The Nomadic Alternative – Page 274

for its inventiveness, its passion and its violence is clear. Its young do not journey into the wilderness to fight the beast as it should be fought. Success in material terms is purchased at the expense of sexual and mental balance, and at the expense of the tranquility that goes with them. The failure of civilization is a failure to grow up. Its neurotic ambition is a flight to avoid a crisis of human identity. Men miscalculate the timing of their initiations and find themselves plunged in adolescent torments long after the body has aged. The lives of the violent - the bully boys in history - are the lives of those who never properly made the choice. They are as doubtful of their humanity as their sex. And they are dangerous. For they find relief from their troubles in violent action, hoping, throughout their lives, to prove what should have been - and could only have been - proved once and for all in youth. The warrior romantic only makes an exhibition of his virility because this was once in doubt.

Others, similarly disoriented, try to establish their identity by transferring the beast fighting episode onto an internal plane. They find relief in work. They battle with ideas and get their teeth into problems of their own creation. Coleridge once said that all great minds were androgynous. Like the inspiration of the feminized shaman poet or the healing of the sexless priest or doctor, the act of creation is everywhere a response to, or cure for, sexual maladjustment. The swift perception of metaphor may be the hallmark of genius. But the great geniuses of the world have been those who remained stuck in a phase of boyhood attachments. They preserve through life a childlike passion for invention, and the hunt for new knowledge takes the heat from personal crises. Each new thing or problem solved attempts to establish a certainty in shifting world. The creator is forced to widen his field of symbolic attachments or anchors, thus recreating his lost universe as a position from which to make a new start.

Seen from this viewpoint, there is no such thing as superior or inferior intelligence. It simply becomes a question of the time in