The Nomadic Alternative – Page 18

or the Dow Jones Index. We have the Descent of Orpheus and the
Ascension of Mount Carmel. On a psychological plane we have the
good or bad ‘trip’, on an economic one the success or failure of
the Five Year Plan. The connection of all or any of these I leave
open, except to note that the human mind is passionately interested
in the idea of the Journey and the direction of the Path.

II

There are two conditions for men, to wander and to settle – to
dig in or to move – two conditions with two incompatible ideologies.
The wanderer exults in his freedom, the settler compensates for his
chains. But when literature first comments on the antithesis it
sings the triumph of the settler, because the settler is closer to
the source of literature. The wanderers are wild men, representatives
of the primal order, and the settlers unstring them and exhaust
their archaic strength. In the Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh, the
battle-axed warrior, ruled over the City, while Enkidu, the wild
man, roamed the steppe, fed on grass with gazelles, jostled with
wild beasts at the water hold, and ripped apart the traps laid by
hunters. Gilgamesh, envious of strength more potent than his,
resented the wild man’s freedom, and hired the town prostitute to
sprawl naked in his path, to weaken him and bind him to the city.
It took her six days of hard copulation to do it. Abel was the
wandering shepherd, Cain the settled farmer. Cain’s weapon was
not a flaying knife, but a hoe. Esau was a hunter and hairy man
of the field, Jacob a soft man, who stayed in the tents, and Jacob
cheated Esau out of his birthright. The soft men win, but for how
long?

In the 14th Century the Arab historian Ib’n Khaldun had this to
say of the moral barrier that separated wanderer from settler. “The
Desert People are closer to being good than settled peoples, because