David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
Do rock climbers have the equivalent of a mile-high club? Do they delight, whether to themselves, or to friends, in the altitude, or the particularly diffficult circumstances in which they have “done it” – clinging to the bottom of an overhang, perhaps, or stretched halfway up a rock “chimney”?
The question is posed (rhetorically), because I am an admirer of climbers. I see their sport as something of a metaphor for life, or at least my life. It is my pretension, as the Parkinson’s freezes me in mid-shuffle from time to time, that I am a climber clinging to some rock-face, calmly considering my options – looking slowly about me for a new hold, a handy device, weighing the likely effects of a small shift in balance this way, or that.
Climbing, I fantasise (having never climbed higher than a few flights of stairs), demands a self-discipline which will not give consideration to the dizzying appearance of the fall below, or the apparent impossibility of the journey ahead, but finds safety in the knowledge that all that matters is the next step and all that is required is concentration,
My interest in the heights to which climbers take their sex lives comes by way of old bones. It may be my imagination, but world interest – at least as judged from the diet served up by international TV networks – is focused at the moment on the terrifying things wild animals, storms, peripatetic asteroids, adventure-sports and a collapse of cyber stocks could do to one. That and the science of paleontology.
Being a recent convert to the mountain- climbing creed, and as such required to affect disinterest in hypothetical or self-induced hazards, this means I spend much time in front of the small screen watching them digging up old bones. I do so open-mouthed in the growing belief that it is as much to the Earth as to the heavens that we must look to discover the significance, or otherwise of this metaphorical rock-face to which (anecdotally, at least) we have all been born and to which we find ourselves clinging.
I will not pretend to any expertise on paleontology; I cannot remember the names of the dinosaurs, Bronti-whatyemecallit, or Thingummy Rex, much less be specific about their life styles. But what I can report back – to those who do not enjoy and suffer DStv, or otherwise qualify to pontificate on the subject – is that the distant past is littered with evidence as to a profusion of experiments which have taken place in the creation of life forms, all testifying to the extraordinary urgency of the evolutionary impulse. The extremes to which these experiments went were worthy of a lovably lunatic inventor in the comic tradition – producing such as one species which had the likes of a crash helmet built of bone to give them the advantage in anticipated head-bashing contests (a variation on the old schoolboy game of conkers) and a sort of skin solar-sail running down the spine so they could warm up faster than the competition in the morning race to the breakfast table.
It is, of course, questionable why anyone should be amazed, or amused, by these curiosities when one considers the extremes of behaviour to which the reproductive instinct drives our own species, from the myopic heights of social and financial ambition (so comically and tragically recorded by such as Hello magazine) to the criminal lows of rape and, one might suggest, even child molestation. So complete is this control that I suspect few will look back over their lives – from the brief vantage point just before the mechanism of built- in obsolescence kicks in – without chagrined recognition of it.
But now we are hopefully in the process of taking over control. Like passengers transported mysteriously to a train racing through the dark we are faced with two possibilities: It may be a runaway train, or there might be a driver in charge pursuing a sacred vision, a mission, or even sealed orders. Whichever way, we would be crazy not to seek control at least until we have discovered the driver, effected an introduction and closely scrutinised his/her/its/their licence papers … not to mention checking around to ensure we are not on candid camera.
With the approach of an era when we start engineering life forms ourselves and in which sex and reproduction are likely to become more clearly distinct functions – a trend already apparent in contraception and what appears to be a convergence of the sexes – sexual reproduction will presumably fall away as the mechanism through which the evolutionary drive will find its outlet.
No doubt it will quickly be replaced by another – an itching urge to mind-meld, mind-mate, or mind-couple perhaps (is “mind”, the 21st century’s four-letter word?) – and sex as we know it will have to rely on sweet pleasure and memories to sustain it.
Which is why I want to know whether climbers have a mile-high club? Is it possible to concentrate on two imperatives simultaneously?
Put another way, I suppose, it is a question of whether man has evolved sufficiently to both walk and chew gum at the same time.