Donkey-donk, I have to say, was an astounding driver. He put the car into a kind of dance through the spinifex. He knew exactly whether to swerve round a bush or flatten it. The seed-heads showered on to the windscreen.
Nero kept the barrel of his 22 sticking out of the window.
‘Turkey-track,’ he whispered.
Donkey-donk braked and a bush turkey – which is a kind of bustard – craned its mottled brown head above the grass stems and made off at a trot. Nero fired, once, and the bird collapsed in a whirl of flying feathers.’
‘Good shot!’ I said.
‘Another one!’ shouted Walker, and a second turkey ran on ahead into a thicket. Nero fired again, and missed. By the time we got back to the first turkey, it too had vanished.
‘Fuckin’ turkey,’ said Nero.
We held our course to the west and, before long, a kangaroo and young leaped up in front of us. Donkey-donk put his foot on the accelerator and the car thumped and bounced over the tussocks with the kangaroos bounding on ahead, gaining. Then we were out of the spinifex into burnt and open country, and we were gaining, and we caught up and hit the mother in the haunches – the young one had veered off sideways – and she flew, in a backward somersault, over the roof of the car and landed – dead, I prayed! – in a cloud of dust and ash.
We jumped out. Nero fired into the cloud, but the kangaroo was up and off, shaky, limping yet with a fair burst of speed and Donkey-donk, alone at the wheel now, at her tail.
We watched the car slam into the kangaroo a second time, but she landed on the bonnet, jumped clear, and came bounding in our direction. Nero took a couple of swinging shots but missed – they zinged into the bush beside me – and the kangaroo zigzagged back the way she’d come. Donkey-donk then headed off and hit her a third time, with an awful thud, and this time she didn’t budge.
He opened the car door and clouted the base of her skull with a spanner – at which she reared up again on her haunches and he had to grab her by the tail. By the time we three ran up, the kangaroo was hopping forward and Donkey-donk was hanging on like a man in a tug-of-war, and then Nero put a shot through her head, and that was that.
Walker looked disgusted and miserable.
‘I don’t like it,’ he said.
‘Nor do I,’ I agreed.
Nero contemplated the dead kangaroo. A stream of blood trickled from her nostrils on to the red earth.
‘Old one,’ he shrugged. ‘Not good for eat.’
‘What are you going to do with her?’
‘Leave,’ he said. ‘Cut off tail, maybe. You got a knife?’
‘No,’ I said.
Nero rummaged in the car and found the lid of an old tin can. Using it as a blade, he tried to cut off the tail but couldn’t saw through the vertebrae.
The back left tyre had a flat. Donkey-donk commanded me to get out the jack and change the wheel. The jack was badly bent and, when I applied a few strokes of pressure, it snapped and the axle hit the dirt.
‘Now you done it,’ he leered.
‘What do we do?’ I asked.
‘Walk,’ said Nero, with a titter.
‘How far?’
‘Two days, maybe.’
‘What about the smoke?’ I suggested.
‘Nah!’ growled Donkey-donk. ‘Lift him! Lift him up, man!’
Walker and I gripped the bumper, braced our backs, and tried to lift while Donkey-donk got ready with a log to shove under the differential.
It was no use.
‘Come on,’ I shouted at Nero. ‘Give us a hand!’
He cupped his fingers and ran them up and down one of his slender biceps, batting his eyelids and giggling.
‘No force!’ he said, breathlessly.
Donkey-donk handed me a digging-stick and ordered me to scoop out a hole beneath the wheel. Half an hour later, the hole was big enough to change the wheel. All three looked on as I worked. I was done in and drenched with sweat. We then rocked the car back and forth, and finally pushed it clear.
We left the kangaroo to the crows and drove back to Cullen.
‘You want to come hunting tomorrow?’ asked Donkey-donk.
‘No,’ I said.
London, 1970
AT A PUBLIC lecture I listened to Arthur Koestler airing his opinion that the human species was mad. He claimed that, as a result of an inadequate co-ordination between two areas of the brain – the ‘rational’ neocortex and the ‘instinctual’ hypothalamus – Man had somehow acquired the ‘unique, murderous, delusional streak’ that propelled him, inevitably, to murder, to torture and to war.
Our prehistoric ancestors, he said, did not suffer from the effects of overcrowding. They were not short of territory. They did not live in cities . . . yet they butchered one another just the same.
He went on to say that, since Hiroshima, there had been a total transformation of the ‘structure of human consciousness’: in that, for the first time in his history, Man had to contemplate the idea of his destruction as a species.
This millenarian claptrap made me quite angry. At question time I stuck up my hand.
Around the year 1000, I said, people all over Europe believed that a violent end of the world was imminent. How was the ‘structure of their consciousness’ any different from our own?
Koestler fixed me with a contemptuous stare and, to the approval of the audience, snapped:
‘Because one was a fantasy and the H-Bomb is real.’
Salutary reading for the end of the Second Millennium: Henri Focillon’s L’An mil.
In his chapter ‘The Problem of the Terrors’, Focillon shows how, exactly one thousand years ago, Western man was paralysed by the same set of fears being put about today by the bigots who pass for statesmen. The phrase ‘Mundus senescit’ ‘The world grows old,’ reflected a mood of dire intellectual pessimism, as well as a ‘religious’ conviction that the world was a living body which, having passed the peak of its maturity, was doomed, suddenly, to die.
The sources of the Terror were threefold.
That God would destroy his creation in clouds of fire and brimstone.
That the legions of the Devil would erupt out of the East.
That epidemics would wipe out the human race.
And yet the Terror passed. The year 1000 came and went, and the new ‘open’ society of the Middle Ages took root. As Bishop Glaber wrote, in the loveliest of lines, ‘Three years after the year 1000, the Earth was covered with a white robe of churches.’
Dinner party, London, 1971
A very tall American came to dinner. He was on his way to Washington from a fact-finding mission in Vietnam. Over the past week he had flown to Hawaii, to Guam, to Tokyo and Saigon. He had overflown Hanoi on a bombing raid. He had conferred with NATO chiefs-of-staff – and this was his one night off.
He was an innocent man. Over salad he spoke of defoliants. I shall not forget the sight of raspberries passing between his lips, nor the thud of stressed syllables coming out of them: ‘The Nórth Viétnamése have lóst betwéen a hálf and a thírd of a generátion of their yóung fíghting mén. This is a lóss nó nátion can affórd to sustáin indéfinitely: which is why we ańtícipate a mílitary víctory, in Víetnám, in the coúrse of 1972 . . .’
From Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Do not press an enemy at bay.
Prince Fu Ch’ai said, ‘Wild beasts, when at bay, fight desperately. How much more is this true of men! If they know there is no alternative, they will fight to the death.
Steiermark, Austria, 1974
Hiking in the Rottenmanner Tauern before my interview with Lorenz, my rucksack weighted with his books. The days were cloudless. I spent each night in a different Alpine hut, and had sausages and beer for supper. The mountainsides were in flower: gentians and edelweiss, columbines and the turk’s cap lily. The pinewoods were blue-green in the sunlight, and streaks of snow still lingered on the screes. On every meadow there were mild brown cows, the cowbells clanking and echoing acr
oss the valleys, or the chime of a church bell far below . . .
Hölderlin’s line, ‘In lovely blueness blooms the steeple with its metal roof . . .’
The hikers: men and women in red-and-white shirts and lederhosen and everyone calling ‘Grüss Gott!’ as they passed. One knotty little man mistook me for a German and, with the leer of a pornography salesman, reversed his jacket collar to show me his swastikas.
Re-reading Lorenz made me realise why sensible people tended to throw up their hands in horror: to deny there was such a thing as human nature, and to insist that everything must be learnt.
‘Genetic determinism’, they felt, threatened every liberal, human and democratic impulse to which the West still clung. They recognised, too, that you couldn’t pick and choose with instincts: you had to take the lot. You couldn’t allow Venus into the Pantheon and bolt the door on Mars. And once you took on ‘fighting’, ‘territorial behaviour’ and ‘rank order’, you were back in the soup of nineteenth-century reaction.
What, in On Aggression, caught the fancy of the Cold War warriors was Lorenz’s concept of ‘ritual’ combat.
The Superpowers, by implication, must fight because it is in their nature to fight: yet could perhaps contain their squabbles in some poor, small, preferably defenceless country – just as two bucks will choose a patch of no-man’s land to spar on.
The US Secretary of Defence, I was told, kept an annotated copy by his bedside.
Men are products of their situation, and learning conditions everything they will ever say or think or do. Children are traumatised by events in their childhood; nations by crises in their history. But could this ‘conditioning’ mean there are no absolute standards which transcend historical memories? No ‘rights’ or ‘wrongs’ regardless of race or creed?
Has the ‘gift of tongues’ somehow done away with instinct? Is Man, in short, the proverbial ‘blank slate’ of the behaviourists – infinitely malleable and adaptive?
If so, then all the Great Teachers have been spouting hot air.
The most ‘objectionable’ passage in On Aggression – or the one that led to catcalls of ‘Nazi!’ – is one in which Lorenz describes the instinctive ‘fixed motor pattern’ observable in young soldiers roused to battle fury: the head held high . . . chin stuck out . . . the arms rotated inwards . . . the shiver down the now non-existent hair along the spine. . . . ‘One soars elated above the cares of everyday life . . . Men enjoy the feeling of absolute righteousness even when they commit atrocities . . .
And yet . . . the mother who fights in fury to defend her child is – one would hope! – obeying the call of instinct, not the advice of some maternal guidance leaflet. And if you allow the existence of fighting behaviour in young women, why not also in young men?
Instincts are Pascal’s ‘reasons of the heart of which the reason knows nothing’. And to believe in the ‘reasons of the heart’ holds no comfort whatsoever for the reactionary – very much the reverse!
Without religion, in Dostoevsky’s famous formulation, everything is permissible. Without instinct, everything would be equally permissible.
A world shorn of instinct would be a far more deadly and dangerous place than anything the ‘aggression-mongers’ could come up with, for here would be Limbo-land where everything could be capped by something else: good could be bad; sense, nonsense; truth, lies; knitting no more moral than child murder; and where a man might be brainwashed into thinking or saying or doing whatever might be pleasing to the powers-that-be.
A torturer can cut off a man’s nose; but if the man gets a chance to breed, his child will be born with a nose. So with instinct! A core of unmodifiable instinct in man means that the brain-washers must begin their work of distortion over and over again, with each individual and each generation – and this, in the end, is a very wearisome business.
The Greeks believed there were limits to the range of human behaviour: not, as Camus pointed out, that these limits would never be surpassed, simply that they existed, arbitrarily; and that whoever had the hubris to exceed them would be struck down by Fate!
Lorenz maintains there are certain crises – or instinctual rubicons – in the life of any animal when it receives a call to behave in a certain way. The call is not necessarily taken up; for if the ‘natural’ target of its behaviour is missing, the animal will redirect it on to a substitute – and grow up warped.
Every mythology has its version of the ‘Hero and his Road of Trials’, in which a young man, too, receives a ‘call’. He travels to a distant country where some giant or monster threatens to destroy the population. In a superhuman battle, he overcomes the Power of Darkness, proves his manhood, and receives his reward: a wife, treasure, land, fame.
These he enjoys into late middle age when, once again, the clouds darken. Again, restlessness stirs him. Again he leaves: either like Beowulf to die in combat or, as the blind Tiresias prophesies for Odysseus, to set off for some mysterious destination, and vanish.
‘Catharsis’: Greek for ‘purging’ or ‘cleansing’. One controversial etymology derives it from the Greek katheiro ‘to rid the land of monsters’.
Myth proposes, action disposes. The Hero Cycle represents an unchangeable paradigm of ‘ideal’ behaviour for the human male. (One could, of course, work one out for the Heroine.) Each section of the myth – like a link in a behavioural chain – will correspond to one of the classic Ages of Man. Each Age opens with some fresh barrier to be scaled or ordeal to be endured. The status of the Hero will rise in proportion as to how much of this assault course he completes – or is seen to complete.
Most of us, not being heroes, dawdle through life, mis-time our cues, and end up in our various emotional messes. The Hero does not. The Hero – and this is why we hail him as a hero – takes each ordeal as it comes, and chalks up point after point.
I once made the experiment of slotting the career of a modern hero, Che Guevara, on to the structure of the Beowulf epic. The result was, with a bit of tinkering here and there, that both heroes are seen to perform the same set of exploits in the same sequence: the leavetaking; the voyage across the sea; the defeat of the Monster (Grendel–Batista); the defeat of the Monster’s mother (‘The water-hag’ – the Bay of Pigs). Both heroes receive their reward: a wife, fame, treasure (in Guevara’s case a Cuban wife and the Directorship of the National Bank of Cuba), and so forth. Both end up dying in a distant country: Beowulf killed by the Scaly Worm, Guevara by the Dictator of Bolivia.
As a man, Guevara, for all his charm, strikes one as a ruthless and unpleasant personality. As a Hero, he never put a foot wrong – and the world chose to see him as a Hero.
Heroes in moments of crisis are said to hear ‘angel voices’ telling them what to do next. The whole of the Odyssey is a marvellous tug of war between Athene whispering in Odysseus’s ear, ‘Yes, you’ll make it,’ and Poseidon roaring, ‘No, you won’t!’ And if you swap the word ‘instinct’ for ‘angel-voice’, you come close to the more psychologically-minded mythographers: that myths are fragments of the soul-life of Early Man.
The Hero Cycle, wherever found, is a story of ‘fitness’ in the Darwinian sense: a blueprint for genetic ‘success’. Beowulf leaves . . . Ivan leaves . . . Jack leaves . . . the young Aboriginal on Walkabout leaves . . . even the antique Don Quixote leaves. And these Wanderjahre, and combats with the Beast, are the story-teller’s version of the incest taboo; whereby a man must first prove ‘fitness’ and then must ‘marry far’.
In practice, it scarcely matters whether myths are the coded messages of instinct, whose structures will reside in the central nervous system, or tales of instruction handed down from the Year Dot. One point cannot be emphasised too strongly. Seldom, if ever, in myth, is it desirable, morally, for a man to kill a man in cold blood.
Among the military fraternities of Ancient Germany a young man, as part of his training to stifle inhibitions against killing, was required to strip naked; to dress himself in the hot, freshly flayed ski
n of a bear; to work himself into a ‘bestial’ rage: in other words, to go, quite literally, berserk.
‘Bearskin’ and ‘berserk’ are the same word. The helmets of the Royal Guards, on duty outside Buckingham Palace, are the descendants of this primitive battle costume.
Homer distinguishes two kinds of ‘fighting behaviour’. One is menos, the cold-blooded stand of Odysseus as he shoots the suitors. The other is lyssa, or ‘wolfish rage’, such as possesses Hector on the battlefield (Iliad IX, 237–9). A man in the thrall of lyssa is thought to be no longer ‘human’, or subject to the laws of earth and Heaven.
Lorenz’s ‘militant fighting enthusiasm’ is a description of lyssa.
The Sioux Indians are a set of miserable dirty lousy blanketed thieving lying sneaking murdering graceless faceless guteating SKUNKS as the Lord ever permitted to infect the earth, and whose immediate and final extermination all MEN, excepting Indian agents and traders, should pray for.
From the Topeka Weekly Daily, 1869
The stranger, if he be not a trader, is an enemy.
Old English
The Middle Latin wargus – i.e. ‘expulsus’ or ‘stranger’, is also the same as the wolf; and thus the two conceptions – that of the wild beast to be hunted down, and that of the man to be treated as a wild beast – are intimately associated.
P. J. Hamilton Grierson, The Silent Trade
Nuristan, Afghanistan, 1970
The villages of Nuristan are set at so vertiginous an angle to the mountainsides that ladders of deodar wood must serve the function of streets. The people have fair hair and blue eyes, and carry battle-axes made of brass. They wear pancake hats, cross-gartering on their legs, and a dollop of kohl on each eyelid. Alexander mistook them for a tribe of long-lost Greeks, the Germans for a tribe of Aryans.