The Nomadic Alternative – Page 1

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The best travellers are illiterate. Narratives of travel are pale compensations for the journey itself, and merely proclaim the traveller’s inadequacy as a traveller. The best travellers do not pause to record their second-rate impressions, to be read third-hand. Their experience is primal. Their minds are uncongealed by the written word.

Optimists have assumed that the invention of writing rescued man from savage ignorance, developed in him a critical awareness of himself, and heralded his progress to higher things. But writing proper began as a system of accountancy, and, like an accountant, has remained a commodity of doubtful benefits. The oldest written documents simply registered the production rate of the lower orders and protected the bureaucrat-or mean-eyed scribe from lapses of memory.

Literacy implements the will of the monopolist and wrecks spontaneity. Through writing, small groups of men made the first systematic attempts to ossify a social order which depended on slavery, to rig prices, to regiment, assess, tax, judge, submit to census, groom into submission and infect with their own fantasies the human cattle over which they had won control. The literate planner orders a campaign of work without dirtying his hands. The signature on a death warrant does not bloody the hands of the signer. And if many writers have complained that writing is ‘bought in blood’, they might remember its bloody career.

What follows is even more perverse than a written narrative of a journey – a provisional account of an ill-advised and ill-prepared expedition to discover the source of The Journey itself. Such an undertaking is a contradiction in terms and foredoomed to failure. It may tail off into supercilious rubbish; we are disoriented from the start. “Useless”, as a proverb in the Chinese Book of Odes [illegible]