Elopement - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 48

He lives by this creed, the curse of officialdom, the bane of the tidy,
sedentary people who hate and envy him, a drug-dealer, fighter, sedu-
cer, former daredevil, teller of tall tales, magnet for disaffected
teenagers, scabby, piss-soaked, drunken prince of revelry, master of
the last wild hunt. He is pitched against his childhood friend Wesley,
now the landlord of the local pub (from which, of course, Johnny has
been banned), who is ground down by the demands of the brewery, by
health and safety regulations, by his humdrum, responsible life and
the sanitized, pasteurized world he has created. '. . . fiddly bloody
sachets, broken bloody towel dispensers, fucking stupid T-shirts. I
come to bed when the last cunt's gone home. I lie there next to her and
I can't breathe . . . Number one, work all your life. Number two, be
nice to people . . .'
There is no room for Johnny Byron in our crowded, buttoned-down
land. He answers a need - expressed by the young people who flock
to him - but it is a need that society cannot accommodate. The tra-
gedy at the heart of the play is that the world cannot make room for
him, just as it can no longer make room for the raids and lion hunts
of the moran . Much as we might yearn for the life he leads, much as
the death of the raw spirit that moves him impoverishes us, he is too
big for the constraints within which we have a moral duty to live, the
confines which, as Wesley discovers, seem to crush the breath out
of us.
There are several ways in which I could try to show that we feel the
loss of the wilder life we evolved to lead. I could discuss the urge to
shop as an expression of the foraging instinct; football as a subli-
mated hunt; violent films as a remedy for unexorcized conflict; the
pursuit of ever more extreme sports as a response to the absence of
dangerous wild animals; the cult of the celebrity chef as an attempt to
engage once more with the fruits of the land and sea. The connections
in these cases are plausible, unprovable and mundane. I think I have
found a more interesting line of evidence.