The Nomadic Alternative – Page 23

predictable route with the certainty of an article of faith or an

idea. This is “wandering for God” as opposed to “wandering for gain”. Pilgrims and missionaries of any kind attach themselves to a book or doctrine which articulates some transcendent philosophy or arbitrary political concept.

And lastly there are the Vagrants or deranged wanderers, in the strictest sense of the word ‘range’, in that they simply do not know where they are going. But then I wonder if there is any such thing as random human movement; I once encountered an international bum, who expressively described his compulsion to wander. “It’s as though the tides was pulling you along the highway. I’m like the Arctic Tern. That’s a beautiful white bird, you know, what flies from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again.” But his pattern of movement was far from haphazard. In Nice many years before, he had bummed the Chief of Police on the ‘Promenade des Anglais”, and regularly revisited the scene of this most successful and satisfying moment of his bumming career.

“A Robin Red breast in a cage puts all Heaven in a Rage.”

Ingrained in the human consciousness is the association of the free flight of birds with the innocence and personal freedom of the first state. In our dreams we are airborne. The human soul is a winged homunculus urged on its migration path by angel helpers.

The Voguls of Northern Siberia called the Milky Way the Tunk Pox or ‘Path of the Ducks to the South’. Their heroic totem ancestor had wandered up and down it and they imagined their souls after death to follow the birds to a paradise of perpetual warmth.

Seers and prophets, the ancient equivalents of our ornithologists, deluded themselves into predicting the future from observing the flight of birds, and in every culture holy men and beneficent apparitions have been able to fly. We have only to recall the