Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

by Bruce Chatwin

  I am having a fine time dashing up to London seeing publishers from which I hope that something will emerge. At present I am focussing my attention and blandishments on Mr Maschler,210 who was the publishing genius behind The Naked Ape, but am resisting a recent account of art auctioneering to be called An Ascension Myth in favour of a work on nomads here, there, past and present.

  The cat211 is sick and I have been buying a number of silly bits from Christopher,212 who is lovelier than ever.

  Love B

  Tell the darling not to fret about her tea caddy as I shall buy her a lovely one in plastic.

  To Tom Maschler

  Holwell Farm | Wotton-under-Edge | Glos | 24 February 1969

  Dear Tom,

  You asked me to write you a letter about my proposed book on nomads. I cannot provide a history of nomads. It would take years to write. In any case I want the book to be general rather than specialist in tone. The question I will try to answer is ‘Why do men wander rather than sit still?’ I have proposed one title – The Nomadic Alternative. We obviously won’t use it. It is too rational a title for a subject that appeals to irrational instincts. For the moment it has the advantage of implying that the nomad’s life is not inferior to the city dweller’s. I have to try and see the nomads as they see themselves, looking outwards at civilisation with envy or mistrust. By civilisation I mean ‘life in cities’, and by civilised those who live within the ambit of literate urban civilisation. All civilisations are based on regimentation and rational behaviour. Nomads are uncivilised and all the words traditionally used in connection with them are charged with civilised prejudices – vagrant, vagabond, shifty, barbarian, savage, etc. Wandering nomads are bound to be a disruptive influence but they have been blamed out of all proportion to the material damage they cause. This blame is rationalised and justified by false piety. The nomads are excluded; they are outcasts. Cain ‘wandered over the surface of the earth.’

  The first chapter might ask the question – ‘Why wander?’ It could start with the Greek legend of Io and her compulsive wandering, and be called Io’s Gadfly (if that’s not too trite). The word ‘nomad’ comes from words meaning ‘to pasture’ but it has come to apply to the earliest hunters as well. Hunters and herdsmen shift for economic reasons. Less obvious are the reasons for nomads’ intransigence in face of settlement even when the economic inducements are overwhelmingly in its favour. But the mutual antagonism of citizen and nomad is only one half of the theme. The other is much nearer home – ESCAPISM (a good personal reason for writing the book). Why do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two? (I am, I admit, a bad case). Some travel for business. But there is no economic reason for me to go, and every reason to stay put. My motives, then, are materially irrational. What is this neurotic restlessness, the gadfly that tormented the Greeks? Wandering may settle some of my natural curiosity and my urge to explore, but then I am tugged back by a longing for home. I have a compulsion to wander and a compulsion to return – a homing instinct like a migrating bird. True nomads have no fixed home as such; they compensate for this by following unalterable paths of migration. If these are upset it is usually by interference from the civilised or semi-civilised half-nomads. The result is chaos. Nomads develop exaggerated fixations about their tribal territory. ‘Land is the basis of our nation. We shall fight,’ said a nomad chief of the 2nd century BC. He cheerfully gave away his best horse, all his treasure and his favourite wife, but fought to the death for a few miles of useless scrub. This obsession for tribal land lies behind the tragedy of the Near East. The High Seas do not evoke quite the same emotional response, and territorial waters lie close to land. Sailors’ emotions are directed towards the feminised ship that carries them far and their home port.

  Looking at some of today’s studies of animal and human behaviour, one can detect two trends . . .1. Wandering is a human characteristic genetically inherited from the vegetarian primates (No fleas).

  2. All human beings have the emotional, if not an actual biological, need for a base, cave, den, tribal territory, possession or port. This is something we share with the carnivores. (Fleas).

  Chapter II will deal with the omnivorous weapon-using ARCHAIC HUNTERS. They can be traced from the Lower Palaeolithic to the present day. They follow their food supply; they return home to base. They take, gratefully, what nature offers (Chapter title – PREDATORS?), but make no practical effort to propagate their food supply, except by ritually identifying themselves with animals or inanimate objects in the environment. Living for the moment they are distinguished from us by having a radically different concept of time and its significance, though differences of this kind are matters of degree rather than kind. Their lives are not one long struggle for food, as many imagine. Much of their time is passed in gross idleness, particularly the Australian Aborigines whose dialectic arguments know no bounds of complication. Though capable of bouts of intense concentration while actually getting their food supply, they do not take kindly to manual work. The leaders lead; they do not coerce. The whole point of receiving a gift is to give it away; a pair of trousers given to an Aboriginal will pass rapidly through twenty hands and end up decorating a tree. Vendetta is a private rather than a public affair. If they kill one another, it is usually for ritual reasons. Mass extermination is a speciality of the civilised. The ‘neo-barbarism’ of Hitler was Civilisation in its most vicious aspect.

  Chapter III will be a discussion of Civilisation (as something to escape from). Chapter title – THE COMFORTS OF LITERACY. ‘Put writing in your heart. Thus you may protect yourself from any kind of labour’ – Egyptian scribe to his son c.2400 BC. The triumph of the white-collar worker was achieved over the backs of sweated labour. The Civilisation of the Old World crystallised in river valleys where the soil was fertile but the choice was ‘Make dams or be swept out to sea.’ Note the hero’s medals offered posthumously by a grateful Mao to those ‘human dams’ drowned while blocking the Hwang-Ho in spate. Diffusionism is unfashionable but I believe (with Lewis Mumford among others) that civilisation as such was an accident that happened once and once only in the very peculiar conditions of Southern Iraq, and that the consequences of this ‘accident’ spread as far as the Andes before Columbus. This proposition is highly debatable. On it hinges the question ‘Is civilisation something natural – a state to which many different cultures have irrevocably led?’ Are those that did not failures – or are they alternatives to civilisation? Or is civilisation an anti-natural accident? If so, the evolutionary analogies, of Darwinism and the survival of the fittest, are misapplied drastically when used with reference to human cultures. In any case WRITING develops hand in hand with civilisation, standardisation and bureaucracy, and with them a stratified social and economic hierarchy, and the repression of one group by a ruling minority. The first written tablets record how much the slaves are bringing in. Literate civilisation freed some for the higher exercises of the mind, for the development of logical thought, mathematics, practical medicine based on scientific observation rather than faith healing etc. But in Mesopotamia the two highest gods were Anu (Order) and Enlil (Compulsion). Breasted writes of the ‘dauntless courage of the architect of the Great Pyramid’. However, the 2½ million blocks were hauled up by fettered labour. Civilisation was lashed into place. We inherit the load.

  Chapter IV HERDSMEN (or PASTORALISTS)

  The herding of domesticated animals was one of the technical advances that led towards the formation of civilisation, but it was always combined with some sort of agriculture, and was, therefore, reasonably settled. True pastoral nomadism, with herds on the move all the time and no agriculture was not a stage towards civilisation. It developed as an alternative to it. It was directly in competition with it, especially in border regions. The art of riding provided the means of mobility; it was the ‘tip-over’ factor that enabled some groups to abandon agriculture and be permanently on the move. The pastoralists had much in common with the hunter �
�� they believed in a mystical bond between animal and man. But from civilisation they learned the idea of the unity of the State, and from the techniques of herding and killing domesticated animals, they discovered those of human coercion and extermination.

  This is a long chapter and perhaps best divided into two. I will then trace the origin of the great nomad cultures, the Scythians, the Huns, the Germanic ‘waves’, the Dorian Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols and the Turks, the last (semi-)nomadic people to aspire to world conquest.

  There will be an account of nomadic life; its harshness and intolerance, its illiteracy and obsession with genealogies; the comparative lack of slavery, though that did not prevent nomads from being the most successful slave traders; the renunciation of all but the most portable possessions in times of emergency; the failure to appreciate civilised standards of human life balanced by a natural adjustment towards death, which the super-civilised have lost; the communality of property and land within a tribe. ‘All are God’s guests. We share and share alike.’ (Bedou chief); the position (remarkably emancipated, especially in Northern Asia); the sanctity of the craftsmen etc.

  Chapter V will continue the story of the nomads in the face of a triumphant agricultural and then industrial civilisation. I may call it Civilisation or Death! the cry of the American frontiersmen. This will be a record of the hard line towards nomads; its rationalised hatred and selfassured moral superiority. Nomads are equated with animals, and treated as such. I will discuss the fate of the gypsies, the American Indians, the Lapps and Zulus, also nomads within highly civilised societies, tramps, hobos etc. I would give an account of the Beja in the Eastern Sudan, the Fuzzy-Wuzzies of Kipling. They have been able to resist all civilising influences since they were first mentioned in Egyptian annals some three thousand years ago only because they are prepared to tolerate the lowest level of personal comfort. They are sensationally idle and truculent as well. Most of the morning for the men is taken up by a fantastic mutual coiffure session (grooming urge?). There is also the depressing moral and physical effect of civilisation on the Arab. ‘Law and order have settled in like a blight on Sinai and Palestine.’ G. W. Murray, The Sons of Ishmael.

  Chapter VI will be the reverse of Chapter V and will trace the longings of civilised men for a natural life identified with that of the nomads or other ‘primitive’ peoples. To be called Nostalgia for Paradise, the belief that all those who have successfully resisted or remained unaffected by civilisation have a secret to happiness that the civilised have lost. It is bound up with the idea of the ‘Fall of Man’, with Paradise myths, and Utopias, the Myth of the Noble Savage and primitivist writings from Hesiod on. Its most extreme form is Animalitarianism, the assumption that animals are endowed with superior moral qualities than human beings. ‘I could turn and live with the animals . . .’ Walt Whitman. Hence at a different level the popularity of such books as Born Free. Otherwise it may emphasise the essential unity of animal and man, an intellectual tendency far older than Aesop and still with us. We also have a lingering idea that eating animals is sinful, and it is interesting to find that some North Asian hunting tribes preserve legends of a Vegetarian Paradise, a folk memory of our vegetarian primate days.

  Chapter VII. THE COMPENSATIONS OF FAITH

  Nomads are hated – or adored. Why? It cannot be sheer chance that no great transcendental faith has ever been born of an Age of Reason. Civilisation is its own religion; religion and state are wedded; at the apex the god king of Egypt, the deified Roman emperor or the papal monarch. In its own day ‘Pax Britannica’ was a religion, and one 19th Century sceptic described religion as ‘civilisation as inflicted on the lower races at the end of a Hotchkiss gun’. The great faiths renounce material wealth and the idea of progress in favour of spiritual values. Their ideologies hark back to the religious experiences of the early hunters and herdsmen – a complex of religious beliefs known as Shamanism. The Shaman is the original religious mystic, androgynous and ecstatic. The nearest the Chinese have to a transcendental faith – Taoism – is ‘little more than systemised shamanism’; Judaeo-Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and the Hindu-Buddhist traditions preserve their pastoral past (Feed my Sheep – The Lord is a Good Shepherd – The Flock of the Faithful – The Sacred Cow). Islam is the great nomadic religion. Even in the Middle Ages the ecstatic dualist cults of the Bogomils and Albigenses had their origins in Manichaeanism and the shamanic traditions of the western end of the steppe – and they paved the way for the Reformation. The religious leaders of the civilised give way to the shamanic type of religious hero, the self-destructive evangelist, the celibate, the wandering dervish or divine healer. Note the difference between the Shakers (ecstatics) who shook themselves out of existence and the Mormons (enthusiasts) who aspired to the Presidency. The nomad renounces; he reflects in his solitude; he abandons collective rituals, and cares little for the rational processes of learning or literacy. He is a man of faith.

  The Jewish diaspora obviously violates every attempt to categorise it. I would think it worth a chapter to itself. Title – ? THE WANDERING JEW – a daunting subject. There are two questions I would like to ask – was Jewish ‘exclusivism’ kept alive by the loss of the ‘Promised Land’, their tribal territory? And were their energies diverted as a result towards the nomad’s other great stand-by – portable gold?

  Incidentally, while we are about it we can lay for all time the Great Aryan Myth; it surfaced again the other day in a new disguise – the wishful thinking of a frustrated lady archaeologist. Northern nomads – The Blond Brutes – were not the active masculine principle that fertilised an effete south. The Amazons are not my idea of femininity; they could not aspire to womanhood till they had killed their man. Neither are the Maenads nor the Bacchae. They were all nomad ladies. There must be some other explanation.

  Chapter VIII will continue some more general aspects of nomadic behaviour, and may be called the NOMADIC SENSIBILITY; their sense of values; the importance of music (the drum and guitar are pre-eminently nomadic instruments); the craving for brilliant colour and the reassuring brilliance of gold. Nomads wear the most elaborate jewellery; a Bedou woman will wear her whole fortune around her neck; the nomads’ roads to ecstasy – Turkish Baths, saunas, Indian hemp and mushrooms. Nomadic art is intuitive and irrational rather than analytic and static. I could use some illustrations to make my point and this chapter will obviously be expanded as I go along.

  Chapter IX to be called the NOMADIC ALTERNATIVE calls into question the whole basis of civilisation, and is concerned with the present and future as much as the past. There have been two main inducements to wander, ECONOMIC and NEUROTIC. For example the International Set are neurotics. They have reached satiation point at home; so they wander – from tax-haven to tax-haven with an occasional raid on the source of their wealth – their base. How often has one heard the lamentation of an American expatriate at the prospect of a visit to his trustees in Pittsburgh. The same thing happened in the Roman Empire in the 3rd Century AD and later. The rich abdicated the responsibilities of their wealth; the cities became unendurable and at the mercy of property speculators. Wealth was divorced from its source. A strong state took over and collapsed under the strain. The rich wore their wealth, and the governments passed endless laws against extravagance in dress. Compare the diamonds and gold boxes of today, and the aura attached to portable possessions. The mobile rich were impossible to tax, the advantages of no-fixed address were obvious. So the unpredictable demands of the tax-collectors were laid at the feet of those who could least afford to pay. Wandering passed from the neurotic to the economic stage.

  True nomads watch the passing of civilisation with equanimity; so does China, the unique combination of civilisation and barbarism. There is a good Egyptian text to illustrate the patronising attitude of the super-civilised in his self-confident days. ‘The miserable Asiatic . . . he does not live in one place but his feet wander . . . he is not conquered, neither does he conquer. He may plunder a lonely set
tlement but he will never take a populous city.’ Civilisations destroy themselves; nomads have never (to my certain knowledge) destroyed one, though they are never far away at the kill, and may topple a disintegrating structure. The civilised alone have control of their identity, and I do not believe in any of the cyclical theories of decline, fall and rebirth.

  Now for today. We may have enough food even, but we certainly do not have enough room. Marshall McLuhan asks us to accept that literacy, the lynch-pin of civilisation is OUT; that electric technology is by-passing the ‘rational processes of learning’ and that jobs and specialists are things of the past. ‘The world has become a Global Village,’ he says. Or is it Mobile Encampments? ‘The expert is the man who stays put.’ Literature, he says, will disappear and the social barriers are coming down; everyone is free for the higher exercises of the mind (or spirit?). One thing is certain – the Paterfamilias, that bastion of civilisation (not the matriarch) is right OUT.