7.9 One evening, a few months after I’d joined the Company, and about half a year before we won the Project contract, I found myself, still in the throes of these thoughts, drinking with a woman in a bar — a random stranger with whom I’d struck up a conversation. At some point, I stopped listening to what she was saying to me and looked instead at the objects she had placed around her: a cigarette pack, a plastic lighter, a dog-eared travelcard and a key-fob, fanned out in a rough semicircle across the zinc counter, like a spread of cards. She was, like many single women in her situation, using these objects to create a buffer zone around herself, in which her lifestyle, personality and, not least, availability were simultaneously signaled and withheld. I’d bought her a fresh drink; beer-froth was brimming over her glass’s rim and running down onto the counter, where it streaked in rivulets between the objects, linking them together as it sogged their edges. Where previously I would have made a mental note of all these objects and then, à la Malinowski, written them down later so that each of them could, when analyzed, yield its semantic content (the key-fob had a picture of some elaborately hairstyled space-princess on it, a pre- or proto-Leian heroine dating right back to the days of silent cinema), now I simply looked at them, blurring my vision till my own gaze became soggy and I lost myself among them.
7.10 And as I did, I felt a fragile, almost epiphanic tingling of what-if-ness come across me. What if …? What if just coexisting with these objects and this person, letting my own edges run among them, occupying this moment, or, more to the point, allowing it to occupy me, to blot and soak me up, rather than treating it as feed-data for a later stock-taking — what if all this, maybe, was part of the Great Report? What if the Report might somehow, in some way, be lived, be be-d, rather than written? I didn’t go home with this girl, this frothy, streaky, princess-in-a-galaxy-far-away woman, and in fact never saw her again — but that didn’t matter. Fulgurate, Peyman had said. As I drank with her, and as I left the bar, and over the next days, and weeks, a new field, a new realm, a whole new Order of anthropological experience seemed to burst open and fulgurate before me, its pieces glittering and dancing madly as they started to take up positions within what I suspected might, one day, turn out to be a stable and coherent pattern — an Order of which I, not Malinowski, would be founding father. What if …? In my reverie, I saw a future where, with my name echoing inside their heads, ethnographers—U-thnographers! — no longer scrolling through dead entrails of events hoping to unpack the meaning of their gestures, would instead place themselves inside events and situations as they unfolded—naïvely, blithely and, most of all, live—their participation-from-within transforming life by bringing its true substance to the fore at every instant, in the instant, not as future knowledge but as the instant itself, which, like a ripened pod, would overswell its bounds and rupture, spawning meaning, spreading it forth to all corners of the world … Then the Great Report would not be something that was either to-come or completed, in-the-past: it would be all now. Present-tense anthropology; anthropology as way-of-life. That was it: Present-Tense Anthropology™; an anthropology that bathed in presence, and in nowness — bathed in it as in a deep, bubbling and nymph-saturated well.
7.11 And yet … And yet … And yet. The Great Report still had to be composed. That was the deaclass="underline" with Peyman, with the age. Even if it wasn’t composed in a way that conformed to any previous anthropological model, it nonetheless had, somehow, to find a form. It was all a question of form. What fluid, morphing hybrid could I come up with to be equal to that task? What medium, or media, would it inhabit? Would it tell a story? If so, how, and about what, or whom? If not, how would it all congeal, around what cohere? How could I elevate the photos I had pinned about my walls, the sketches, doodles, musings, all the stuff cached on my hard-drive, the audio-files and diaries not my own — how could I elevate all these from secondary sources to be quantified, sucked dry, then cast away, to primary players in this story, or non-story? Above and beyond this, how could life as lived become transmogrified from field-work into work, the Work? Here my thinking, I’ll admit, got vague even by Peyman’s standards. What if …? I imagined cells of clandestine new-ethnographic operators doing strange things in deliberate, strategic ways, like those conceptual artists from the sixties who made careers out of following strangers around for hours on end or triggering unusual events, specific situations (fainting, or rather pretending to, or simply lying down, in a busy street, say, or staging a quarrel in a café)… Could that kind of stuff, that kind of practice, be applied to modern life? And then, as Present-Tense Anthropology™, could it be somehow passed on, communicated to (or even replicated by) collaborators who might, through the very act of recognizing it, cause it to be simultaneously registered, logged, archived … Could that be it …? How would it work …? I tried to picture cells, “chapters” of new-ethnographic agents, like you get with biker-gangs and spies, each of them primed, initiated, privy to a set of protocols and gestures, that a tacit call to order might activate, and re-activate time and again … And then the rituals and ceremonies that ensued — might that be the Report …? Would this new Order then, like a cult gestating in the catacombs of some great city it will one day come to dominate, pulsate and grow with each one of these covert iterations — until, eventually, it might, yes, fulgurate: erupt, break cover, soar upwards and, in the light of full, unhindered proclamation, found its Church? Then the world would be made over; there’d be jubilation, exaltation: I saw Nobel Prize dinners and tickertape parades and general dancing in the streets. But still — here was the catch; here, every time, even my wildest fantasies, with their champagne and bunting and confetti, came back full circle to their sober starting point — for all that to come to pass, for that whole sequence to be set in motion, the Great Report had first, somehow, to come into being.
7.12 The iodine’s not getting any traction, Petr said the next time I met him; so they’re trying a new tactic. Oh yes? I asked. What’s that? Well, he told me, they’ve taken sample cancer-cells from me and sent them to this lab where they mix them with cells from honey, and thyme, and rosemary, and the sweat of humming-birds, and all kinds of natural things. The cells of these have quite specific structures, which react in certain ways with other structures — and, once in a while, one set of cells can neutralize another, take them out. If they find one that takes out my cells, then we’re rolling. Don’t they know already which cell-structure will suit you? I asked. No, he replied, they haven’t got it all mapped: it’s still hit and miss. You just have to pair your cells with each of these others, moving down the line, running the gauntlet, and you never know, you might just find a match. The lab’s in Greece, he said. Greece? I asked. Yeah, he answered: Greece. How about that? He paused, and I pictured this Greek lab for a few moments. I had a quite clear picture of it — only it was shedding, even as I held it in my mind, its modern, scientific ambiance and acquiring an ancient one instead: mutating into a grotto full of hecatombs and urns into which white-robed ministers served offerings of blood and flesh. Above these ministers, hovering beyond the smoke and vapour, a pantheon of gods sat around a long board table at whose centre lay a big, fat tome in which all structures and all matches had been written down. It was to them, to this Olympian committee, that these libations were being given, these supplications made — made in the hope that the committee might, in their infinite pity, wisdom and benevolence, do what only they could do: look up an entry and send back to meek, afflicted mortals a celestial ping! of recognition. Petr started speaking again, his words floating above this vision like a voiceover. It’s worth a try, he said.