Hunters and Gatherers , livre ebook

By the same author THE FOOD CHAIN
Copyright
First paperback published in
the United States in 1995 by
The Overlook Press
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com

For bulk and special sales contact sales@overlookny.com
Copyright © 1991 Geoff Nicholson
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN 978-1-46830-360-5
Contents
Copyright

ONE: The accumulation

TWO: The dispersal
ONE
The accumulation

‘… in all collections, Sir, the desire of augmenting it grows stronger in proportion to the advance in acquisition; as motion is accelerated by the continuance of the impetus.’
Samuel Johnson, quoted in
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
Tuesday, May 8th, 1781.
Dust collects. It falls on old moquette, on walnut veneer, on corduroy and melamine. It settles on picture rails, in the curves of porcelain shepherdesses, in the corners of junk-rooms; ground-in dirt unmoved by dusters and vacuum cleaners; an amalgam of carbon, dead skin, industrial waste; fall out. It passes through doors and windows, lodges in our clothes and hair, collects in every crevice.
We call in the dustmen, the refuse collectors. They take away what we no longer need. Our waste is smashed, burned, compacted, taken to tips and dumps where mountains of waste grow, decay and collapse.
We throw away what no longer suits us, what we no longer want to have near; the left-overs and the peelings and things out of fashion, and old love letters; things we once thought part of ourselves.
Men scavenge the dumps. They, and flocks of seagulls, live on what is thrown away. It is a salvage operation and a re-cycling. The men select. They have an eye for what is still usable and repairable, what can be sold, what still has value.
In bedrooms and attics and garages, or displayed on shelves, and in cases and cabinets, on mantelpieces, in drawers and boxes and albums, people keep their collections. Anything and everything. The small, delicate and personal, the vast and public; snapshots, Roman coins, architectural masonry, steam engines, biplanes. Things to be treasured. Collectors’ items. Antiques and curios.
There is a mental junk-room. It contains decades-old conversations, childhood games, class registers, amazing facts, lines from songs, bad jokes, strange but true stories, dates of battles, anecdotes. It does not seem a very complete collection. It is not the full set, yet we seem to need it all. We don’t like to throw anything away, even though much gets lost. It is a gathering, a build-up, a load of rubbish, like the hoard of gold and the stockpile of weapons. It is more than the sum of its parts.
We need our accumulations and conglomerations, our massing and amassing. There is safety in numbers. There is miserliness and acquisitiveness. The coffers are never full enough.
Money sits in banks. It works. Interest accrues and compounds. Taxes become due, are assessed and collected. Money attracts money. Litter collects in the gutter, dirt under the fingernails. People collect their wages, their dole, their carriage clocks, their pensions. At the bookmakers one or two collect their winnings.
In our rooms, after the furore, we collect ourselves, collect our thoughts. We wish to appear cool, calm and collected. Clothes are collected from the dry cleaners, children are collected from school. Fares on the buses, tickets on the train. The postbox gives the time of the next collection.
These groupings, these special interest collections, souvenirs, forms of tourism, these archives and museums and reference libraries of the self, these fine words and fine stories to be found in the collected works, this treasury, this high point in the anthologist’s art, this miscellany …
There is nothing random here. There is a significant clustering, deeper structures, a raking-in and rounding-up, localised stacks of meaning. Groups of things: flocks, schools, prides, exultations. Collective nouns. An accumulation of detail.
Charms against dissolution, protection against loss and dispersal, against the unconnectedness of things.
It begins with a visit from a woman claiming to be a market researcher.
On the outskirts of Sheffield, Jim is lying on the bed in his mobile home. He is thinking about the nature of obsession; about fame, about washing cars, about people who commmit murders in order to become famous. He has a couple of pints of extra-strong lager inside him. There is a knock on the door. He opens it, and the young woman standing there says, ‘Hello, I’m conducting a survey into educational resources. I wonder if you’d mind answering a few questions.’ He is a bit drunk so he says, ‘Well, come on in.’
She isn’t the type of woman who normally comes knocking at Jim’s door, and she’s not the type who would normally step inside if invited. Above all else she looks business-like. She is wearing a severe, navy blue business suit, with just a hint of shoulder-pad. Her hair is very short. She carries a heavy brief-case. Her face is young, pleasant, and not nearly as business-like as her clothes.
‘Want a beer?’ Jim asks.
‘I shouldn’t.’
‘Go on.’
‘Usually I wouldn’t, but it’s been a long day, a very long day. You’re very sweet. Thank you.’
‘I’ll try to find a glass.’
‘You’re wonderfully kind.’
‘You know, just before you knocked on the door, I was thinking how easy life must be for some people. They know what they want and they can see a way of getting it, and they just pursue it. Or they have an all-consuming interest in something, and personally I don’t think it matters all that much what it is, whether it’s model railways or ballet or poker, but, for people like that, life’s easy.’
‘I can see you’re an intelligent man,’ she says.
He pours her a beer.
‘But I’m not like that,’ Jim continues. ‘I’m not obsessed. I think I could be if I found the right thing, but so far I haven’t. I’m just ordinary. I watch television. I go for a walk. I go to the pub …’
‘This survey is a very simple one,’ she says. ‘It’s designed by experts at a well known American university. We’re trying to find out people’s attitudes on a range of educational issues.’
Jim isn’t much interested in educational issues. He considers the weight of his beer can. It is light, nearly empty. He thinks he’d better have another one lined up before she begins her questions. He shambles into the kitchenette. She is not thrown.
‘Would you say that education is a good thing?’ she calls after him.
He agrees as he takes the beer from the fridge.
‘And do you agree that education should be accessible to all?’
He returns with his beer and agrees to that too.
‘And do you think that the amount of money a person has should or shouldn’t be a determining factor in the quality of that education?’
‘I think it shouldn’t,’ he says earnestly. ‘You see, I was thinking about people who get fame for the stupidest reasons. Like all those people in The Guinness Book of Records who are only famous for knocking down dominoes, or regurgitating goldfish. I suppose it’s like an obsession for them. And, like I said, I don’t have any obsessions. I’m interested in things in general but not anything in particular. You know?’
‘I do. Yes. You’re obviously a thinking person. That’s good. So would you say that knowledge is power?’
‘I’ve never thought about that one, but I suppose it could be. It depends on what you know, probably.’
‘Excuse me,’ her voice changes and is no longer briskly professional, ‘would you mind if I took off my shoes? They’re killing me. It’s been a bad day, a really, really bad day. Sorry. Let me get back to the survey. If there was a simple, easy, cost-effective, infallible way of increasing knowledge, then wouldn’t you agree that all reasonable people would be interested in it?’
‘I suppose.’
‘So, in other words, you are interested in finding a simple, easy, cost-effective way of increasing your knowledge.’
‘Oh no. Is this where you try to sell me a set of encyclopedias?’
The muscles in her face dance. She tries to smile but her mouth can’t be forced into the necessary adjustments, and tears are about to ooze from her eyes.
‘Shit,’ she says. ‘That’s what everybody says.’
‘It seems a bit obvious.’
‘I know it’s obvious. That’s the whole problem. It’s really stupid. This is my first week doing this job. There’s a script you have to follow. There are all these things I have to say, and they’re all really stupid. I don’t see why anybody would ever fall for it. I don’t see how I’m ever going to sell any encyclopedias.’
She makes a noise that in other circumstances might be mistaken for a yelp of hysterical laughter, but Jim recognises it as a howl of misery.
‘I really don’t think I want any encyclopedias,’ he says.
‘Of course you don’t. Nobody does. People just want to wallow in their own ignorance. They think it’s bliss.’
Jim wonders if he’s entitled to feel insulted, but she doesn’t seem to be trying to insult him, at least not him personally. She is looking girlish and petulant now. She throws her brief-case, which she’s been holding on her knee until now, on to the floor. It is unfastened. Its contents slew across the floor; sample pages of text, maps, line-drawings and photographs fan out like a deck of cards. They are undeniably eye-catching. Jim’s eye is caught. He sees a map of Africa in purple and lurid orange, a photograph of Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot , a diagram showing the reproductive organs of different animals (not to scale), a cut-away drawing of a steam train, an artist’s impression of Mercury, and several pages of large, easy-to-read text with s