Anatomy of Restlessness

by Bruce Chatwin

  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 nineteenth-century sceptic described as religion ‘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 systematised 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 steppes 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 round 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 points 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 for 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 lamentations 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 third 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 sources. 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 nofixed-address were obvious. So the unpredictable demands of the tax-collector 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 civilisations with equanimity; so does China, that 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 conquers not, neither is he conquered. He may plunder a lonely settlement 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 destiny, 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 linch-pin of Civilisation is OUT; that electronic 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 Encampment? ‘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. McLuhan is correct in much of his analysis of the effects of the new media. He does not seem to appreciate their probable long-term consequences. They are likely to be rather less than comfortable. The old nostalgic dream of a free classless society may indeed now be possible. But there are too many of us and there would have to be a drastic drop in population. Much of the world’s population is on the move as never before, tourists, businessmen, itinerant labour, drop-outs, political activists, etc: like the nomads who first sat on a horse, we have again the means for total mobility. As anyone who owns a house knows, it is often cheaper to move than to stay. But this new Internationalism has activated a new parochialism. Separatism is rampant. Minorities feel threatened; small exclusive groups splinter off. They £50 travel allowance was not imposed for purely economic reasons.

  Are these two trends not representative of the two basic human characteristics I mentioned earlier?

  Yours ever,

  Bruce Chatwin

  THE NOMADIC ALTERNATIVE

  Diogenes the Cynic said that men first crowded into cities to escape the fury of those outside. Locked within their walls, they committed every outrage against one another as if this were the sole object of their coming together. Diogenes’ deprecation of city life is an early example of ‘cultural primitivism’ or ‘the discontent of the civilised with civilisation’.1 It is an emotional rather than a rational impulse that has always led men to abandon civilisation and seek a simpler life, a life in harmony with ‘nature’, unhampered with possessions, free from the grinding bonds of technology, sinless, promiscuous, anarchic, and sometimes vegetarian.

  But civilisation rarely lacks its champions. ‘All men have civic virtues,’ as Protagoras suggested – ‘a democratic note often in modem times associated with the belief that democracy is a return to the original goodness of man.’2 The word ‘civilisation’ is charged with moral and ethical overtones, the accumulated inheritance of our own self-esteem. We contrast it with barbarism, savagery, and even bestiality, whereas it means nothing more than ‘living in cities’. The City, as such, appeared with astonishing abruptness out of the alluvium of Southern Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC. This transformation depended on irrigation works, intensive
agriculture, specialised skills such as pottery and metallurgy, and supervision by a literate bureaucracy, judiciary and priesthood. Civilisation demands a stratified social and economic hierarchy. There is, regrettably, no indication that it is cohesive without one. The urban civilisations of the Old World radiated outwards, excluding all who would not conform to the canons of civilised behaviour. There were setbacks. Mesopotamian chroniclers lament the ravages of the ‘Amorite who knows not the grain’ or the ‘host whose onslaught is like a hurricane, a people who have never known a city’.3 But as the civilisations consolidated they came, in the north, to the point of diminishing returns. Their natural frontiers crystallised. Beyond, the ‘barbarians’ were to be left to their own devices. As some Han officials said, ‘The lands are all swamps and saline waters, not fit for habitation. It is better to make peace.’4 But the stigmatised outsider was unlikely to regard the frontier with the smugness of the man inside; nor could he emulate urban civilisation in land unsuited to it. On the steppe, from Mongolia to Hungary and beyond, he gave up his agriculture and opted for a ‘Nomadic Alternative’.5

  A nomad does not ‘wander aimlessly from place to place’ as one dictionary would have it. The word derives from the Latin and Greek meaning ‘to pasture’. Pastoral tribes follow the most conservative patterns of migration, changing them only in times of drought or disaster. The animals provide their food; agriculture, trade or plunder are additional benefits. ‘The Nomad’ is a clan elder, responsible to the whole tribe, who parcels out the grazing for each person. Ssu-Ma-Ch‘ien says that the Hsiung-nu congregated in the first month of the year for the allotment of their rights, and again in the autumn when the cattle were fat. Haymaking does not enter into this scheme: that would prejudice mobility and grazing claims. Spring and summer are the times when the nomads are on the move. ‘The days are long and the nights are short,’ a Chinese said of the plains about the Caspian in the thirteenth century: ‘in little more than the time needed to cook a mutton chop, the sun rises again.’6

  The nomads selected their animals to make the best use of all types of pasture. Horses and cattle cannot graze where sheep and goats have already cropped; herdsmen must move to keep their animals from starving. Heavy oxcarts are known from the steppe from the third millennium BC, the progenitors of the Scythian wagons, ‘the smallest with four wheels, the largest with six, all covered over with felt’.7 But equitation, adopted some thousand years later, so increased the nomads’ range that they could abandon their unprofitable agriculture completely. All known species of horse can hybridise with one another; there are two distinct species involved in domestication: the one the steppe ponies of Tarpan and Przevalski’s type, the other the ‘coldblooded’ European forest horse. When riding horses first appear in graves near the Danube they resemble Przevalski’s horse, a species confined in the wild to Mongolia. Central Asia bred the finest horses, the ‘Celestial Horses’ of Ferghana that fed on fields of blue alfalfa, or the ‘hoar-frost’ coloured chargers of the Alans. The Emperor Hadrian had an Alanic horse that ‘flew’ and he named it Caesar. The steppe came to resemble a vast exercise ground with squadrons of cavalry moving up and down it.

  The nomad had a tactical advantage over the farmer. He could descend and pasture his horses on the irrigated fields. After the Great Wall of China was built, the Hsiung-nu ‘no longer ventured to come south to pasture their horses’. But if the defences were unmanned, they demanded tribute or threatened: ‘When autumn comes we will take our horses and trample your crops.’8 The same problem faced the Romans on the Rhine and Danube limes. Nomad and citizen belonged to exclusive systems and both knew it.

  But a pastoralist is a poor man. He could not always resist the temptations of trade or plunder that brought the luxuries of civilisation. The steppe is brilliant with spring flowers in May. At other seasons the featureless landscape is dry and dusty or leaden with frost and snow. The nomad craves colour. He is also traditionally drawn to the reassuring brilliance of gold. ‘The Huns burned with an insatiable lust for gold,’ wrote Ammianus Marcellinus.9 He spoke of their ‘hideous clothes’, and Apollinaris Sidonius was overcome by the garish outfits of the young Frankish prince Sigismer, ‘a flame red mantle with much glint of ruddy gold ... feet laced in bristly hide ... and green cloaks with crimson borders’.10

  Luxury hampers mobility. The nomad leaders knew that overindulgence threatened their system. Civilised ways were insidious. Attila drank from a wooden cup and Chingis Khan lived in a yurt to the end of his days. Like so many colonists, the Greeks brought drink to the lands they colonised. Herodotus tells the sad tale of the Scythian king, Scyles. Discovering the delights of Bacchus, he was ‘maddened’ by the god. The Scythians, however, were intolerant of such innovations and demanded conformity. They beheaded their king. They also shot Anacharsis, a Scythian divine healer or shaman, who wandered through Greece ‘carrying a small drum and hanging himself about with images’.11 At Cyzicus he worshipped the Great Goddess, and the Greeks admired him for his spirituality. ‘And now,’ says Herodotus, ‘the Scythians say they have no knowledge about him; this is because he left his country and followed the customs of strangers.’

  There were, however, obvious attractions for the city dweller in a society where ‘all are born noble’ and where there was less slavery (for it was too troublesome). In times of despair the ‘Nomadic Alternative’ was too tempting to resist. A Han counsellor, Yin Shan, was appalled at the prospect of a proposed abandonment of the Great Wall. ‘The frontier posts of China are as much needed to keep the Chinese traitors out of the Tartar’s land as keeping the Tartars out of China.’12 The eunuch Chunghsing-sho, a defector to the Hsiung-nu, decried the complications of city life, its useless silks, elaborate food, ornate houses and tiresome social obligations; he contrasted them with the simplicity of felt and leather clothing, comradeship, cheese and plain meat. Similarly a Greek, once married to a rich woman, ran away to the Huns. With tears in his eyes he admitted that the Roman constitution was the best in the world but claimed that the complacency of its rulers, the tyranny of its generals, the inequity of its legal expenses and the unpredictable burdens of its taxation had ruined it. Nomads rarely, if ever, destroyed a civilisation. They merely took advantage of a disintegrating situation. In this they were encouraged by defectors or uncommitted nomads, who were the disruptive factor in steppe politics.

  The military tactics of the steppe horsemen and those of civilised states were incompatible. Once the steppe ponies passed into agricultural lands their short legs bogged down. Conversely it was only in times of national prosperity and outstanding leadership that any great power could countenance the hideous expense of mounted expedition against the ‘natural cavalry’ of the steppe. ‘No profit comes to an army that has to fight a thousand miles from home,’ the Imperial Secretary lamented.13 What was worse, the nomads ran away. The Celts taunted their foes and rushed into battle. The Scythians or the Huns did nothing so inept. ‘They do not consider it a disgrace to run away. Their only concern is self-advantage, and they know nothing of propriety or righteousness,’14 the assumption, so recurrent in our time, that the enemy is obliged to show its face.

  Part of Herodotus’ Book iv reads like a manual for guerilla warfare. ‘They [the Scythians] have devised that none who attack them can escape, and none catch them if they desire not to be found. For when men have no stabilised cities or fortresses, but are all house-bearers and mounted archers, living not by tilling the soil but by raising cattle and carrying their dwellings on wagons, how should they not be invincible and unapproachable.’15 Darius invaded Scythia in 516 BC with a conventional army. He chased around Russia, probably as far north as Kazan on the Volga, the Scythians always retreating before him. In exasperation he sent a message to their king. ‘Why do you always run away? Why don’t you stand and fight or else submit?’ The reply, ‘I have never fled for fear of any man, nor do I now flee from you. If you really want a fight, find the graves of our fathers, and then you’ll see w
hether we’ll fight. As for your boast that you are my master, go and cry.’16 The retreat of Darius resembled the retreat of Napoleon; he only just escaped. Compare the tactics of Mao Tse-Tung.

  The steppe nomads moved in summer. The northern tribes of the taiga and tundra stayed put. Swamps and swollen rivers impeded all movement, except, perhaps, when escape from the clouds of mosquitoes that make the short Arctic summer so uncomfortable was imperative. They awaited the great migrations of wild-fowl, swans, ducks and geese, clubbing them to death in moult. In some rivers the teeming runs of salmon and sturgeon provided food close to their settlements. The winter was the season for mobility, when the rivers and bogs froze, and since the Arctic Stone Age these peoples had known the use of dog – and deer-drawn sledges and skis; Ptolemy refers to the Skrithifinnoi or Skiing Finns. It was also the trapping season, for sables, marten, mink, lemming, ermine and Arctic fox. Fur was, and still is, the staple of the Siberian tribes. The heroes of the Nibelungenlied wallowed in their sables; Kubilai Khan had a tent lined with ermine and sable, and the Cossack colonists of Boris Goudonov greeted the Kirghiz with cries of ‘Sables or Death!’