GOING ALONG

My brother, a redhead, was also a metalsmith, a community college professor, and a Marine sharpshooter.  A terrible fall caused him to hit his head on a sidewalk, left him brain-damaged which gradually grew into psychosis.  When he ended up taking refuge on my uncle's ranch, he grew too paranoid to be tolerated.  They asked him to leave and he went off down the road with a staff, wearing a hoodie.  His mind clung to the image of this, a figure that has persisted since before the Iceman, Otzie, was found felled and frozen.

The image stretches around the world from Star Wars to medieval monks, probably dates most indelibly from that version.  It has a religious vibe, from wizard to mendicant, but also a hint of being protected.  "Scriver" comes from "shriver", a maker of cloaks and by metaphorical extension means to throw protection over someone to warm and shelter them.  But that's my name, not my brother's name.  He was still a Strachan, meaning "river of rocks -- strath au cairn."  Created as a defence, rebuilt into a bridge.

There's a lot more to the story, but I won't tell it here.  His Master's thesis at University of Oregon was a series of armour helmets, each made to fit found skulls of small birds and animals he found on rambles.  So under the monk's cloak there was a sense of militance, even if small and foreign.  The hooded walking man is also related to being outcast and possibly insane.  This rural family had a previous madman in it, a person whose name and identity has been erased as much as possible, but the sense of danger and mystery remain as a dangerous space.  He'd been institutionalized much of his life but occasionally turned up without warning.

This trope of the walking man exists at the edge of community where individuals must find ways to survive alone.  My brother lived in his old pickup on the streets but there was an old friend who took him for a hot meal once a day, a woman who ran a thrift shop who recognized his heart attack, and a couple who took him into their home when the hospital released him.  

The second heart attack took him to the Veteran's Hospital where hundreds of traumatized veterans were turning up before there was any systematic or researched way to know what to do with them.  He and his cousin lied him out, but not for long and he died.  Death is a hooded figure, a being on the liminal edge between life and ceasing, which we know about but resist and try to outwit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPDIbTvoYXk  links to a movie called "The Pilgrimage."  The medieval drama clings to the subconscious of many, re-animated in new ways.  To watch one trailer of this movie I had to swear I was old enough.  I decided I was too old for that much blood and guts.  It was only a clever way to make another list of names with their url anyway.  Just because the figure of a man in a cloak, walking with his staff across long distances, is such a strong one, bad movies can be made about it.  Dedication and violence predominate, a vehicle for martyrdom and heroics.

Historically, the way we see it, human beings and many other hominins have been wanderers.  It may be one of their genetic characteristics.  Their skeletons show they were walkers from the beginning, before there were domestic animals that could be ridden -- in contrast to the neanderthals, whose bones show they loved most to sit in the entrance to home caves overlooking river valleys

From the beginning a few of both kinds had visions and powers that elevated them to power, made them too dangerous to live in communities but able to go into death, then returning with news.  They became satellites to settlements, who took them gifts of food.  Some saw how to capitalize on this, form institutions, claim that they had religious power, the one true connection to God.  They stayed in the town, built temples, blurred with government, became an alternative government.

https://www.ancient.eu/Medieval_Monastery/   "From the 3rd century CE there developed a trend in Egypt and Syria which saw some Christians decide to live the life of a solitary hermit or ascetic. They did this because they thought that without any material or worldly distractions they would achieve a greater understanding of and closeness to God. In addition, whenever early Christians were persecuted they were sometimes forced by necessity to live in remote mountain areas where the essentials of life were lacking."  This is one way of looking at it, but also monasteries were a way to find safety and to preserve knowledge both through books and through teaching.  Since they lived so simply and with mutual support, they became rich.  Sovereigns tried to buy them off by giving land or punish them by the opposite.

And individuals left, possibly ejected and possibly because they were seeking something not found with the walls of the establishment.  They were not priests, were not considered able to do the magic of rites, they went in and out of secular life, what there was of it, since everything was religious in those days.  When Rome, falling, became half Byzantium, the chaos was an invitation for prayer.  The time may be upon us again now.  Our films offer wizards with cloak and staff, some of them evil.  We cannot see their faces clearly.

Shriven, cloaked, the monastic figures may offer priestly services like absolution in confession, baptism, and so on, but the idea of writing, scribbling, also clings to them.  Writing can be a kind of magic, but also carry tales of redemption or obscenity, salvation or damnation.  The deepest unknown under the biggest and darkest cloak is generally neither good nor bad but part of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans at the heart of holiness, beyond the questions of morality.

But also, the "rovers" as the BBC dramas call them, may simply wonder what is on the other side of the mountain and decide to go there.  Their cloak may be an old blanket and their staff cut from a local tree.  They may sing as they go.  Or meditate. Or pray for the rest of us.