Savage Gods

by Paul Kingsnorth

  I’ve been on both sides of this conversation over the years: I’ve argued the primitivist case and opposed it, depending on who I was talking to. I’m like that: pushed easily into the opposing camp when I hear someone expressing a strong opinion. It’s easy to see the flaws in someone else’s ideological positioning, and then it’s logical to argue with them if you’re the sort of person who is drawn to arguing or can be led to believe that it can ever resolve anything at all. After a while, this grinds you down enough that you can see the flaws in your own ideological positioning too, which in turn leads you to realize the absurdity of any kind of ideological positioning, and the next thing you know you’re reading Camus on the beach and you’ve stopped thinking about the Stone Age entirely. For a while. But not for long enough.

  26.

  At this point, even as they abandon me, or force me to fall silent, I feel like making a stand for words. I feel like making a stand for books, for writing, for the abstract and the conceptual. I feel like making a stand for the European mind. Maybe Eros and Psyche are divorced now, and painfully. Maybe they don’t speak anymore, maybe they fight over custody of the kids. Maybe I can’t hear the old echoes, maybe the flaming hoop is broken and doused, but this is where I am and who I am. Here I stand, a child of modernity, a boy from the post-war suburbs of England, adrift in an Irish fieldscape as the echoes float by. The echoes are all I have. What can I make of them, and how do I start?

  D. H. Lawrence, deep into his ‘savage pilgrimage’ in New Mexico, wrote an essay in 1922, ‘Indians and an Englishman,’ in which he concluded that, however much he might yearn to sit around that tribal fire, he was separated from it by his modernity as surely as Adam and Eve were separated from Eden:

  I don’t want to live again the tribal mysteries my blood has lived long since. I don’t want to know as I have known, in the tribal exclusiveness. But every drop of me trembles still alive to the old sound, every thread in my body quivers to the frenzy of the old mystery. I know my derivation. I was born of no virgin, of no Holy Ghost. Ah, no, these old men telling the tribal tale were my fathers.

  Ah, Lawrence! Where have all the writers like him gone? Stupid question: there were never any other writers like him. But I mean to say: why is it so shameful now to burn the way that he did? I suppose it was shameful then too, and that’s why he was made to eat shit all his life and after it by magistrates and judges and defenders of public morals and cowards hiding behind ideologies and minnowy critics mired in post-whatever theory. Working class, openly passionate, proudly masculine, in love with the feminine, anti-modern, anti-egalitarian: Lawrence never stood a chance. He knew that modern humans were animals who acted like animals and he knew we were ashamed of it and he urged us, instead, to be ashamed of the civilization that made us feel that way. He knew the animal would outlast the Machine and he knew that the Earth was alive. Of course. Of course. He could feel the old mystery quivering in every thread of his body and he was bold and suicidal enough to say so to an audience of frightened 20th century cynics and they never let him forget it. Lawrence grew up, as we all grow up, in a Machine world in which the feted artists are the ones prepared to act and talk and create like good little well-behaved Machine people, using the right words to say the right things to the right audiences in the right way for the right outcome. They were never going to hear what he had to say, because what he had to say exposed what they really were.

  Enough of this. I could do it all day: defending Lawrence and those writers almost-like-him against the ruling robot people. I ought to calm down. I don’t think it’s good for me to do it in anything other than short, concentrated bursts. It makes me itch and fidget and start to rage. Plus, whenever I think of Lawrence these days I’m aware that I have now reached the age he was— 44—when he died, and thinking about this will start me off on a what the hell have I ever done that even approaches what he did? train of thought, or a when was I ever half as brave as he was? session, and then it’s time to start drinking. I can’t start drinking now. All the wine’s gone.

  Lawrence, sitting with those Indians in New Mexico, felt too that he stood ‘on the far edge of their firelight’; that something in him meant he could never sit comfortably around that campfire, even if he wanted to. He was ‘neither denied nor accepted,’ he wrote, but he was always a few paces outside. The old path wasn’t walkable for him. The songlines wouldn’t sing. ‘My way is my own, old red father,’ he concluded. ‘I can’t cluster at the drum any more.’

  I have to feel the same; I do. But for a society which has severed itself from the past, what remains? In the Machine world, amongst the robot people, where is life to be found? Where is my indigeneity, who are my ancestors, what is our lost place and who will tell us its stories?

  The words. The writing.

  ‘In Western Civilization,’ says the poet Gary Snyder, ‘our elders are books.’ Books pass on our stories. Books carry the forbidden knowledge and the true. Books are weird things, inhuman things, abstract things, but they are gateways, at their best, to the world to which the drum and the fire and the sweat lodge used to take us. The Otherworld. At her best, the writer is a shaman, a priestess, a summoner.

  ‘The writer knows his field,’ writes Annie Dillard. ‘In writing, he can push the edges. Beyond this limit, here, the reader must recoil. Reason balks, poetry snaps; some madness enters, or strain. Now courageously and carefully, can he enlarge it, can he nudge the bounds? And enclose what wild power?’

  27.

  Reason, implies Dillard, is not enough in our business. Milan Kundera agrees. ‘Imagination,’ he writes, ‘freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought.’ As in the fire ceremony, as in the rite of passage, something older and more ragged, more dangerous too, is invited into the circle. No writer who imagines that reason, argument, logic or the rational presentation of well-researched facts will do their job for them will ever enclose that wild power.

  Writing, suggests Dillard, is the disciplined pursuit of unreason, the willful, controlled enclosure of magic by words. That’s when it works; that’s when you’ve hit it. You always know. Then, you are a wizard. You have never felt more alive than when that sentence does its job; when the beast can never escape from the words you have wrapped it in. When the trap is sprung.

  This: this is what I have lived for.

  We judge writers either as teachers, storytellers, or enchanters, suggested Vladimir Nabokov, but it is the enchanter who outlasts time. Outlasting time: that’s what we’re in the business of, all of us. Writing is the pursuit of immortality. As long as this book sits on a shelf somewhere in the British Library, even if no one withdraws it for a hundred years—as long as it’s there, I can never die. I know, it’s terrible. Arrogant, egocentric, the very opposite of wisdom. But it’s true.

  28.

  Or is it? That last paragraph was nicely self-effacing, but actually the pursuit of immortality is a side-effect of writing, not its aim or purpose. Nobody would spend their life on words if the only benefit they got was that somebody might read them after they were under the ground. Some of us tell ourselves that we write not for the present but for posterity—usually when no one is buying our books—but it’s not what pumps the blood through the writing hand.

  Why write? Rainer Maria Rilke, the German language’s greatest modern poet, took his young protégé Franz Kappus to task in 1903 on this question. Stop worrying about whether ‘your poems are good poems,’ Rilke instructed him. Stop sending them off to magazine editors and feeling like a failure when they reject them. Stop asking the world’s opinion. The world’s opinion has nothing to do with why you do this:

  You must seek for whatever it is that obliges you to write. You must discover if its roots reach down to the very depths of your heart. You must confess to yourself whether you would truly die if writing were forbidden to you. This above all: ask yourself in the night, in your most silent hour — Mus
t I write? If there is an affirmative reply, if you can simply and starkly answer ‘I must’ to that grave question, then you will need to construct your life according to that necessity.

  The only reason to write is because you can’t not write; because something sharp and heated is pushing you through. We write, I write, because of life’s brevity and the need to blaze. Rilke’s poetry blazed because he pointed himself at it like a spear and everything else fell away. He blazed because he built his life around words, until it ended at the age of just 51. If I die at 51 I have another seven years of life left. What am I going to do with them? How am I going to blaze? I’ve been asking myself that question, neurotically, since I was about 21. It adds a terrible, tiring urgency to life.

  But this is the heat from which words are born. Nobody writes for money, power, fame, or sex, none of which writing is likely to get you anywhere near, at least for long. It’s the blazing—the burning. It’s the intensity of being: of love, of sorrow, joy, grief, brokenness, loss. It’s the aching of all that is short and will soon be washed away. You have your one, brief, tiny life. You have your pen. Can you convey the heat of it? The way that every cell burns with the true light when you realize, in some tremendous moment—some kiss, some death, some echo across a midnight lake—the high, thin, oxygenless truth of being here? Of living? Can you get even a sliver of that onto a page? That is what you came for. Everything else is flotsam. Everything else can be shrugged away on the tide. Get it down. Get it down. Capture it. There is nothing else.

  29.

  Late May. I am in the field, scything the grass and the docks down. I am mowing shirtless in the rain and I remember why I came here and suddenly, in an instant and just for an instant, I am here. I am nowhere else. I am the field and the motion of the scythe and the falling of the rain and the movement of the muscles in my back and shoulders, the sideways motion of my stiff hips and I think nothing at all. I just mow. I just move. I just am. For a moment, I just am.

  Sometimes, when you least expect it, you are given a gift.

  30.

  One man went to mow a meadow. One man and his dog. And as the man shuffled slowly forwards, slicing the dock with his scythe blade and wondering if it was time to sharpen it again, one man suddenly realized this: that however many words he used up trying to explain himself, none would ever fall anywhere near the mark because there was no mark to aim at. Everything the man did, all of his actions and the stated reasons for all of his actions, all this was like steam rising from the boiling lake of his unconscious, and he had no idea what the heat source was. All the pulls and pushes, the justifications and opinions, the thoughts and actions were waves on top of deep, dark waters and he would never see into the depths of what lived down there or swam through. Nothing in the universe could ever be explained or written. All the words were blowing away like vapor. One, two, three. Answer! But the blade cut easily through the dock stems and now the rain was coming in again, always from the west.

  31.

  This move from fire to water: it is real for us all, I think, and it is hard. Back around the campfire there would be ceremonies, rites of passage, there would be people to hold you, there would be mythic containers for the journey. In our culture, if we have a culture, we have no rites of passage because we don’t understand transitions and we are terrified of age and death. In our culture we don’t grow up. Parents act like children, 60-year-olds dress like 20-year-olds, men are boys forever. Capitalist consumer culture renders us perpetually adolescent, stuck behind a door we don’t know how to open. It sells excuses like the Church once sold indulgences, and the stink of corruption is just as rank.

  It has taken me a long time—pages and pages, thousands of words—to begin to understand what is happening to me and to understand that I can’t stop it happening, that my only choice is to sit through it, to walk through the wood one step at a time without pretending I know where I’m going. I don’t know where I am going. I think that’s the point. I think that’s the challenge. My words have lifted off me and away, up into the night canopy and I am walking on now, silent and alone. One step at a time. It has to be enough, because it is all there is.

  Now I can feel the fire and the water rush against each other, feel the hissing fog of steam that is born from the meeting. I am moving into water time but part of me is still burning. Who wants their fire extinguished? What fire wants to die down before its time? I am not ready. I am not ready!

  But the heat escapes through tiny cracks and the fire rages upwards, burns through the beams to get where it needs to be, brings the building down. I don’t know what will be left of me after this burning. I have no idea at all.

  32.

  And so, I am stuck. Lost for words and with only half a book on my hands. What does a writer do when he discovers that writing is part of the problem? He writes differently

  or he stops writing.

  I know what the silence demands of me.

  You build up a career, even if a career was the last thing on your mind, even if you have always hated careers and run from them, you end up with one and then people think they know what you do and they ask you to keep doing it, and you have to earn a living and so you keep doing it and anyway you enjoy it, it’s fine really, it’s good. But then something, just a tiny thing, something small, invisible even, gets stuck. Something lodges somewhere in the great firmament of yourself and it stays there and it itches. It just keeps itching.

  You know what it wants.

  But I can’t walk away. Not yet. Something made me write this. Something called it into being. Words don’t just drop out of the sky, they have to be formed, and books too. Books are like people: they come from somewhere and they have to belong somewhere and they want something, though you don’t always know what it is.

  I have to keep going.

  33.

  The poet W. S. Graham referred to whatever power it is that lives behind and activates words as ‘the beast in the space.’ In his poem of the same name, he described what it did to him whenever it approached, demanding verse:

  The beast that lives on silence takes

  Its bite out of either side.

  It pads and sniffs between us.

  Now It comes and laps my meaning up.

  This beast is a dangerous animal, says Graham, though not malicious. Just hungry; always hungry. The act of writing sends the beast across the space from the writer to the reader. If the writer has done his job properly, the beast is now the reader’s problem. ‘Give him food,’ Graham advises his readers, in the final lines. Be respectful, be cautious. Keep the beast happy:

  He means neither

  Well or ill towards you. Above

  All, shut up. Give him your love.

  34.

  If not writing, then what?

  Being, I suppose. But being is harder. Harder than writing, and more boring. In my 20s, I wanted to be Bruce Chatwin, or some version of the Romantic traveler. I would escape my suburban life and my suburban mind, and I would see and record the world, I would write its beauty out. But because I never really knew even the small things which I skimmed over and ran from, whenever I did get away I would find myself inescapable. I could travel anywhere but I would take the gauze with me, because I was not paying attention to what I was running from, or where I had been, or what I was carrying.

  Here, I could do this with the land I live on, and with my life. I know this, because I have found myself doing it—treating the place like a backdrop or a writing exercise. I could pour myself into the land this way, but the land would not receive me. I could tell my story in big letters, in primary colors and maybe publish it to some acclaim but you would be unsatisfied and I would be lying because no painter who can’t do detail is ever any good at all. We can all do broad brushstrokes. I could make this place a backdrop for some grand thesis or I could pay attention, to it, and to myself in it. I could really watch, not assuming that, before I even start, I will receive an answer which will lead my lat
est book to a satisfying conclusion.

  What if there are no satisfying conclusions? What if there is only the great flaming hoop and us spinning inside it? No end and no knowing. What if I don’t know the person who writes all this down, or the place he wanders in, because I have skipped over what I thought were the boring bits of the story?

  35.

  We bought a small house and two and a half acres of land here from people we didn’t know. Five years before that, those people had bought the same place from a person they didn’t know. Perhaps in the meantime the place had risen or fallen in notional value, but it remained a resource: an area of land over which ownership could be expressed, a claim staked. You buy a place, you live in it for a while, you sell it, you move on. This is how I was brought up: where I come from, we call it the ‘housing ladder,’ it’s about buying, doing up, and selling on at a profit, and it has by this point in history pretty comprehensively screwed our children’s future.

  Above all, it is about being temporary. A temporary person, always moving on. Since I have lived here I have come to understand, with a startling clarity, how different I might have been as a human being, how differently I would look at the world, if I had inherited this land from my parents and expected to hand it on to my children. Maybe that is the remains of our indigeneity. Just staying put. At least since the development of agriculture, this would have been how the majority of humans saw their homes. Not as resources to be exploited or temporarily enjoyed, but as inheritances to be cared for and passed on. I imagine how I would feel about this land if I’d been passed it by my mother and father, if I’d grown up on it with them, if it had been constructed by their hands and my memories. And I think about how much more carefully perhaps I would nurture it, how much more pride I would have in it, how much more love I could afford to give it if I knew that one day it would be my children’s, and that they would inherit their own memories from it. That one day, after Jyoti and I are gone, Leela and Jeevan, as adults, might sit on a bench by the pond they once watched us dig, under the mature trees they helped us plant as children, and watch the frogs jumping as they jump now. I would have my connection across time then, my mooring in a place, I would be a link in a long chain and there would be a meaning in my life that is not here now. Would that not be a beautiful thing?