The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

by Will Self

  Clearly this fascism of the very animus had to be counteracted. Sikorski, scion of a wealthy East Anglian landowning family, at one time a brilliant clinician with a promising career in orthodox medicine ahead of him, took the plunge and followed the path dictated by his own convictions. After the initial Quantity Theory multi-disciplinary team broke up Sikorski disappeared. Later, there were rumours that he had had himself sectioned; that he had undergone more than twenty ECT treatments, that he had been overdosed with Halperidol. And later still that he had been partially leucotomised … privately … by a friend.

  He emerged two years later on the fringes of the metropolis. By now he was at the head of a ragged band, which styled itself as ‘the Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists’. The aim of this collection of university dropouts, druggies, actors and other assorted social deviants was to act as a kind of emergency oil rig capping team in the context of mental health.

  Like a method acting workshop they refined and perfected their assumption of symptoms of mental illness. (Occasionally members of the troupe would appear on one of the regional news-feature programmes to give the folks at home a demo.) Then, they would descend to picket day-care centres, long-term asylums, secure wards for the criminally insane and of course analysts’ and therapists’ offices. Lounging, squirming, ranting, collectively deluding, over a two- or three-year period the Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists became a familiar sight around Britain. They had the same sort of cachet – as a bizarre diversion threading their way through the conformist crowd – as the Hare Krishnas had had some ten or so years before.

  I had always had a kind of a weakness for Sikorski. He was such an attractive man, and so enthusiastic, given to large passions. Very Slav. He was really the Bakunin of psychology, asexual and subject to borrowing large amounts of money that he couldn’t possibly hope to repay.

  Now he stands. And then struts back and forth on the sward. Arms outstretched, he clutches up divots and presses them to his brow. His mouth opens and closes, but I can’t hear what he’s saying. Apparently he has been invited to Denver as a gift to the municipality from the conference organisers. The Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists are going to practise their strange arts in the vicinity of the state mental hospital and ameliorate the conditions of the inhabitants … that’s the idea at any rate.

  Plenty of people, some of them quite respectable thinkers, believe implicitly in the efficacy of Radical Psychic Field Disruption. What a joke! These people haven’t a clue what Quantity Theory is really about. Quantity Theory is not concerned with total physical cause, it operates at the level of the signifier. People are willing to come forward in droves and claim that they have been helped by the actions of Sikorski and his followers. And it is considered slightly hip by the intelligentsia to piggyback on a field disrupting trip in order to obtain relief from some trying neurosis or other – to shuck off a co-dependant relationship, or ‘deal’ with some emotion or other. I have been told that nowadays it’s virtually impossible to pass a mental institution of any kind at all, without seeing a little ersatz ship of fools moored by the main door and in the shadows, lurking, a pasty-faced scion of the Sunday Review benefiting obscurely from the local field disruption.

  As soon as my address is over and the ovation has been tidied away I stride out of the auditorium. Walking across the concourse I turn to Dagglebert, outraged.

  ‘What the hell are these people doing here? Why have the conference organisers allowed them into the precincts of the university?’

  ‘Oh, them,’ says Dagglebert – and as he speaks I see once again the utter stupidity of employing a research assistant who drools – ‘They’re here by invitation of the conference, as a gift to the municipality of Denver …’

  ‘I know that, I know that!’ I turn away from Dagglebert and head towards the cafeteria, which lies on the far side of the precinct. Dagglebert, undeterred, follows me, drooling the while.

  Safely ensconced behind a chest-high arras of plastic bamboo shoots I watch the ebb and flow of conferees as the swarm coming from the auditorium runs into the traffic on the precinct and the Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists enter from the outside. Rocking and dribbling they stand here and there talking to former colleagues, half-remembered through a fog of tranquillisers.

  I see my own former colleagues there as well. Zack Busner stands with a tall, shrouded girl, nervously rolling and unrolling the end of his mohair tie. Phillip Hurst has his briefcase propped open on one knee, foot up on the rim of a concrete shrubbery container as he riffles through notes for the benefit of a stocky individual, who flexes and reflexes his muscular arms. I see Adam Harley deep in conversation with Janner, the anthropologist, who I know vaguely. Janner is wearing what looks like a second-hand Burton overcoat and carries a plastic bag emblazoned with the logo of a popular chain of South London convenience stores. Janner is a repellent individual, with something of Alkan about him – the way he tilts his head back in order to slurp the catarrh down his throat is especially striking. I have no idea why he has chosen to be in Denver.

  And here and there dotted around this space are other familiar figures. Faces from the past that split and reform with speech. A manic, Jewish type who looks like an accountant clutches a sheaf of marketing brochures under his arm, and stands engrossed, while Stein, that millenarian charlatan, lays down his new law. Sikorski is moving among the throng. There’s something hilarious about the way his false penis quests ahead of him. Especially if you know, as I do, that he’s completely impotent. He stops to shake hands and chat with well-wishers. However, he hasn’t knocked off work altogether. A slowly rotating strand of spittle still threads through his tangled, fair beard, twisting this way and that, catching and refracting the sunlight streaming through the skylights above.

  And as I observe Sikorski and his cohorts the nervous irritation that has gripped me since I arrived in Denver starts to fade away. I am left with a sense that this conference, this scene, is a watershed for Quantity Theory. A heaven-sent second opportunity for me to re-establish the school of thought at the correct level with the correct emphasis. Where has Quantity Theory gone wrong? In its application? In its development as a therapy? As a method of social control? As a tool of radical psychiatric policy? In all and yet none of these areas. The truth, as ever, comes to me purely, in one flash of instant realisation. I knock over the styrofoam beaker full of tepid coffee that Dagglebert has placed at my elbow as I fumble through my pockets for pencil and notebook. I start to jot down a first attempt to express the realisation in some form of notation:

  Q(Q> <[Q]) = Q(Q> <[Q])

  Of course it would be possible to qualify this. It may be that this is itself too blindingly, elegantly simple and that the value ‘Q’ may have to be defined with some reference to a value external to itself. But for the moment it stands happily to explain what I see around me.

  The Radical Psychic Field Disruptionists; the American students dressed in puffy, autumnal sports gear; the heads of a dozen university faculties gesturing with passion over a subject they neither know nor understand. And all of them, mark me, all of them, confined within definable societal groupings.

  The Quantity Theory of Insanity has reached its first great epistemological watershed. Like theoretical physics it must now account for the very phenomenon it has helped to identify. It must reconstruct the proof of its own ground on the fact of its own enactment. Clearly, by concentrating so many aberrant and near-aberrant people in one place or series of places, the very fact of Quantity Theory has been impacting on the sanity quotient itself.

  The task now is to derive an equation which would make it possible to establish whether what I suspect is true. Namely that as more and more insanity is concentrated around educational institutions, so levels of mental illness in the rest of society …

  Select Bibliography

  Ford, Hurst, Harley, Busner & Sikorski, ‘Some Aspects of Sanity Quotient Mechanisms in a Witless Shetland Commune’, British Journal
of Ephemera, September, 1974.

  Ford, H., ‘Teaching Stockbrokers Ring Dancing’, Practical Mental Health, January, 1975.

  Ford, H., The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Publish Yourself Books, London 1976 (limited edition).

  Ford, H., ‘Repressing People Who Laugh Alone: Towards Effective Public Transport’, The Bus, October, 1975.

  Harley, T., ‘Shamanism and Soya Futures’, World Bank Research Briefs, September, 1979.

  Hurst, P., ‘Nailbiting in Bournemouth versus Bed-Wetting in Poole: Action and Amelioration’, Journal of Psychology, March, 1976.

  Hurst, P., ‘General Census of Sanity Quotients in the UK’, HMSO, January, 1980.

  Sikorski, A., ‘Daddy, Mummy’s Mad.’ ‘Good.’, Shefcott and Willer, London 1976.

  Mono-Cellular

  I used to play a game as a child. Well, not so much a game, it was more of a pastime. Lying in bed, if I squinted at the shafts of light that streamed in through the curtains they became solid. Solid tubes of brightness. I could extend and contract these tubes simply by the degree to which I squinted. It was a sensation of the most incredible kind of control, a control of a peripheral world that lay behind the thin sham of mere workaday appearances. A secret world. Lots of things happened to me during my childhood. It wasn’t happy or unhappy, it was eventful, but what I remember best are those solid tubes of brightness.

  I remember them best because they’re back, albeit in a different form. I’m sitting in the living-room and there are these solid tubes of brightness wreathing just about everything in sight. A blue haze runs over the back of the leather three-seater sofa against the far wall. It shimmers across the carpet, six inches above the surface of the Wilton twistpile, mimicking, in a ghostly kind of a way, the diamond patterning. Purple haze round the pelmets. Green haze pulsing gently in front of the wall unit. And through the double doors, with their distorting panes of toughened glass, I can see my misbegotten children in the diningroom. They are lying in orderly rows, their backs humped at angles, a militaristic school of miniature cetaceans. Above each one there is a little corona of black light. If I squint I can harden the corona to a cloud. If I strain it fades out to almost nothing, a faint retinal after-image, nothing more.

  You see, my feeling is this: I’m going to sit here for some time. Probably for the next three hours. You see, if I move, there’s a little sort of wart of pain – a hard little thing – stuck in the crook of my arm. And I hate the way it bobbles and jostles me when I move. It does it even when I perform a very simple action like taking a sip of beer. God knows what it would do to me if I walked through to the kitchen and fried up some spicy mushrooms. That would be a real mistake.

  It’s a mistake I don’t intend to make. I have adjusted my environment. I’ve erected a little bubble here. I’m like one of those children that are allergic to everything. I cannot leave my bubble. I would be risking death. The wrong sort of stimulation could be fatal to me at this point. I mark down especially the spicy mushrooms in this context. Although I am not subject to those mushrooms in any real sense. Nor their foil container.

  There are a lot more of my children upstairs. They are sleeping quietly. When the morning comes and Gavin calls … they will be taken away from me. Into Care. Yes, I like that ‘Care’. With a capital ‘C’. They’re sleeping up there swathed in robes of bubbled plastic, girded with corrugated cardboard. But for this wart, this worrisome wart, I would join them. Lie for a while, in the small back bedroom. Go into the second bedroom and then disport myself in the master bedroom. Lie among them like a patriarch. Actually, I could do this. If I really wanted to. But I don’t. I want to be right here when the dawn makes the railings across the road fizz. When an aureole projects out from the statue of the naked woman at Henley’s Corner. When Gavin rings …

  Actually. Actually, I think, I think Gavin will ring quite soon. It’s nearly 6.00 a.m. and there’s the time difference to consider. I’m worried about something, no, let me tell you. I’m worried that you think me needlessly cryptic: children, warts, spicy mushrooms, purple pelmets… but let me do it my way. Because I’ve already finished. As far as I can see, each sentence, each clause I utter contains the whole story. Beginning, middle and end. If I were to be true to my vision I’d shut up now. I could always shake my head and subside in a snowflake whirl of fragmented light … so let me be cryptic. If I hold out I can pretend that I haven’t finished telling the story and that makes it worth telling, you see.

  There are a lot of books lying around this chair. It’s like a little village. They are all half open, spines upward. Little houses of knowledge. I’ve always liked books about How To Do Things. How To Do Economics, How To Do Finance, How To Form a Company, How To Enamel Jewellery, How To Build a Boat. Within the past hour or so I’ve looked at each of these books in turn. And in the next hour or so I’ll do it again. I’ve done the same thing with the swathe of magazines and newspapers in the wedge of space between my chair and the wall. I’ll come to the records later.

  I look at each of the books in turn. I read a sentence or a short paragraph. And then, that’s it. I’ve built the boat. Made the pendant. Floated the company. I have the same problem as I do with my own story. Everything is contained within everything. But I don’t despair, I continue to pick up each of my books in turn, riffle through it, seize on a paragraph and then abandon it. Early on in the night the same was true of other rooms in the house. In the kitchen, before the spicy mushrooms gained their grip, I read cookery. In the toilet, humour. Upstairs it was novels. I daresay the books are all still there, abandoned villages.

  I search the books and the newspapers for one fact, one piece of information, that will provide the key … but I already know it. What I’ve neglected to tell you is that I’m old, really old. Inhumanly old. I’m as old as a long-buried culvert. Bricks fall from my walls and expose the mud. I’m a huge wrinkled finger. I’ve been in the bath too long. My flesh hangs on me in wattled pouches. Every part of my clothing is a sweaty gusset. And I haven’t mentioned the pulsing sound. Or the booming sound. The great wash of the ocean that pulls my head around on my neck.

  And then again. That’s better. Good to pull taut the clothesline. It’s awfully depressing to see those grey many-times-washed aertex shirts. Trailing their cuffs in the dirt. Ha! Ha, ha … We bought a company, off the shelf. I like that ‘off the shelf’. Makes me think of neat wire boxes full of miniature executives, all stacked on racks. Not quite like that. Our company, that is, Gavin’s and mine: Ocean Ltd. Formerly trading as plankton farmers, for fish food, you see. Pet fish. Estuary – somewhere. Now, ours. And fitted out with new directors: Gavin, myself and Mr Rabindarath. Unwittingly in this last instance. He never leaves his room except to pick up his prescription. Gavin kindly relieves him of the bother of reading any of the correspondence relating to Ocean Ltd. And, indeed, of his responsibility as Financial Director thereof. Good of Gavin. Mr Rabindarath is a hopeless neurotic. He would worry.

  I feel a lot better. Well enough to take on the kitchen. The purple edging around everything has stopped furiously oscillating. Either that or it now vibrates with such frequency that it appears static. At any rate, objects have achieved a crystalline purity of line. This beer can, for example. Have you ever seen a purer beer can than this? Why, the drawing of the Castlemaine Brewery in Brisbane is so sharp, one might be standing right outside of it. I drink. That flat taste. Absolute purity of line.

  I lift myself from the chair. A little stiff. To be expected. Cigarette ash forms a network of lines pointing to my crotch. It’s a crotch rubbing! Ha! Ha, ha …

  Walking, like most other human activities, requires a great deal of assurance. If you want it to look right you have to undertake it with tremendous confidence and verve. You can usually spot a young or inexperienced walker by their lack of style, or their assumption of a style which is too old and complex for them. Pretentious walking can be a real problem. But here, I stride into the hall quite naturally. I’m on my way to the ki
tchen … ‘Spicy mushrooms,’ you say? Well, to hell with them, is my reply. You were taken in by my bullshit.

  There is no discontinuation of floor covering between the front room and the hall, which is comforting. The careful two-cornered ascent of the staircase in the corner is reassuring as well. I bought this watercolour, hung centrally on the wall, over the oval hall table, in Betws-y-Coed. It depicts a stone cottage, in the mid-ground. In the foreground there is a field and a dry-stone wall; in the background, clouds. It’s tremendously homey, this watercolour, as is the table, bought in Beccles, which looks dark and woody in the light that spills through from the front room. It imparts a mahogany, old solidity to my house, which it doesn’t really deserve.

  Even the children, the fruit of my labours, look innocuous enough here, viewed in receding twos, marching up the treads of the staircase and huddling around the door to the cupboard under the stairs. They’ve lost their militaristic mien. I can pause here, tent my hand casually on the oval table, pinning down some junk mail, and recount.

  Gavin says that this house is a cluttered little cabinet of lower-middle-class knick-knacks. That it betrays my yearning for respectability. All I know is that I could never be comfortable in his minimal environment: spotlights, wire-wooled mouldings, varnished wood, little rugs, that’s all.

  When I bought this house, a necessary bit of deficit financing for Ocean Ltd, I was determined that it should be a place of real respite. At the time I was spending almost all day sitting up against freestanding baffles covered in sheeny grey fabric, talking to men whose hair pointed and whose gestures were punctuated by little stabs with aluminium ballpoints. Coming back to this house was an escape. I’ve only lived here a few months, but it really feels like home.