe slid off down river, one of the younger men cried out, “Come back soon, if you can stand the pace!” And then we were gone. In two days we were at the town of Mentzos where we boarded a launch that took us to the mouth of the Amazon. Two days after that we were in Buenos Aires and a day later we arrived in Purley, where we have remained ever since.’

‘And that’s it? That’s the story?’

‘Yes. Like I said, I live in Purley now and I do a little teaching at Croydon Polytechnic. If you like to put it this way: I’m cured of my obsession with the Ur-Bororo.’

‘But what about the Lurie Foundation? Don’t you have to publish your work? Won’t it be popularised in the Sunday supplements?’

‘No, no, there’s no necessity for that. All Lurie wanted was for some other poor idiot to suffer the unbelievable tedium he experienced when staying with the Ur-Bororo in the Thirties.’

‘And what about Jane and David? You can’t tell me that you’ve managed to integrate them into English society with no difficulty at all. You said that the Ur-Bororo are racially distinct, what does that mean?’

‘Yes that’s true, and I suppose in a way intriguing; the Ur-Bororo don’t really have any defining characteristics as a people. They aren’t Mongoloid or Negro or Caucasian or anything for that matter. But their appearance as a people is so unremarkable that one — how can I put it — doesn’t feel inclined to remark upon it. As for Jane, I’m very much in love with her. I must confess that although we can’t be said to have a great rapport, I still find her maddeningly erotic; it’s something about her complete inertia when she’s in bed, it makes me feel so … so like a man. We have a child now, Derek, and he’s all that you could want. And David still lives with us. Why don’t you and your wife come over next week and meet them, you’ll be able to see how well they’ve assimilated.’

After Janner had gone I sat staring at the twin elements of the electric fire. It was high summer and they were cold and lifeless and covered with a fine furring of dust which I knew would singe with a metallic smell when winter came. Funny how no one ever thinks of dusting the elements of electric fires. Perhaps there was room on the market for some kind of specialised product.

Exactly a week later my wife and I stood outside 47 Fernwood Crescent. The house was lit up in a cheery sort of way, the curtains were pulled back from the windows and inside everything looked spick and span. Number 47 was a more or less typical Purley residence, semi-detached with a corrugated car port to the side of the house in lieu of the garage. Like the other residents of Fernwood Crescent Janner had taken the trouble to paint the exterior woodwork and drainpipes in an individual colour, in his case bright green. The bell ding-donged under my finger and the green door swung open.

‘You must be Jane?’

‘That’s right, come in. I’ve heard such a lot about you.’

What I first noticed about her was her accent, remarkably flat and colourless — it was pure South London, right down to the slightly nasal character. I can’t say that I paid any attention at all to what she looked like; in this respect Janner’s description of her was entirely accurate. She was like someone that you pass in a crowd, a face that you momentarily focus on and then forget for ever. As for her brother David, who got up from the sofa to greet us, there was an obvious family resemblance.

We hung up our coats and sat down in a rough semi-circle around the redundant fireplace, and exchanged the conversational inanities which signify ‘getting-to-know-one-another’. After a while Janner came in. ‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you arrive. I’ve just been in the garden doing a little pottering. Would anyone like a drink?’ He took orders and repaired to the kitchen. By the time he returned I was deeply embroiled with David in a discussion of the relative merits of the Dewey decimal system, as against other methods of cataloguing. Janner caught the tail-end of something we were saying. ‘I see David’s caught you already,’ he laughed. ‘He won’t let up now, he’s a demon for classification since he started work at the library. Why, he’s even colour-coded the spice jars in the kitchen.’ We all laughed at this.

What Janner said was true. David wouldn’t let go of me all evening. He was an irritating conversationalist who had the habit of not only repeating everything that you said, but also ending your sentences for you, so that a typical exchange went something like this:

‘Yes, we try and maintain a microfiche …’

‘Catalogue at the school for the older students — maintain a microfiche catalogue for the older students, hmn …’

I would have felt like hitting David if it wasn’t for the fact that he was so affable and ingratiating. Dinner was unremarkable. We had some kind of casseroled meat with vegetables, but I couldn’t say what kind of meat it was.

David’s pressing interest in taxonomy cast a deep sense of enervation over me. I nearly slumped down on my chair during the dessert course and once or twice the vinyl did give off a squawk. My wife and Jane were deep in conversation about the Local Education Authority and Janner had disappeared upstairs to change the baby’s nappy. I excused myself from David and tiptoed after him.

I found him in a little room under the eaves which had been tricked out as a nursery. He was deftly manipulating the Wet Ones, as a man born to it. The baby was a nondescript little thing with putty-coloured skin and a whorl of indeterminate mousey hair on its little scalp.

‘Takes after its mother,’ said Janner grasping two tiny feet in his one bony hand. ‘Can’t say I’m sorry. Wouldn’t wish my face on any child.’

‘Janner, what are you going to do?’

‘Do? Do about what?’

‘About Jane, about David, about the Ur-Bororo.’

‘Why, nothing, nothing at all.’ He fastened the sticky-backed tapes and plunked the baby back in its cot. It stared up at us with blank, unfocused, incurious eyes.

‘But Janner, you’re a scientist, you have a duty to tell. Is it the Lurie Foundation, have they got some kind of a hold on you?’

‘Nothing of the sort. Of course I could publish if I wanted to, but for some reason the whole subject of the Ur-Bororo leaves me cold, I just can’t get worked up about it. I don’t think the world would be any the wiser for my insights.’

Soon afterwards we took our leave. All the way home my wife talked about Jane. They seemed to have really hit it off together. I was silent, entirely preoccupied by my thoughts about Janner and the Ur-Bororo.

Our two families became quite close during that autumn. I should say that we saw each other at least once a fortnight, sometimes more. I even grew to appreciate David. There was something admirable about his dogged adherence to the most simple categories he could latch on to. As for Janner, I raised the subject of the Ur-Bororo with him several more times but he was completely unconcerned. He was in the process of becoming quite a minor celebrity — the sort of pop academic the general public takes up from time to time and turns into a television personality. His book linking the observation of swirling laundry to traditional Buddhist meditation surprisingly had become a hit and he was in the process of negotiating serialisation with the colour supplements.

As for me, I went on teaching, playing volleyball and asking recalcitrant pupils the names of power stations. The lagging which had for a brief period been removed from my mind came back — together with new, improved, cavity-wall insulation.