The Nomadic Alternative – Page 17

→ : ‘Loaf Candles’

But these sentiments concern vertical ascents to something higher. In one way or another, they all exhibit a disdain of the present and dissatisfaction with the past. And the Mediaeval Englishman would have found arguments on the nature of moral or material progress nonsensical. True, he would have framed them differently; but for him Progress was geographic or horizontal.

A “progress” was a journey or circuit round a number of given points. The feudal monarch and his retinue progressed round the estates of his barons. A judge progressed round the assizes, a bishop round his churches, a pilgrim round a sequence of shrines, and a nomadic herdsman round a cycle of fixed pastures. “Progress” to denote the march of science or the ascent of moral virtue crept into use during the 17th Century. And just as a city, denied room to expand sideways explodes vertically into the air, I suspect that if horizontal aspirations are satisfied – if people are free to move SIDEWAYS – vertical aspirations will look after themselves.

Geography is a gut reaction. That is the underlying supposition behind the ideas I should like to expound.

The words ‘progress’, ‘way’, ‘journey’, ‘road’, ‘path’, ‘pilgrim-age’, ‘travel’, and ‘wander’ call to some deep-seated bed of consciousness and we answer them with an emotional response. For all pertain to that great intangible – the Idea of freedom. We have the cliche “Life is a Journey”, the voyage imaginaire, the Archetypal Journey such as the Odyssey, the Afterlife or Metaphy-sical Journey, such as Pilgrim’s Progress, the Revolutionary Journey and the Road of Peyote. For the Chinese the Tao was the Way of the Universe; Muslim Sufis spoke of themselves as “Travellers on the Way”, and the American Way of Life is held as a religious principle. Little boys take great pleasure in ‘ways’ of any kind, be they hoofprints, railway tracks, or the Mésegllise and Guermantes Ways of Proust. The construction of unnecessary motorways and the revival of interest in the “Old Straight Track” belong to the same level of mythopoeic thought. Up is good, down is bad, whether this applies to the health of the body, Heaven, Hell, Snakes and Ladders