Savage Gods

by Paul Kingsnorth

  I didn’t really think about the implications at the time because I was too busy feeling flattered, and I had to make dinner for the kids. But then a friend said something similar to me a while later. ‘How can you write like that, and then just come back to your family and try and act normal?’ she asked. Write like what?

  I wondered. What do you mean act normal? It was just what I did. It didn’t occur to me that it was a balancing act. Could it be I didn’t realize the price I would have to pay down the line for ‘writing like that’? Could it be that wrangling the beast leads you towards exhaustion, even injury? Could it be that the well is deep but not inexhaustible? Could it be that the beast and the children, the words and the peaceful landscape I wanted to draw them from, are a threat to each other? That the gods don’t mix?

  21.

  ‘Great novels,’ writes Milan Kundera, ‘are always a little more intelligent than their authors.’

  22.

  Words, for me, have always been everything. They overlay everything I see and walk through, like a set of grid lines which make sense of and measure a landscape. They are my means of understanding the scale of what I am looking at. My mind responds not to images, sounds, even emotions, but to words. I listen to music and it’s the lyrics that speak to me. I read the lyric sheets inside the CD boxes while the tune plays. When I see a piece of art I look around for the explanatory leaflet. I feel an emotion and I want it explained in words, I want it analyzed, laid out for me, because it’s easier than feeling it properly and it makes more sense. I read a poem, and nobody needs to explain it. I write a book and everything is explained.

  Words are my gateway. They always have been, I think, since I was a child. They take me into, through, beyond, the reality I share with other people. And sometimes, words make you promises. No matter how much you fuck up, say the words, we will be there to save you. Whatever happens, you can write your way through it. We are your lifebelt, your raft, your parachute. We will always save you from your own consequence.

  Without my words, there is no path at all through this wood.

  But now something is wrong with my words.

  Something has happened, and I don’t know what it is. I could cling to words, once, use them to explain myself, bend them to my will, enslave them. But now there is some flaw in them, some resistance. Within them, something stumbles. The animal that makes them is sick, or in refusal. The gods won’t play. I have words, still—look, here they are. But it feels as if they are playing with me. I set them to run in some direction and they veer off course, jump the fences, make joyfully for the ocean. They have broken their chains, at last. Not this time! they laugh as they run. We’re in charge now!

  Do I sit down here, in this small clearing in the light, or do I stumble on into the undergrowth? How do I know which is the right direction?

  23.

  Here is Russell Means, member of the Oglala Lakota people, of the Sioux Tribe, activist in the American Indian Movement, occupier of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee. Means has riled people on his side and others with his work. Politics has got him into trouble, and he doesn’t even like politics. In fact, he hates it; it is a means to an end, for him, but the end is deeper than anything that can be expressed in political language. And he hates talking about it, or at least writing about it, because he hates writing too. In 1980, Means agrees to give a speech about what he stands for, but only on the basis that he doesn’t have to write it down. He starts it like this:

  The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of ‘legitimate’ thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.

  He’s got the crowd’s attention now, and he goes on to give a long and powerful speech about the need for American Indians to resist Europeanization. This is not just a matter of fighting for political rights, he says. There is a whole worldview involved, and it is deeper, wider and more disturbing than most people, including most American Indians, in his view, will give credit for. It’s not a question of Marxism versus capitalism, religion versus secularism, right versus left. These, according to Means, are just different shards of the same broken window:

  Newton, for example, ‘revolutionized’ physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these ‘thinkers’ took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction … Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer!

  Unlike me, it seems, Means does not have a European mind, and no European expectations rest on his shoulders and so he is not scared of the call or the silence. He is not afraid to use a word like ‘spirituality’ in public. He knows why people sing to the forest. Maybe he sings himself.

  Where is my European mind leading me? Where do these abstractions end?

  The European materialist tradition of despiritualizing the universe is very similar to the mental process which goes into dehumanizing another person …In terms of the despiritualization of the universe, the mental process works so that it becomes virtuous to destroy the planet. Terms like progress and development are used as cover words here, the way victory and freedom are used to justify butchery in the dehumanization process. For example, a real-estate speculator may refer to ‘developing’ a parcel of ground by opening a gravel quarry; development here means total, permanent destruction, with the earth itself removed. But European logic has gained a few tons of gravel with which more land can be ‘developed’ through the construction of road beds. Ultimately, the whole universe is open—in the European view—to this sort of insanity.

  Sometimes—not often enough—when I have squatted around mountain fires or sat in straw-laid houses in jungle valleys, and I have listened to those tribal people speak, usually through translators, I have felt at home. Not because of the way they lived, or because of their cultural particularities—what they wore, what they ate, how they worked and organized themselves—some of which my European mind felt alienated from or was even offended by. No, I felt at home because they said, almost casually, the kind of thing that Russell Means is saying here more angrily. Well of course, they would say, the Earth is alive. Of course everything is sacred. Why would you think otherwise?

  When I hear or read this, straight from the heart of a much older culture, I am always, no matter how many times it happens, brought up short. In moments like that I, someone who, in common with those of my class, nation, and generation, has never really belonged anywhere, feel curiously at home. Is this what I have been looking for all along? Some old home I never had? These people I have somehow felt connected to, though they are so distant from me in almost every way: they know how to be part of a world that is alive, and that, for them, is a very practical proposition.

  I have always felt the world was alive and speaking, ever since I was a child, and I have always wanted to sit around that campfire, even if just for a moment, like my children can still sit in Wildy and talk to the birds. And when I do sit around those fires, so very rarely, I understand, maybe, who I am, or once was, and what I am trying to get back to and why it takes me so many words to say it and why I so often get it wrong. I am using the wrong language. I am in the wrong world. Nobody knows how to hear, and I don’t know how to speak.

  If I wanted to live that way, where would I go? What would I do? Russell Means may despise what he calls the ‘European mind’ but he makes clear, later in his speech, that it’s the mind
he takes issue with, not the body. Native Americans can have European minds too, he says. As for Europeans—any of them who resist this desacralizing of the world, this colonizing, this building and profiteering, this digging and burning—as far as he’s concerned, they stand on the side of virtue. We can argue over the way he uses the word ‘European’ if we want to—and I probably would—but we can all see what he’s saying if we’re not wilfully blind, and it’s something I’ve believed in—no, it’s something I’ve felt—for as long as I can remember. Of course the Earth is alive. Of course.

  Somebody once told me, commenting on an article I’d written about something or other, that I was a ‘pre-modern thinker.’ It wasn’t an insult, just an observation, and it brought me up short because I saw that it was true, and also terrible. I realized that all this scrabbling towards ‘belonging’ somewhere, towards rooting myself in something, all this puzzlement over how and what to be—it was some clutching towards a notion of being indigenous. That was what I wanted: to live in a culture which thinks the world is a sacred thing, for which reality is, as it was for the Lakota, a flaming hoop, whose language is the language of beauty and fire, which sings to the forest and expects it to hear. I have always wanted to be part of a culture which walks through the wild world as if it were of it, which doesn’t talk of carbon or biodiversity or profit or growth but talks and lives as if this way of speaking were the poisonous bullshit that it so obviously is.

  That’s what I have wanted. That would be a living world. That is the world that humans lived in for 99 percent of our history. Why would we imagine it was not still swimming in our veins? Maybe it is, and maybe we know it. Maybe people like me were forged in the breaking of that world. Maybe our European minds grew like weeds from the rubble of the old cultures which managed to live well in the world for 200,000 years without fucking the whole place up. Maybe we are an invasive species, we who think the world is a Machine we can take apart and examine. Us, with our letters, our concepts, our plans. Us, with our writing.

  Was this indigeneity, this burning hoop, this old world, what I was looking for when I came here, even if I didn’t know it? A world without writing, a world before abstract symbols? Echoes of it, at least? It’s ridiculous, surely. And yet sometimes I think I do hear echoes, in the field in the still of night, and they bounce off me like bat sonar from the walls of a cave because I do not live in a culture like that. I live in this one, and I cannot escape it because it is all around me and it is in me and I will carry it, like a dormant virus, as long as I live.

  I walk the world looking for something to belong to, but there is nothing to belong to because there is no culture for us anymore, only civilization, and they are not the same thing. There is no connection between the wild and the tame, the human and the beyond-human, the sacred and the profane. In the world I was born in, Eros and Psyche have gone their separate ways, and now my words are eating themselves alive.

  24.

  A few nights ago, I was at a birthday party on a friend’s farm. There was a bonfire, and the kids were playing around it. A cake had just arrived, with candles. The day had been warm but the night was coming down now, a spare crescent hung in the sky and the cold was sharp in my nostrils.

  I went for a piss in a hedge. I turned back, buttoning myself up, and looked down the slope to the fire. Half-lit figures laughed and drank. I turned again: through the window of a mobile home, a lampshade, starlit in orange. A wooden outbuilding, two polytunnels. In the encroaching dark, the air blue, the horizon smoky orange, it all looked like a painting.

  And it always looks like a painting, everything, to me. The world happens on the other side of a thin gauze and I can only ever break through by accident and all my life the gauze has been there and I have never believed in the world, have never believed it was real, and the only time I have ever really, truly felt alive, ever really felt I could break through it, tear it, come out into the real

  has been when I am writing.

  I’m writing this now alone in my freezing car at the farm’s edge, by a rushing river, with a pen I found in the door and a scrap of paper from the dashboard. I can’t feel my toes. The world pumps like blood when I make these marks; at other times, the blood pools, tepid and waiting. And still I never remember to bring a notebook.

  25.

  Most Wednesday nights I cycle down to the local pub to meet my friend Mark. The pub is a small one-room affair in a rural hamlet with a dartboard, a pool table, a TV, a peat fire, and five or six men lined up at the bar with pints of stout. We add to their number weekly for two or three pints of Guinness, a game of chess or darts, both usually lost by me, and some conversation about the state of the world. Mark and I both like conversations about the state of the world, and we both come at it from the same kind of direction, only he is more committed to the business of escape than me. He once lived for two years in a caravan without handling money, and he now lives in a self-built off-grid cabin with no running water or electricity. Last year he chucked out his phone and his laptop. If you want to contact him now you have to drop by or write a letter. It’s quite a nice discipline, though awkward if you need to cancel your pub date on a Wednesday morning.

  In his heart, and sometimes in his head, Mark is a primitivist. He’s convinced that the default state for human beings is hunting and gathering in small bands in a wild world, and that most of what has happened since the development of agriculture has been a spiraling down towards doom. Mark, like me, has a sense that something fundamental has been disconnected in our circuitry, and that this is demonstrated when people like me write sentences about human beings which use the word ‘circuitry’ to describe their inner workings, as if they were bloody machines, which they may be soon but are not yet. For a while he toyed with the idea that his primitivism could be a political project: that somehow we could work towards a resetting of humanity, that we could crash the system and go back to the Garden. This is a mistake we all make. These days he is more philosophical, and concentrates his energies on learning to fish and butcher deer, neither of which he is yet anything like good enough at to survive an apocalypse.

  As both a primitivist and a writer—a combination which is itself a farcical contradiction, as we both know—Mark understands my collapse of confidence in the written word, and like me he sometimes asks himself if, after a while, all writers come to this point: the point where the very project of writing itself, the very use of words, their bare existence, becomes the problem to be solved, the barrier to be busted through. Can I use words to destroy words? Can I use writing to lay bare the futility, the inherent weakness of these symbols, these marks, their inability to come anywhere near touching the essence of living? What else is left to try?

  A committed primitivist—as opposed to someone like me, who is just prim-curious—would understand this dilemma, but, after listening to my anxieties, they would then patiently explain that there is, in fact, something else left to try. If writing is not the truth, can never be the truth, can only ever be a faint representation of it, then this is merely a function of a deeper problem. As primitivist philosopher John Zerzan explains, in paragraphs ironically dense with turgid academic prose, the ultimate source of our alienation from the rest of nature is language itself:

  To Levy-Bruhl, Durkheim and others, the cardinal and qualitative difference between the ‘primitive mind’ and ours is the primitive’s lack of detachment in the moment of experience; ‘the savage mind totalizes,’ as Levi-Strauss put it. Of course we have long been instructed that this original unity was destined to crumble, that alienation is the province of being human: consciousness depends on it.

  In much the same sense that objectified time has been held to be essential to consciousness—Hegel called it ‘the necessary alienation’—so has language, and equally falsely. Language may be properly considered the fundamental ideology, perhaps as deep a separation from the natural world as self-existent time. And if timelessness resolves the split between spontaneity a
nd consciousness, languagelessness may be equally necessary.

  Words, language, symbolic thought itself: is this the gauze which hangs between me and the world, the gauze which occasionally rips in part or sways in the wind, offering me a glimpse of unity between the picture and myself, but which never fully falls away? Is the gauze a product of my consciousness itself, of my forebrain, of my evolutionary heritage? Did growing up with language mean I would always feel disconnected? Is this what clumsily I try to break with my moves to the country, my attempted divorce from the Machine, my moments on the mountain or with the pen and notepad, and can I never break it until, yes, I lay down the pen, and not just the pen? Do I have to walk out there unarmed with ideas and representations of ideas before I can be part of the world again? How the hell could I possibly do that?

  This is a life sentence with no possibility of probation.

  A worldview like primitivism, while posing sometimes as a philosophy or even as politics, seems to me more like a psychological, even a spiritual, cry for help. It is a search for the source of Hegel’s ‘necessary alienation,’ which it finds in our severance from a pre-civilized age of peaceful, artistic, egalitarian and perhaps matriarchal hunter-gatherers for which there is precious little actual evidence. But that’s what makes it so attractive. Projecting your dreams or desires is easiest when you know little about the place, the person, or the time onto which you are projecting. This is why it’s so easy to romanticize Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, 25th century Mars-dwelling immortals, and that woman you saw briefly across a bar who flashed you an amazing smile and then left before you could pluck up the courage to even ask her name.

  Primitivism is dangerous for me because it plays into a pre-existing tendency of mine—a tendency which, judging by human history, I share with plenty of others—which is to look backwards in search of a breaking point: the moment at which we stepped from the True Path. I spent years doing this, and sometimes I still do it. When did it all go wrong? The Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuels. Modernity. The Enlightenment. Capitalism. Science. Agriculture. Hunting. Fire. Language. Symbolic thought. Coming down from the trees. Crawling up onto the land. Soon enough you find yourself obliquely or not-so-obliquely espousing the notion of Original Sin: the poison is in us, the poison is us. It is how we think. It is our very minds. Or, as the novelist William Golding put it, more simply: ‘The Fall is thought.’