Laurens van der Post: Visionary or canting old phoney? You the jury.

Laurens van der Post: Visionary or canting old phoney? You the jury.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To me it was simply that the older I got, the more and more I felt that we had lost, there was a bushman in everybody, and we'd lost contact with that side of ourselves. And we must learn again from the bushman. Trying to find out what is that side about.
I thought how strange it was that people were digging up old ruins -- archeologists excavating to find out what archaic man was like, and here he was walking about in our midst. Why didn't we ask him? That really is at the back of it: the fact that the bushman personified an aspect of natural man which we all have, but with which we've increasingly lost contact and that has impoverished us and endangered us.
         

And when I spoke to Jung about it he said this is not an extravagant thought at all. He said every human being has a 2 million year-old man within himself. And if he loses contact with that 2 million year-old self he loses his real roots. So this question of why modern man is in search of his soul and has lost his religious roots had a lot to do with my interest in the bushman.
Because I found that the difference between this naked little man in the desert, who owned nothing, and us was that he is and we have, but no longer are. We have. We've exchanged having for being.
So if the bushman goes, through what one knew of him, his stories, and his art, he would still be important to us. He must live on through these things. And that's what I've tried, merely tried, to bring back -- to use him as a bridge between the world in the beginning, with which we've lost touch, and the now.

 Laurens van der Post at 87, 1994, interviewed in his home in Chelsea