on the ancient Jailun

(This excerpt is said to belong to a lost passage of Herodotus's book, the Histories, regarding the Yaelong tribes that reside in the country known today as Grigovia.)

And then, after the emissaries from the East had finally left, and while our party was preparing to make camp for the night, men dressed in strange garb – brightly mottled animal skins – stole silently from the brush, as if they were spirits. We had chosen the grounds to rest because they neighbored cool, flowing springs, and because they sat in a small valley that our native guide said would shelter us from the heavy, dangerous winds for which the region is known. As soon as these men appeared, our guides' women, who otherwise never spoke, wailed in unison, and, cowering fearfully, begged us not to touch them, lest, the women claimed, we become tainted by their strange and powerful sorcery. After much difficulty in finding a common tongue, we, however, were able to speak with these spirit-like men, who called themselves Jailun; they were interlopers just as we were, and had no plans to kill us for trespassing on sacred ground, as we had initially feared. They told us of their home in a mountainous region with many valleys that lay north of the lands of the Eastern emperor, whom they knew well, as he had tried, they said, repeatedly yet each time unsuccessfully, to subjugate them – first by warfare, then by bribery, and then by arranged marriages. Each time they had denied the emperor his advances, and stayed always free of the yoke of foreign rule – by warring with him, by refusing his gifts, and by putting to death the women he sent. While we were breaking bread with these quiet men who were all armed with long, slender poles-axes and curious weighted throwing ropes, a male child – the son of a lesser guide – was carried off in the talons of a mighty eagle, and never seen again. All who had witnessed the event agreed that it was a bad omen, and a warning not to walk with a loping gait similar to that of the abducted child.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit

no se permite vagabundos

  It is a good thing that Jack Kerouac lived when he did, for if he were alive today, he would likely be in jail for vagrancy. It was a subtle and unique culture that was lost when the day of the tramp and of the wanderer came to a close, when we Americans came to see those people who are perpetually on the move as threatening and dangerous, when we passed laws that made their existence all but untenable, and stamped out forever their culture, their language, and their way of life.
  We are lucky that Kerouac wrote his book On The Road when he did, in the heyday of the tramp, in that glorious period when hitch-hiking was not illegal, when strangers and transients were not viewed universally as outcasts, when it was still possible for the auto-less to make his way across our fine continent on conveyances other than corporate run bus, train, or airlines. For if he were to have attempted to live that life in our current era, he would likely be spat upon in the street and avoided like the plague by callous and uncaring people on their way to shell out five dollars for a medium coffee.
  The tramp lifestyle had its inconveniences and perils (dogs, weather, floods, robbers), but it was also in a way a deeply American condition, the tip of the spear of restlessness, the true embodiment of the notion that we can start a new life on the other side of this ridge, on the far bank of that river, on the shores of some distant ocean. The tramp had to rely on his wits; he had to trust in the chalkings of his fellow vagrants to alert him to a hostile town, or to one with generous inhabitants, or to one where a bit of labor was available for the eager but wanderlustig.
  It is unlikely that we will ever have another author like Keroak, another person able to simply perambulate across the land (like Herodotus and Pliny before him), absorbing and retelling the stories of those whom he meets, a person not necessarily pursuing a goal but one who has made the Way his Goal. We have adopted the notion in this country that raw ambition and unbridled egocentricity are virtuous states of being, when, in my opinion, they are the beginning of folly, cul-de-sacs that nearly always end in the mid-life-crisis, after which the individual will lay down her lust for money to pursue that which she knew intrinsically would make her Happy, thus rediscovering for herself the deep and abiding meaning of the Declaration of Independence.
  We are not a nation of clones, nor are we a nation founded on the notion of rigid conformity - we are a nation of Many who share a common binding purpose, to make of ourselves One, to pursue Happiness according to the myriad ways that each of Us must decide for ourselves. I fear, however, that we have over-legislated, that we have made so many things illegal in an effort to protect ourselves from potential yet only vaguely defined harm that we are now truly afraid of the transformative and perpetual process of upheaval, that we have made it all but impossible to wander the land in search of an undefined yet tremendously important goal, a goal found neither in the cubicles of the corporation nor in the folds of our wallets, a goal that eschews materialism for internal or spiritual tranquility.
  I fear also that there is no going back, that the child-like wonder and inherent purity exhibited by the characters in On The Road has been forever lost in the white noise of the television, in the vociferocity of the religious extremist, in the blind hatred that hides in an Us versus Them mentality. Woe be unto us, for we have strayed from the Path and become: calcified in our ways; blinded to the subtle wisdom of the vagabond; convinced that turban-wearing boogeymen are lurking in the shadows; and intolerant of anything we do not understand.
  Stand up. Speak out. Spread freedom.

"Fear is the mind-killer." Frank Herbert, Dune

JPR