The Nomadic Alternative – Page 232

II

The annual death and rebirth implicit within the cycle of the seasons repeats again and again in miniature the events of that larger unit of time, The Seven Ages of Man, from the "mewling and puking stage" to "second childishness and mere oblivion". In the course of each of these ages, the glands of the body perform a fixed sequence of functions which should coincide with a fixed sequence of messages that surface in the brain, telling the individual how to behave. If these messages are ignored they surface as myths which record the anxieties of not having obeyed them.

The journey of life is programmed in advance, each phase marked by an initiation. I suggest these are Birth - Weaning - Puberty - Marriage - Leadership or Height of Powers - Decline - Annihilation. The stages are naturally affected by, but do not necessarily correspond to, the number of years lived. The aim is to live out each stage to the full, and it is immaterial whether the life journey takes fifty or a hundred years to complete. We shall also recall that the life cycles of men and women are not exactly synchronized together. Women live longer than men, and reach the height of their influence when the men have already begun to decline.

The career of the body is immediately geared to the progress of the soul. And if the body keeps the commands implicit within each unit of biological time, what John Donne called his "slow pac'd soul" will finally be set free from matter. The point of death, far from being a painful torture, will come as a happy excursion.

I am not given to metaphysical abstractions, and darkly mistrust anything that smacks of the supernatural. When people talk of 'spiritual nourishment' and other woozy intangibles, I suspect them of wilfully evading the issues of life. I would find it convenient to avoid all mention of the soul. But this is unavoidable. For I have already discussed the activity of wandering as a technique