Leith, William (15 page)

Thinkers were not like this in the past. Plato, with his

theory that everything has an ideal version of itself, seemed fairly confident, as did Aquinas and Anselm, who collected together evidence, much of it spurious, to prove the existence of God. Bishop Berkeley had no problem that God existed, simply because he believed the trees in his quadrangle stayed there even when he wasn't looking at them.

Descartes had faith in the self: 'I think, therefore I am.' But wasn't there a problem with this very thought? When he said the words 'I think', was he not positing an 'I' a self before he had justified it with the latter half of the thought, the `therefore I am' bit? Was he not, in that case, making a false assumption?

After Descartes, it was more or less downhill. By the twentieth century, philosophers had lost the knack of looking for what is true, stymied by the question: 'What is truth?' The retreat was on; thinkers began to doubt their own tools. Philosophy began to be about the arbitrary nature of language, and then about the radical uncertainty of the self. Baudrillard said that we had become 'obscene' and 'obese', bloated with meaningless desires. Mankind, he said, had `become a virus', and might be on course to destroy the world. Well, yes, I thought. He might have a point.

Baudrillard was my kind of guru. For a long time, I suspected that he did not actually exist. Also, I was not sure if I wanted him to exist. Who was he? In the intellectual imagination, he was a fashionable French thinker. He was just about as French as you can get. He had cruised effortlessly past the death of logic and the eclipse of the self. He wrote: 'God exists, but I don't believe in him.' He wrote: 'I feel like a witness to my own absence.' He saw the world as a

place in which there was no way of knowing what is real and what is fake. We humans, mired in late capitalism, could not see outside the constructions of our own thought. In 1991, he accused the Gulf War of not happening.

I arranged to meet him in the late winter of 1998. The meeting was fixed through a third party. I wanted to find out whether Baudrillard was real or not, and, if he was, whether he was deadly serious, or a joker. Both outcomes would disappoint me. In photographs, he was a bespectacled man in an open-necked, expensive shirt with permanently half-raised eyebrows; he looked as if he was enjoying a joke that nobody else could understand. He once said, 'Since the media always make you out to say the opposite of what you say, you should have the courage always to say the opposite of what you think.'

I flew to Paris with an address and a telephone number for Baudrillard on a piece of paper. In my hotel, I gave the piece of paper to the receptionist, so she could call a cab. She looked at it and frowned. Then she took out an index of the streets of Paris, looked through the index, and handed the piece of paper back to me.

, Ce n'existe pas.'

`What?'

`L'adresse n'existe pas.'

Quite, I thought. Baudrillard, who says the world is full of `simulacra', rather than real things, might be a simulacrum himself. He could, quite easily, be a brilliant invention. I was gripped by a sudden panic. Perhaps I was the butt of a joke, and someone would soon arrive and let me in on the secret that Baudrillard was not, in fact, real. Then, perhaps, I would

be invited to join the conspiracy, and pretend to write an article about him.

I called the number. A recorded voice, arch and French, answered and told me to leave a message.

`Hello,' I said into the void. 'Is that Monsieur Baudrillard? Are you there? If you are, would you pick up the phone?'

A taxi arrived. The driver was actually wearing a beret and a smock. He did not quite look real. I showed him the address on the piece of paper. He frowned. He said, 'N'existe pas.' He shrugged at me. He looked for the address in the A-Z. Unsuccessful, he put the book down.

I asked the man wearing the beret and smock to call jean Baudrillard. The hotel receptionist dialled the number and handed over the phone. The man started talking. Someone, anyway, was on the other end. I stood there, slightly paranoid. 'Oui, oui,' said the taxi driver. Then he said, 'Come to the car. I will take you.'

We moved through the thick, nervy Paris traffic. Baudrillard once wrote, 'I detest the bustling activity of my fellow citizens, detest initiative, social responsibility, ambition, competition.' On pavements, women were walking to work. 'It would be so nice to tear them from the blankness of the morning air and plunge them back into their beds,' Baudrillard wrote of these women. He had written that he found women walking to work in the morning 'erotic'.

Baudrillard's apartment was in Montparnasse, on the south side of central Paris, in a street too narrow to exist on the Paris streetfinder. We moved towards him past famous iconic buildings ('They are not monuments, they are monsters.') One thing I liked about him was that he had a

pronouncement for every place, every situation and emotion. Here he is on being fat: 'The overweight person ... says "I lack everything so I will eat anything at all." ' And on being slim: 'The obsession with becoming slimmer and slimmer is the obsession with becoming an image.'

The taxi driver dropped me off at the end of Baudrillard's street. I pressed his doorbell, opened the door and found myself in a large hall with a high ceiling. There was a lift. But I took the steep stairs. Baudrillard was at the top of the building. He once wrote about a girlfriend who 'does not take the lift, but goes up the stairs instead and undresses floor by floor her sweater, her skirt, her shoes, her watch, finally, just outside the door, her knickers; then she rings the bell. When I open the door, she is standing there completely naked, like a dream.'

I rang the bell. I felt obscene, obese, totally out of breath. The door opened. A smallish, compact man, definitely the eyebrow-raiser from the photographs, opened the door and backed away. He was wearing an expensive, open-necked shirt and a V-neck sweater of very fine wool. He looked at his watch. I was, of course, late. Time was short.

The apartment was bathed in light. There was a sitting-room, a study, a bedroom. In the study were two bookshelves one for his books, and another one for books by other people.

He said, 'What do you want to talk about?'

`I thought ... the obscene. Your concept of obscenity. And other things.'

We talked about other things for a while. He had recently taken up photography. 'When you are a photographer,' he

said, 'you are a keen observer, an ethnographer, a hunter. There is a link with hunting. And also there is a link with travelling. So, for me, photography is a little bit like travelling. It's connected with journeys, moving around. But above all, it's connected with objects. There are no human beings.'

He continued. He said that photography was 'the art of making the object appear, the subject disappear. In other words, me. I try, in fact, to disappear.'

He got up from his sofa and went to the desk and picked up tobacco and a cigarette-rolling device. I asked him to tell me about his general world-view. He said, 'Where shall we start, then? Obscenity?'

`Yes.'

`I often talk about obscenity, but not necessarily in the sexual sense. General obscenity exists in a world where everything becomes transparent, everything is visible, there are no more secrets ... It's the same thing as pornography, if you like. That is to say that everything that existed before metaphor, utopia, dream, idealism, everything is immediately materialized. In pornography, materialized in a body, in a sexual act. But it's like that everywhere.'

And for a moment, I could see it. Baudrillard was saying that the Western world had become bloated and pornographic obese, obscene. We had everything we wanted, in abundance. And it wasn't making us happy. It was making us hungry. He knew what the problem was. It was us. We were a virus. We were nothing but appetite. But was this something I wanted to believe?

I said, 'Are you happy?'

`Yes, I think I have succeeded in creating conditions of

autonomy and freedom. So if that is happiness, no problem there. I have managed to avoid stress, impatience and all that. Anyway, I have invented for myself a sort of "jet lag" of a second state in which I can live. Not philosophically. just a question of existence. I keep a distance from a world which, for me, is not truly real, so the happiness which I can have in it is not necessarily real.'

My Kind of Diagnosis

`I knew I had something wonderful,' says Dr Atkins. I look back across the desk at him. The wonderful thing he had, of course, was the conviction that carbohydrates were the problem. Eating too much carbohydrate leads to overproduction of insulin. Overproduction of insulin leads to low blood sugar. Low blood sugar leads to food cravings. Food cravings lead to obesity. And diabetes. And misery on a catastrophic, global scale, legions of miserable people, wave after wave of fat bellies and chafing thighs and self-consciousness and anxiety and deep-seated feelings of not being attractive, not being worthy, not being loved. Women like Shelley Bovey, going through life terrified of public transport, men like Robbie Coltrane who really, really don't want to talk about it.

Atkins and I talk about how insulin works in the body. For the record, I get him to take me through the cycle. I say: 'So, you eat carbohydrate . . .'

Atkins: 'Your blood sugar goes up.'

Me: 'Why does it come down so much?'

Atkins: 'Because you then put out insulin. And insulin drives it down.'

And we move on to the subject of hyperinsulinism. The pancreas produces insulin in response to carbohydrates, but if you repeatedly overeat carbohydrates, you reach a crucial tipping point, after which your pancreas produces far, far too much a veritable deluge of insulin, which causes a corresponding low tide of blood sugar, which triggers a cacophony of craving, which leads to an exponential population curve of obesity, an army of overeaters lining up under the golden arches.

What a tempting analysis. The problem is carbohydrates! As Atkins says in his book, 'Many carbohydrate addicts could no more walk past a refrigerator without opening it than Venus or Serena Williams could let a short lob drift overhead without smashing it.'

`You see,' Atkins goes on in his book, 'your food compulsion isn't a character disorder. It's a chemical disorder.'

That's it! That's why I want to believe Atkins. If Atkins is right, the problem is not us, it's not the human condition. If Atkins were directing a disaster movie about the fat crisis, it would be one of those movies where the threat comes from outside, and can therefore be exorcized. It's just a bunch of spiders! It's just those pesky triffids! It's just the food we're eating! Atkins is saying that there isn't something essentially wrong with us, that there isn't something essentially wrong with me. I'm just eating wrong, that's all. And that's a diagnosis I like to hear. That's my kind of diagnosis.

We talk on, as the sky darkens outside his office. Atkins roots around and produces charts, and shows me the results

of surveys. He seems tired, but he doesn't want to stop. He makes no secret of the fact that he's not a top-level scientist. He's not a laboratory man. Equally, he doesn't seem like a huckster or a conman. He's a messenger. For three decades, he's been telling us this one thing, this one important fact. 'I didn't realize I'd be fighting the whole world,' he says. 'It didn't enter my mind.'

Atkins grew up in Dayton, Ohio. His father was a restaurateur. A restaurateur, in the Midwest, in the 1950s! A vendor of fries! When his parents retired to Florida, Atkins put them on the Atkins diet.

He lives in the shadow of his father. 'He was just an extremely likeable person that everybody sort of fell in love with. He was just a very wonderful role-model for teaching me to be a nice person.'

`Yes?'

`I will never be as nice as him. But he was special.' `What was his secret?'

`He just truly liked people, and you could just tell.'

My train of thought goes something like this. So there he was, the son of the neighbourhood restaurateur, the man who loved everybody, and fed everybody, a man who soothed the local populace with carbs, and was greatly loved in return. Hardly surprising, then, with food playing such a central role in the Atkins family set up, that Atkins began to overeat. And then he got chubby, and became a chubby doctor, and one day, in 1963, he went back home to Dayton, and ate a huge Thanksgiving lunch with his family, travelled back to New York, looked at himself in the mirror, and felt waves of self-disgust. Here he was, 33 years old, unmarried and fat, living

in a small apartment, and he'd just visited his folks, these great feeders of people he could never hope to emulate, and he'd eaten this meal, with potatoes and turkey and flour-based gravy and puddings a meal that, he tells me, went on all afternoon, until six o'clock. And he was filled with self-disgust. And so he became a diet doctor, the world's most famous diet doctor, and, later, when his parents had retired, he put them on his diet. He put his father on the Atkins diet! And what happened? His father followed the diet, and lived to be 84. His mother, who still lives in Florida at the age of 93, 'cheats too much. But she tries.'

Atkins says, `Oh, I love working, what I'm doing now. Because the relationship I have with my patients is just like a love affair. They're so grateful. It's very gratifying to see them come back and then say, "Thank you, Dr Atkins." It's really incredible. Before I did this I don't think I knew what it was like to have a patient really thank me. But I mean, the emotion that goes into it. It's very gratifying.'

Before I go, I have a question a delicate question. As a diet guru, Atkins is, in a sense, a living embodiment of his own work. And yet recently, one morning after breakfast bacon, sausages and eggs, as people have pointed out, sometimes snidely his heart stopped. He was rushed to hospital. He was diagnosed as having had a heart attack.

`So do you feel a pressure to be healthy?'

`Very much so,' says Atkins.

`And does this make life ... difficult?'

`Well, whenever I've come down with something, like I've had a few infections that have threatened my health, it's worried me a great deal, because I had to knock out the