The Nomadic Alternative – Page 28

In theory, help would an extroverted character, while if another child reached the same stage during the confinement of winter, this might lead to introversion. But the vagaries of childhood experience are rarely predictable and differences of temperament would vary from latitude to latitude. Faith in the horoscope is, perhaps, more significant as a mental activity than a biological fact, and may reflect a craving of the disoriented to resynchronize themselves to the celestial timepiece.

So we have an internal chronometer which regulates the processes of life from day to day and year to year. It even divides the phases of the life cycle into boyhood, manhood, senility and so on. But do we have an inborn direction finder to steer with? The claims advanced at one time or another for an innate sense of locality have proved ambiguous. Some people, it is true, can be hypnotized into finding their way back to a given point even when blindfolded. The phenomenon of sleep walking or walking in trance is little understood, and the mandalas of Oriental mysticism, discovered by Jung to have an organic existence in the brain, are suspiciously reminiscent of a compass dial. We certainly cannot rule out a vestigial sense of orientation, but on the whole we learn to navigate.

And yet on reflection we discover in man a unique faculty for finding his place in the world – his language. Millions of years before man, travellers sped to obscure destinations “all surely going somewhere”. The Palaeozoic world resounded with calls to mate or migrate. The ‘howls’ of fish underwater can pass through the sides of a ship, rousing sailors from their bunks. Cries, gestures, colours, scents and textures flashed coded statements and received reciprocal replies. But the language of man is unique among these communication systems and severs him from the mindless animal. The vehicle of language relays a body of experience from one generation to the next. No other animal can cross-reference the lessons of the past with the conditions of the present and the hopes of the future. The very existence of language presumes