Anatomy of Restlessness (22 page)

At this point let us also recall that early man did not know the existence of a neuter, inert thing. For him everything in the universe was mysteriously alive and sending messages. Stones and trees have often spoken to mystics like Mohammed or to depressives like Gérard de Nerval. And if the universe was alive it was also sexed. The subconscious appears to contain a mechanism for dividing the world of our experience into sexed opposites, male and female, corresponding to the Chinese Yin and Yang. Mountains, rocks and promontories are likely to be male; caves, crevasses and bays female. The sky raining thunderbolts and covering the earth is always male. The Earth is always the Mother. One cannot with certainty predict the sex of, say, the sun. For Louis XIV the Sun was male and symbolised potency, light over darkness, order over chaos, power and glory. For the Rwala Bedouin of Arabia the sun is a mean and destructive old hag, who forces the handsome moon to sleep with her once a month, and so exhausts him that he needs another month to recover. The point to notice is that everything is sexed one way or the other; and the archaic languages preserve this. Hebrew contains no neuter, and the French have preserved ‘la chose'.

The sexing of things applies equally to man-made objects. A Scottish psychologist examined some admirably normal school children and found that boys have a taste for soft rounded objects, while the girls favour linear ones, developing a marked taste for the hard and cylindrical as they reach puberty. And if one applies this insight to art styles, one would hope to be able to identify the periods in which the women were sexually secure, finding correspondences in the exuberant heterosexuality of a Rubens and the curves of a Neolithic figurine. Conversely in a mandominated society (where women are denigrated or denied), we should expect a linear purity in art. And we find it in the rigid verticals of the Greek Doric Order, the Islamic minaret, Cistercian architecture, or the art of the Shakers.

Tricky ground, but apparently we can go further. It seems that abstract designs, preferably symmetrical with plenty of open space, are the artistic expression of anarchic societies in which social differences, if they exist, are tacitly ignored. And if you don't place one man over another, you don't seem to place one species over another. Accordingly, one finds that people who do not elevate themselves above the rest of nature incline to an abstract art. If this is so, it is rather surprising that the people who have been called the ‘Nature-Folk' should deny nature in their art; and it will cause terrible headaches for interpreters of Palaeolithic cave painting. However, it will very conveniently explain the nomad's horror of the image, and why bouts of iconoclasm are the peculiar feature of all millenarian or levelling movements.

The reverse proposition also seems to hold true. Devotion to images increases within a hierarchy where everyone knows his place on the ladder and where man elevates himself above other species. Certainly we can trace an affinity between the Lion Kings of Assyria, God Almighty as Pantokrator in a Byzantine apse, or Lenin and Marx raised to superhuman proportions in Red Square. All of these images mesmerise their beholders into submission to higher authority. Researchers have also claimed that a tendency to view human figures in profile betokens a shifting, oblique view of life, and of course one can go on like this indefinitely.

I will now ask you to accept that a work of art is a metaphorical affirmation of territory, and an expression of the people who live there. An African ancestor statue, not less than a Gainsborough, announces the legitimacy of a man, family or tribe in their own particular place. Now we have all heard the notion that art collecting is territory formation. The collector patterns his spot as a dog marks a round of lamp-posts. And we shall speculate that man's fixation with things, which Freud branded as a perversion, is simply his means of marking a place in which to live. Things appear to be vital to us; to be without them is to be lost or deranged.

The late Professor Winnicott had another name for the fetish. He called it a ‘transitional object'. For our children, this object might be a teddy bear, the comer of a sheet, or a piece of wood. Winnicott maintained that the child must be allowed to play with things; otherwise it will never form its own personal space and break away from the mother to orientate itself to the outside world.

If the practice of the ‘primitives' is anything to go by, Winnicott is right. Mothers of Bushmen children give them the whole inventory of the land in which they will grow up. The child fingers, sniffs and bites shells, flowers, animals, stones or fungi. As he learns to speak he patterns his discoveries into a sequence of metaphorical associations, comparing like and like, and thus forms an ideal territory in his mind. It is significant that the people who speak the most complex languages in the world are the best oriented to their territory. Charles Darwin nearly took the Yaghan Indians of Tierra del Fuego for a sub-human species; yet one of their boys could speak as many words as Shakespeare ever wrote. But they were never allowed by their mothers to hoard things, merely to handle them and let them go. Gypsies, I would add, do not have toys.

The scene of our childhood explorations resides in our minds as a lost paradise which we are always trying to recapture. Proust's description of the Jardin du Pré-Catalan at Illiers is the consummate example in literature. But the savage never outgrows his infantile paradise unless he is forcibly expelled from it. And I suspect that all the time and effort we spend in making or wanting new things (which we have ritualised as the Myth of Progress) merely compensates for the ideal territory from which we have estranged ourselves. Only at our roots can we hope for a renewal. The Australian Aborigines would wander afield throughout the year but return at seasonal intervals to their sacred places to make contact with their ancestral roots, established in the ‘dreamtime'. And I once met a man who did the same.

I had felt estranged from my friends and enjoyed the company of a man who was very old and very wise in Islamic teaching. He was also the commercial attaché of a Middle Eastern embassy. One evening there came to his flat in Victoria an Englishman of about fifty-five with an expression of perfect composure. No wrinkle lined him. He seemed to belong to that nearly extinct species – the happy man. He was not withdrawn or half out of this world, but very much in it. Yet he lived a life which would reduce most of us to nervous breakdowns. He was the representative of a manufacturer of typewriters and every three months he visited nearly all the countries of Africa by plane. He had no relatives or attachments. He lived from a suitcase, and the suitcase was sufficently small to fit under the seat of an aeroplane so that he could carry it as hand baggage. When he passed through London he renewed the lot, the suitcase and the clothes. He appeared to possess nothing else, but when I pressed him he admitted to owning a box which he didn't want to discuss. I would make fun of him, he said. I promised not to laugh at the box, and he told me he kept in the office safe a solicitor's black tin deed box. Inside it were his
things.
Back in London four times a year he would sleep in the office bunk room which the company reserved for its travelling salesmen. For half an hour he would lock the door, take the things from the box and spread them on the bunk. They were the assorted bric-à-brac of English middle-class life—the teddy bear, the photograph of his father killed in the First War, his medal, the letter from the King, some of his mother's trinkets, a swimming trophy and a presentation ashtray. But each time he brought from Africa one new thing, and he threw out one old thing that had lost its meaning. ‘I know it sounds silly,' he said, ‘but they are my roots.' He is the only man I have ever met who solved the tricky equation between things and freedom. The box was the hub of his migration orbit, the territorial fixed point at which he could renew his identity. And without it he would have become literally deranged.

If
things
are territorial markers, we should remind ourselves of the function of territory in species other than our own. A territory is the tract of land an animal and its group needs to feed and breed in. Among baboons, dominant males defend their frontiers until they give way to a more powerful newcomer. Their instinctive fighting apparatus serves two distinct functions: one to protect females and the children from wild beasts; the other to maintain fitness in the Darwinian sense, by preventing inferior males from breeding and contributing their inferiority to the gene pool. For an animal without territory may become sterile.

Now man is certainly equipped to kill other animals for food and defend himself against dangerous beasts. Our adrenal system alone confirms this. But instead of beating his neighbouring rivals into submission, he maintained fitness by the Incest Taboo. He distinguished his own group from outsiders, the in-group from the out-group. The out-group lived in the territory which provided his women, and they alone were sexually permitted to him. He had to define a frontier between
his
and
her
territory. And he did so by fighting for it, not with fists, but with things. He made ritual exchanges of useless gifts that were no less aggressive than an armed scuffle. These things (necessarily sexed) were, like our works of art, statements of territorial integrity, and were used for the moral purpose of diplomacy. We all know that gift-giving is aggressive, and can observe it in the custom whereby heads of state, who cordially loathe each other, nevertheless present each other with idiotic ornaments.

We frequently read blustering letters on the erosion of Britain's art treasures. The sale of a Velazquez to the Metropolitan generates more heat in the press than the sale of some vast industrial complex to overseas investors. For some irrational reason, the sale of a Velazquez is the loss of a symbol, while the sale of a company obeys normal economic pressures. Imagine the upheaval if the Metropolitan bought the Crown Jewels. America would have absorbed Britain and destroyed our territorial integrity. But if we lent the Crown Jewels and borrowed the Declaration of Independence, albeit a bad deal, it would be seen as a reciprocal act of goodwill between two rival, but friendly, nations. It is precisely such tit-for-tat dealing in symbolic things, on the basis of one-to-one parity, that makes people friendly, or at least makes them feel that they are not being taken advantage of. Property, to quote Proudhon, may be theft; but if we remove all property we remove the social cement which keeps people at peace. When the delicate balance of ownership and exchange is upset, men begin to fight. And if gift-giving without due return is aggressive, it is not surprising that the dog bites the hand which feeds it.

We often imagine all trade to be a system of regulating the flow of necessities. Our banking credits are variations on a ‘natural' economy of barter in which I exchange my eggs for your turnips, so that we both eat eggs and turnips. If we believe this, we will also believe that the art market has imposed itself as a by-product of this natural economy, and is mere surplus and frivolity. However, this does not prevent businessmen thinking of the money market as an irrational game. And if we care to look at the behaviour of savages, we find no ‘natural' economy, no primitive communism where everything is shared, but a great part of life taken up in hard-headed deals and selfish bargaining in
useless things
. For the trade of territorial symbols precedes the exchange of commodities. In the Trobriand Islands two villages traded with each other in yams, despite the fact they were both well supplied with identical yams. The yams were chosen because they were pretty yams, not because they were better to eat. The point being, that if I invade you with my pretty yams, I have a territorial claim on you, and I must expect you to invade me with even prettier yams if we are going to remain at peace.

It will be an honour for me to receive a pretty but useless thing from you. But it will be dangerous for me to hoard it and gloat over it. If I do, I will attract the envy I wish to avoid. Also the
thing
itself, is alive. It does not like being trapped and longs to return to its roots (and having got there to take off again). Instead I will pass the thing on to someone else over whom I wish to have a moral hold. Then one day he will be forced to give me another pretty thing and I will pass it on to you. I know that if I am generous with my things, I will attract more things from my friends – only please God they have good taste! This is a rather different morality of things, and what we should, in an ideal world, be doing with our art collections. All the same, it's nice to think that something like the art market existed before the bankers.

 

I HORREUR DU DOMICILE

The tide of this section is taken from one of Chatwin's favourite quotations: ‘La grande maladie de l'horreur du domicile', from Baudelaire's
Journaux intimes.
The phrase recurs frequently throughout his work, becoming a sort of leitmotif, most notably in
The Songlines.

 

‘I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia – The Making of a Writer' was published in the
New York Times Book Review,
2 August 1983: pp. 6, 34—6

 

‘A Place to Hang Your Hat' is a description of one of Chatwin's principal ‘writer's chambers'—his pied-à-terre in London – and an exploration of the author's paradoxical attitude to home. It was written for
House
&
Garden
to draw attention to the work of the flat's designer, the architect John Pawson.

 

‘A Tower in Tuscany' evokes another of the ‘writer's chambers': Gregor von Rezzori's mediaeval signalling tower, near Florence. Chatwin liked to write ‘away from home' while staying with friends such as von Rezzori in Italy, Patrick Leigh Fermor in Greece, or George Melly in Wales, in whose tower overlooking the River Usk he was to write part of
On the Black Hill.