Savage Gods

by Paul Kingsnorth

  The budding trees are stark in the blue silence. A cow lows gently in a barn three fields away. A dog barks from the other side of the river. The air is cool but not cold on my chest. Somewhere off to my right, I hear a low, distant hum.

  50.

  It’s night again, nearly midnight this time, and I’m sitting on the sofa, typing. I wonder at what comes when I do this. Usually my books are planned: I sketch out each chapter, make sure the pre-determined themes run through the book, that it has a clear narrative, that it rises and falls in the right places, that the end comes around again to meet with the beginning and the closure is satisfying. I make sure I say everything I want to say. I do my research and back up my arguments. I can’t write unplanned, any more than I can work with a messy desk. I need order.

  This time around though, I have done none of that. I sat after midnight in a strange bedroom in a college miles from home and I felt something descend upon me, I felt the Muse address me, and I just began to write what came. The poet Robert Graves believed that the Muse was not a writer’s metaphor but a real figure, a White Goddess, the embodiment of the moon, ‘a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair.’ Every ‘true poet’ since Homer, said Graves, has seen and recorded his experience of the Goddess. Graves doesn’t say whether this iron law applies to female poets. His relationship to his Muse-Goddess always sounded like it might be more than strictly literary to me.

  Still, this energy that descends, this sense of being given a task, of being a vessel for some mystery—this is real, and any writer will tell you about it if you ask them and they are in the mood to talk about their writing, which most writers rarely are. Is it a gift? To me it feels like both an honor and an obligation. When I feel it descend—and you always know in advance that it’s coming— I feel a duty to try and transcribe what I am given to the best of my ability. I scrabble around, I get away from other people, I need to find peace, a quiet space. I sneak off to the toilet if I have to, I find those scraps of paper and I ready myself.

  Today though, sitting here, something suddenly came to me, a question, something to wonder about. I have always found this Muse to be insistent, strident even. It makes demands of me, I’ve felt, and I’ve been happy to meet them because I know that being chosen is something to take seriously, an honor to be quietly grateful for. But I wondered today: what if it isn’t insistent, strident, demanding, this Muse? What if those are my projections, built from my own sense of obligation and a neurotic desire to please authority figures? What if, far from demanding, the Muse is gently asking? What if, rather than blaring at me from on high—take this down now!—she is instead standing quietly at my shoulder, offering me a gift with lowered gaze, extending her hands, shyly saying: I made something for you. Would you like it…?

  I think that would change everything.

  51.

  I mean to say: this is an organic book. It has grown, piece by piece, stone by stone, like a vernacular cottage. It has no architect, or none that I know of. It was not plonked down. It emerged.

  Our land has emerged the same way. When we came here we were full of plans. Jyoti and I were doing a distance-learning horticulture course. We had all sorts of ideas about mapping the land in great detail, planning out a permaculture garden, working out the planting and the rhythms in detail. In the end, we gave it all up, threw out the plans, stopped the course and just did what came, what seemed needed and wanted. Walk the land for long enough and you see where the sun sits and where the moss grows, where the natural paths are, where things want to grow, what is convenient, what is unlikely to work. You talk to other people, you get ideas, you see what the wildlife is doing and the garden, like the book, emerges from what is happening today, now, here. No one is in charge. The land, the garden, becomes a living response to an ever-roiling world, a green improvization under the sun. And better for it: so much better.

  This knowing: it is real. If only I could turn my forebrain off, retune my rational mind, get back to the Garden always—then this place, this work, this being would be enough. It would be enough.

  Another way of putting that: everything would be all right, if only I could stop being human.

  52.

  John Berger, another writer, another restless intellectual, though a real one rather than a pretend one like me, another literary urbanite who fled to the land to root himself in some older reality, once told his mother’s ghost: ‘I’ve always put life before writing.’ This is the kind of person I thought I was until I got lost in this wood. Life before writing. Writing that serves life. Not the other way around. That was what I thought I did. It was what I did. Maybe it is what I will do again. I don’t know.

  But all the time, at some level, I’d have to admit that writing has always felt more real to me than life. More real and more interesting. The patterns you can make from what you see out there are better than what you actually see out there, because they are yours. ‘It is a life in itself,’ wrote Lawrence, of the creating of his fictional worlds, ‘far better than the vulgar thing people call life.’ This is a catastrophically egotistical worldview and I expect I ought to feel ashamed about it, but I don’t. What can I say in my defence? Not much. I think John Berger must have been a better man than I am. Or maybe he just had a better map.

  His mother’s ghost did reply. ‘Don’t boast,’ she told him.

  53.

  It’s not complicated, says Loki, cracking open another can of something cheap-looking. It’s life. It happens to the best. Here you are with all these roles you’ve taken on. Father, husband, smallholder farmer, provider, man of the community, writer with a social conscience, aspiring D. H. Lawrence. How does that all fit together? Where’s the space for me in there? You need to throw it all off, mate. Crack it all open. Have a breakdown, or something. Breakdowns can be very productive when you’re uptight. Do you know that when a caterpillar retreats into its chrysalis it actually dissolves? It doesn’t just grow legs and wings—it reconstitutes itself at the molecular level. It becomes this gooey mess, and then emerges as something else. Nothing else will do when it’s chrysalis time. No point in resisting. Dissolve your roles. Dissolve your reputation. Dissolve all your stories. It’s the only way to find out what comes next for you. Of course, you’ve no idea what that is, any more than a caterpillar can imagine being a butterfly. Might be good, might be terrible. You might end up in the gutter. But that’s what the gods are demanding of you now. Dissolution. Nothing less will do. Trust me, I asked them.

  Piss off, Loki, I reply, weakly. Nobody believes a word you say.

  He grins.

  Suit yourself, he says. It’s going to happen whether you go with it or not. It’s just messier if you push against it. Have you got any more of these, by the way? Your fridge is empty.

  54.

  I regret every word I have ever written, and every word I will ever write.

  And I stand by all of it.

  55.

  I read somewhere that Roman Emperors, on their death beds, would receive a round of applause from the assembled worthies for the act they had played over their lives. It was like taking off a mask at the theatre and finally revealing their true face. Well done, the audience would signal. Great acting!

  I don’t remember where I read this. Is it true? I don’t really care. It’s such a good story, and that’s always more important than whether it actually happened.

  56.

  Remember Russell Means? Here’s another man of the Oglala Lakota, Black Elk, who told the story of his life and work to poet and ethnologist John Niehardt in the 1930s. Black Elk was a Holy Man, which meant he was also a healer. But he didn’t heal alone:

  I cured with the power that came through me. Of course, it was not I who cured, it was the power from the Outer World, the visions and the ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds.

  If I thought that I was
doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish.

  Writers, when they get lucky, or pray at the right altars, are also a hole through which some power comes. Now I’m thinking again of the White Goddess, or the shy woman standing at my shoulder with offerings of words, and I’m thinking that if you were to change ‘cured’ to ‘wrote’ in that paragraph, then Black Elk and Robert Graves might have a lot to talk about, and that I would love to join the conversation, or at least stand in the corner and listen.

  57.

  A few months back, I had to go to London. I had some interviews and some meetings and the kind of things you go to London to do. I arrived in the morning with some hours to fill, so I decided to visit the National Gallery. I hadn’t been there for years, and it was free, which is always a consideration. Writers are not proud. Pictures, I thought, can be a good balm when there are too many words in your head.

  I dropped my bag in the cloakroom and bought myself a map and headed for the rooms with the Turners and Gauguins and Van Goghs, distracted on the way by a series of vast Canaletto landscapes of the Grand Canal in Venice. I would like to live on the Grand Canal. I would like to drop all of this and move to Venice with Jyoti and change my name and wear a linen suit every day and wander the streets and drink strange orange drinks in little bars down crumbling alleyways and gaze up at huge Tintorettos in dark old churches, forever.

  London. I had thought the gallery might take me to another place for a while, and it did, but not the one I expected. As I paced through its vast marble and gilt halls, weaving in and out of the other daytrippers, I felt a strange heaviness slip down over me, as if from the great stone domes above. Suddenly all this history, all these accretions of received image and overtold stories, seemed dark and oppressive. I wanted to throw off, to run from, all the accretions, from all the centuries of oiled portraits of doges, knights and electors, from the prophets with their snake sticks, from the black slaves holding platters and the white mistresses grimacing under broad hats, from the squires and the racehorses and the sailing ships and the endless nativities and crucifixions. All the weight of the past that was lying on me, and I hadn’t even known what it had made me, and what did it have to do with me, any of this? Who said this was my history, my culture, who said I belonged to it? Nobody ever asked me, and yet I took it all on and suddenly, now, it was another weight to be sloughed off. The heavy ceilings and the dark wood, the ways of being laid under. Of course the artists and the writers wanted to crawl out from under this as soon as they got the chance, of course they wanted the weight to leave them, of course they spent the last century happily casting it all away and trampling it under. How else could they be free?

  And in the gallery, under the dome, I found myself thinking: I don’t want to belong anymore. I don’t want this weight anymore.

  I don’t want to belong.

  I want to be.

  58.

  Art: this is what I want more of in my life. I wish I knew something—anything—about art, beyond what I’ve picked up over the years just by seeing things I like and looking for more of the same. I wish I could walk knowledgeably around galleries and understand the history of Renaissance painting, the difference between a Caravaggio and a Titian, the cultural moment that the German landscape painters came from, the difference between Impressionism and Expressionism. I’d like to know everything about the history of art from the paintings on the wall of the Chauvet cave to the dawn of Modernism. I ought to buy myself a hefty illustrated book about Renaissance Italy. Maybe I could go on a course, do a Grand Tour of galleries and churches, maybe I could write about art instead of the death of the world. Yes! That’s the thing. I will sit in pavement cafes in the Mediterranean sun and expound about Monet and Van Gogh. I will dream of what Paris was like before Europe began rotting in a stew of sugar and electricity. I will wear a broad brimmed hat and drink alcoholic things with vegetables in them. Words will appear from the high blue sky, like the sunflowers on the canvas.

  Art, I suppose, in the broadest sense of the word, is the difference, if there is a difference, between writing fiction and writing non-fiction. Not that non-fiction can’t be art—if you believe that, go and read some Annie Dillard—but in the writing of fiction, the creating of worlds, there is a freedom to dream and to be drawn that is not available if, as I am doing now, you are tethering your words to some version of externally accepted reality. Everything I am writing in this book is true, as far as it is ever possible to represent truth with words. Everything I am writing in this book is an attempt to strip something away and see what is underneath it, and that is also what fiction does at its best and what poetry has to do all the time.

  But without that tethering to accepted reality, as Kundera points out, writing can soar and dive into places it could never otherwise go, as a Turner or a Van Gogh can, as all the best art does, as anything interesting at all will always do, and in doing so it will often excavate the depths of what it means to be human better than any fact ever can, because facts are the things that float on the surface of the boiling lake and we only take them so seriously because we can see them right here in front of us right now, and thus they seem more solid than what lurks down at the bottom by the hydrothermal vents, with seven blind eyes and a light on a stalk on its head, burping carbon dioxide into our psyches without us ever knowing it.

  59.

  ‘When I paint,’ said Picasso, ‘my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for.’

  60.

  In Martin Amis’s short story “The Janitor on Mars,” humanity is contacted by a source on the red planet and instructed to send a mission. When they arrive, they are met by the single surviving remnant of an ancient Martian master race—the Janitor. It turns out that he was programmed, millions of years ago, to make contact with the human race when their extinction was imminent—but only after it was too late to prevent it.

  Before he breaks this news to them (‘Oh come on. What did you expect? This is Mars, pal!’) he has a question for them. He is puzzled by humanity’s one distinguishing characteristic—their propensity for art. In every other area of endeavor, he explains, from science to politics, humankind has barely advanced beyond the level of pond slime. But the art is a different matter:

  Art is not taken very seriously in this universe or in any other. Nobody’s interested in art. They’re interested in what everybody else is interested in: the superimposition of will. It may be that nobody’s interested because nobody’s any good at it. … It’s strange. Your scientists had no idea what to look for or where to look for it, but your poets, I sometimes felt, divined the universal…

  Why, the Janitor wants to know, has humankind been so dedicated to the creation of art, in all its many forms, from music to poetry to painting? He has a theory: that human history happened the way it did, with all of its horrors, in order that it might provoke the creation of great art:

  Like Guernica happened so Picasso could paint it. No Beethoven without Bonaparte. The First World War was to some extent staged for Wilfred Owen, among others. The events in Germany and Poland in the 1940s were set in motion for Primo Levi and Paul Celan. Etcetera. But I’m already getting the feeling it isn’t like that…

  ‘No, sir,’ he is told, ‘it isn’t like that.’

  ‘Well in a way,’ he says, ‘this makes my last chore easier.’

  61.

  I have a friend who is a green woodworker. He lives in the north of England, and I haven’t seen him for years, but today I came across his website. He’s been making ash splint baskets. I didn’t know what an ash splint basket was until I saw the pictures but the beauty and the simplicity of his work struck me hard. To be able to make something like that: it seemed like a real skill, a real use of the hands, not like typing. I should make ash splint baskets, I thought. I should stop writing and make ash splint baskets until I can make one so beautiful that I never want to stop looking at
it, because beauty is the thing, isn’t it? Beauty is what gives life meaning, beauty is the light in the awesome dark, beauty is what we all want and need, it is life and without it we waste. To Robinson Jeffers, craggy old California poet, beauty was an objective external reality, something which existed outside of us, in ‘the pristine granite’ of the cliffs and mountains, not simply a product of human aesthetics. ‘The beauty of things was born before eyes,’ he wrote, ‘and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty / Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.’

  Is there a beautiful sentence in this book? Even one per book would make me happy. Those are my ash splint baskets. When I can make them I am proud, but they are never pleasing to the eye, only the ear and the mind, and they are never pleasing to the hands either. You can’t live by typing and thinking, you can’t live by pen and paper. Maybe you can’t live by ash splint baskets either, but I know a real thing when I see one, and a beautiful thing too.

  My woodworking friend wasn’t always a woodworker. Once he was an academic scientist. He threw it all away to make ash splint baskets and scythe handles and greenwood spoons, and he’s never looked back.

  62.

  When we planted our trees in the field this winter, we decided to put a wide circle of Scots pines right at the high point, where the field crowns a gentle rise before descending the hill. Scots pines are comical things in their first couple of years: tiny little stumps ringed with verdant green whiskers and rusty cones which look like baby rattles. They start small and grow slow and last longer than people. When I am old, if I am old, maybe I’ll see them start to mature. I’d like that.