Elopement - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 47

beginning to settle down, to move to the cities, to lose the freedoms
which distinguished them from us.
But even had these pressures not existed, the wild life of the moran
would have become less viable. Lion hunts are now severely punished
by the Kenyan authorities, as lions are becoming scarce. The prin-
ciples of universalism are arriving slowly in Kenya, where politics still
divide people on tribal lines. But I doubt that the Kikuyu have ever
enjoyed having their cattle raided - and their warriors speared - by
the Maasai. As groups other than our own are able to make their
needs and their rights known to us, as we come to recognize their
humanity, we can no longer subordinate their lives to our desires; no
longer expand our world into theirs. The freedoms the Maasai enjoyed
at the expense of others - thrilling as they were - are rightly being
curtailed. Perhaps there is no remaining moral space for the exercise
of physical courage. Wherever you might seek to swing your fist,
someone's nose is in the way.
Though it is now almost universally admired, when Jez Butterworth's
play Jerusalem began to be noticed it sharply divided its audience. At
the end of the performance I watched, in the last week of its first,
incandescent West End run, half the audience stood to applaud, the
rest barged out with thunderous faces, snapping and muttering.
Johnny Byron, played mesmerically by Mark Rylance, is the last of
the Mohicans. He is sensuous, feckless, promiscuous, wild and free.
He is a charismatic but ignoble savage, living in a mobile home in the
woods, mad, bad and dangerous to know, the last man in England still
in touch with the old gods. His totemic creature - his avatar - is the
giant he claims to have met and whom he insists he can rouse: the
undiminished ancient being, free from regulation or social constraint,
who no longer belongs to a world in which new estates crowd the
woods and council officers in yellow jackets patrol with their
clipboards.
'Grab your fill,' Byron tells us. 'No man was ever lain in his barrow
wishing he'd loved one less woman. Don't listen to no one and noth-
ing but what your own heart bids. Lie. Cheat. Steal. Fight to the
death.'