In Africa, where I was raised, it can be a bit awkward bumping into folk you don’t know in the middle of the bush. Spirits frequent such lonely places and people can be affected by them, so you’d do well giving everyone a wide berth. Just in case. Who knows what medicine they might be concocting?
Which is just quaint superstition, right?
‘Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.’ CG Jung
There’s a lonely country lane I take between isolated villages in rural Devon where I now live. Along the way is a farm complex converted into holiday lets. Within striding distance of these buildings, I encounter this archaic man on a regular basis, not as an individual but as a species; members of which doubtless lived in very different parts of the country and have no knowledge of one another, yet behave as if enacting the secret rites of some esoteric society.
Had you simply been driving by, you’d hardly notice the sight of a lone man taking an early morning stroll in the country. It wouldn’t be in the least bit remarkable. People go for walks all the time, especially holiday makers for whom the country stroll is obligatory fare.
But if you saw a thousand men, a different one every day, all along the same ecological niche, wearing the same anxious yet expectant faces, you’d begin to notice the patterns and subtleties, just as you would variants of Raven’s call if you hang out with him long enough.
Each man could have no inkling of the one preceding him, nor of the one who would be trudging the same route next week as farm guests came and went. Yet they were like peas in a pod, these men-of-a-certain-age, straddling that uncomfortable hiatus between keeping fit and staying active.
Wordsworth said of his endless questing across the Yorkshire moors that no man does such a thing without being in search of something. These men seemed to have come to this lonesome spot for the same reason. They were intently looking for something, even if it could not be articulated, searching for some quality of spirit to inform and give meaning to anemic lives bled dry of communion with Nature.
To that end special new trainers were required, preferably bright enough to rival Hermes’ winged sandals, all violent oranges and powder blue, but with traditional Barbours and flat caps or shooting hats to present their country credentials, done without swagger, competence having lost its novelty, omnipotence renounced, the socket still raw from bloody extraction.
These were men who had thrown out their old gods, to quote Nietzsche, but ‘had no new ones in swaddling clothes’, men all making the same primal gesture, embracing some measure of life’s solitude so as to cross one of her more obscure thresholds.
Each one had stolen from their bed at daybreak, bid their other half a muffled something and slipped out into the dawn with all the quiet excitement of being upon the trail of some sacred treasure.
And so, to a man, there was no roadside bonhomie. They were all in ritual space, shielded from the world by some invisible veil, acknowledgement limited to a raised hand without eye contact intruding into sacred precepts.
The gestural significance of such an existential mile is easy to dismiss. It’s just a walk down the lane, right? But when you see there is a particular contemplative gait that goes with it, a whole bunch of guidelines for dress code, special rules for interaction and the pervasive aura of rapt attention with each and every one, you begin to understand something words can scarcely approach; they were no less marvelous in their display than birds of paradise, no less mysterious than the cracking of chrysalis.
For some reason such gestures are like Heineken, they refresh the parts words cannot reach. We think of gesture as being a kind of adjunct to language but actually it’s the other way around. Words are garnish. You can have a whole plate full and still feel hungry. You can spend half a lifetime trying to figure it all out with words before discovering that the transformation is in the tone, the gesture, the lonesome yet heartfelt unknowing of an existential mile.
When I first came to Devon I would joke that the locals might accept you on the face of it but would ship your bones to the border once you died. Then I realized I was just as prejudiced myself. I regarded them as uneducated peasants compared to whom I was infinitely superior. So I felt stuck for years because my direction lay not in becoming more refined but in accepting my own unvarnished, salty self.
Of course, words matter. The truth of this is currently being tested with the question of whether Trump’s admission to NBC’s Lester Holt, that he fired Comey over the Russia investigation, will have political consequences for him.
But where being together really gets tested is in our actual demeanor to one another, who you are before you open your mouth, shown to me recently by my mechanic who I’d asked about somewhere to get a hot cup of something whilst I waited for him to fix my truck.
Oh yes, he nodded, and while his accent was so thick I couldn’t get a word of it, he indicated with his circled hands, thumbs and fingertips barely able to touch one another in their efforts to contain the sumptuous pudding cake I was sure to find down in the village, even tipping his hands towards me to better admire the imagined feast that would surely be mine before long.
If you ask an indigenous African for directions and he likes the look of you, your destination will always be gestured as close by, just around the corner or over the hill, a symbolic equation being made between his regard for you and the subsequent ease of passage evoked on your behalf with a laconic wave of the hand. If he doesn’t like you, it will be ‘kutchana‘, far away, hand and arm arching waaay over the horizon, even if your goal is within plain sight.
My mechanic and I were no different, the delicious treat I would soon enjoy was his own warm regard; and it was not simply that pretense can be dropped without tragic consequences but that the space then be filled with something more fundamental, something which just wells up by itself once you’ve gotten sufficiently out of the way. Strangely, it seems you have not to know what you are looking for to find it and stranger still, learn how to be with others by treading your own existential mile.
