Born To Be Wild

Fifteen years ago when I had two large dogs, it was my pleasure to run with them at night in forests and deserted parks. Sometime after sunset, I would pull over on a quiet out-of-town road devoid of people, open the van door and the three of us would plunge into the darkness. For an hour or so we would roam and scamper across the terrain, barking and shouting, then regroup to the portable security of the van, excited, exercised and happy. I started doing that kind of thing as soon as I left the city and moved home into the countryside. It was a childish indulgence, selfish, a little dangerous and enormously satisfying.

The memories of those hours and our spectacular freedom seems -in the open-prison grind of 2021- like a fever-dream I had in another lifetime. Once I had made my way out there, the countryside felt like a new, superior planet after a quarter of a century cowering in the rabbit-hutch flats of London.  My city  had become a zoo where keepers rattled the cages all day and night, screaming orders, lies and warnings to keep you trembling in your little pen. From screens, radios, televisions and speakers, every square mile of a city echoes with a Babylon chorus of nagging, probing voices. Yet I do not doubt the London of twenty years ago was a paradise compared to today's version. 

I know a young Londoner -a woman-  who escaped New York just as the Covid net began to close. She was both lucky and shrewd. When you've had enough, you get out. When you finally escape the city and the screaming stops, you can, slowly, regain control of your mind. Slowly is the crucial word here, because the onslaught of stimulation humans endure in a metropolis forces us to make thousands of decisions every hour, at incredible speed. That's not an exaggeration - you are so busy coping in a modern city you have no time to even assess the amount of energy you're burning, let alone how fast you are burning out.

 

OVERLOAD

 

One day in 1999, when my home was a council flat in Deptford, South London, I counted how many people I walked past going to the newsagent and back - a five minute round trip. I counted well over four hundred individuals on the pavements alone -and that was just those I saw. There were also a handful of freerange dogs and dozens of moving vehicles to avoid, two sets of traffic lights to negotiate and hustlers and beggars to evade. The following day I tried to count how many signs - information, warning and advertisements- I saw on the same journey. I was up to over sixty when I reached the high street where I gave up counting because immediately there were thousands.

 

Consider the pressure all this puts on your capacity to think. Your mind will -unasked- check each of those  hundreds of faces for recognition, familiarity, potential hostility etc. (An impossible task in today's swarm of face-masked clones).  Your steps are unconsciously previewed and pre-selected to avoid collisions, danger and delays in a landscape swarming with obstacles. Arrows, symbols, words and pictures are deployed all around on every surface, below your feet and above your head, all trying to steer your path and influence your next decision. 

 

Your ears -the precious early-warning stereo system that never switches off- ring with brakes, barking, engines, drills, bangs, voices, whispers, screams, music piling upon music, drumbeats and howling sirens. This, remember, was 1999. No wonder that nowadays half the people on every city street walk with headphones clamped on their bonces. I cannot even visit a city without experiencing a kind of spiritual nausea. The stench of engineered air, the press of city crowds, the everyday ugliness are things I can no longer shut out. I have lost the carapace, the psychic armour-plating which city people must wear to navigate the streets, stairs, stations, tunnels, trains and malls where everyone ends up. 

The joy of spending whole days surrounded by trees, rivers, grass :and sometimes actually in the wild was -to me- unbelievable; the feast after a famine. Mile after mile I walked on soft surfaces where concrete and tarmac had never appeared. For five years I worked in a stable, spent my mornings -sometimes whole days- riding horses across landscapes of awesome natural beauty. A mile above sea-level, wandering on horseback in the hills of Wales, an entire day could pass with no signs of human interference beyond the occasional fence and an isolated homestead. It felt like the privilege it was.

 

 

Although I fled the city in the year 2000, I had no idea of the horrors that would be wrought upon London in the twenty-first century that followed. I used to say London was a fine place to be as long as you were either young or rich. I don't know if youth can still immure people to the hell that our capital city now resembles - I will never be young again - but there isn't enough money in the Bank of England to persuade me to live there.    

Every so often another remote tribe is unearthed, or filmed, or observed and documented, and we- the sophisticats of Western civilisation- gawp at the TV, repulsed amused by their painted faces, primitive clothes and brutal weapons. We laugh as they chant and dance in worship of obscure Gods.

 

But walking among us on the high streets of our own cities are full-body-tattooed, violently-pierced freaks, religious maniacs who would would kill for their Prophet, mumbling illiterates, drug-addled zombies and hooded killers with machetes and guns. When darkness falls, the streets are teeming with two-legged insanity while millionaires admire the twinkling lights from lofty penthouses of glass and steel, behind their guard-dogs, gates and walls. Are we closer to the jungle in the city or the meadows?

 

In the city I lived "fast" - racing from one stimulus to the next, too busy to think because I was often afraid of where thoughts might lead. In the end they led me out. Nowadays I can pass unlimited hours at ease within my mind, mainly because the ugliness no longer shrieks from my surroundings.  

 

 

It's just life, not a religion. There are hundreds of ways to get the city out of your head. Paddle your own canoe. Learn to cook. Head for the hills. Find places where there are no radios, televisions,  advertisments or engines. Ride a horse. Climb a tree. Dig a hole. Have a bonfire of leaves. Make sandwiches, walk into a forest.and eat beneath the trees. Swim in a river, or the sea. Run with dogs. Breathe the last good air you can find. Stand in the lampless dark and watch the stars. Touch the earth and remember where you came from and where you are going.

 

[see this short video THE METAVERSE for a glimpse of Mr Zuckerberg's hideous alternative reality] 

 

The people who come after us, they say, will be partly machine, cyborg-style, with 'augmented senses', smart-chips in their heads and who knows what in their hearts. So do what you can with all that you have left while something of our ancient selves remains. Ours is a small and dwindling tribe - the last of the wild humans.   

Ian Andrew-Patrick

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