12.8 The idea of Present-Tense Anthropology™ as armed struggle excited me. I thought of the seventies in Germany: the way those Baader-Meinhof people — highly educated, liberal-arts degrees in their back pockets — ran around causing mayhem. They wore such good clothes! Shirts with big, big collars; aviator sunglasses; flared cords. And they’d have sex with one another all the time: turn up at a safe-house in Munich, Düsseldorf, it didn’t matter where, give the sign, show you’re one of them, and boom! straight into bed. Same with the Patty Hearst gang in America: the funky heiress, honour-roll fine-art student, banging all those revolutionaries in her closet. I printed an image of her off the Internet and pinned it to my office wall. She wasn’t actually that hot; it was the gun she held that made her sexy. I did the same with Ulrika Meinhof, who had a similar look about her: kind of plain and big-boned too. That didn’t matter, though, I figured: my network of highly educated, highly trained subversives, armed with the very latest, anthropology-derived search-and-destroy techniques, would be the sexiest, best-dressed, most orgasmic revolutionaries ever.
12.9 One evening, I confided to Madison my dream of vandalizing everything, of using my insider status to wreak sabotage upon the Project. I knew a boy like you once, she said when I’d finished. Nobody had called me a boy in a long time. It was strange; I kind of liked it. But the thing is, she continued, turning from me in the bed, it won’t be you doing the wreaking and the vandalizing. Oh? I said. Who will it be then? She turned half-back again, sat up, lit a cigarette and said: It isn’t revolutionaries and terrorists who make nuclear power plants melt and blow their tops, or electricity grids crash, or automated trading systems go all higgledy-piggledy and write their billions down to pennies in ten minutes — they all do that on their own. You boys, she said, as once again I felt a double-pang of compliment and slight, are sweet. You all want to be the hero in the film who runs away in slo-mo from the villain’s factory that he’s just mined, throwing himself to the ground as it explodes. But the explosion’s taking place already — it’s always been taking place. You just didn’t notice …
12.10 I sat facing her in silence. I didn’t know what to reply. I tried to have sex with her again, but she wasn’t interested; she just finished off her cigarette, scrunching its small stub onto a saucer lying beside the bed, then went to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, though, thinking about what she’d said. Lévi-Strauss claims that, for the isolated tribe with whom an anthropologist makes first contact — the tribe who, after being studied, will be decimated by diseases to which they’ve no resistance, then (if they’ve survived) converted to Christianity and, eventually, conscripted into semi-bonded labour by mining and logging companies — for them, civilization represents no less than a cataclysm. This cataclysm, he says, is the true face of our culture — the one that’s turned away, from us at least. The order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which structures of untold complexity are being cooked up, demand the emission of masses of noxious by-products. What the anthropologist encounters when he ventures beyond civilization’s perimeter-fence is no more than its effluvia, its toxic fallout. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into mankind’s face.
12.11 That night, I eventually had a splendid dream. A rich and vivid one: one full of splendour. I was flying, like Daniel and Peyman in their helicopter, over a harbour by a city. It was a great, imperial city, the world’s greatest — all of them, from all periods: Carthage, London, Alexandria, Vienna, Byzantium and New York, all superimposed on one another the way things are in dreams. We’d left the city and were flying above the harbour. This was full of bustle: tug-boats, steamers, yachts, you name it, bobbing and crisscrossing in water whose ridges and wave-troughs glinted in the sun, though it was nighttime. Out in the harbour — some way out, separated from the city by swathes of this choppy water — was an excrescence, a protuberance, a lump: an island. Was it man-made? Possibly. Its sides rose steeply from the sea; they were constructed of cement, or old bricks. The island was dark in hue; yet, like the sea, it seemed somehow lit up. As we approached it — flying quite low, parallel to the water — the buildings on it loomed larger and larger. These buildings — huge, derelict factories whose outer walls and rafters, barely intact, recalled the shells of bombed cathedrals — ran one into the next to form a single giant, half-ruined complex that covered the island’s entire surface area. Inside this complex, rubbish was being burnt: it was a trash-incinerating plant. Giant mountains of the stuff were piled up in its great, empty halls, rising in places almost to where the ceiling would have been. They were being burnt slowly, from the inside, with a smouldering, rather than roaring, fire. Whence the glow: like embers when you poke them, the mounds’ surfaces, where cracked or worn through by the heat, were oozing a vermilion shade of yellow. It was this glowing ooze, which hinted at a deeper, almost infinite reserve of yet-more-glowing ooze inside the trash-mountain’s main body, that made the scene so rich and vivid, filled it with a splendour that was regal. Yes, regal—that was the strange thing: if the city was the capital, the seat of empire, then this island was the exact opposite, the inverse — the other place, the feeder, filterer, overflow-manager, the dirty, secreted-away appendix without which the body-proper couldn’t function; yet it seemed, in its very degradation, more weirdly opulent than the capital it served. We were homing right in on it now: descending in our chopper through the factory-cathedral’s shell, skimming the rubbish-piles as walls and rafters towered above us, gazing in awe and fascination at the glowing ooze, its colours as they morphed from vermilion yellow to mercurial silver, then on to purple, umber, burnt sienna, the foil-like flashing of its folds and gashes as light flowed across them. And, as we skimmed and veered and marvelled, a voice — the helicopter pilot’s maybe, or some kind of commentator, or perhaps, as before with the roller-blader half-dream, just my own — announced, clearly and concisely: Satin Island.