The Nomadic Alternative – Page 228

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The metronomic action of the wanderer's legs propels him through a sequence of timed appointments with trials and pleasures and synchronizes his arrival with annihilation point on time. But over-strenuousness wandering, disciplines or penances can have the effect of advancing this annihilation before the body is ready for it, in which case the traveller dies before his time and is 'twice-born'.

In the foregoing I may have harped too insistently on the effect of the seasons or cycles of natural time in setting up the time-table for life's journey. I should now like to reflect on some of the implications.

The human body is the seat of a biological clock, synchronized to celestial time. Our innate time sense activates a cycle of natural functions, such as sleeping and waking, over a period of twenty four hours. But a single day is only one unit of biological time, and some functions of the body repeat themselves on a weekly, a monthly and a yearly basis. Thus the passage of the seasons organically affects our bodies and in turn the way we behave. In England we are barred from correct coordination to the seasonal cycle by over-heating our houses during the 'winter of our discontent'. Nonetheless winter devitalizes us, epidemics immobilize us. We reach the pit of depression in February and begin with the mad March hares to revive. We require an annual depression before feeling renewed.

No place in the world, except the tropical forests of Equatoria, lacks a lean season, an annual trial for the people, a crossing over the 'bridge of cutting knives', quite literally, as Rimbaud knew, "Une Saison en Enfer" when the beasts are hungry and the people weak from hunger. Now is the time the elements show their destructive face - a time of cold wind, rains, or searing heat, and also a time of torpor, when men are pinioned by snows, trapped by floodwaters, or so exhausted by the sun that muscular exertion becomes impossible.