Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989

by Bruce Chatwin

  Following their passion for human urine, reindeer were attracted to human settlement. They were easily tamed, could be ridden and harnessed. They provided meat, milk and hides. The elk was also ridden, and it was once claimed that reindeer – and elk-riding preceded equitation. The poet of the Finnish epic, the Kalevala, was quite unable to decide if the hero Väinämöinen fell from his ‘blue elk’ or his ‘dun-coloured courser’;17 this seems to be reflected in the Pazyryk burials where horses of the finest central Asiatic breed were fitted with reindeer masks. The Mongols themselves were one of the forest tribes who broke out onto the horse-riding steppe.

  The condition of north Asian hunters remained virtually unchanged from prehistoric times until the nineteenth century. Their tangible remains, when recovered, testify to this tenacious conservatism. Metal-working came late to the north, and though wood, leather and bone preserve well in bog conditions, their survival is less favoured than is that of the debris of civilised communities. Consequently, assessments of the Animal Style art of northern Europe and Asia may lay undue stress on influences emanating from the south. Influences there certainly were; many individual motifs can be traced back to their southern sources. But, from the Upper Palaeolithic era, the North had its own Animal Style, conserving its own peculiar conventions. These Arctic Stone Age finds include the wooden bird and animal figures from the Gorbunovo bog in the Urals, slate maces from Sweden and Finland, the bone carvings from the graves on the middle Yenisei River in Siberia, the rock carvings of animals stretching from central Siberia to Norway. Three wooden ladles from southern Finland were carved from a pine (pinus cembra) that grew in the Urals a thousand miles away. Those sledges certainly travelled.

  To the Greeks, northern and central Asia was a Land of Darkness, a land of abominable monstrosities. Their main source of information came from an epic poem, now lost, the Arismaspeia by Aristeas of Proconnessus.18 This traveller seems to have made a journey into Scythia and far beyond during the seventh century BC, in advance of the first Greek settlements on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Some say his was a journey of the spirit, a ‘souljourney’ like a shaman’s, but his topography is too circumstantial. He knew of the promiscuous Agathyrsi ‘greatly given to wearing gold’, the Cave of the Winds – probably the Dzungarian Gap in Western Mongolia – and the Rhipean Mountains, identified as the Altai – the ‘Mountain of Rhipe, aflower with forests, breast of the black night,’ wrote the Spartan poet Alcman. Thereabouts beaked griffins guarded sacred gold from the one-eyed Arismaspeians, ‘the horsemen who live about Pluto’s stream that flows with gold’.

  Nearby, Aeschylus placed the home of the Phorcides, ‘aged swan-shaped maidens possessing one eye in common and one tooth’, and the three winged Gorgons ‘with their snaky hair’. Long before, Hesiod knew of the Dog-Men and Herodotus of he Neuri, ‘one of whom is turned into a wolf for a few days each year’. Simias in the third century BC tells of ‘islands dark green with firs, overgrown with lofty reeds ... and a monstrous race of men, half dogs upon whose supple necks is set a canine head armed with powerful jaws. They bark like dogs but comprehend the speech of men.’ There was a Land of Feathers; there were headless people with faces on their shoulders, the Ox-Feet, the Goat-Feet, the Web-Feet, the Parasol-Feet, and, in the Himalayas, ‘hairy men swift of foot with their feet turned backwards’.19 The Abominable Snowman is the one monstrosity that has resolutely refused to die.

  The monstrosities of Asia are difficult to explain away. Some dismiss them as mythical nonsense in the same class as the ‘Pobble-with-no-toes’. Others resolve them in purely ethnographical terms. The Web-Feet are wearing snow-shoes, the headless humpty-dumpties anoraks, and so on. But they are persistent. Sober Chinese annalists and the first European travellers to Central Asia in the thirteenth century report them too. The Dog Jung were nomads with whom the Chinese actually fought. ‘The appearance of these people is like dogs.’ There were the Kuei. ‘These people have the faces of men but only one eye’; and there ‘were wild men with hairy bodies and pendulous breasts’.20 ‘These are the Things from the North-East Comer to the North-West Corner,’ wrote the author of the Shan-Hai-Ching, no later than the end of the first century BC, ‘the Shankless, ... the Long-Legs, ... the One-Eyes – these people have only one eye set in the middle of their forehead’, and ‘the Jou-Li – these people have one hand and one foot.’21 Other sources report the ‘Tip-Toes’ and the ‘No-Bellies’. The Annals of the Bamboo Books speak of King Mu (of the Chou Dynasty) pushing westwards over the Moving Sands (the Gobi) and the ‘Country of the Heaps of Feathers’.22 Some two thousand years later Bishop Ivo of Narbonne wrote in a panic-stricken letter that, on his invasion of Hungary, the Mongol Batu was accompanied by Dog-Headed Warriors.23

  Civilised men attributed animal properties to the nomads. Ammianus Marcellinus spoke of the bestial cunning of the Huns – ‘one might take them for two-legged beasts, or for stumps rough hewn into images’.24 In his Gothic History, Jordanes wrote, ‘They had a sort of lump, not a head, with pin-holes rather than eyes ... though they live in the form of men they have the cruelty of wild beasts.’25 The Han Imperial Secretary said of the Hsiung-nu ‘in their breasts beat the heart of beasts ... from the most ancient times they have never been regarded as a part of humanity’.26 In the year I BC their ruler paid a state visit to the Chinese capital. His hosts lodged him in the Zoological Gardens.27 In Central Asian folklore supernatural beings put their bird and animal forms on and off at will. The Lady Ala Mangnyk ‘puts on her golden swan clothing’; Jelbagan’s wife was a ‘leaden-eyed, copper-nosed witch’; there were ‘swan maidens living in the dark with leaden eyes, hempen plaits, hands with yellow nails and murderous’,28 and royal emissaries in the form of hounds or eagles. Some shaman costumes are hung with ribbons that represent snakes; in the Yakut and other traditions, snakes have the same magico-religious significance as hair does. Herodotus reports a plague of snakes that drove the Neuri, the wolf tribe, from their lands; ‘maybe they were sorcerers’, he says.29 Other costumes are hung with mirrors that represent little ‘eyes’ and little images of human organs. Tales of such curiosities may have given birth to the monsters that puzzled the Greeks; the Gorgons with their snaky hair, the swan-shaped Phorcides, griffins and Dog-Men.

  Shamanism is a religious ideology peculiar to hunters and herdsmen.30 It appears to be north Asian in origin, yet is diffused throughout North and South America, Oceania, Indonesia and Australia. Shamanist practices are historically documented in lands as far apart as China, Ireland of the Iron Age, Pagan Scandinavia, among the Scythians and Thracians, in Classical Greece after the opening of the Black Sea trade route, and even in Siberia in the nineteenth century. Its basic features are a Celestial Being identified with the Sky, direct communication between Heaven and Earth, and an infernal Region connected to these loci by a Cosmic Axis.

  A shaman, as Professor E. R. Dodds describes one, is ‘a psychically unstable person who has received a call to the religious life. As a result of his call he undergoes a period of rigorous training, which commonly involves solitude and fasting, and may involve a psychological change of sex. From this religious “retreat” he emerges with the power, real or assumed, of passing at will into a state of mental dissociation’.31 Each trance repeats his symbolic death; he achieves it by fasting, followed by dancing to the monotonous beat of a drum. He often resorts to pharmacopoeia, hemp, and the shamanic mushroom – the Fly Agaric, which is probably the Soma of Vedic texts. Ostyak and Vogul shamans eat this mushroom and fly to the Sky ‘where they live in the Sun’s rays like insects in human hair’.32 Herodotus describes some Scythians ‘howling for joy’ in what seems to have been some kind of sauna bath with the added benefits of hemp.33 Strabo talks of shamans or seers ‘walking in smoke’, and the first part of Aristophanes’ Clouds seems to be little more than a moralistic take-off of a shamanistic seance.

  The shaman’s body ‘dies’, and his soul flies off on the wings of ecstasy to the Sky or to the Un
derworld. Dodds says, ‘From these experiences, narrated by him in extempore song, he derives the skill in divination, religious poetry, and magical medicine which makes him socially important. He becomes the repository of a supernormal wisdom.’34 Feared, sexually ambivalent, set aside from the ‘normal’ life of the tribe, he remains the hub of its creative activity, its culture hero.

  A fable of Aesop tells of the Golden Age when ‘the other animals had articulate speech, and knew the use of words; and they held meetings in the forests; and the stones spoke and needles of the pine tree ...’35 In his trance, the shaman forsakes his human condition and regains this Paradisal Time. He identifies himself with a ‘helping spirit’, usually an animal or bird, and learns to imitate its language. A costume completes the transformation. The Tungus have duck and reindeer costumes, the duck for ascents to the Sky, the reindeer for descents to the Underworld. By putting on the costume he becomes that animal or bird. ‘I transformed myself into my holy shape of a black-throated loon and flew from tree to tree where my festival was celebrated.’36 In the Ynglinga Saga, Odin’s body ‘lay as though dead, and then he became a bird, or a beast, a fish or a dragon, and went off in an instant into far-off lands’.37 Is this the underlying idea behind the symplegma of animals, so recurrent a feature of the Animal Style?

  The shaman changes himself into his alter-ego. Yet he is the focal point of all tribal activities, his protective spirit is the one which the tribe will adopt as its totem. The Teleut believe that the eagle is their protector; their words for eagle and shaman are the same. Attila was surrounded by sorcerers, and eagles were emblazoned on his shields. The undivided Turks had golden wolf-head standards. Ssu-Ma-Chi’en records that ‘King Mu attacked the Ch’uan barbarians and brought back with him four white wolves and four white deer.’38 Chingis Khan’s ancestor was a wolf sent down from the sky, whose wife was a white deer. The Hungarian chronicles tell of the origin of their race: two hunters crossed the Maeotic swamp chasing a doe (the totem of those lands which they then annexed); the doe turned itself into a beautiful woman, and the sexual implications are obvious. The animal totem represents the ideal of the tribe; hence the urge to denigrate or subdue the totems of other tribes; hence one possible explanation for the ‘animal combats’ of the Animal Style.

  Mental disorders are common in northern Asia. The harshness of the climate is sometimes blamed. Shamanist candidates, ‘morbid and sensitive’, tell of the relief that shamanising brings. The deliberate dérèglement de tous les sens of the shaman’s ordeal stabilises an otherwise disintegrating mental condition. Periods of sanity are offset by bouts of psychosis or excursions into the world of dreams. Modem reports of hallucinations under trance include a disordering of space and form, the disintegration of eidetic images into spirals, whorls, volutes, carpet patterns, nets and lattices; colours are of otherworldly brilliance; there are half-faces, faces split in half about a central axis, X-ray vision, and ‘amputated limbs, mutilated bodies, detached heads and fusion of parts’.39

  All works of art, even mechanical artifacts, reflect the aspirations of their makers, and are eye-witnesses of the past. The art of urban civilisations tends to be static, solid and symmetrical. It is disciplined by the representation of the human body and by the mathematical skills attendant upon monumental architecture. To a greater or lesser extent, nomadic art tends to be portable, asymmetric, discordant, restless, incorporeal and intuitive. Naturalistic representations of animals, themselves often in violent motion, are combined with a compulsive tendency towards ornamentation. The northerners rarely concerned themselves with human activities, admitting only an occasional mask. Colour is violent; mass and volume are rejected in favour of bold silhouettes and a pierced technique of openwork spirals, lattices and geometric tracery. Animals are depicted from both sides at once, their heads abutted to form a frontal mask. The so-called X-ray style is common and shows a schematised view of the animal’s skeleton. So is the convention of pars pro toto, especially with the amputated limbs of animals, and the fusion of parts to form a repertory of fantastic beasts. The similarities between hallucinatory experience and nomadic art cannot be explained away as pure chance.

  In Siberia and elsewhere there was a close relationship between the shaman, as creative personality, and the craftsman, especially the metal-smith. ‘Smiths and shamans come from the same nest,’ says a Yakut proverb. In nomadic society the smith was not the underprivileged artisan of civilisation; for the Mongols he was a hero and a free knight. Shamanism has always been connected with mastery over fire; metallurgical secrets are handed down within a closed circle associated with magic and sorcery. There were the Irish ‘Men of Art’, the Hephaestus tradition in Greece, the shaman-smiths of the Kalevala, and German and Japanese metallurgical secret societies.40

  The shaman’s disordered appreciation of reality verified the ‘spiritual’ truth of the artistic traditions of his tribe. In time, models strayed from their archetypes and became slack and repetitive. But as the shamans were able to renew the spiritual content of their beliefs, so the Animal Style was able to renew its vitality and power through to the Middle Ages and beyond.

  1970

  IT’S A NOMAD NOMAD WORLD

  In one of his gloomier moments Pascal said that all man’s unhappiness stemmed from a single cause, his inability to remain quietly in a room. ‘Notre nature,’ he wrote, ‘est dans le mouvement ... La seule chose qui nous console de nos misères est le divertissement.’ Diversion. Distraction. Fantasy. Change of fashion, food, love and landscape. We need them as the air we breathe. Without change our brains and bodies rot. The man who sits quietly in a shuttered room is likely to be mad, tortured by hallucinations and introspection.

  Some American brain specialists took encephalograph readings of travellers. They found that changes of scenery and awareness of the passage of seasons through the year stimulated the rhythms of the brain, contributing to a sense of well-being and an active purpose in life. Monotonous surroundings and tedious regular activities wove patterns which produced fatigue, nervous disorders, apathy, self-disgust and violent reactions. Hardly surprising, then, that a generation cushioned from the cold by central heating, from the heat by air-conditioning, carted in aseptic transports from one identical house or hotel to another, should feel the need for journeys of mind or body, for pep pills or tranquillisers, or for the cathartic journeys of sex, music and dance. We spend far too much time in shuttered rooms.

  I prefer the cosmopolitan scepticism of Montaigne. He saw travel as a ‘profitable exercise; the mind is constantly stimulated by observing new and unknown things ... No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, however much opposed to my own ... The savages who roast and eat the bodies of their dead do not scandalise me so much as those who persecute the living.’ Custom, he said, and set attitudes of mind, dulled the senses and hid the true nature of things. Man is naturally curious.

  ‘He who does not travel does not know the value of men,’ said Ib’n Battuta, the indefatigable Arab wanderer who strolled from Tangier to China and back for the sake of it. But travel does not merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind. Our early explorations are the raw materials of our intelligence, and, on the day I write this, I see that the NSPCC suggests that children penned up in ‘high-rise’ flats are in danger of retarded mental development. Why did nobody think of it before?

  Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths first, things and people second – paths down the garden, the way to school, the way round the house, corridors through the bracken or long grass. Tracking the paths of animals was the first and most important element in the education of early man.

  The raw materials of Proust’s imagination were the two walks round the town of Illiers where he spent his family holidays. These walks later became Méséglise and Guermantes Ways in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The haw
thorn path that led to his uncle’s garden became a symbol of his lost innocence. ‘It was on this way’, he wrote, ‘that I first noticed the round shadow which apple trees cast on the sunlit ground’, and later in life, drugged with caffeine and veronal, he dragged himself from his shuttered room on a rare excursion in a taxi, to see the apple trees in flower, the windows firmly shut for their smell would overpower his emotions. Evolution intended us to be travellers. Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been a sporadic condition in the history of man. Prolonged settlement has a vertical axis of some ten thousand years, a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time. We are travellers from birth. Our mad obsession with technological progress is a response to barriers in the way of our geographical progress.

  The few ‘primitive’ peoples in the forgotten comers of the earth understand this simple fact about our nature better than we do. They are perpetually mobile. The golden-brown babies of the Kalahari Bushmen hunters never cry and are among the most contented babies in the world. They also grow up to be the gentlest people. They are happy with their lot, which they consider ideal, and anyone who talks of ‘a murderous hunting instinct innate in man’ displays his wanton ignorance.

  Why do they grow up so straight? Because they are never frustrated by tortured childhoods. The mothers never sit still for long, and their babies are never left alone until the age of three and more. They lie close to their mothers’ breasts in a leather sling, and are rocked into contentment by the gentle swaying walk. When a mother rocks her baby, she is imitating, unaware, the gentle savage as she walks through the grassy savannah, protecting her child from snakes, scorpions and the terrors of the bush. If we need movement from birth, how should we settle down later?