Will Self
Each month Esquire commissions an unsparing inspection of Will Self ’s body. This month: the brain
This month, the award-winning writer’s anatomical survey dissects the wonders of the brain
ok. uh-huh... alllriiight — here we go! Last month, I threatened regular readers of this column with the diamond-tipped circular saw, and now it’s in my hand, evilly screaming with machine rage — while you, you’re lying flat out on the operating table with your head shaved. Yes, this month we’ll be examining the brain, so I’d be obliged if you remain still while I carefully scalp you with this, um... scalpel, and then deftly apply the saw so as to create a bony lid that can be... lifted. “My brain hurts!” I hear you scream — and in this instance it’s no mere idiom — however, I hasten to reassure you: if there’s one thing that should make us all feel a little bit more sanguine about having to undergo brain surgery, it’s that the organ in question has no nerves whatsoever.
Bizarre, isn’t it, especially when you consider that the principal business of these approximately 1,400 grammes of greyish mush is to engender in us all sorts of feelings, from the most grossly physical — “Need. Shit. Right. Now!” — to the most ineffably spiritual: “Oh God, why hast thou forsaken me...?” I remember saying breathlessly to one of my inamoratas, when at the very peak of that hysteria known as love: “I’m jealous of your thoughts!” And when she asked me why, replying: “Because they’re deeper inside of you than I’ll ever be.” Which I suppose was true enough — although even the weightiest of thoughts tend to be more evanescent than the lightest of penises. Weighty — and often painful, yet not physically so.
I read a book by a surgeon called Henry Marsh, in which he describes performing brain surgery in the most lyrical terms: the baroque complexity of the brain tissue itself — and the gothic convolvulus of the cancer bodying forth from it. Most lovely of all, Marsh assures us, is the ease with which the skeins of cancerous cells can be cut away from the cerebellum using a precision scalpel attached to a microscope — and reading this account I began to
fantasise that it might not be too late for me to circumvent my obvious deficiencies — emetic squeamishness and utter cackhandedness — to become a brain surgeon like him. Or if not a surgeon, at least a patient.
After all, who among us has not wished for a better, stronger, faster brain? Sod that singularity malarkey, and all those machine dreams of uploading the code-that’s-ourselves to a new hardware substrate, because what they really are, are delusions of intellectual adequacy. Popular culture is replete with storylines in which so-called “nerds” use their hypertrophied noggins to conjure up beautiful lovers — but what about the opposite side of this troublingly divisive equation? Far be it from me to criticise this noble organ, but the appurtenances of wealth and style are dwelt on far more lovingly in its pages than those of wisdom and analytic rigour. And yet all of us — no matter how dense — know in our hearts (I speak metaphorically here, thickos), that another 20-odd IQ points would make all the difference to our romantic prospects.
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Susan Sontag and Annie Liebovitz, Elton John and David Furnish, Theresa May and… Philip? Is his name Philip? Anyway, you get the point: opposites attract, and never more so than in the realm of the intellect. Listen, far be it from me to big myself up, but I quite honestly believe I’d be a 56-year-old virgin now if it weren’t for my assiduous cultivation of my brain: while others were in the gym, pumping iron, I was in the library, thumping wood pulp. And a lot of the pulp I thumped was concerned pretty directly with the brain that was doing the thumping. Yeah, weird — but studying philosophy can, on rare occasions, also be an entrée to the world of fashion and style.
A few years ago, I was contacted by an ad agency who were looking, on behalf of their client — a major international menswear brand — for a public intellectual to model and generally front up a new line of sophisticated clothing. I wish I could remember what the schmatte’s moniker was — something deliciously implausible like Singularity, or AI. Anyway, the client was offering simply operating-theatre-loads of hard cash for the right smarty to flog their pants — and so far as they were concerned, Mistah Shirtz was moi. Of course, I didn’t just smell one — it was as if a small rat corpse had been inserted into either nostril — so I declined; and it turned out that the whole thing was indeed a spoof, one pulled for a feature in The Guardian. How do I know? Because some silly-Billy fell for it sufficiently for a transcription of his vanity and avariciousness to appear (as I recall), in the newspaper’s pages. Who was that silly-Billy? Sadly, such are the neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques now cluttering my ageing brain, that I’m unable to remember — it’s either that, or I’m too decent to out him, but that seems unlikely….
OK. Uh-huh… Alllriiight — here we go! Or rather; here we didn’t go — I mean, you could’ve reasonably expected — given the grandstanding Guignol at the top of the page — a visceral approach to the seat of consciousness instead of these snide digs at illustrious men of letters. All of modern neurology begins with brain damage, and the pioneering Russian neurologist, AR Luria, really made his bones off the skulls of the vast numbers of shot-and-shell casualties generated by the Battle of Stalingrad. Luria wrote an early classic of the field called The Man with a Shattered World, in which he directly traced the weird perceptual distortions suffered by one of these Ivans to specific insults endured by this or that spoonful of the grey goo.
Anyway, I know why you turn to this column — you want a few light-hearted observations about the quirks of the human body, not a pitiless examination of the thinking thing you think with. Yes, the last thing you want when you’re reading this over a leisurely weekend breakfast, is for me — even figuratively — to crack open your skull and begin digging about in there with my spoon. Especially if you’re having a boiled egg.
I honestly believe I’d be a 56-year-old virgin now if it weren’t for my assiduous cultivation of my brain: while others were in the gym, pumping iron, I was in the library, thumping wood pulp. And a lot of the pulp I thumped was concerned pretty directly with the brain doing the thumping