Savage Gods

by Paul Kingsnorth

  I was not going to be eaten this way. I was not going to have my heart eaten this way. I despised the values of the world I had seen him grow into and promote. And so I grew up and became an angry anti-capitalist student, much to my dad’s horror—which was half the point, I suppose—and then wrote two books about how much I hated corporations and the world of business and all the values they promoted, which were and are seeping into every crack in my society, making everything in life the shape of an open-plan office full of middle managers in nylon trousers whose souls died years back on the M25.

  Money, money money! says Mellors the gamekeeper to Lady Chatterley as they lie in his bed in the bluebell wood. All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of a man.

  Those were the days in which I made my words serve my cause, a cause which took in everything in the whole world. I would make the whole world better with my words, I would show that it could be made better. Those were the days when the external landscape represented my internal landscape and taking on one meant taking on the other. If I could help stick it to Monsanto or the World Trade Organization, it would represent one great big fuck you to my dad and all of his values. They ain’t gonna do to me what I watched them do to you, Dad.

  41.

  It was never that simple, of course. Nothing is ever that simple. As soon as you think you have identified a cause or a reason for your actions or feelings, it immediately starts to look glib, simplistic, narrow. Events can’t explain everything. Maybe they can’t explain anything. People are mostly inexplicable, I think now, which is maybe another reason I find it so hard to write about them.

  In the end, you can only ever live with the things which make you. There is no guarantee that you will ever understand them. Life is not a puzzle to be solved. In one way or another, I suppose, these things go on in every life, in every household, all the time. They go on within each of us, all the time. This is the stuff of life. We live through it, and then it lives through us and none of it makes for a story with a comfortable moral thread or any consistent characters at all.

  42.

  In 2008, after several years in which none of his plans went right, in which all his control systems broke down, in which nobody would obey him anymore, in which none of his rages produced results, my dad took his own life. ‘Took his own life’ is what we are supposed to say now, I recently learned, ‘suicide’ having been designated by somebody or other as offensive and problematic. Still, suicide is a better word: it’s harder, less euphemistic. My dad decided that death was better than humiliation and so he took to the motorway without a seatbelt and looked for something to stop him. When I try to remember how I felt when I heard this news, it’s hard to recall the sensation. I think I felt empty, or relieved, or empty and relieved, or something like that. I felt guilty, too, and still do sometimes. I felt I should have been there with him to prevent it. But I also felt like something inevitable had happened. I didn’t feel sadness. I wonder about that.

  Despite everything, I have always wanted to be fair to my dad, who can’t now answer back. Even having exposed him like this, in a way he would have hated and been shamed by, I still find myself wanting to be fair to him. It’s why I resisted writing about this for 10 years, even though writing things down is my impulsive reaction to every single thing in my life. I wanted to keep it out of the public eye because—well, why? Because it’s nobody else’s business, for starters. But then writers are in the business of what is nobody else’s business. What right do I have? What right did he have?

  The other reason, though: everybody fucks up. I can look back and trace the wrong turnings that my dad made. He was human. He got it wrong, and then wrong again, but along the way he got things right too. I could tell you that I had some horrible, abusive childhood and maybe that would sell more books, but it wouldn’t be true. My childhood was fine, mostly. Sometimes pressured, and with the constant background hum of my dad’s need for control, but I had plenty of good times, and both my parents loved me. Everything seemed normal. That’s what ‘normal’ is for. It’s a word we use to paint over the cracks in what we fail to live with.

  Yet now I find that, like some slow-spreading oil slick eating up a living ocean, the end of my father’s life has become more real to me than the way he lived it, and the horrors which came at the end—horrors I will still not write about—have become more vivid across time than any of the good things he gave me. I can’t help feel downcast about this. It feels like a failure. I wonder if it is his failure or mine.

  In the end, all my dad’s wrong turnings took him so deep into the wood that he could never find his way out and he died alone there, lost and raging. I enjoy judging him for this, sometimes. It makes me feel strong and righteous and powerful. It draws a line between us, and I am not a boy anymore when I am behind it. He can’t touch me here. Ha ha! Fuck you, Dad!

  But it could have been me. It could have been you. Maybe one day it will be. Mercy. Mercy.

  43.

  There’s a fear, a fear or a promise, that sits with perhaps anyone whose parent dies by suicide: that some things are handed down. That some ghost haunts your line, and that now it’s done with your father, now it has had its way with him, it will turn its sights on you. That you look in the mirror and see your father’s face and one day you will see more than that. And you, man— well, you’re a writer, and we all know how writers die. The good ones anyway. The Romantic ones. This is how they show they are serious.

  And there’s the secret: that suicide, sometimes, is thrilling. That suicide, sometimes, is tempting, appropriate to the moment. That sometimes it seems like destiny. And these are the words whispered in your ear some restless night, when the moon is up and on the fields and some sharp energy fills you like the scent of tarragon, and something is singing far off in the trees:

  You’re next.

  44.

  The poet Tony Hoagland, writing about the attraction of suicide, concludes that ‘though I would still like to jump off a high bridge / At midnight’ to do so would represent a ‘serious ingratitude.’ And anyway, he asks, ‘Who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?’

  Not me. You stay alive you stupid asshole

  Because you haven’t been excused,

  You haven’t finished though it takes a mulish stubbornness

  To chew this food.

  It is a stone, is an inconvenience, it is an innocence,

  And I turn against it like a record

  Turns against the needle

  That makes it play.

  45.

  My dad would identify what he wanted, and then he would go and get it, and anyone in his way would be burned unless they helped him on his journey or stood aside. I am not like this. I am disappointingly weak in this way. I like to keep people happy. I am more likely to apologize than to stand up for myself in any given situation.

  With one exception: the writing. For my writing I have sacrificed relationships, money, security and sometimes my own health, both mental and physical. I can give up almost anything else in my life, but not the words, which is why what is happening to me now is so disturbing.

  I know about my tendency to do this. I know it can consume me, and so for years I have tried instead to bury it. I have tried to bury it under land, work, family, children, marriage, ideas, theories, politics, manifestoes, organizations. I do not want to be the kind of writer who causes pain to those around him. ‘When a writer is born into a family,’ said the poet Czeslaw Milosz, famously, ‘the family is finished.’ I used to object to this notion on principle. Since when did being a writer give someone carte blanche to be a shit, I wanted to know? How could writing be that important? In the end, they’re only words.

  Right?

  That was what I wanted to believe, because I wanted to believe that my words were under my control and not the other way around. I wanted to believe that words were my tools, my instruments. I wanted to believe that I was the surgeon, but it
was never true. When the writing I was doing was the real thing I was always the instrument, however blunt or rusty. And so I came here and I tried to bury my words and all their power, to hold them under, to fence them in on this plateau under the Irish sky. I thought I’d done it this time. I really did. I thought it was under control. I was so confident that I even stopped thinking about it.

  Then the words broke out again and ran wild across the hills, crying at night and snarling. It turns out that they will never be held under. Do they want more than I was prepared to give? Are those gods hungry again? Do they want another sacrifice?

  46.

  Why am I writing so much about gods? I have noticed this happening again and again, in almost everything I have written for years now. I can be writing a novel, an essay, a poem, on any subject, from any angle, and there they are, popping up from under every stone: gods. Strange, old, gnarled, primeval gods. They manifest in every guise I can think of, and some I clearly didn’t think of by myself. Where did they come from, all these gods, and why?

  I grew up irreligious and argumentative and materially minded and then something, in my 40s, went to work on me. I said earlier that I sometimes feel I am being called. Now that I’ve written myself through this thing, whatever it is, that feeling is even clearer. But what does it mean? I don’t know. What could be calling me? I don’t know.

  What I do know is that when you give your words permission to access that boiling lake, to dig down beneath the shores of reason, to look out at the terrible madness and beauty of the universe or into the Gorgon’s eyes or down into the abyss, then you are in danger of unleashing something you can’t control. It’s like playing with a Ouija board, or visiting a cabin in the woods with your teenage friends in an American horror film. You muck about with these things at your peril. If you open those doors, you have to know how to close them again.

  There are many different gods, of course, which is why it matters which one your words, or your life, are serving. Hermes— Mercury—god of writers, boundary crosser, emissary between worlds, bringer of instability, sometimes madness: Hermes will fuck with your head. Bacchus, on the other hand, will probably just show you a good time. If you open the door to Freya, goddess of love and poetry, you’re going to get a whole different experience to the one you would get if Loki was standing on the other side, holding a cheap bottle of wine and insisting that a friend of a friend invited him to your party.

  Loki used to fascinate me as a teenager, while I was going through a phase of listening to Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and obsessing over Norse mythology (these things tend to go together). For a while I convinced myself that I was the reincarnation of some Viking from the northern fjords. I had this strange affinity with pine forests, which still remains, and it was enough to build my shaky case on.

  Loki was the Viking trickster god. Every culture has some representation of his energy. Half-demon, half-divine, son of a giant, father to a wolf and a serpent, he causes trouble, and sometimes the trouble is big. Lies, betrayal, violence, murder: Loki has done it all. He hates the other gods and they hate him, but they know, too, that he can be useful to them in their own machinations. He is never to be trusted, should rightly be expelled or killed, but that never happens and never could, because the energy he brings to the party, the trouble he carries, is some essential part of being human. Loki challenges boundaries, breaks through encrusted ideas, brings the dirt and danger from the margins into the heart of the kingdom. He is always around somewhere in your life. You probably need to just accept it and give him some space. Make up a bed for him in the spare room. The worst thing to do would be to tell yourself he had left town and wouldn’t be coming back.

  In his book on tricksters and the role they play in creativity, Lewis Hyde suggests that mythological figures like Loki, who has an equivalent in many other cultures—Hermes to the Greeks, Eshu to the Yoruba, Coyote to some Native American tribes—help to create and reinvigorate culture precisely through the act of destruction. The trickster breaks boundaries so that boundaries might be redrawn. The trickster gives settled, staid cultures and people what they don’t know they need: renewal.

  Creative mobility in this world requires, at crucial moments, the strategic erasure of ethical boundaries. They lose that mobility who cling to beauty, or who suffer from what the poet Czeslaw Milosz has called ‘an attachment to ethics at the expense of the sacred.’

  The trickster, in other words, brings a tough message: what you need might not be what you want. Sometimes, you have to do the ‘wrong’ thing to stay alive. And the trickster won’t be denied. He knows when you need to be broken open. You can run from him, but you know you can’t hide.

  The worst crime Loki ever committed was to kill the ‘beautiful god’ Baldur. Baldur, who was loved by all the gods in Asgard, began to have a series of dark dreams prophesying his own death. Fearful, his mother, Frigg, forced every living thing on Earth, from the largest giant down to the smallest beetle, to swear an oath that they would not harm him. But she left one thing out: a tiny mistletoe plant. Loki noticed. Loki fashioned a spear from mistletoe. Loki took the spear to the blind god Hother, and persuaded him to throw it at Baldur, who was killed.

  Why did Loki do this? Because what you need isn’t always what you want. Because too much beauty and too much peace, too many rules and too many plans, can kill the soul as surely as too much chaos. Because change will not be denied. Because, even in Asgard, there is no plateau. Because without the pain, there is only entertainment:

  There is no way to suppress change, the story says, not even in heaven; there is only a choice between a way of living that allows constant, if gradual, alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals. Those who panic and bind the trickster choose the latter path. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop styles (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes contingency will always engender.

  But there is something else here, too. In many mythologies it is the trickster, in the service of his destructive urges, of his need to break boundaries and cause trouble, who invents the lie. While the other gods, or the other animals, speak the truth plainly from their allotted place in the cosmos, the trickster, who belongs nowhere, who has no place and no role, needs to rely on his cunning and his deceit to get by. In the service of this deceit, he seems to have invented the technology which allows humans to lie so consistently and effectively: language. And in the service of language: writing.

  Is Loki the god of writers? No. The trickster can’t be anyone’s light. He is far too much trouble. I do not serve Loki. I have no interest in meeting him. I want him to stay away from me. But I have a feeling that it’s too late now. Whether from the boiling lake or the mead halls of Asgard, Loki seems to have turned up at my door, and though I’m sure I didn’t let him in, he’s somehow ended up inside anyway, booted feet on the sofa, drinking my beer, smiling up at me in a way which somehow, though it’s impossible to quite put your finger on, is not at all kind.

  It’s been a long time, he says. Aren’t you pleased to see me?

  47.

  In the classic of Chinese literature, Journey to the West, the trickster figure is an arrogant, impulsive, swaggering, immortal monkey. As Loki was finally chained by the gods to a rock until world’s end for killing Baldur, so Monkey was imprisoned by the Buddha below a mountain for 500 years for challenging the will of Heaven. Journey to the West centers around Monkey’s epic trip with the monk Xuanzang to retrieve a series of sacred texts from the Buddha himself at the summit of an Indian mountain.

  It takes them nearly 100 chapters of adventuring to reach the Buddha’s citadel, but when they do they are handed the sacred scriptures and begin their journey back. It is Monkey, the cunning one, who thinks to actually check what they have been given as they travel. He unrolls the scrolls, only to find they are entirely blank. The travelers return to the Bud
dha’s citadel, where they berate him for his deceit. ‘How dare you give us these blank scrolls?’ they demand. ‘Where’s the wisdom to be found here? Give us the real thing!’

  The Buddha smiles at them. ‘Fine,’ he says, handing them some written scrolls; ‘take these home instead.’ But really, he explains, there was no deceit involved:

  As a matter of fact, it is such blank scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I quite see that the people of China are too foolish and ignorant to believe this, so there is nothing for it but to give them copies with some writing on.

  48.

  Some books are day books and some are night books. My last novel was written in the mornings, between 7 and lunch, almost daily like a ritual, alone in my cabin in the field. Most of my writing happens in the morning, when things are cleaner, lighter. Morning writing can be planned, organized, edited, controlled. But this book has come at night, when everything is less defined, and when humans are smaller. It is 1:30 a.m. as I write this. I don’t usually write late at night, but this book will not come in the day and I have learned not to ask it to. This book won’t come in steady doses, planned and controlled and monitored and strategically edited-as-I-go. This book won’t let me sketch it out, rein it in, and when I try I can feel it dying, can literally feel the collapse in my fingertips and in my chest and neck. These words want to use me and I am not to resist. They come clawing out at me when the moon is up and everything sleeps but the foxes and they will not ask my permission. This work is night work. I am to do as I am told.

  49.

  It’s 2 a.m. now. I stand and walk to the back door and open it and walk outside. The dog follows me out and we stand on the grass together. High, light clouds scud under a haloed full moon. I stand in my dressing gown, looking up. A full moon has always been a holy thing to me. I stretch my arms up and around my body, bend over and down, rescuing my muscles from hours of sitting. Then I get down on my knees before the moon, and give it the praise it deserves.