Ripcord Adventure Journal 2.2

24
Why travel writers should be badgers
Dr Charles Foster
There’s a big problem with my travel writing. It’s that the writing is
not about the places I purport to describe. Instead it is about the
contents of my own head. And that’s a lot less interesting than
anywhere in the universe.
I’ve written quite a lot. That I should have supposed anyone to be
interested in my head strikes me now as monstrously arrogant.
My ancestry’s partly to blame. All humans grew up on the plains of
East Africa. There was, there, a glorious and catastrophic
evolutionary accident. My ancestor hoisted herself onto her hind
legs. She immediately had a big view of the veldt. It brought many
advantages. She had context; she could strategise; in some ways she
understood the movements of the wildebeest better than they
understood the movements themselves. But it imprisoned her. Her
wonderful binocular vision became tyrannous. In lifting her eyes
and her nose and her ears up and away from the earth she lost touch
with many of the sensations that had shaped her own ancestors. The
dominance of the visual made her a supreme abstractor.
Abstraction’s a lot harder if you have many modes of information
about a tree being beamed into your brain instead of just one.
Natural selection loved abstraction. It meant that large numbers of
hypotheses could be tested out in the complete safety of a skull
rather than in the dangerous world of teeth and horns. And so
abstraction was favoured. Good abstractors bred efficiently. My
ancestors were good abstractors. And so am I.
When I go into a wood I don’t smell or hear or feel or intuit the
trees at all. I only see them for the time it takes for their images to
flash to my retina and then into my visual cortex. Then the trees
become my abstractions: less green than the trees, less old, less
generally sensuous, and a lot more boring. My abstractions certainly
contain much less information about the trees than is in, say, the
brain of a relatively non-cognitive badger. They are, therefore, less
accurate representations of the trees than the badger’s. Then I go
and write about my abstractions, calling them ‘trees’. I’m a fraud.
How can I earn an honest living as a writer about place? One