Goatwalking, On Errantry (excerpt) - Jim Corbett

by Jim Corbett (excerpts)

On Errantry

"Errantry means sallying out beyond a society's established way, to live according to one's inner leadings. This looks like, and in a sense is, madness - Quixote's Madness. Both the lunatic and the visionary create a life outside the ready-made roles prescribed by their society, adjustment to these roles constituting a society's understanding of sanity. As social animals, ants are invariably sane, but human beings are typically alienated. Our anxiety, restlessness, make-believe, compulsive intervention, freedom, and creativity are all rooted in the reflective awareness that distinguishes humankind. We aren't called to cure alienation by destroying reflective awareness with surgery, drugs, discipline or meditation. The world has enough ants. Mere survival would constitute adaptation if we were simply living creatures. As life becomes reflective, we must choose to adapt either demonically by trying to process the world, or prophetically, by actively participating in creation. In its quest of full communion, errantry neither waits for recruits nor compromises to gain allies. It shrugs off the arguments of all theological or political parties, each of which claims to have discovered the right way to fracture time and the world into good ends and effective means. It is therefore an insecure, impolitic, minority way of life. Errantry disdains adaptive pretense, majoritarian morality, and all politic forms of solidarity because it is based on the Quixote Principle: To open the way, a cultural breakthrough need not involve masses of people but must be done decisively by someone. Errantry's archenemy, "the Conjurer," substitutes symbolic appearances for the lived actuality, contriving a name to replace the quest. Conjuring often takes the form of organized religion. For example, in a society at war with man and nature, a religion of peace and love might be fantasized into creeds, rituals, and otherworlds while its professed adherents continued to live by conquest. The Conjurer also deludes both the religious and irreligious into assuming that errantry, rather than conjured make-believe, is the fantasy. This contrast has to do with two radically different meanings of faith: For errantry, faith is fulfilled here are now as cocreativity; for conjuring, one's faith is professed rather than lived, as a belief in good goals to which the living present is a sacrifice."