The Nomadic Alternative – Page 238

of three inches can have nothing whatever to do with the heartbeat.

No. The baby instinctively requires something quite different.

To work off its frustrations, it demands to have them walked off.

It screams not simply for the mother's presence but HER MOVEMENT.

Sixty paces per minute is the speed of a SLOW WALK - an optimal

rhythm for walking long distances without tiring, and the traverse

represents her lilting strides as she picks her way barefoot through

the rough and spiny ground. A pampered infant in curtained creche

screams for the same thing - to be back in the savannah or forest

slung from its mother's left side as she walks on her daily foraging

round or from one camp to another. The 'aggression' of an infant

(See Note.) does not bubble up from some innate fountain of rage.

Babies yell BECAUSE THEY CANNOT BEAR TO LIE STILL except during the

periods of the day and night the biological clock has reserved for

sleep. And if a baby cannot endure inertia how shall we settle down

later?

To return to the nature of the attachment bond between a child

and its mother. From birth to the age of ten months the two are,

in theory, inseparable. During this time the mother teaches her child

the essential functions of the body. But its total dependence on

her gradually gives way to increased awareness and curiosity about

its surroundings. It learns through the mother - and often despite

her - what it likes to eat and how it likes to play, and after a

further five months loses its categorical fear of everything that

is not the mother. It befriends relations and strangers once they

show themselves to be harmless, but still registers alarm and fear

of the new. It tolerates animal pets and roams about in an ever

Note- This insight will perhaps allow us to redefine the word 'aggres-
SION'. We shall take it to mean exactly what it says, "the will to
move forward or ahead" in an active sense. Aggression will be synon-
ymous with activity, muscular or intellectual, preferably both
combined, with nothing necessarily destructive about it. 'Aggression'
when accompanied by violence is simply a response to the frustra-
tions of settlement or confinement. The confined man is like a
coiled spring which may suddenly unleash itself in an outburst of
energy.