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.