The Man Who Writes with His Feet THE SONGLINES

By R.Z. Sheppard

The word travel, Bruce Chatwin reminded an interviewer in a recent issue of the British literary journal Granta, is related to the French travail. "It means hard work, penance and finally a journey," he explained, noting, "There was an idea, particularly in the Middle Ages, that by going on pilgrimage, as Muslim pilgrims do, you were reinstating the original condition of man. The act of walking through a wilderness was thought to bring you back to God."

. Chatwin, 47, does not claim to be devout, although he appears, as was said of James Joyce, to have rejected religion while preserving its forms. He even seems to have had an antirevelation in which scales did not fall from his eyes but covered them. Twenty years ago, Chatwin, then an art expert with Sotheby's in London, woke one morning and could not see. His sight returned later that day. No organic cause for this temporary blindness could be found. An examining physician concluded that the young connoisseur had been looking too closely at pictures and prescribed distant horizons.

Chatwin took the advice and hit the road. He traveled to Asia, the Soviet Union, Africa, South America and the U.S. The results were In Patagonia (1977) and The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980), two remarkable books that demonstrated enviable gifts for observation, description and narrative invention. The Songlines brings these qualities to high relief, combining the conventions of travel writing, the patterns of the philosophical essay and the strategies of fiction. The work is obviously based on fact and personal experience, although Chatwin declares that much of it is literary concoction. In short, The Songlines is a book whose resistance to definition places it, by default, into the increasingly liberal category of the novel.

Its narrator is a tall, thin ascetic named Bruce Chatwin, a migratory writer fascinated by nomadic peoples and the origins of human nature. His curiosity takes him to Australia, where he has heard that the continent is entwined by songlines, invisible paths that the aboriginals can read like sheet music. According to their creation myths, Australia was literally sung into existence by ancestral creatures. They wandered over the vast land mass during the dreamtime, giving names to animals, plants, hills and depressions. Re- enactments of these legends are the walkabouts, aboriginal cross-country amblings that not only strengthen ties to the old ways but mark territories. As long as the walker sticks to his own songlines, he can have friends in far- flung places. Nearly every geological feature represents a sacred and evolved musical narrative. "A spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys" is the way this captivating phenomenon is described to Chatwin.

Indeed, much of what the author finds in Central Australia is Greek to him. Descendants of the Lizard Man, the Bandicoot Man and the Perenty Man relinquish their secrets grudgingly. Strangers are usually given incomplete or false "dreamings." To sort them out, Chatwin attaches himself to an Australian-born son of Soviet immigrants who maps songlines in an attempt to preserve them from obliteration by mining companies and railroads. Arkady Volchok earned honors in history and philosophy from Adelaide University. He plays Bach on the harpsichord, speaks several aboriginal languages and holds the provocative opinion that his Slavic forebears make better Australians because they, unlike the original Anglo-Saxon colonizers, have little fear of wide-open spaces.

Chatwin contributes his own controversial assessments. The network of harmonious songlines convinces him that Homo sapiens is not hopelessly belligerent. He reconstructs a conversation he had with Konrad Lorenz, ethnologist and author of the influential On Aggression; he ransacks his notebooks and ponders anthropological and philosophical teachings. His hesitant conclusion is that humans are fundamentally restless and, like the aboriginal, the species needs to wander.

Could all this be simply a projection of Chatwin's own footloose urgings, a legacy from generations of talented Englishmen who sought regular escape from their restrictive little island? From Cain and Abel to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, there is ample sign of conflict between homing and nomadic instincts. Chatwin is not unmindful of the persistent ambivalence. He quotes Pascal's morosely amusing thought that all human misery is the result of our inability to remain quietly in a room.

In the Outback, which is currently In, Chatwin finds that rooms are few and far between. Lonesomeness and cultural dislocation are the norm, and traditional songlines are sometimes surprisingly upbeat. What would the ancestors think of the aboriginal rock band whose record Grandfather's Country reached No. 3 on the antipodean charts? Or of the highly educated tribal leader who twice a year set aside his hunting spear, put on a double-breasted suit and boarded a train for Adelaide, where he read back issues of Scientific American?

The riches of The Songlines are varied and artfully stashed. Chatwin's physical journey over Australia's parched hide corresponds to his intellectual excursions, which are full of surprising turns. He travels light, living off his readings, his impressions and quotations from such diverse sources as Herodotus, Buddha, Heidegger and a Caribou Eskimo who said, "Life is one long journey on which only the unfit are left behind." What this furry philosopher ignored was that the unfit are frequently poets, abandoned to new perceptions. Like turning Australia into a metaphor for mind, thinly cultivated at the edges and wildly alive at the interior.