The Shapeless Unease Read online

  But then came studies on the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon, who do not make recursive sentences. Their language doesn’t permit them to make the sentence I made above, or even something like When it rains I’ll take shelter. For the Pirahã it would have to be It rains. I take shelter. They don’t embed a thought inside a thought, nor travel from one time or place to another within a single sentence.

  When it rains, unless I take shelter, I get wet.

  Unless I want to get wet, I take shelter when it rains.

  So that I stay dry when it rains, I take shelter.

  For the Pirahã tribe there are no sentences like these – there is none of this restless ranging from one hypothesis to another. Instead, It rains. I take shelter. Or, I take shelter. I don’t get wet. Or, I take shelter. I stay dry.

  The Pirahã seem incapable of abstraction. They seem literal in the extreme – their ability to learn new grammar rules through a computerised game, by predicting which way an icon of a monkey would go when a type of sentence was generated, was thwarted in almost every case by their inability to see the monkey as real, and therefore to care what it would do next. They became fascinated and distracted by the icon, or by the colours on the screen. One of them fell asleep in the middle of the test. ‘They don’t do new things’ was the repeated assertion of Daniel Everett, the only westerner who has ever got anywhere near knowing and understanding the Pirahã language and culture. They don’t tell stories. They don’t make art. They have no supernatural or transcendental beliefs. They don’t have individual or collective memories that go back more than one or two generations. They don’t have fixed words for colours. They don’t have numbers.

  Yet they are a bright, alert, capable, witty people who are one of the only tribes in the world to have survived – largely in the jungle – without any concession to the modern world. A meal might involve sucking the brains from a just-killed rat. A house is fronds of palm or a piece of leather strung over four sticks in the ground. They have no possessions. Their language might involve speaking, but it might also occur through whistling, singing or humming. And their experience of the present moment is seemingly absolute. ‘The Pirahã’s excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river bend is hard to describe,’ Everett writes. ‘They see this almost as travelling into another dimension.’6

  There is a Pirahã word that Everett heard often and couldn’t deduce the meaning of: xibipiio. Sometimes it would be a noun, sometimes a verb, sometimes an adjective or adverb. So and so would xibipiio go upriver, and xibipiio come back. The fire flame would be xibipiio-ing. Over time Everett realised that it designated a concept, something like going in and out of experience – ‘crossing the border between experience and non-experience’. Anything not in the here and now disappears from experience, it xibipiios, and arrives back in experience as once again the here and now. There isn’t a ‘there’ or a ‘then’, there are just the things xibipiio-ing in and out of the here and now.

  There is no past or future tense as such in Pirahã; the language has two tense-like morphemes – remote things (not here and now) are appended by -a and proximate things (here and now) by -i. These morphemes don’t so much describe time as whether the thing spoken about is in the speaker’s direct experience or not. The Pirahã language doesn’t lay experiences out on a past–present–future continuum as almost every other language does. In English we can place events quite precisely on this continuum: it had rained, it rained, it has rained, it rains, it is raining, it will rain, it will have rained. The Pirahã can only say whether the rain is proximate (here) or not.

  They can then modify a verb to qualify the claims they make about it. If they say ‘It rained in the night’, the verb ‘rain’ will be modified by one of three morphemes to convey how they know it rained, i.e. whether they heard about it (someone told them), deduced it (saw the ground was wet in the morning), or saw/heard it for themselves. The Pirahã language and culture is not only literal but evidence-based. How do you know something happened? If the line of hearsay becomes too long, involving too many steps away from experience, the thing is no longer deemed to be of any importance to speak or think about. This is why they don’t have transcendental beliefs or collective memories and stories and myths that go back generations.

  What a thing this is, to be so firmly entrenched in the here and now. What a thing. We are, I am, spread chaotically in time. Flung about. I can leap thirty-seven years in a moment; I can be six again, listening to my mum singing while she cleans the silver candelabra she treasures, that reminds her of a life she doesn’t have. I can sidestep into another possible version of myself now, one who made different, better decisions. I can rest my entire life on the cranky hinge of the word ‘if’. My life is when and until and yesterday and tomorrow and a minute ago and next year and then and again and forever and never.

  Time leaks everywhere into English, some ten per cent of the most commonly used words are expressions of time. The Pirahã language has almost no words that depict time. This is all of them: another day; now; already; day; night; low water; high water; full moon; during the day; noon; sunset/sunrise; early morning, before sunrise. Their words for these are literally descriptive – the expression for day is ‘in sun’, for noon ‘in sun big be’ and for night ‘be at fire’.

  Are there whole slices and movements of time that the Pirahã people don’t experience, then? If they can only speak in terms of ‘another day’, do they not experience ‘yesterday’ and ‘a year ago’ as different things? If something doesn’t exist in a language, does it also not exist in the minds of those who speak the language?

  I wondered that when I tried to teach the perfect tense to Japanese students; there isn’t a perfect tense in Japanese. When I taught the sentence I have eaten I got blank looks, incomprehension. Why not just say I ate? Why say I have been to Europe when you could just say I went to Europe? I tried to illustrate: I ate (before, at some time you need to specify – this morning, all day yesterday); I have eaten (just now, I’m still full). Blank looks, incomprehension. In the perfect tense a period of time opens out, the past, not as separate from the present, but running up to and meeting the present. I have eaten; we’ve danced all night; it’s been a year. Do the Japanese not experience that segment of time? Or is it that they deal with it in other linguistic ways, or by inference and context?

  Everett described the Pirahã’s mode of being as ‘live here and now’. If you live here and now, you don’t need recursion in language because there’s no conceptual need to join together ideas or states according to their order in time, or in terms of which causes which, or in terms of hypothetical outcomes. You don’t need a past or future tense if you’re living only now. You don’t need a large stock of words that try to nail down instances of time along a horizontal continuum from the distant past to the distant future, a continuum that also has an enormous elastic stretch into the vertical planes of virtual time, time as it intersects with space, time as happening elsewhere, real or imagined.

  What would it be like to be a person of the Pirahã tribe? How would it be to not experience that continuum? For one’s mind to not be an infinitely recursive wheel within a wheel? It feels in some ways a relief, even to imagine such a mode of living, but it feels almost non-human too. And yet there the Pirahã are, as human as human can be. I can’t imagine it. I can’t imagine being anything but submersed in time, it ticking in every cell.

  Time has always felt to me so alive and strange; even when I was a child listening to my mother singing ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ I knew something odd was going on. My hands, transferring marbles in and out of the cart, would feel warm and have the sensation of swelling to ten times their size. I knew that the song was addressing something ungraspable but intimate. Our minds are lost in space and time. Or not lost, I don’t know, maybe when you’ve gone down enough wormholes and black holes and opened into enough new realities there’s no longer a question of being lost. It’s only when you get stuck in th
e black holes and wormholes that you begin to feel lost.

  Sometimes time, for me, is a medium with a sort of viscosity, like water, or like oil, or like mud, depending on how it impacts on me. I move through it with differing degrees of ease and difficulty, and am aware of it getting lumpier, less consistent, as I get older. I see it reorganising my face and body, shapes shifting – a youthful soft line becomes harsh and old, a youthful harsh line soft and old. I see it dismantle people I love. Sometimes it’s like a surface I hit when I desperately want something to happen and am tired of waiting. Then I watch the clock and the second hand appears to quiver long and lingering between every shift. Other times it moves around the clock face, fleet and even, as if helped by a tail wind.

  It’s an abundance, so much of it; a king-size duvet on a single bed that I can grasp in fistfuls. Then it’s like scratching at barren ground; not enough of it to make anything, do anything. It’s darkness. My life appears as shapes within it, ones that come and go. It’s a horse I must lasso. I’m the horse and it has me lassoed.

  St Augustine asked: what is time but a set of nothings? The ‘no longer’ and the ‘not yet’ separated by the vanishing now. Is that where the Pirahã live, in a vanishing now? Nights are spent thinking about this. I try to imagine a life without narrative, which is easier in the night, because the night is itself without narrative – the way the hours move, less like a stream flowing somewhere and more like water swilling in a shallow pool, until suddenly the pool is drained and it’s morning. Do they, the Pirahã? Live in a vanishing now?

  I don’t know if St Augustine is right except on the level of technicality; the past itself might be no-longer, and the future itself not-yet, but my thoughts and feelings about the past are here, now, as I lie awake remembering my childhood bed as a rowing boat, or remembering my mother singing, and my thoughts and feelings about the future are here, now, as I envisage years of this, being awake all night, worrying and wondering and envisaging years more. That past isn’t no-longer if it’s alive in me now, and by the same token that future isn’t not-yet. Both are now; in imagination, yes, but through imagination they arrive as physical fact, in my neural pathways, and in my emotions whose flavour and intensity affect the rapidity of my heartbeat and the rhythm of my breathing. Lying here awake, confronting a future that will bring years more of lying here awake, I’ve made a fist to protect myself; there are little moons incised on my palms where my nails have dug in. These little moons aren’t not-yet, they’re here, my fear of the future really put them here. The future is now.

  As for the continual vanishing of the now, well, here is also the continual birth of the now. A live birth, from a living now; there are no deaths, there’s no hiatus. It seems to me that now is the largest, most predictable and most durable of all things, and that the question isn’t so much: what is time but a set of nothings? But more: what is time but an indomitable something? An unscalable wall of now. When I think of the Pirahã I don’t imagine them cresting the brink of a collapsing moment, each step bringing an existential vertigo. I imagine them fishing, skinning animals, drinking, painting their faces, building shelter. It rains. We stay dry. Their here and now seems as solid to me as one brick – it rains – laid on another – we stay dry.

  What would it be like to live and think like the Pirahã? For the world to be continually xibipiio-ing? No mad spooling out of events through time, all chain-linked and dragged each by the next, one event causing another, one event blamed for another, one past pain locked into a present pain to cause future pain; no. No things crossing the boundary from experience to non-experience. Just things disappearing and reappearing around the bend of the river.

  I was ill once and in pain – long ago, in my early twenties. It was a kidney infection; in moments of almost hallucinatory pain it occurred to me I was being granted a way of knowing in some sense what my dog knew back when she’d suffered the same, or it was a way of making recompense for her suffering. It felt that my kidneys were the size of rugby balls, the pain distorting and hijacking my perception. It was a hot, solid, ceaseless ache that left me hardly able to move. Then, one night, lying in my makeshift bed on the living-room floor, I thought I’d died. All the pain had suddenly gone and my body was dense but light, like an air-filled lung, and when I moved my arm to look at my hand I saw it with complete equanimity. Am I dead, I asked, am I dead? I couldn’t know. I was only curious, not at all afraid.

  I watched the clock on the video and it was moving, and I wondered what that meant. It could be moving in an afterlife. Its numbers were just numbers. They bore no relationship to me. They weren’t tugging in a forwards direction, they were just things gently changing, rearranging, in the same way that the clouds rearrange, and they were rearranging in a vast stillness. They were xibipiio-ing. Only: here I am. Then: here I am. Then: here I am.

  Is that akin to the Pirahã’s experience of time? Is that where the dance is, the dance T. S. Eliot told us about when we read Four Quartets as uncomprehending teenagers? At the still point, there the dance is. My painless night watching the video clock was the most serene I’ve ever known, and yet there the dance was – an extreme aliveness even as I thought I was dead. The aliveness I felt was, I think, some reverb happening in sudden stillness. And in fact the feeling that I might be dead came from the new awareness of being alive – not the usual awareness of doing this or that, or of the pain in my kidney, or being sleepy or hot, but an awareness that there was a thing beyond all this that was alive, and that thing was me. Now that there wasn’t any pain or sleepiness or heat to mask it, I could know it directly, and now that I knew it I also knew the possibility of not-it. Life and death were one sphere with a continuous surface.

  I watched the video clock that night for hours, and it was only by seeing that the minutes were following evenly on from each other in a plausible, predictable and sustained way that I came, eventually, to doubt being dead. I watched the two-fold working of time on the digital display – the undulation of the minutes as they built up and were knocked back to zero, and the steady accumulation of hours stacked one on top of the other, and under this persistent, silent double advance my stillness was eroded, a fortress that had given way to siege.

  In those erosions, pain came slowly in, then thirst, and tiredness. I felt the weight of time again, its perpetual nagging. Time kicks, kicks, kicks its way in with the tip of a toe. Time is the thing that breaks apart life from death, eases apart their embrace. Time, not life, is what we live. Time, not life, is what runs out. Time pushes death over there, where we can see it, and then offers itself as finite protection. Time is the breeding ground of fear and despair.

  Do the Pirahã fail to sleep? Do they worry? Do they ever pace the floor? It was night, I think now, filled with hopeless rage. It was Tuesday night and now it’s Wednesday morning. Tuesday has become Wednesday and not a shred of sleep has separated out the two. How can I survive these forty-hour days? All these minutes of the night and day, time is living me into submission; I give up, I say into the darkness and then into the morning light, I give up.

  I have been awake all night and now it’s morning, say I. Panic building, a story of woe unfurling. I have been awake all night, all the long night, and now it’s morning. It was Tuesday and I didn’t sleep and now it’s Wednesday.

  It is night. I don’t sleep. It is morning, say the Pirahã, for whom this, with these recursions, is impossible. For whom the past has just flickered out of experience, gone.

  It is Tuesday, they might say, with factual unrecursive ease, with no wind of time to turn the windmills of their minds. It is Tuesday. I don’t sleep. It is Wednesday.

  We’ll go to Wales.

  We won’t take much, just the whole car full. It’s January. We’ll walk by the sea. We’ll swim in the sea? Wetsuits in, playing cards, Scrabble just in case, laptops, books, wellies, Netflix log-in, washing powder, fire lighters, logs, camera, bikes. Not bikes. Bikes. Bikes in. Anyone can sleep in Wales. It’s dark and col
d and there’s nothing to do. We’ll sleep in Wales, sleep for England.

  We’ll hear the stream. We’ll look out in the morning where we parked wonkily in the dark and we still won’t see the stream but we’ll hear it, and we’ll see the rain. We’ll light the fire. Matches. Matches. Matches? We’ll walk to the shop to buy matches. We’ll light the fire and watch the flames, we’ll feel like Tarzan and Jane. Me Tarzan, you Jane.

  We’ll cook our repertoire: Monday pasta, Tuesday chilli, Wednesday baked potatoes, Thursday pasta again, Friday curry. We won’t make curry, there aren’t any spices, we’ll make it into a pasta sauce instead. Pasta again. Saturday out. Sunday baked potatoes again. Monday repeat. There’s paprika. We’ll add that to everything. We’ll juice carrots: eight carrots, two centimetres of juice. We’ll juice red cabbage. We won’t juice red cabbage again.

  We’ll walk on the cliffs. We’ll wrap our heads in scarves against the wind. We’ll walk for hours above the roaring sea. We’ll see a seal, no, an otter. An otter? An otter! We’ll watch a swimmer in the bay and pretend to be sad about not having our wetsuits. We’ll think of them hanging up at the house like new year’s resolutions. We’ll see herons and we’ll disappoint a swan with our breadlessness. We’ll regret not bringing food, for ourselves as much as for the swan. We never bring food, why do we never bring food? One day, we’ll buy a proper flask that keeps things hot. We’ll buy Nordic walking poles and gaiters and a Labrador. We’ll live by the sea, one of these days.

  We’ll watch the rain. We’ll hear the rain. We’ll see the rain, we’ll see the rain make lakes of fields. We’ll get wet and covered in cow shit. We’ll see the stream gush above the bridge. We’ll drive two hours to see a house we’ll never buy, and have to turn back half a mile before it because the road is flooded. We won’t buy that, we’ll say. It floods.