We find ourselves drawn to joy, truth, harmony, security, beauty, thrills, fulfilment, meaning, ecstasy. We don’t want to be stuck in some pointless, shitty situation. Such is our yearning for the pure wild honey of imagination, that we’re willing to risk being stung as we trace the sweet comb to some nest high up in a tree. If anyone can help take us there, we are their eager follower. This, in brief, is the human condition, expressed symbolically and according to ancient tradition, as when Moses promised a land flowing with milk and honey.
I got the wild honey idea from a legend relayed in Heart of the Hunter, by Laurens van der Post. Youngest of thirteen children born to an Afrikaner family on a farm, he first heard animal stories from his nurse Klara, whose mother was one of the almost-extinct Bushman people of South-West Africa. Later, after a life of adventure, heroic deeds and imprisonment by the Japanese, he was sponsored by the BBC to make a documentary series, The Lost World of the Kalahari. In that arid region, he lived among the remnants of these hunter-gatherer people, seeing how they managed to survive on the margins, find water in the desert, locate edible roots to stave off famine. When they found meat, they would feast till they could eat no more. When they found honey, it was treasured as a great treat and reward in their simple lives.
Laurens learns from a Bushman called Dabé that honey can be found by listening to the song of a bird called the Honey-guide, as it hops from branch to branch, tree to tree, giving the hunter time to catch up and open up the hive, which the bird cannot do on its own, so that both can gain access to the honey. This part is true, but Dabé makes it part of a more elaborate tale involving the honey-badger—a fierce creature related to the wolverine. It eats anything and is afraid of none, including venomous creatures like scorpions and mamba snakes. It was said that a hungry lion had once attacked a ratel, which almost killed the lion in the struggle.
Since then, says Dabé, every other creature steers clear of the ratel. It has but one friend, the honey-guide, which leads it to the hive. Then the honey-badger climbs the tree, approaches rear-end first, letting out a bad smell so potent as to knock every bee unconscious. After this, it tears open the nest with its claws, so that both creatures get the honey. Thus the Bushmen’s ancestors, through following the honey-badger’s spoor, learned about the honey-guide, and became its friend too. To read Laurens’ own words, click the images.
This is clearly one of those myths common to every oral culture, in which observable reality is explained and endowed with purpose, so that every plant, creature and topographical feature has its place and deserves respect. The dawn of agriculture brought into being a different kind of world, one which led to what we call Civilization, spread and advanced by the invention of written words. Now, to cut a long story short, we have the
internet meme: a concept or idea that spreads “virally” from one person to another via the Internet.
—so that when you look up “honey-badger” or “honey-guide”, you find references to “popular claims” that the honey-guide works in a team with the honey-badger. There is even a learned paper which goes to the trouble of refuting these claims, while it’s also said that they appear, unchallenged, in David Attenborough’s Life of Birds. And someone made a video to illustrate the meme, which is supposedly faked with a stuffed bird and a tame ratel.
Taken literally, none of this gives us any concern whatever. Allegorically, it is a different matter. Today, perhaps especially this one November 8th, 2016, myths and counter-myths are being parried back and forth. The quest remains, as to who will guide us to the honey. Once I had a guide myself. I put faith in his song and his dance for much of my life. I hardly think of those years now, but the other night I woke up with two words in my head, and they stayed with me since, like one of those catchy songs you hear one day and find still playing in your head the next.
One word was dogma, as in something unquestioned, which unites its adherents in a common rallying-cry; while simultaneously uniting others in outraged opposition.
The other was racket, as in racketeering, which I took in the moral sense, as deliberately taking more out than you give back, or promising more than you intend to deliver. I found them linked, each providing justification and succour to the other.
And I saw that my years of guide-following, long since abandoned, were based on a dogma, whose propagation was a racket. To be a follower was to have the dogma burned into your vision, distorting it against everything else. Now that my vision is cleared, I can see all the other dogmas and rackets. We can scarcely escape their influence. We have come to accept them as dyed in the fabric of civilization—like taxes.
We accept the dogma because we want to find the honey. We accept the racket because we want to buy the honey.
There must be a way out of here. We can’t go back and be hunter-gatherers. Even if we try to stay with the crowd, each of us is following our own trail. What I’ve learned from mine, by a continuing process of trial error, is to be guided from within.
a wayfarer’s notes 