The Nomadic Alternative – Page 271

killing machine". Arms, armour and military plumage imitate fangs,

beaks, claws, stings, hide, fur and feather; martial music the trumpetings and snarls of the primaeval bush. Black Panther stalks White Pig.

XII

But "Why", asks Plutarch's character Gryllus, "do your poets call those who fight most bravely against their enemies 'wolf-breasted' or 'lion-hearted' and compare them to wild boars; but never call lions 'man-hearted' or compare the strength of a wild boar to that of a man?" Why indeed?

We have no alternative but to think of war, fighting among adults and hierarchies of dominance as reversions to animality. And the whole symbolism of war makes it plain that some factor has drastically impaired the brain's capacity for metaphoric exchange with our environment. Somewhere the programming of the intellect has gone wrong and badly wrong, presumably at the stage of early explorations when the intellect was formed. We distinguish ourselves from other animals by comparing ourselves to them and so find our humanity. But in war we assume our enemy to be animal, or our enemy does the same. Furthermore, the way in which men brandish their weapons (or for that matter their cameras) as assertions of virility suggests that their difficulties (and their violence) are those of sexual identity. Very briefly, I should like to tread this swampy ground and explore the possible connection between the two.

The mental illness, known as schizophrenia, stems from a break-down in the brain's capacity to form symbolic concepts and coincides with the terminal point of reason. In other words, the metaphor making mechanism in the brain, which is the precondition of human society, ceases to function (from whatever cause). And in losing his capacity to reason symbolically, the schizophrenic loses his [illegible]