The Dhutanga Practices

Ācariya Mun insisted that in order to live in comfort a monk must comport himself like a worthless old rag. If he can rid himself of the conceit that his virtuous calling makes him somebody special, then he will feel at ease in all of his daily activities and personal associations, for genuine virtue does not arise from such assumptions. Genuine virtue arises from the self-effacing humility and forthright integrity of one who is always morally and spiritually conscientious. Such is the nature of genuine virtue: without hidden harmful pride, that person is at peace with himself and at peace with the rest of the world wherever he goes. The ascetic practice of wearing only robes made from discarded cloth serves as an exceptionally good antidote to thoughts of pride and self-importance.

A practicing monk should understand the relationship between himself and the virtuous qualities he aspires to attain. He must never permit pride to grab possession of the moral and spiritual virtues he cultivates within his heart. Otherwise, dangerous fangs and daggers will spring up in the midst of those virtuous qualities – even though intrinsically they’re a source of peace and tranquillity. He should train himself to adopt the self-effacing attitude of being a worthless old rag until it becomes habitual, while never allowing conceit about his worthiness to come to the surface. A monk must cultivate this noble quality and ingrain it deeply in his personality, making it an intrinsic character trait as steadfast as the earth. He will thus remain unaffected by words of praise, or of criticism. Moreover, a mind totally devoid of conceit is a mind imperturbable in all circumstances. Ācariya Mun believed that the practice of wearing robes made from discarded cloth was one sure way to help attenuate feelings of self-importance buried deep within the heart.

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[Unfortunately self-importance and pride may as well increase due to wearing such robes.VB]

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Ācariya Mun strongly believed that the observance of dhutanga practices truly exemplified the spirit of the ascetic way of life. He strictly adhered to these ascetic practices throughout his life, and always urged those monks studying under his tutelage to adopt them in their own practice.

Going on almsround every day without fail, excepting only those days when a monk is deliberately abstaining from food. Ācariya Mun taught his disciples that, when walking to the village for alms, they should always have mindfulness present and remain properly restrained in body, speech, and mind. A monk should never permit his mind to accidentally become prey to the various tempting sense objects contacting his eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind while walking to and from the village on almsround. He stressed that mindfulness should bring their every movement, every thought, at every step of the route, under vigilant scrutiny. This should be treated as a sacred duty requiring reflection of the utmost seriousness each time a monk prepares to go on his morning almsround.

Eating only that food which has been accepted in the alms bowl on almsround. A monk should consider the quantity of food he receives in his bowl each day to be sufficient for his needs, as befits one who is content with little, and thus easily satisfied. For him it’s counter-productive to expect extra food by accepting the generous offerings that are made later inside the monastery. Such practices easily encourage the insatiable greed of his kilesas, allowing them to gain the strength to become so domineering that they’re almost impossible to counteract. A monk eats whatever food is offered into his bowl, never feeling anxious or upset should it fail to meet his expectations. Anxiety about food is a characteristic of hungry ghosts – beings tormented by the results of their own bad kamma. Never receiving enough food to satisfy their desires, they run madly around, desperately trying to fill their mouths and stomachs, always preferring the prospect of food to the practice of Dhamma. The ascetic practice of refusing to accept any food offered after almsround is an excellent way of contravening the tendency to be greedy for food. It is also the best method to cut off all expectancy concerning food, and the anxiety that it creates.

Eating only one meal per day is just right for the meditative lifestyle of a dhutanga monk, since he needn’t worry about food at all hours of the day. Otherwise, he could easily become more worried about his stomach than he is about Dhamma – a most undignified attitude for one sincerely seeking a way to transcend dukkha. Even when eating only once a day, there are times when a monk should reduce his consumption, eating much less than he normally would at that one meal. This practice helps facilitate the work of meditation, for eating too much food can make the mental faculties sluggish and unresponsive. In addition, a monk whose temperament is suited to this practice can be expected to experience results invaluable to his spiritual development. This particular dhutanga observance is a useful tool for eliminating the greedy mentality of practicing monks who tend to be infatuated with food.

In this respect, the safeguards that society has introduced to protect itself operate in much the same manner as the safeguards of Dhamma. Enemies of society are confronted and subdued wherever they pose a threat to wealth, property, life and limb, or peace of mind. Whether it be fierce animals, such as wild dogs, snakes, elephants and tigers, or pestilent diseases, or simply pugnacious individuals, societies all over the world possess appropriate corrective measures, or medicines, to effectively subdue and protect themselves against these threats. A dhutanga monk whose mind displays pugnacious tendencies in its desire for food, or any other unwholesome qualities deemed distasteful, needs to have effective measures for correcting these threatening tendencies. Thus, he will always possess the kind of admirable self-restraint which is a blessing for him and a pleasing sight for those with whom he associates. Eating only one meal per day is an excellent way to restrain unwieldy mental states.

Eating all food directly from the alms bowl without using any other utensils is a practice eminently suited to the lifestyle of a dhutanga monk who strives to be satisfied with little while wandering from place to place. Using just his alms bowl means there’s no need to be loaded down with a lot of cumbersome accessories as he travels from one location to another, practicing the ascetic way of life. At the same time, it is an expedient practice for monks wishing to unburden themselves of mental clutter; for each extra item they carry and look after, is just one more concern that weighs on their minds. For this reason, dhutanga monks should pay special attention to the practice of eating exclusively from the alms bowl. In truth, it gives rise to many unique benefits. Mixing all types of food together in the bowl is a way of reminding a monk to be attentive to the food he eats, and to investigate its true nature using mindfulness and wisdom to gain a clear insight into the truth about food.

Ācariya Mun said that, for him, eating from the bowl was just as important as any other dhutanga practice. He gained numerous insights while contemplating the food he was eating each day. Throughout his life he strictly observed this ascetic practice.

Investigating the true nature of food mixed together in the bowl is an effective means of cutting off strong desire for the taste of food. This investigation is a technique used to remove greed from a monk’s mind as he eats his meal. Greed for food is thus replaced by a distinct awareness of the truth concerning that food: food’s only true purpose is to nourish the body, allowing it to remain alive from one day to the next. In this way, neither the pleasant flavor of good foods, nor the unpleasant flavor of disagreeable foods will cause any mental disturbance that might prompt the mind to waver. If a monk employs skillful investigative techniques each time he begins to eat, his mind will remain steadfast, dispassionate, and contented – unmoved by excitement or disappointment over the taste of the food he is offered. Consequently, eating directly from the alms bowl is an excellent practice for getting rid of infatuation with the taste of food.

Wearing only robes made from discarded cloth is another dhutanga observance that Ācariya Mun practiced religiously. This ascetic practice is designed to forestall the temptation to give in to the heart’s natural inclination to desire nice, attractive-looking robes and other requisites. It entails searching in places, like cemeteries, for discarded pieces of cloth, collecting them little by little, then stitching the pieces together to make a usable garment, such as an upper robe, a lower robe, an outer robe, a bathing cloth, or any other requisite. There were times, when the dead person’s relatives were agreeable, that Ācariya Mun collected the shroud used to wrap a corpse laid out in a charnel ground. Whenever he found discarded pieces of cloth on the ground while on almsround, he would pick them up and use them for making robes – regardless of the type of cloth or where it came from. Returning to the monastery, he washed them, and then used them to patch a torn robe, or to make a bathing cloth. This he routinely did wherever he stayed. Later as more and more faithful supporters learned of his practice, they offered him robe material by intentionally discarding pieces of cloth in charnel grounds, or along the route he took for almsround, or around the area where he stayed, or even at the hut where he lived. Thus his original practice of strictly taking only pieces of old, discarded cloth was altered somewhat according to circumstances: he was obliged to accept cloth the faithful had placed as offerings in strategic locations. Be that as it may, he continued to wear robes made from discarded cloth until the day he died.

Ācariya Mun insisted that in order to live in comfort a monk must comport himself like a worthless old rag. If he can rid himself of the conceit that his virtuous calling makes him somebody special, then he will feel at ease in all of his daily activities and personal associations, for genuine virtue does not arise from such assumptions. Genuine virtue arises from the self-effacing humility and forthright integrity of one who is always morally and spiritually conscientious. Such is the nature of genuine virtue: without hidden harmful pride, that person is at peace with himself and at peace with the rest of the world wherever he goes. The ascetic practice of wearing only robes made from discarded cloth serves as an exceptionally good antidote to thoughts of pride and self-importance.

A practicing monk should understand the relationship between himself and the virtuous qualities he aspires to attain. He must never permit pride to grab possession of the moral and spiritual virtues he cultivates within his heart. Otherwise, dangerous fangs and daggers will spring up in the midst of those virtuous qualities – even though intrinsically they’re a source of peace and tranquillity. He should train himself to adopt the self-effacing attitude of being a worthless old rag until it becomes habitual, while never allowing conceit about his worthiness to come to the surface. A monk must cultivate this noble quality and ingrain it deeply in his personality, making it an intrinsic character trait as steadfast as the earth. He will thus remain unaffected by words of praise, or of criticism. Moreover, a mind totally devoid of conceit is a mind imperturbable in all circumstances. Ācariya Mun believed that the practice of wearing robes made from discarded cloth was one sure way to help attenuate feelings of self-importance buried deep within the heart.

Living in the forest. Realizing the value of this dhutanga observance from the very beginning, Ācariya Mun found forest dwelling conducive to the eerie, secluded feeling associated with genuine solitude. Living and meditating in the natural surroundings of a forest environment awakens the senses and encourages mindfulness for remaining vigilant in all of one’s daily activities: mindfulness accompanying every waking moment, every waking thought. The heart feels buoyant and carefree, unconstrained by worldly responsibilities. The mind is constantly on the alert, earnestly focusing on its primary objective – the transcendence of dukkha. Such a sense of urgency becomes especially poignant when living far from the nearest settlement, at locations deep in remote forest areas teeming with all kinds of wild animals. In a constant state of readiness, the mind feels as though it’s about to soar up and out of the deep abyss of the kilesas at any moment – like a bird taking flight. In truth, the kilesas remain ensconced there in the heart as always. It is the evocative forest atmosphere that tends to inspire this sense of liberation. Sometimes, due to the power of this favorable environment, a monk becomes convinced that his kilesas are diminishing rapidly with each passing day, while those remaining appear to be ever more scarce. This unfettered feeling is a constant source of support for the practice of meditation.

A monk living deep in the forest tends to consider the wild animals living around him – both those inherently dangerous and those that are harmless – with compassion, rather than with fear or apathy. He realizes that all animals, dangerous and harmless, are his equals in birth, ageing, sickness, and death. We human beings are superior to animals merely by virtue of our moral awareness: our ability to understand difference between good and evil. Lacking this basic moral judgment, we are no better than common animals. Unknown to them we label these creatures ‘animals’, even though the human species is itself a type of animal. The human animal is fond of labeling other species, but we have no idea what kind of label other animals have given to us. Who knows? Perhaps they have secretly labeled human beings ‘ogres’, 6 since we’re so fond of mistreating them, slaughtering them for their meat – or just for sport. It’s a terrible shame the way we humans habitually exploit these creatures; our treatment of them can be quite merciless. Even among our own kind, we humans can’t avoid hating and harassing each other, constantly molesting or killing one another. The human world is troubled because people tend to molest and kill each other, while the animal world is troubled because humans tend to do the same to them. Consequently, animals are instinctively wary of human beings.

Ācariya Mun claimed that life in the forest provides unlimited opportunities for thought and reflection about one’s own heart, and its relation to many natural phenomena in the external environment. Anyone earnestly desiring to go beyond dukkha can find plenty of inspiration in the forest, plenty of incentive to intensify his efforts – constantly.

At times, groups of wild boars wandered into the area where Ācariya Mun was walking in meditation. Instead of running away in panic when they saw him, they continued casually foraging for food in their usual way. He said they seemed to be able to differentiate between him and all the merciless ‘ogres’ of this world, which is why they kept rooting around for food so casually, instead of running for their lives.

Here I would like to digress from the main story a little to elaborate on this subject. You might be tempted to think that wild boars were unafraid of Ācariya Mun because he was a lone individual living deep in the forest. But, when my own monastery, Wat Pa Ban Tad, was first established 7 and many monks were living together there, herds of wild boars took refuge inside the monastery, wandering freely through the area where the monks had their living quarters. At night they moved around unafraid, only a few yards from the monks’ meditation tracks – so close that they could be heard snorting and thumping as they rooted in the ground. Even the sound of the monks calling to one another to come and see this sight for themselves failed to alarm the wild boars. Continuing to wander freely through the monastery grounds every night, boars and monks soon became thoroughly accustomed to each other. Nowadays, wild boars only infrequently wander into the monastery because ogres, as animals refer to us humans – according to Ācariya Mun – have since killed and eaten almost all the wild animals in the area. In another few years, they probably will have all disappeared.

Living in the forest, Ācariya Mun met the same situation: almost every species of animal likes to seek refuge in the areas where monks live. Wherever monks take up residence, there are always a lot of animals present. Even within the monastery compounds of large metropolitan areas, animals – especially dogs – constantly find shelter. Some city monasteries are home to hundreds of dogs, for monks never harm them in any way. This small example is enough to demonstrate the cool, peaceful nature of Dhamma, a spirit of harmlessness that’s offensive to no living creature in this world – except, perhaps, the most hard-hearted individuals.

Ācariya Mun’s experience of living in the forest convinced him just how supportive that environment is to meditation practice. The forest environment is ideal for those wishing to transcend dukkha. It is without a doubt the most appropriate battlefield to choose in one’s struggle to attain all levels of Dhamma, as evidenced by the preceptor’s first instructions to a newly ordained monk: Go look for a suitable forest location in which to do your practice. Ācariya Mun maintained this ascetic observance to the end of his life, except on infrequent occasions when circumstances mitigated against it. A monk living in the forest is constantly reminded of how isolated and vulnerable he is. He can’t afford to be unmindful. As a result of such vigilance, the spiritual benefits of this practice soon become obvious.

Dwelling at the foot of a tree is a dhutanga observance that closely resembles living in the forest. Ācariya Mun said that he was dwelling under the shade of a solitary tree the day his citta completely transcended the world – an event that will be fully dealt with later on. A lifestyle that depends on the shade of a tree for a roof and the only protection against the elements is a lifestyle conducive to constant introspection. A mind possessing such constant inner focus is always prepared to tackle the kilesas, for its attention is firmly centered on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness 8 – rūpa, vedanā, citta, and dhamma – and The Four Noble Truths 9 – dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, and magga. Together, these factors constitute the mind’s most effective defense, protecting it during its all-out assault on the kilesas. In the eerie solitude of living in the forest, the constant fear of danger can motivate the mind to focus undivided attention on the Foundations of Mindfulness, or the Noble Truths. In doing so, it acquires a solid basis for achieving victory in its battle with the kilesas – such is the true path leading to the Noble Dhamma. A monk who wishes to thoroughly understand himself, using a safe and correct method, should find an appropriate meditation subject and a suitable location that are conducive for him to exert a maximum effort. These combined elements will help to expedite his meditation progress immeasurably. Used as an excellent means for destroying kilesas since the Buddha’s time, the dhutanga observance of dwelling at the foot of a tree is another practice meriting special attention.

Staying in a cemetery is an ascetic practice which reminds monks and lay people alike not to be neglectful while they are still alive, believing that they themselves will never die. The truth of the matter is: we are all in the process of dying, little by little, every moment of every day. The people who died and were relocated to the cemetery – where their numbers are so great there’s scarcely any room left to cremate or bury them – are the very same people who were dying little by little before; just as we are now. Who in this world seriously believes himself to be so unique that he can claim immunity from death?

We are taught to visit cemeteries so that we won’t forget the countless relatives with whom we share birth, ageing, sickness, and death; so as to constantly remind ourselves that we too live daily in the shadow of birth, ageing, sickness, and death. Certainly no one who still wanders aimlessly through the endless round of birth and death would be so uncommonly bold as to presume that he will never be born, grow old, become sick, or die. Since they are predisposed toward the attainment of freedom from this cycle by their very vocation, monks should study the root causes within themselves of the continuum of suffering. They should educate themselves by visiting a cemetery where cremations are performed, and by reflecting inwardly on the crowded cemetery within themselves where untold numbers of corpses are brought for burial all the time: such a profusion of old and new corpses are buried within their bodies that it’s impossible to count them all. 10 By contemplating the truly grievous nature of life in this world, they use mindfulness and wisdom to diligently probe, explore, and analyze the basic principles underlying the truth of life and death.

Everyone who regularly visits a cemetery – be it an outdoor cemetery or the inner cemetery within their bodies – and uses death as the object of contemplation, can greatly reduce their smug sense of pride in being young, in being alive, in being successful. Unlike most people, those who regularly contemplate death don’t delight in feeling self-important. Rather, they tend to see their own faults, and gradually try to correct them, instead of merely looking for and criticizing other people’s faults – a bad habit that brings unpleasant consequences. This habit resembles a chronic disease that appears to be virtually incurable, or perhaps it could be remedied if people weren’t more interested in aggravating the infection than they are in curing it.

Cemeteries offer those interested in investigating these matters an opportunity to develop a comprehensive knowledge and understanding of the nature of death. Cemeteries are the great gathering places of the world. All people without exception must eventually meet there. Death is no small hurdle to be easily stepped over before a thorough investigation of the issue. Before they finally crossed over, the Lord Buddha and his Arahant disciples had to study in the ‘great academy’ of birth, ageing, sickness, and death until they had mastered the entire curricula. Only then were they able to cross over with ease. They had escaped the snares of Māra, 11 unlike those who, forgetting themselves, disregard death and take no interest in contemplating its inevitability; even as it stares them in the face.

Visiting cemeteries to contemplate death is an effective method for completely overcoming the fear of dying; so that, when death seems imminent, courage alone arises despite the fact that death is the most terrifying thing in the world. It would seem an almost impossible feat, but it has been accomplished by those who practice meditation – the Lord Buddha and his Arahant disciples being the supreme examples. Having accomplished this feat themselves, they taught others to thoroughly investigate every aspect of birth, ageing, sickness, and death so that people wanting to take responsibility for their own well-being can use this practice to correct their misconceptions before it becomes too late. If they reach that ‘great academy’ only when their last breath is taken, it will then be too late for remedial action: the only remaining options will be cremation and burial. Observing moral precepts, making merit, and practicing meditation will no longer be possible.

Ācariya Mun well understood the value of a visit to the cemetery, for a cemetery has always been the kind of place that encourages introspection. He always showed a keen interest in visiting cemeteries – both the external variety and the internal one. One of his disciples, being terrified of ghosts, made a valiant effort to follow his example in this. We don’t normally expect monks to be afraid of ghosts, which is equivalent to Dhamma being afraid of the world – but this monk was one such case.

Venerable Ācariya Mun Bhūridatta Thera

 A Spiritual Biography

 by

Ācariya Mahā Boowa Ñāṇasampanno

I have long harbored a conspicuous suspicion that I ought never to have come into existence in the first place

 

(...)

I feel, that is, ina sense “ready” to die. It is an altogether new sensation for me. I suspect that most people are graced with this disposition of resolute readiness much later in their lives, although many no doubt also come to this point quite a bit earlier than I have, and still others, to be sure, never reach this point, but always fear death’s inception, even when their end is most imminent. As for myself, in the interest of accuracy, I must admit that | cannot say for certain how I would react if I were actually brought face to face with the Reaper right now; I don’t know if I would quail and shake and beg anew for the life I had so recently felt I could do without. Perhaps, in truth, I cannot trust my newfound thanatos- thirst; it may be that, resolute though I feel, I may not possess all of the requisite resolution to “cease upon this midnight with no pain” or “shuffle off this mortal coil.” I should also clarify that anticipating and at times even wishing for death does not for me equate to contemplating suicide. Ending one’s life by one’s own effort is an entirely different proposition than finding oneself eager for the moment when one finally slips the surly bounds of earth, having at last gained true wings, to effect a complete and final departure from that which one knows... and loathes (familiarity with such trappings having bred a quite proper conviction of contempt).

Perhaps, in fact, I will still have to endure this fleshly cell for many more years to come. But I feel myself compelled to set down some “notes before death” just the same, to cast forth some fragments to buttress against the blight of my soul’s ruination. This work, indeed, must of necessity assume a fragmented form, because this collection of musings and observations is intended, in its humble way, to provide a sort of mediation on earthly existence, and incompletion is our lot in this life. We come from we know not where, we are thrust into this chaotic, carnal realm for a certain arduous span of time, during which we come to experience the violent truncation of joy, the forceful circumscription of bliss, the final corruption of sweet innocence, and the sorrowful transformation from vibrant sentience into degraded senescence. Were this earthly realm merely a place of torment, it would in some ways be more tolerable, since then it would never provide passing glimpses of delight, and we would then not have to endure the anguish of losing that which we loved and treasured, but which nevertheless fled from us, never to return.

In any event, a man’s assessment of his experiences can never be complete so long as he lives, since he cannot break the bars of his fleshly cage until that deathful climax, that occasion of an “awful daring of a moment’s surrender,” when he finally shakes off his flesh and breaks free.

And so notes composed before death (the only sort possible to compose, after all) can only take the form of jagged fragments, pieces of a greater puzzle which fail to fit together as an entirely coherent whole, but which still provide clues which, for the sensitive undertaker of ideas, beckon even as they baffle.

So this sojourner into the dusky depths of death proceeds with his task, at once knowing the hopelessness of it, but aware also that somewhere, in some purer realm, the whole he seeks to convey does indeed abide: non-truncated, unfragmented, rendered radiantly manifest; its jagged, festering blemishes stitched together and made whole. But before this light breaks forth, he must first fall through a great darkness: the darkness which he currently occupies, and which currently occupies him.

ALL WAS WELL, UNTIL IT WASN’T

I have long harbored a conspicuous suspicion that I ought never to have come into existence in the first place. Not that I ever had any say over the matter, of course. At least, I have no memory of an ante-existent “existence” where I can recall giving the expectant authorities the go-ahead to have me incarnated in a fleshly vessel and bundled away to this earthly inferno within which we all now languish. Nevertheless, according to some traditions, we all exist somewhere in a preborn state, and individual incarnation is a matter of willful volition. In such a perspective, we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t want to be, and we have no one to blame but ourselves if we don’t like it, since we knew the deal ahead of time, even if we promptly forgot about our foreknowledge.

Perhaps this is so. If it is, I can only observe that I must have known something then that I don’t know now, something that actually made the journey into earthly incarnation bearable, even worthwhile. If this scenario is actual, I hope someday to rediscover this originating conviction. What I suspect, however, is that I didn’t choose to come here, but rather was summoned forth, for some inscrutable purpose known to none but my Creator himself, and, that for equally undecipherable reasons, He chose to keep this discovery, as well as Himself, hidden from me.

To be sure, my emergence into the world gave joy to some—namely my parents and my extended family—not because of any especially endearing traits on my part, but simply because I was theirs. Once I squirted forth, I became a much-loved boy, a somewhat spoiled only-child happy to live largely in his imagination most of the time. And in these early years, I remained unaware of any misshapenness in my being, or of anything that would cause me any sense of dislocation with the universe that surrounded me.

Though admittedly an absent-minded lad who indulged heavily in elaborate daydreams, it didn’t strike me then that I was eager to escape from anything, not even boredom, and certainly not horror or tragedy. It wasn’t that I was unaware of pain and discomfort; at the time, I would mainly have associated it with the state of being sick with a fever, or a sore throat, or a stomach ache. Of course even illness had its attendant pleasures of mandatory relaxation and eventual recuperation. The sweetest moments I can recall were of being on the mend, still ailing enough not to feel any pressure to get off the couch, but nevertheless sure that my recovery was taking place and that in short order I’d be entirely well again.

Up to the age of 12, I can honestly say that I never suffered in the least from ennui, that malady which would alarm and distress me when | reached the threshold of adolescence. There was, I recall, never really anything to be bored with at this time, no possible reason to account myself “bored’; boredom simply never occurred to me as a possible scenario or outcome. Usually something interesting was going on around me somewhere, and if nothing of interest was happening, I could still always find some fascinating concept to ponder or satisfying sensation to meditate upon, even if it were a mere sense-perception, like the satisfying taste of a crispy, greasy piece of fried fish or the hearty warmth of a blazing fire in the living room hearth.

Simply existing, and being aware of the wonder of existence, was itself a kind of high. Pleasure back then came naturally, and when I speak of “pleasure,” | of course do not mean anything improper, untoward, or unseemly. Instead, my general state was a general state of comfortable equipoise. Of course, I don’t intend to imply anything exalted about my character or temperament as a child; like most children, I would occasionally sulk or pout if I didn’t get my way, but the point is that, at bottom, I felt safe, protected, and at peace. | never asked myself if I was “happy” —such a question would never have pierced my profoundly satiated child’s consciousness. My innocent, inborn hedonism was, in fact, tempered by a naturally calibrated moderation; though | wanted to have fun—and in fact, primarily lived for “fun” —I also instinctively knew, knew in my very marrow, that experiencing “fun” required keeping alive a sense of adventure, and that creativity was required in order to retain an aura of proper adventuresomeness always pulsing in one’s brain, and that creativity could only be maintained as long as one possessed a nimble, active, flexible mind, and that retaining an active mind necessarily militated against the intellectual lethargy that is the inevitable result of overindulgence.

To be sure, I didn’t think in such terms, not in the slightest, but the proposition nevertheless held true. As an infantilely instinctive Epicurian, then, my sense of enjoyment never corresponded with the commission of any bacchanal-esque escapades, or whatever would constitute a “bacchanal” for a child... Of course, I needed my parents’ stern rule to prevent me from eating too many sweets, and to get me to go to bed on time, and so forth—once more, I have no wish to assert that, as a boy, | was in possession of any sort of preternatural inclination to healthy, prudent moderation... except that, to some extent I truly did in fact retain an ease of restraint, and a inborn proclivity towards the “golden mean,” insofar as I was occasionally steered in that proper direction by my loving mother and father.

All was not well all of the time, of course—often little problems crept up here and there, as happens in even the most perfect of lives... still, in a profound, general sense, all was well. And all remained well for blissful years and years on end... until, without much warning, a fearful transformation occurred, and suddenly all became most emphatically not well.

AN EYESORE IN THE ARCHTECTURE

As has been extensively recorded elsewhere, things turned sour for me at roughly the time of my initiation into puberty. It was at this juncture that that I came to recognize that my previous impression of being at ease in the world had perhaps always been mistaken. Indeed, having become self-aware, I now saw that my very presence, when I dwelt with others, seemed to have the effect of making those others uncomfortable.

Increasingly, in fact, the distressing notion came over me that people would be much more at ease with one another if I weren’t around to muck up the works. My existence in itself seemed to be an inconvenience which caused them irritation and annoyance.

Had things changed, or had I changed? As long as I was ensconced in the sweet cocoon of childhood, I never reckoned myself an eyesore in the architecture, as it were. Then again, it never occurred to me to think of myself this way, so perhaps it was merely that my perceptive abilities had grown more acute. Yet when I peer at a photograph of myself at age seven, and compare it to one of me at age fourteen, I am struck by a transformation in countenance, one not attributable to mere natural changes. Instead, there is an unhappy absence where once there was a presence, and at the same time, a malignant presence where before had merely been an absence. In the earlier photograph, my face, while unsmiling, nevertheless lends an impression of dreamy, distrait bliss; one - obtains the sense of a child who knows that, should he fall, he will nevertheless be saved from harm.

The second photo, in which the subject betrays a tentative sort of grin, nevertheless evinces a budding aura of tragic disillusionment, as perceived from the perspective of one so new to being disillusioned that he does not feel at rest in the grip of its cold tentacles; instead, one senses that the young boy’s spirit throbs painfully between resolution and relapse, between the comfort of as-yet unwon despair and the agony of still-unkilled hope. It was the springtime of his youth, of course, and as the poet notes, springtime is the cruelest season, as it will not allow a boy simply to be alone with his newly-discovered grief, won't allow his consciousness to die to the world; it must instead torment him mercilessly with intimations of brazen optimism, whispers of a promised better tomorrow, considerations that, after all, in the words of the infernal Howard Jones, “things can only get better.” I could, however, never square these hopes with the reality which now pulsed so heavily through my perception. I was told that one day it would all make sense, that things would come together and reach rich fruition, that “before I knew it,” it would all coalesce properly, that “in the twinkling of an eye,” I would find that my overall state had, in fact, improved; I just needed to see things in the proper light. My temptation to be disillusioned was itself misinformed (so I was appraised); of course, they allowed, being as young as I was, it wasn’t surprising that I felt inclined toward such naive apprehensions ... but then, there really wasn’t any cause for me not to embrace the changes underway, both within myself and all around me. Change was good, they told me. I would become convinced of this eventually, in due time; I just needed to get some perspective on the matter. I’d find out, all right! (Here they would smirk a little at the racy and ribald implications of their forbidden knowledge, which they reckoned I’d soon discover, and which would be plenty compelling enough to get me to see things their way.) Soon enough, I’d uncover the wonderful truth, and when I did, I would again regain the happiness of my youth, in spades.

Oh yes, I’d “find out.” Boy, was I ever in for a delightful treat, once I finally grew up a bit and learned to accept what was happening to me, rather than always fighting it! These were the messages I was sent by my elders. And now, as an “elder” myself, I can testify unabashedly that my elders were, one and all, a bunch of smarmy fools. Of course most of them were no doubt quite guileless in spirit, in the main unconscious regarding the extent of their rhetorical skullduggery. That they didn’t know better, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that they shouldn’t have known better. Perhaps I am being too hard on them, but my severity is borne out of a very pronounced and definite sense of having been betrayed. After all, I trusted these fools, these speciously-informed, pseudo-wise, smirking, self-deceived, misinformed, irresponsible Pied Piping simpletons who fancied themselves counselors and relief-bringers.

I trusted them against my better self-judgment, trusted them in part because I wanted to believe their foolish lies. Yet at the same time, I somehow always knew the truth, even when I thought I’d convinced myself otherwise. I knew that things had changed irrevocably, and that change was in fact NOT good, at least not in this context, at least not as I had ever before understood the concept of “good.” To be sure, it may yet prove to be “good,” in the sense that all things supposedly turn out well, to those who subscribe to the notion of divine providence, wherein everything, desirable and undesirable, happens ultimately to benefit the victory of the-Good. But the changes that took place at the time were in fact of no good whatsoever, in any familiar usage of the term. No... change was plainly bad in this case. I suspected such at the time, but was implored to believe otherwise by authoritative forces; thus, out of seemingly called-for deference to authority, I refrained from mourning what should properly have been mourned, and instead trusted in my elders, only finding out later what I had truly known all along: that my elders were either deluded by or compliant in the corruption I rightly espied lurking behind their smarmy smirks.

REBUFFED

It was around this same period of time that I began to notice how my presence seemed to be a burden to others. I at times felt afflicted with the dreary conviction that it would indeed be better if I weren’t around, since when I asserted my identity it invariably caused discomfort. It sounds contrivedly angsty to declare such a thing, and I don’t blame any reader for feeling skeptical of so grandiose a claim, but I can still recall the arduous vividness with which this impression made itself felt at the time.

On various occasions, I would find myself caught up in what was-- by all accounts—a jovial conversation, involving a set of peers discussing one trivial subject or another. Over the course of these exchanges, my peers would fling forth witticisms, concoct bon mots, and dash off simple, unadorned observations, and each additional comment would be taken in stride by the rest of the group; whether it assumed the form of a dry query, a wry assertion, a glib rhetorical feint, or a bold and bawdy wisecrack, each participant seemed, in his own way, to be helping to buttress the overall structure, or meta-structure, of the thing being discussed. A sense of comradeship was being subtly achieved through the words that each contributor offered, each new remark acting as a new ingredient in the pot of delicious comradely fun being cooked up.

Yet when I chanced to say something, my words either went unheard or were ignored. After a few flailing attempts at becoming “part of the gang,” and each time being subtly but firmly rebuffed by all of its true members—never with overt mockery or outward expressions of contempt, but merely with a tactfully willed disregard, i.e., with everyone acting as if I weren’t truly present—I eventually slunk away, having taken the collectively-sent hint quite well.

FLAILURE

Presently, I managed simply to give up the ghost, to stop trying. But it took me some time to get to this point. At the inception of adolescence, I strove mightily, and rather pathetically, to include myself in the ranks of a proverbial “party” where 1) I wasn’t a member, and 2) I had never been invited. Eventually, however, I caught hold of the bitter truth, and realized that my place was elsewhere. Thus, I relinquished my once- perpetual proclivity to desperately wield those twin self-improvement instruments of hairbrush and hairdryer; I stopped cultivating the silly excuse for “fashion sense” that I had attempted to adopt upon earlier occasions. These things clearly weren’t for me, nor I for them. Yet with the distance of time, I find myself still slightly baffled concerning the fact of my exclusion.

For it was, indeed, a fact. There was no sentimentally mitigating interpretation possible. My status as a reject was in no sense “all in my head”; there had been no tragic misunderstanding; I wasn’t actually well- liked, but simply unaware of it, nor was it merely a case of me overlooking all of the many ways that my peers really treasured and adored me (though this was what my ever-optimistic would-be mentors tirelessly conveyed to me, and what I tirelessly attempted to believe). My alienated state wasn’t attributable to the fact that I had simply “not expended enough of an effort,” as my mentors tended to advise me, when they were in a slightly more severe, less indulgent mode... In fact, their message would vacillate with regularity, depending upon the degree of exasperation they felt with me, their inconsolably mopey, altogether hopeless charge. One day would find them insisting that I really wasn’t as alienated from everyone as I felt I was; but on the morrow their frustration would prompt them to launch into a lecture, wherein they would relIate the “tough love” lesson that if I feel alienated it was really my own fault—what I really needed to do was to TRY HARDER, to “fake it till I made it,” to refrain from acting so moody all of the time, to stop taking myself so seriously, to cease being so paranoid, to relax, to smile more, to be willing to make fun of myself, so that other people would see the wonderful person I was inside, to take care lest I become a self-fulfilling prophecy (“If you think you’re a loser who doesn’t fit in, then that’s all you'll ever be!”) and so forth... Hopeless! No, it wouldn’t do. I flailed against my fate; flailed ineffectually, and without result. I flailed on, and was only rewarded with a deep degree of what could well be called “flailure.” I flailed for weeks, months, years. I had in fact advanced well into my twenties before I ever left off my flailing routine, whereby my insides flopped around like a doomed, dying fish on a hard, dry surface, a being tragically ripped from the comforts of its true habitat. Yet I did not die, and the poisoned atmosphere which at first choked me somehow became my new, fitful home for what would prove to be the remainder of my life.
Indeed, I grew peculiarly habituated to conditions which by all accounts ought to have killed me. Yet it was a perverse adaptation, one which resulted in the spawning of an inwardly misshapen being, one which had learned to internalize the conflict which had previously battered and buffeted his soul from without. The resultant creature, staggering as from the wreckage of a terrible crash, should never even have lived an hour; his contradicting essential traits ought to have sabotaged one another immediately, causing a tragic but necessary stillbirth. I suppose, then, that one could consider it a “miracle” that I somehow escaped the clutches of oblivion; there was no reasonable explanation for why I ought to have emerged, body and soul intact, from such torment. Yet in adapting, I fear I may well have been complicit in a self-betrayal; that is to say, in choosing to adapt, rather than perish, I consigned myself to a far greater death, a kind of death-in-life. The very ghost I thought I had given up came back to haunt me.

THE IMPOSTOR

So contradictory have been my impulses that I have committed two acts I never could have imagined taking part in prior to giving up my ghost: that is to say, I have married... and I have reproduced.

These facts are particularly perplexing for me. I cannot fathom how such things could have taken place, given my general orientation to regard these and all such related activities as alien to my consciousness, and alienating to my sensibilities. And yet, I don’t view this unusual deveiopment as any sort of repudiation of the distinct convictions of my youth. My perspective, in fact, has little changed. I never was won over by my would-be mentors and their assurances that all would be well. In fact, all has not been well. In making this assertion, I am in no way expressing a repudiation of my wife or our children, whom I love dearly. In fact, I repudiate nothing—neither my nuptials, nor the births of my blessed kids—yet in pondering the oddity of having chosen this life, I conclude that the trajectory taken was one which could be categorized as “man bites dog”; indeed, it was a longshot that such a circumstance ever could have unfolded—something like a one in a thousand chance. In my case, that very “one” out of a thousand happened to be the one which was set into motion, and now, much to my shock and disbelief, I am a married man with two children.

How did I wind up in this position? It is inconceivable and inexplicable, but there it is. I have no compulsion to shirk my duties, yet I can’t help but feel myself to be a kind of fraud for having taken on that which I clearly was never meant to adopt. Indeed, my strongly-held impression as a youth was that I would remain celibate for the entirety of my life. I did not come to this conclusion lightly, though it was assuredly not reached due to any dearth of a sex drive. My appetite equaled or exceeded that of the average teenage boy, but unlike the average boy I instinctively saw the dangers lurking in heart-related affairs, and wished to have no part whatsoever in that ghastly business, even though my Joins certainly wanted every part of it. The price, to me, however, didn’t seem worth the alleged enjoyment of the experience.

As these matters are all discussed elsewhere (in my memoir Confessions of a Would-Be Wanker), there is no particular cause to redundantly reiterate them here. It seems, though, that a significant glitch took place somewhere in the warp and woof of reality, ultimately causing two new lives to enter the world. Yet my alienation from anything approaching the “normal” perspective on married life has always remained. There is still nothing “normal” to me about the state of being a husband and a father; even after having adopted these roles, | still cannot properly comprehend how I came to take on either one or the other, much less both. .

Perhaps it sounds startling and grandiose to you, good reader, that I should declare myself such a glaring exception to the rule, that I should indeed be a husband and a father, and yet a celibate at heart. I take my family responsibilities seriously, to be sure, and I have no shortage of affection for my wife and children (and yes, for those who must know about such matters, I do indeed have a carnal relationship with my wife), but there is still a general consciousness of being apart from others of my alleged “kind”; when I regard other husbands and fathers, I don’t think to myself: “There is another one like me!” Instead, at my essence, I am an unabashed acetic, even while I find myself inexplicably saddled with the trappings of a family man. This state of things cannot last, | am sure: my outer shell-- which resembles the guise of a “family man”- will surely crumble away from my spiritual body once I die and go to my reward, whatever reward that may be.

Indeed, though I have wound up engaged in the “worldly” pursuits attendant upon being a “family man,” (working to support my wife and children, doing the best I can to guide and assist my son and daughter to become happy, healthy, spiritually nourished, and morally scrupulous human beings), I also on many a day find myself looking upon myself with incorrigible incomprehension and bafflement, as one would regard a stranger who has somehow, by some disconcerting miracle, stepped into one’s own consciousness. Who is this impostor? How and why did he come to be here?

AFTER THE FALL

A great conviction has shaken me of late, familiar yet recently heightened in its intensity. This conviction has seized me in its grip with a harsh, violent, and terrible tenacity. It has so addled my perception that I cannot tell for certain if in fact this conviction is accurate, or if I have been put under the spell of some malignant delusion. But whatever may be the case, I must repeat the things that I discern. Readers may judge for themselves whether or not what I perceive is true, or if in fact I have been led astray. What I see, in part, is this: the complete degradation of human affairs is due to the permeation of carnality into every cranny and nook of our lived consciousness. An overripe, oversexualized age, with the spirit of eros run rampant and rendered spectacularly ghastly.

But I discern still more. Rightly or wrongly, erroneously or factually, I perceive that eros is, at its core, a destructive and degrading force. How it soaks us in all its slime! A more prudent age was at some level aware of this fact. It knew, of course, that, still and all, the vast majority of our species would still wish to partake in eros; nevertheless, it saw to it that the best among us would wish to do without this indulgence. The institution of celibacy, in all of its forms, exists because man saw that only in renunciation of the flesh could he find his way to his essential, purified self.

I know that this message jars at the ears of those indoctrinated into the current Zeitgeist, with its relentlessly enforced doctrine of “sex-positivity,” but I particularly perceive that one who has carnal relations has been “used up,” spoiled, and rendered morally hideous. Lest I be misunderstood, I don’t make this claim in what may be called a “misogynistic” context; I’m not talking of de-virginized women here as having an exclusive claim to the “used up” label. Indeed, though the hymen is an organ particular to the female sex, it is an apt universal metaphor—applying to males and females alike—for the very thing of which I speak; its rupture—that which is referred to in vulgar slang as “popping the cherry” —broadcasts the bloody-mess that is post-lapsarian life. The blood shed at the moment of penile penetration provides a poignant illustration of the horror of having been irrevocably degraded.

Not for nothing do we still refer to the initial act of coitus as a representing a “loss of innocence.” We intuit that sex is corruption from the very start, and no amount of social conditioning from our masters will remove this solidly fixed impression.

Yet even the older, more traditional mores of the previous dispensation still amounted to little more than whoremongering, ultimately, even if it was a more Subtle variety of that which is common today. Sex back then didn’t entirely permeate the culture, and its more deleterious effects were kept in check by still-prevalent force of traditional morality, but even the more innocent past was tragically soiled by the consequences of the Fall. The time of our corruption antecedes both the present and the past; there never was a time, in fact, when it was not, at least not one that lurks anywhere in our collective memory... and yet, we still somehow feel the irrevocable loss in our bones. And even if we were to regain the mores of the halcyon era, before the onrush of militant indoctrination into ever more malignant forms of degeneracy, we would still feel this loss.

Of course, it won’t do for a decently married man to see wedlock as merely a more sophisticated form of prostitution. Such a perspective demeans the perceived legitimacy of marriage—an institution which, as we all know, has already taken its share of knocks in recent years. However, I can’t help but view things the way they present themselves to me now. True enough: there are varying degrees of degradation, but sex within wedlock—the traditional norm—contains, as it were, the virus of corruption, even as it renders it less virulent and appalling in its effects. It does not, however, eliminate the degradation as a thing in itself. Of course, I am not suggesting that we should strive to eliminate it, since such quixotic crusades-- which attempt to extinguish entirely that which, for better or worse “comes naturally”—are almost guaranteed to cause more mischief than they are meant to curtail. No: eros is a force that can perhaps be contained, but never stopped; it is a force, indeed, of nature. Nature must have its reign, but that which is “natural” isn’t therefore good: that we are bound to tolerate it  [we aren’t VB] isn’t to say that it must be liked, much less loved.

It isn’t that sex isn’t agreeable or pleasurable; to be sure, it is both. [Its agreeableness and pleasurableness depend on perceptual distortion VB] Finding it loathsome in its essence and éffects isn’t the same thing as finding it unappealing as an activity. The wreckage of our bloody, oozy, ejaculate-flooded, hymen-perforated world, increasingly shorn as it is of every former vestige of innocence, is a testament to the fatal indulgence of this proclivity, “natural” indeed, but no less malignant for its naturalness, as might indeed be said... of a tumor.

ADULTERATED

“But it’s through that very force, which you liken to a ‘tumor,’ that life emerges!” So it will be objected. In response, it would only be appropriate to point out a couple of things. First of all, the fact that life comes into being due to sexual intercourse does not function as a pro forma argument, rendering the inherent goodness of sex self-evidently obvious. If one wishes to make such a case, one would instead need to demonstrate that life itself is inherently good—a considerably more dubious proposition absent the assent to some a priori doctrine on the matter. And even if life is an inherent good, it should not therefore be seen to follow --as the proverbial night follows the no less proverbial day-- that sexual intercourse is good simply because it is an act which produces life. In any event, while such an argument constitutes the basis on which the Church, and Christianity generally, has praised sex as a God-created good (provided it is kept within wedlock), it is most emphatically not the reason why sex is typically lauded in our day and age. Rather, to put badly, sex is lauded because it represents 1) raw pleasure and 2) the obliteration of innocence. What makes sex “sexy” isn’t the fact that it produces babies but rather that it signifies a version of “adult”-hood (as in turn is signified in related terms like “adult language” or “adult situations,” both of which are common descriptions of “adult movies” —and need we add terms like adulterate—meaning, “to render impure” —and adultery— meaning, “to be unfaithful” ?) Sex is distinct from other pleasures of the body in this way: unlike with eating, drinking, sleeping, and so forth, here the pleasure derives not merely from indulgence, but from having been seen or known as one who has participated in said indulgence. Hence the hullabaloo typically made about virginity; when one “loses” this state of being, it functions as a sort of initiation ritual into an “order” which, while not necessarily characterized by sin per se, definitely has the earmarks of moral complication and psychic besmirchment.

Finally, I offer that my point of view on this subject is not to be taken as the final word on the matter, (not that anyone is likely to feel tempted to take it this way anyhow). What I am relaying here are my impressions, valuable if read within certain prescribed limits, perhaps “thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season,” but no more fit to be dismissed for all that. Perhaps, though, there is something redeeming in sexuality, something I have always previously missed. Please note that I use the word redeeming, not merely “alluring,” “appealing,” “desirable,” or... “sexy,” but “redeeming,” as in salvific, as in not savoring of sin, defilement, or corruption.

The Catholic faith, to which I am a convert, seems to think this way. It has always taught the intrinsic good of sex between married a husband and wife. Yet through the vast majority of its history, the Church has mostly made reference to marital relations as a means towards reproduction. Only in the post-sexual revolution age have Church leaders attempted to defend the glories of sex as such, as with John Paul Il’s somewhat queasy “theology of the body” innovations. It is true, of course, that from its inception the Church engaged in metaphorical comparisons between Christ and the Church as being equivalent to that of a man with his newly-wedded bride; it is also the case that when nuns take their vows, they pledge their troth to Christ to express their spiritual fidelity.

Still, when it comes to the sexual act itself, the Church has wisely refrained from making any explicit parallels, in order to avoid any unseemly figurative ramifications. Again, we see reinforced the scarcely concealed admission that sex is a thing best not looked at too closely, a thing essentially loathsome and corruptive in nature.

DARK SPRINGTIME

As I write, it happens to be the height of the spring season, when a fine polien powder coats the earth like yellow snow. What is more, a powerfully musky scent hangs in the air, which plainly resembles semen. It is oppressively inescapable.

Springtime has been hymned and gloried in by poets and nature enthusiasts from time immemorial, and it is indeed a time of mystical resonance and power, since it is the time wherein life reasserts itself in all of its simultaneous glory and ghastliness. It is at the heart of the very notion of birth, a central mystery of existence, one whose origins can in no sense be properly addressed by applying purely mechanistic explanations.

Life is indeed a miracle, in the sense that it shouldn’t exist, yet does. But much as the poets and sentimentalists go on about the vernal wonders of springtime, they seldom pay attention to what could be called the dark side of the season.

********

“In spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” So writes the poet, knowing well enough the resonances he is conjuring up. Springtime connotes carnality; just as the bee invades the bud of the flower to plant its seed, so the “young man” aches to deposit his seed within the womb of his lover. Tennyson couldn’t have expressed such a sentiment outright, of course; it would greatly have offended the sensibilities of his readers to be so forthright. Like most skilled writers, he merely hinted at a plainly undeclarable notion through subtle analogy.

I have known love, myself; the reader would be wrong to conclude that I take these stances on carnality without being acquainted with the matter on a personal level. Not only have I been in love, I have also (as previously noted) married and reproduced. I have watched my two children emerge into the world (each time, my attendance for this event was quite against my will; I would just as soon not have been present, and remained in the waiting room until afterwards, as was the norm in previous eras, but for my wife’s insistence). I love my children dearly, and wish nothing but the best for them, but seeing them spring from their mother’s womb didn’t cause me to fall in love with the process of birth, or make me eager to praise the manner in which new souls become incarnated. That it is “wondrous,” there is no doubt; that it is inexplicable, certain; that it is, in its way, a “miracle,” indisputable, but none of these conclusions necessitates that one ought to regard it with reverential adulation. To be sure, birth is awe-inspiring, in its way, much the same way that death is; that life suddenly appears is as weirdly arresting to the apprehension as is the notion that is suddenly disappears as well. Birth and death are intertwined wonders, for the one cannot exist without the other, and carnality—the means by which life, and therefore death, comes about-- is also a wonder, though, as with birth and death, its undeniable intriguingness doesn’t render it a good thing. Coming to such an arbitrary conclusion is at best intellectual sloppiness, at worst (and most typically), sheer anti-intellectual cant.

THE MARK OF CAIN

I have long held to these conclusions, based upon my deepest, unshakable convictions. I did, for a time, attempt to put these notions aside, the better to adopt what I understood to be the tenets of Christian orthodoxy. After falling in love, and getting married, I tried to convince myself—in accord with the doctrines taught by the Church-- that sexuality was an inherent good. I chalked my earlier thoughts up to youthful folly; I told myself that believing such things was just a testament to a priggish tendency to be overly extreme in my boyhood beliefs. Now, I congratulated myself to think, I had grown “mature” and “responsible” in eschewing such untenable and fantastic ideas.

The trouble was, I was never able to convince myself of my newly- amended tenets regarding sex. I recognized, of course, that there were gradations of corruption, and that not every manifestation of this proclivity was foul or objectionable to the same extent. Matrimony and wedlock tamed and contained this beast, it was true; still, the beast itself did not register to me as anything but beastly; it did not grow angelic once tamed. A temperate, well-ordered society which enforced monogamy was indeed better than a culture which promoted “free love” and hedonistic abandon; a nation which tolerated monogamy but most fully prized celibacy (as endorsed by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians and by Christ in his “become eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven” homily) was even better, but sex, wherever it manifested itself, still represented a tainted and compromised psychic condition, scarring the soul of the human race much like the mark of Cain.

Eventually, the truth, as I had originally comprehended it in my formative years, pushed its way back to the surface, and I found myself yet again seized with the sure knowledge that had come over me from the very inception of my transformation. It is, however, with something of a mournful heart that I find myself once again inhabiting these intellectual quarters. Not only is my belief in itself at odds with the impulses of my body (for I am not, nor have I ever been “asexual”), but my convictions are intensely alienating to most people. In fact, they tend to become astonishingly indignant when this point is raised... to the point that I seldom do raise it anymore, except in print.

The last time I argued for antisexualism was a couple of times when I was a teenager. I recall both occasions quite well, at least when it comes to certain particulars. One time was in a college dorm setting; my interlocutors draped themselves all over each other licentiously, as if in defiance of my unwelcome argument, while I sat alone, fittingly enough, and vehemently made my case with all the bravado of an arrogant and eloquent young man. On an earlier occasion—one that is more seared in my mind, for some reason—I was riding on a bus, during a summer school trip in Ireland, of all places. As we drove through an intensely picturesque landscape of forest glen under ominously overcast Celtic skies, a conversation got struck up somehow, for some reason, on the subject of sex: whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. I must have made some Opinionated, semi-belligerent verbal sally or other, else it would be unclear why the debate would have ensued at all; certainly none of my classmates hewed to such a strange and perverse doctrine that would actually disparage sexuality! As some outspoken wag would later put the matter: “Who the FUCK is anti-sex?” That he would use this particular profanity was telling: it reflected not only the emphatic incredulity of his response, it also showed the blatant carnality of even his metaphorical conception of affairs.

I don’t really recall much about the content of my argument. I think I may have focused on how sexuality causes us to be selfish, since we end of paying more attention to people we find attractive and caring less about those with the misfortune to be ugly or plain-looking. Also, I suspect that I honed in on the ego, and how it gets puffed up by sexual pursuits, to the point of chasing only its own gratification, whereas true love is self-sacrificing, rather than being acquisition-oriented. The “loss of innocence” angle didn’t really occur to me at the time, perhaps because I hadn’t yet achieved much distance from it, being still relatively fresh from the ravages of puberty and still in the throes of late adolescence.

Little as I remember about my own talking points, I have even less recollection of what my interlocutors said. It seems that there were four or five of them who chimed in from time to time, along with a few other mere interested (or semi-interested) spectators who said nothing. I was, to be sure, the only one among us taking this most intrepid stand. It seemed to succeed at agitating one of my classmates (though he was an easily agitated fellow); he grew eager to convey to me how much of an idiot I was, and how reprehensibly atrocious he found my point of view. He responded to my theoretical points as one personally offended. There was also a certain moon-faced girl who actually felt so hurt by my assertions that she broke down and cried silently. It mustn’t be thought that she was weeping out of compassion for me, however; she didn’t regard me as a tragic figure who had come to faulty conclusions and now was denying himself the comfort of carnal companionship and dooming himself to a lonely life in the process. No: though there would have been something touching about such a response, I’m afraid that hers was more the sulky apprehension of a frustrated, generally unreflective faithful believer in the presence of a shameless blasphemer.

Though our debate no doubt had the effect of alienating me still further from my peers—who at the very least found my ideas somewhat freakish, and at worst thought me odious for attacking what to them was close to sacred—nevertheless, I felt pleased with the interaction, since it at least indicated a level of engagement with them, something I had felt very little acquainted with as a youngster, being, as I was, a general “eyesore in the architecture” at that time. Here, I was at least being noticed, and noted, rather than scrupulously avoided, as was more typical. And hope kept stubbornly asserting itself: I found myself caught up in its clutches, pressed up against its fulsome bosom, where its deeply deceitful heart vibrated seductively, causing my own heart to flare with undimmed expectation. Perhaps, after all, I still stood a chance of being understood, accepted, embraced. I never admitted to myself that I desired such an outcome, because it struck me as a base betrayal of my better self; still, I indeed wished for it. (...)

NOTES BEFORE DEATH
Andy Nowicki

Don Quixote at the Source

 

‘Safety! Where is that to be found? I am obliged to fight for my own life every day.’

                              Ras Michael.

EVEN THE briefest glance at Bruce’s life reveals the great gulf that divides us from the privileged classes of eighteenth century England. He belongs to a world that seems to us now as dead as the dodo: the ancestral arms and the entailed estate, the classical education and the emphasis on manners, the patronage and the violent prejudices. Bruce hated the Papists as some people hate snakes, and if he did not actually believe in the divine right of kings he was certainly monarchist to the core.

Unlike the Victorian explorers who were soon to follow him to Africa, he never takes a moral attitude about such matters as the slave trade or the benefits that civilization could confer on the benighted blacks. He does not even make the pretence of being a reformer or an educator. He accepts the world as it is. Quite simply he is out to do the best he can for himself, and he explores purely for the sake of curiosity and personal adventure.

Even by the standards of his time and his class he was a formidable man. He was six foot four in height and strong in proportion, and he had dark red hair and a very loud voice. He had a reputation as a horseman and a marksman, and wherever he went he seems to have dispensed an air of confident superiority. He felt superior. Even Arabic and the Ethiopian dialects did not defeat his natural fluency in languages, he was an enthusiastic amateur of such subjects as astronomy, he was socially at ease and he was rich. If he was quick to take offence (he describes himself as of ‘a sanguine, passionate disposition, very sensible of injuries’), and was often childishly vain and boastful, he was also a man of imagination, and there is no doubt whatever that he was very brave and very determined.

It is strange that with all his obvious merits one does not like Bruce very much, and stranger still that his own contemporaries should have been so brutal with him. Some vital ingredient was missing in his nature, perhaps it was humanity, and when all his hardships and misfortunes are related one is still left with the cold impression of an intensely self-reliant man, one of the kind who repels sympathy by his own conceit.

He was born on the family estates at Kinnaird in Scotland in 1730, and within three years his mother had died. His father soon married again and had three daughters and six sons by his second wife. Thus from the first Bruce remained a little apart from the rest of the family as the eldest son by another wife, and the heir to property and privileges which dated back, it was claimed, to the ancient kings of Scotland. He was a delicate child who soon outgrew his own strength, yet at the age of 6 he was sent to be educated by tutors in London, a week’s journey away by coach to the south. At the age of 12 he was put into Harrow school, where they thought very well of him as a scholar. Education 200 years ago was pushed ahead much more rapidly and thoroughly than it is today, and at 16 Bruce was sent back to Scotland to continue his studies at Edinburgh University. He would have preferred the church, but his father insisted on the law, and this was a mistake, for Bruce hated it so much that he soon became ill. There followed then several years of idleness and convalescence at Kinnaird, and in the end it was decided that he should go down to London and find a post with the East India Company.

In London, however, he soon fell in love with the daughter of a well-to-do wine merchant, and after the marriage he entered her family’s firm. With wealth and good connections he was now installed in English society, and it seemed that his career might follow more or less upon the lines of his near contemporary, James Boswell, who was also destined one day, for all his love of London, to inherit family estates and set himself up as a laird in Scotland. But within nine months of his marriage Bruce’s wife died of consumption when she was pregnant, and one has to consider just how far Bruce’s toughness and self-sufficiency spring from the sudden disappearance of women from his life, for it was to happen again, and more than once.

They were in Paris on their way to the south of France when the girl died, and there was a grisly scene when Bruce, in a Protestant rage, rejected the attentions of the Roman Catholic priests and at length found a burial ground on the outskirts of the city. She was buried at midnight, and Bruce at once got on his horse and rode all night through a wild storm to the Channel. At Boulogne he collapsed, and it was a day or two before he could continue to England.

He was now 24, and the tragedy appears to have had the effect of revealing himself to himself. From this time forward he never really hesitates. He hungered for solitary travel just as Boswell hungered for social life in London, and he seems to have turned by instinct to Africa and the south. Not even his father’s death in 1758 could bring him back.

For the next few years Bruce’s life is that of the talented young man making the Grand Tour. He studied Arabic manuscripts in the Escurial in Spain, he sailed down the Rhine, he fought a duel in Brussels, he made drawings of ruins in Italy, and eventually George III’s ministers found him a job as British consul among the Barbary pirates in Algiers. It was not an easy post. Ali Pasha, the Bey of Algiers, was a sensual and cruel old man who thought nothing of throwing foreign consuls into gaol and of enslaving the crews of visiting ships. He had disliked the previous British consul very much and had written to ‘the English Vizier, Mr. Pitt’: ‘My high friend . . . your consul in Algiers is an obstinate person, and like an animal.’ Bruce presumably knew what he was in for but already he had vague plans for getting to the source of the Nile—that mystery which for 2,000 years had been, he declared, ‘a defiance of all travellers, and an opprobrium to geography’—and Algiers was a step along the way. In June 1762, aged 32, he arrived at Algiers equipped with two camera obscuras for drawing ruins and a quantity of astronomical instruments to chart his journeys in Africa. He found things much worse than he could have anticipated: the Bey was furious at the seizure of one of his ships by the British and the French and was out for blood. Within the first few months of his consulship Bruce saw the French consul taken away in chains, Forbes, his own assistant, was threatened with ‘a thousand bastinadoes’ and fled into hiding, and Bruce himself scarcely dared to go out. When he did have an audience with the Bey one of the court officials was strangled in his presence. Bruce stuck it for two years before the British Government gave him permission to leave his post and continue with his journey to the east. From Algiers he travelled on along the north African coast to the cities and the great ruins of the Near East, and it was a progress in the Byronic manner, brigands, shipwrecks and hand-to-hand skirmishes besetting him all the way.

The year 1768, when he was 38, finds him in Cairo accompanied by a young Italian secretary named Luigi Balugani, and dressed as a dervish. And now at last he has his great design in view: he will travel up the Nile into the unknown fastnesses of Ethiopia.

There are a number of unusual aspects about the tremendous journey upon which Bruce now embarked. It was, in a way, a journey in a vacuum, not only in the sense that the places he visited were virtually unknown to the civilized world, but also in the sense of time as well. Some seventy years had elapsed since Poncet had been in Ethiopia, and after Bruce’s visit in 1771 another thirty years were to go by before any other European penetrated far into the country. The secretary Luigi Balugani died at Gondar, and so Bruce is the only eye-witness of what befell the two men there; his account cannot be checked by either collaborators or contemporaries. Like Marco Polo he tells an intensely personal story, and the people he writes about so confidently and familiarly were then as strange to Europe and the civilized world as the denizens of outer space are to us today. On his return, says his biographer, Francis Head, he told the public ‘of people who wore rings in their lips instead of their ears—who anointed themselves not with bear’s grease or pomatum, but with the blood of cows—who, instead of playing tunes upon them, wore the entrails of animals as ornaments—and who, instead of eating hot putrid meat, licked their lips over bleeding living flesh. He described debauchery dreadfully disgusting, because it was so different to their own. He told of men who hunted each other—of mothers who had not seen ten winters—and he described crowds of human beings and huge animals retreating in terror before an army of little flies! In short, he told them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; but . . . the facts he related were too strong.’

There was yet another impediment to the success of Bruce’s journey. He was absolutely fixed in the mistaken idea that the Blue Nile was the main stream and that the White Nile was a tributary. However, this scarcely mattered; every journey in Africa at this time added something to human knowledge, and the Blue Nile was every bit as important as the White.

He set out at first on Norden’s and Pococke’s route up the Nile from Cairo, but at Aswan he found his further progress on the river blocked by local wars, and so he decided to enter Ethiopia by the Red Sea route instead. He turned back to the town of Cus below Luxor, and thence made his way across the desert to Kosseir. Here he embarked on a roundabout trip across the Red Sea to Jedda, where he found a British consul who helped him on his way. In September 1769 he landed at Massawa, which was then in the hands of a piratical gang that was even more rapacious than those he had left behind so long ago in Algiers. It took him two months to extract himself from Massawa, and then in November 1769 he turned towards the interior. Up to this point he had covered ground which was dangerous but fairly well explored. Now he faced the unknown.

There were about twenty men in the little party: Luigi Balugani, a Moor named Yasmine, who acted as a sort of major-domo, and a gang of porters who were mainly occupied in carrying an enormous quadrant and other scientific instruments. Six asses had also been bought in Massawa, but Bruce himself walked. In three weeks he had crossed the coastal plain and had struggled up the mountain paths to Adowa, which was then a place of some 300 houses and one of the principal strongholds of the country. Here Bruce had a warning of what lay before him: several hundred miserable wretches were imprisoned in cages awaiting the day when their families could raise enough money to buy their release. He pushed on to Axum, the ancient capital of the country, where he saw forty obelisks and the ruins of a great temple, and then marched on again towards Gondar, which by now, he learned, was the seat of the government. It was on this stage of the journey that the famous incident of the raw beef occurred. Bruce declared that he saw three Ethiopians throw a cow to the ground and cut two steaks off its buttock. The skin was then pinned back over the wound and covered with clay, after which the beast was allowed to get up and was driven off. The three Ethiopians fell on to the warm meat.

In mid-February 1770, ninety-five days out of Massawa, the party reached Gondar, and Bruce settled into a house in the Moslem quarter. Addis Ababa at this time had not yet been built, and Gondar was the principal city of the country. It was a settlement of some 10,000 families who lived in clay huts with conical roofs, but the King’s palace was a large square building flanked by towers and a surrounding wall. It had a view down to Lake Tana, and its principal reception hall was 120 feet long. For most of the year, however, the court lived in tents and followed the army on its endless meanderings across the Ethiopian plateau.

There is an air of nightmarish fantasy about affairs in Ethiopia at this moment, and in the pages of Bruce’s book they never really achieve coherence or sanity from the day he arrived in the country to the day he left. This is the atmosphere of Grand Guignol, and of mediaeval melodrama: of horror piled upon horror until everything dissolves into a meaningless welter of brutality and bloodshed. Bruce describes it all in the minutest detail: the endless marchings and countermarchings of futile little armies, the pitched battles, the savage feasts, the treachery and the rhetoric. It all very much recalls the Chinese, who in their traditional opera handle this sort of thing very well. The General struts on to the stage waving his sword, and you can judge his importance by the number of flags stuck into his costume. His Grand Vizier and his executioner stand at his side and scowl ferociously while he hurls defiance at the enemy. Then with a crash of drums and cymbals he marches off, to be replaced by the rival chieftain, who is an even more terrible fellow with his black moustaches and his dagger, and he too is full of braggadocio. The battle, when it comes, is like the dialogue, a pattern of stylized rhythmic gestures signifying nothing. There is a great deal of noise, a great deal of rushing about, and in the end one side is the victor and the other the vanquished; and then it all begins again.

There may be a certain entertainment to be had from these things when they are treated as an illusion on the stage, but when they are presented as actual happenings the drama is lost, the horror becomes gruesome and tedious, and one begins to hunt about for reasons why human beings should be as dreadful as this. It almost seems from Bruce’s account that a death-wish was operating among these people, that they were born expressly to hate and destroy one another, and the fact that they maintained an outward show of Christianity and observed a crude ceremony in their manners only made matters worse.

The young king, Tecla Haimanout, and his vizier Ras Michael, who really ruled the country, were away on one of their punitive raids when Bruce arrived, and so he paid court to the Iteghe, the queen mother. She seems to have been an intelligent woman. ‘See! See!’ she exclaimed one day to Bruce when he confided to her the object of his journey, ‘how every day our life furnishes us with proofs of the perverseness and contradiction of human nature: you are come from Jerusalem, through vile Turkish governments, and hot, unwholesome climates, to see a river and a bog, no part of which can you carry away were it ever so valuable, and of which you have in your own country a thousand larger, better and cleaner. . . . While I, on the other hand, the mother of kings, who have sat upon the throne of this country more than thirty years, have for my only wish, night and day, that, after giving up everything in the world, I could be conveyed to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and beg alms for my subsistence all my life after, if I could only be buried at last in the street within sight of the gate of that temple where our blessed Saviour once lay.’

Her daughter, Ozoro Esther, who was married to Ras Michael, also attracted Bruce’s sympathy, for she was a beautiful girl and she was driven half mad by the violence around her. Hardly so much could be said for Tecla Haimanout and Ras Michael; when Bruce first met them they were busy putting out the eyes of a dozen captives. Of the king’s appearance Bruce tells us very little, but Ras Michael emerges as a fairly well-defined figure, a terrible, white-haired old tyrant in his seventies, who adopted the airs and manners of a mediaeval baron. He rode into Gondar wearing a cloak of black velvet with a silver fringe, a page marching at his right stirrup carrying a silver wand. Behind him came the army, each soldier who had killed a man bearing on his lance a shred of scarlet cloth and the testicles of his victim.

Bruce was received in audience a day or two later, and he found Michael sitting on a sofa, surrounded by his followers, his hair hanging in short curls, a gaunt, authoritative figure, about six foot in height, with very intelligent eyes. Bruce made the customary obeisance by kissing the ground at his feet and was well received. After warning him of the dangers of moving about the country alone, Michael gave him the command of a troop of the King’s horse.

It is wonderful that Bruce should have survived and have even been honoured among these violent men whose first instinct was to kill a stranger and then rob him of his goods. He had a certain value as an oddity, of course, and he carried with him a formidable portfolio of letters from the Sultans in Constantinople, Cairo and Mecca, but they hardly counted for much in this barbaric Christian world. He tells us that the Ethiopian warriors were greatly impressed by the power of his modern rifle, especially when he galloped about on a black charger potting at the mountain kites. His skill as a doctor also made him very welcome, since plagues like smallpox were endemic; and it was useful that he had learned to speak both Geez and Arabic. But in the end probably it was his commanding presence and his air of assurance that really saved his life. Explorers in Africa tend to fall into two groups: the sophisticates and romantics who absorbed the protective local colouring of the country, and who went about in disguise pretending to be merchants, couriers or even pilgrims on their way to Mecca; and the practical men who boldly announced their identity and who disarmed opposition by marching ahead to their objectives with a show of perfect confidence. Bruce was no fool in the arts of persuasion, and he tells us that in Ethiopia he got himself up in chainmail, cloaks and bright cummerbunds stuck with pistols like any other chieftain, but he tends on the whole to belong to the practical group. He also possessed a good eighteenth-century knowledge of court intrigue and the soft word that induces patronage. ‘Man is the same creature everywhere although different in colour,’ he wrote. ‘The court in London and that in Abyssinia1 are in their principles the same.’And so, when he had cleared the queen mother’s palace of smallpox and had flirted with Ozoro Esther and had flattered Ras Michael, they were ready enough to take him off on the next expedition at the south of Lake Tana, where a rebel chief named Fasil was raising an army against the throne.

This was precisely the direction in which Bruce wanted to go, and it was a great disappointment to him that Fasil should have surrendered before he could get to the Little Abbai, which he believed to be the true source of the Nile. He did, however, reach the river close to its outflow from Lake Tana, and here he turned south-east to the Tisisat Falls. ‘The cataract itself,’ he says, ‘was the most magnificent sight that I ever beheld. The height has been rather exaggerated. The missionaries say the fall is about sixteen ells, or fifty feet. The measuring is indeed very difficult; but by the position of long sticks, and poles of different lengths, at different heights of the rock, from the water’s edge, I may venture to say, that it is nearer forty feet than any other measure. The river had been considerably increased by rains, and fell in one sheet of water, without any interval, above half an English mile in breadth, with a force and noise that was truly terrible, and which stunned, and made me, for a time, perfectly dizzy. A thick fume, or haze, covered the fall all round, and hung over the course of the stream both above and below, marking its track, though the water was not seen. It was a magnificent sight that ages, added to the greatest length of human life, would not efface or eradicate from my memory; it struck me with a kind of stupor, and a total oblivion of where I was, and of every other sublunary concern. It was one of the most magnificent, stupendous sights in the creation, much degraded and vilified by the lies of a grovelling fanatic priest.’

The passage is revealing; in fact, it provides a valuable key, not only to Bruce’s nature but also to the account of his journey which he was eventually to publish in England. There is first of all his inaccuracy, and it is very puzzling. One cannot altogether blame him for exalting the scene before him—after all, most of the explorers were guilty of exaggeration, and the Tisisat Falls are indeed very fine. But such phrases as ‘one of the most magnificent, stupendous sights in the creation’, are perhaps a little too much; they smack of the story-teller and the supernatural. Then when he gets down to facts he makes the Falls much wider than they really are, but less than a third of their true height; the actual drop is not forty feet but a hundred and fifty. The references to the missionaries and the ‘grovelling fanatic priest’ are even more disturbing.

These were the two Portuguese priests, Pedro Paez and Jerome Lobo, who were in Ethiopia early in the seventeenth century, that is to say about 150 years before Bruce. Paez was the remarkable man who, after being for many years a captive in Arabia, made his way to Ethiopia and (in 1621) converted the emperor Susenyos to Roman Catholicism. The ruins of a large and beautiful church at Gorgora at the north end of Lake Tana are a witness to Paez’s ability as an architect and a builder. Father Lobo, who followed Paez to Ethiopia, left an account of a journey to Tisisat. In it he declared that he clambered on to a ledge of rock that was below the falls and between them and the precipice. From this perch he says he looked out through the falling water and saw rainbows in the gorge. Bruce makes great play with this: the whole story, he says, is ‘a downright falsehood’. No man could have reached that spot through the thundering, boiling water. ‘And, supposing the friar placed in his imaginary seat, under the curve of that immense arch of water, he must have had a portion of firmness more than falls to the share of ordinary man, and which is not likely to be acquired in a monastic life, to philosophize upon optics in such a situation, where everything would seem to his dazzled eyes to be in motion, and the stream, in a noise like the loudest thunder, to make the solid rock (at least as to sense) shake to its very foundation, and threaten to tear every nerve to pieces, and to deprive one of other senses beside that of hearing.’

In this tumble of words Bruce overlooked the fact that while he himself visited the falls when they were in flood Lobo arrived at Christmas, which is the height of the dry season. And in point of fact Colonel Cheesman, the chief geographer of the river in modern times, actually sat under the falls just as Lobo says he did, when he (Cheesman) was prospecting the river in May 1926. On the way down the cliff-face one of Cheesman’s men grasped the tail of a python, thinking it was the branch of a tree, and very nearly came to grief.

But Bruce, where his own explorations were concerned, was as jealous and as prickly as a lover, and his hatred of the Jesuits was a special hate. This attack on Lobo was the prelude for another and much stronger onslaught which was to follow shortly afterwards.

For the moment, however, he was thwarted in his attempt to reach his main objective, the source of the Little Abbai, and he returned with the army to the intrigues at Gondar and the mutilation and massacre of the prisoners there. For a while he was ill with fever (no doubt malaria), and it was not until October 1770 that he was able to set out again. This time he travelled with his own small party, which included Balugani and a Greek named Strates, and porters carrying the quadrant as before. For the moment the country was at peace, and Bruce had so far got himself into the good graces of the King and Ras Michael that he had been nominated governor of Ghish, the territory around the source of the Little Abbai. It was hardly more than a nominal appointment, since Bruce had neither the means nor the intention of residing there, but it provided a sort of passport for his journey, and it enabled him to impress the local chieftains he met along the way. He passed around the west side of Lake Tana and then moved up the valley of the Little Abbai towards Ghish Mountain, which is about seventy miles south of the lake. The final march was made on November 4, 1770, through charming country filled with flowering shrubs and tropical birds and with a view of vast mountains in the distance. Late in the afternoon, when they had climbed to 9,500 feet, they came on a rustic church, and the guide, pointing beyond it, indicated a little swamp with a hillock rising from the centre; that, he declared, was the source of the Nile.

‘Throwing my shoes off,’ Bruce says, ‘I ran down the hill, towards the little island of green sods, which was about two hundred yards distant; the whole side of the hill was thick overgrown with flowers, the large bulbous roots of which appearing over the surface of the ground, and their skins coming off on treading upon them, occasioned me two very severe falls before I reached the brink of the marsh; I after this came to the island of green turf, which was in the form of an altar . . . and I stood in rapture. . . .’

There was no actual flow to be seen—the water merely appeared to seep through the swamp from several different springs to a point on its downward side where it combined into a tiny brook—but there was clear, cold water in the well and to Bruce at that moment it was sacred.

‘It is easier to guess than to describe the situation of my mind at the moment,’ he says, ‘standing in that spot which had baffled the genius, industry and inquiry of both ancients and moderns, for the course of near three thousand years. . . . Though a mere private Briton, I triumphed here in my own mind, over kings and their armies.’

But then, almost at once, he tells us, a reaction set in. For well over a year through tremendous hardships and dangers he had struggled to reach this goal, and now suddenly, having won the battle, having achieved what had so often seemed impossible, the impetus and the inspiration of his journey were gone; now he faced the long way home. ‘I found,’ he says, ‘a despondency gaining ground fast upon me, and blasting the crown of laurels I had woven for myself. I resolved, therefore, to divert myself till I could, on more solid reflection, overcome its progress. I saw Strates expecting me on the side of the hill. “Strates,” said I, “faithful squire! Come and triumph with your Don Quixote, at that island of Barataria where we have most wisely and fortunately brought ourselves! Come, and triumph with me over all the kings of the earth, all their armies, all their philosophers, and all their heroes!”

‘ “Sir,” says Strates, “I do not understand a word of what you say, and as little what you mean; you very well know that I am no scholar. But you had much better leave that bog . . .”.’

Determined to be merry, Bruce picked up a half coconut shell he used as a drinking cup. Filling it from the spring he obliged Strates to drink a toast to ‘His Majesty King George III and a long line of princes,’ and another to ‘Catherine, Empress of all the Russias’—this last was a gesture to Strates’s Greek origin, since Catherine just then was attacking the Turks in the Aegean. There was still another toast. ‘ “Now, friend,” ’ Bruce said, ‘ “here is to a more humble name, but still a sacred name, here is to—Maria!” ’ Strates asked if that was the Virgin Mary and Bruce answered, ‘In faith, I believe so, Strates.’ We are to hear more of this lady later, on Bruce’s return to Europe.

It was a strange scene, full of delusions, more to be likened to Lear and the fool on the blasted heath than to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. If Bruce was looking for the source of the Nile he was on the wrong river. The true source was in Lake Victoria, a thousand miles away. He was even on the wrong part of the wrong river, since, as Cheesman says, from an engineer’s point of view, the overflow from Lake Tana near Bahardar should be considered as the source of the Blue Nile.

There was an even more serious delusion than this: Bruce was utterly mistaken in thinking that he was the first European to reach this spot. Pedro Paez had been here in 1618, and his account of his experiences is very clear and very similar to Bruce’s: ‘On April 21 in the year 1618,’ Paez says, ‘being here, together with the king and his army, I ascended the place, and observed everything with great attention; I discovered first two round fountains, each about four palms in diameter, and saw, with the greatest delight, what neither Cyrus, the king of the Persians, nor Cambyses, nor Alexander the Great, nor the famous Julius Caesar, could ever discover. The two openings of these fountains have no issue in the plain on the top of the mountain, but flow from the foot of it. The second fountain lies about a stone-cast west from the first. . . .’

And he goes on to give a detailed and accurate description of the swamp and the surrounding country. It is useless for Bruce to claim that all Paez’s distances and place-names are wrong, and that Paez’s whole account is based upon hearsay. There can be no doubt whatever that Paez had been here 150 years earlier, and Bruce’s attack was both spiteful and ungenerous. This was a pity, because Bruce was to make a tremendous contribution to the knowledge of the Nile and of north-east Africa, he was a genuine pioneer, and he had no need to filch others’ spoils or discredit their reputation. He in his turn was soon to know the full bitterness of such unfairness when it was directed upon himself.

The whole argument, of course, is very trivial—who really cared about this discovery of a remote spring in Ethiopia?—and yet it was true that from Cyrus to Julius Caesar the kings of the ancient world had occupied themselves with this matter in vain; and it is also true that the history of the river is compounded not out of calm deductions and wise decisions but out of just such petty disputes and jealousies as this. It is a story that unfolds through rivalry, pride, greed and finally bloodshed. ‘Peace,’ Richard Burton says somewhere, quoting an old proverb, ‘is the dream of the wise, war is the history of man.’ 

The Blue Nile

Alan Moorehead