Savage Gods

by Paul Kingsnorth

  Last night I stood in the pine circle in the evening. A great tit was peeping somewhere, a wood pigeon calling, rooks cawing and passing overhead regularly, dominating the sky lanes. All the birds were preparing for sleep. Sometimes I feel the gauze split for a second, and it split now and I thought: it is time to stop looking into the darkness. I felt I’d been passed this information through the rift, though it felt not like information, really, but more like a quiet order: stop, now.

  For 10 years I have been staring at the darkness without a shield. For 10 years, there has been a weight on me. I have tried to work with it. I have treated it like a duty, tried to help others with their weight too. But I realized at dusk, under the flight path of the rooks, that this weight on me was perhaps not words or my need to belong, but was the weight of knowing too much, seeing too much, taking on too much, staring too long into the abyss, taking it all so personally. Since my dad died, I have not torn my gaze away from it. Now, it feels like time

  for some light

  at last.

  63.

  I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head. By a stream in a clearing sat a woman in a red dress. She was tremendously beautiful.

  I am so thirsty, she said. Would you fetch me water?

  I have no water, I said. I don’t know how I came here.

  The stream, she said. Use your imagination. You seem to think you have one.

  Who are you? I asked.

  Freya, she replied. Goddess of love, sorcery, birth, sex. War, death. It’s all connected. We need to talk about Loki.

  OK, I said.

  I suppose you know you can’t trust him? she said. He is a terrible liar. Once he accused me of sleeping with every god in Asgard. There are plenty I wouldn’t touch with a krókspjót! Have you seen the state of Tyr? I’m not saying Loki will always lie, of course. Sometimes he can be very direct. And even a lie can communicate a truth. So it’s not that he’s wrong in what he says to you, necessarily. It’s just that there might be stories he isn’t telling you.

  What stories? I mumbled.

  Well, that’s for you to work out, she smiled. That’s where the fertility comes in, and the war. Maybe the sex, too. Loki wants chaos. That’s what he comes for and what he brings. Sometimes you need chaos. Sometimes chaos is what keeps you alive, keeps you moving, running, burning. Sometimes chaos is what breaks you out of outmoded patterns. I’d only say that there are certain kinds of chaos, and then there are other kinds. You might want to think about the distinction.

  I will, I said, feeling like a small boy. She smiled again, and I wanted to stay there forever, and also I wanted to cry.

  Now, she said. The water?

  64.

  In my 40th year, I took up Zen Buddhism. As a discipline, a practice, it sounds intimidatingly mystical, and its followers can sometimes enjoy making it seem more so, but its essence is the simplest—and therefore also the most challenging—thing on Earth. It’s about paying attention. The most succinct description of Zen is also one of the most famous: a finger pointing at the moon. What would become Zen developed in China in the 5th century, as the teachings of the Buddha came in with wandering monks down the Silk Road from India and merged with indigenous Daoism to create a stark, stripped-down version of Buddhism, which itself is all about stripping everything back and paying attention to what remains.

  Everything we experience, said the Buddha, is a product of the mind. Human life is a series of delusions—or stories—invented by the mind to explain the world of sensory experience, and the source of human unhappiness is our clinging to these delusions as if they were reality. Pay enough attention to the workings of your mind and you’ll see the delusions being created. Once you can see them, they are more likely to drop away, or at least release their hold over you. I’ve always seen Zen as a kind of Buddhist puritanism. Strip away all the scriptures, the golden statues, the robes and bells and bowls and temples and what are you left with? The moon, and the finger. What is Zen? Its Japanese masters have a two-word answer: just sitting.

  I was attracted to Zen because it seemed like a good way to prevent myself from going mad. Writers spend their whole lives in their minds, but often they don’t understand how those minds work. That’s not really part of the job. It doesn’t matter where the story comes from as long as it comes, and if you try to understand where it comes from you might find that it stops coming. ‘It’s rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about,’ said the poet John Ashbery, understatedly. What he didn’t add was: ‘and it’s dangerous to try.’

  Zen, for me, is the antidote to the call of the wild gods with their demands, and the Muse with her offerings, and all of the pulling and tugging of the creative impulse, whatever it is. Every day, in theory at least, I sit silently on a stool for half an hour and I just watch what my mind does. I watch what obsesses it, I notice how thoughts trigger feelings, I see the paths it wends down. It calms me, if I’m lucky, because I can start to see how I work. And very occasionally, if I am luckier, I might get a glimpse of the experience the Zen masters call kensho: a tiny flash of the true nature of reality. The boundaries of everything will suddenly dissolve away, and that horrible New Age word oneness will make sense at last. Everything, it turns out, really is connected to everything else. If you’re lucky, this insight might last a second or two, but you’ll never forget it.

  Kensho, though, as the Masters will tell you sternly if you mention it to them, is not the point of Zen. The point of Zen is that there is no point. Forget the kensho, they will say. Stop seeking. In the seeking is the pain. Just sit. It is, they will say, what it is.

  If writing is undertaken in service to a god, or gods, then Zen is undertaken in service to nothing at all, or to everything, depending on your point of view. As such, I have hoped that perhaps it can save me from myself. Pay enough attention to who you think you are, and you find out soon enough what you are not. You will see that you are not your body, your ideas, your opinions, your history, your emotions, your thoughts. All of that stuff changes from year to year, from minute to minute.

  You are not the person you were half an hour ago, let alone 10 years ago. So who are you? What essence remains? Is anything about you unchanging? Is anything about anything unchanging? If not, what does it even mean to talk about who ‘you’ are, what ‘you’ want, what ‘you’ think and feel?

  Start to notice this—start to sit with it—and you will find, on a good day, that a strange calm descends, and you will find that it has saved your life.

  65.

  The problem with Zen is that it does tend to destroy you. That’s really the point. I wonder if practicing it, albeit sporadically, for five years has been part of what is cracking me open now. ‘Who am I?’ is its fundamental question, and once you start asking it you find that the answer is… well, interesting.

  To live is to suffer, said the Buddha, and the root cause of this suffering is craving—craving pleasure, craving pain, craving sex, power, food, attention, money, peace, excitement, enlightenment, anything. What is it that craves? It is your ego—your created sense of a permanent ‘self’—and it craves because it believes that if it can have what it craves it will stop suffering. This is the story of our civilization, and we are discovering the hard way that it doesn’t work. The pursuit of ‘progress’ or ‘economic growth’ or ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are all cravings, all goals which, when reached, suddenly slip from our grasp, leaving behind oil spills and the stumps of forests. Satisfying your cravings doesn’t work because the ego wants what it wants, regardless of the consequences for itself and for others, and it never knows when to stop.

  We have built a whole society on what a Buddhist would say is a delusion—the primary delusion. The only way to end suffering, said the Buddha, is to end the cravings that create it, and that’s where the hard work starts. It’s a lifetime’s work, the work of attention and self-knowledge, the hardest work, t
he work that none of us really wants to undertake.

  Since I took up Zen, a question has stalked me: is writing an example of this craving, grasping, ego-self? Is the terrible, narcissistic ego of the self-identified ‘writer’ part of the same problem? When the self-centered delusions which keep the ‘writer’ attached to his career, his reviews, his reputation, his style, his back-catalog are ripped away, what is left? What is he writing for?

  How would you write if you believed that you didn’t really exist?

  And is that the same question as, ‘what god does my writing serve?’

  66.

  I began my Zen practice at the deep end, with a week-long silent retreat in an electricity-free farmhouse on a wet Welsh mountain. This is my idea of a week off. After a few days of trying to get into the whole thing and failing and becoming fed up and frustrated, I was sent out for a walk by the teacher. She could see that I was having trouble sitting still. Go for a walk she said, walk slowly, just pay attention to what you see. Don’t judge it or think about it particularly, just let it be there. So I did. I saw a slug eating a mushroom in the dewdropped grass and I watched it for 15 minutes. Have you ever seen a slug eating? Just to pay attention to the small things breaks the carapace of your seeing, if only for a moment. I’ve had more appreciation for slugs ever since, though I still feed them to the chickens.

  I walked slowly uphill for maybe a mile or so and I came across a fence. The mist had come down by now, a wet Welsh mountain mist and this fence snaked off into the mist in a line and disappeared into it. I stood by one of the fence posts and looked up the fence and then down the fence. In one direction, uphill, the next fence post had a metal cap on it. In the other direction, downhill, it was a standard wooden post, slightly rotten, barbed wire attached to it with metal staples. I looked up the fence again and down the fence again and the metal post was the future and the wooden post was the past, and I realized that I spent around 70 percent of the time in my head, living in one or the other, usually dreaming of the past and dreading the future. The post I was standing by, which represented the present, rarely got a look. I was never here.

  I went back and told my teacher this, and she laughed her head off.

  Sometimes I feel that time is an illusion, that I don’t have a past, that the endless permutations of the process of always-becoming happen like everything else behind the gauze that separates me from reality. The fence stretches off and I can never really touch it. It might not even be real. It might be a story. The whole world is an illusion, a game, a freak show. There is no past, no future, no me, and therefore nothing to belong to. I don’t have a past because nobody has a past, we are all living in some giant computer simulation or God is mocking us or God fled long ago or there is no God and no programmer and nothing but dark matter and the universe expanding out into… well, what? What could it possibly be expanding into?

  67.

  You take your craving and you lay it onto the place where you are, or onto the place you ran from or are running to, or the person. You write a story that says: yes, it is all here for me, if only I can hold on to it.

  And then it all slips away, and you start again.

  68.

  As I grow older, the colors seem to become cleaner, simpler. A lot of effluvia flows away, things seem clarified somehow I am 44 years old now. I am in the last half, the last third, the last quarter of my life; whichever it is, the active part, the burning, is behind me and dying back in time. The second half of a life is governed by the moon, not the sun. It is water time, not fire time, and I can no longer write books with plots that work, I can no longer structure stories and bring them to a climax, I can no longer craft and carve the paragraphs and the sentences. I can’t plan a narrative journey because none of it makes sense to me now and if I think like that, if I think that that is the work, then I cannot even pick up a pen.

  It’s a terrible and a liberating discovery. Life is not that shape. Life is not the shape of a book.

  69.

  What would happen, I wonder, if all writers were legally disbarred from writing about anything of which they didn’t have direct, personal experience? There would be far fewer books in the world, for a start, which would probably be no bad thing, and maybe those that remained would be tighter, smarter, and more honest. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s a terrible idea. Still, sometimes I think I will write a book which aims at nothing, proves nothing, and does nothing: simply represents the world-as-it-is. This book will just be a list of things I have directly experienced, perhaps over a 24-hour period. ‘A woman walks across a bridge.’ A young birch in the April sun.’ One long haiku, the most honest, if also the most boring, piece of literature ever written. But of course it would still be as untrue as anything else painted in words. All the experiences would still be filtered through this creation named Paul Kingsnorth, who noticed the woman on the bridge rather than the red car which drove past at the same time, and who thought that an April sun was sufficiently different from an October sun that to mention it might spark an image in your mind, a feeling, a body-memory that might fleetingly join your perception to mine and bring us together. I am a filter and you are a filter and we are alone, trapped in our perceptions, and we see different worlds. Scientists have been telling us for years that our brains are perception-filters, that what we see of the world is not ‘reality’ but simply what our brains make of it, usually based on pattern recognition. We knew this even before the scientific method could demonstrate it: Immanuel Kant was telling us the same thing 250 years ago, apparently, though I’m not going to pretend to have read Critique of Pure Reason.

  In this context, words become bridges, reachings-out, from one filter to another. Words become—writing becomes—a means of confirmation. Do you see the same world as me? You do? Then I am not alone! Words can connect our worlds, and that’s one reason, maybe, that we write them. But while words can join the filters together for a time, I think that nothing can dissolve the filters except the silence: except sitting and watching and listening and saying nothing. The author of the Dao De Jing knew this 2500 years back. ‘He who knows does not speak,’ he wrote. ‘He who speaks does not know.’ Every generation forgets this, I suppose, and the next one has to learn it again.

  70.

  In The White Goddess, Robert Graves tells us that all True Poetry throughout history is a variation on what he calls The Theme. This is ‘the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year.’ In case this is not definitive enough, Graves explains further that the central chapters of this tale must ‘concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess,’ she of the hooked nose and rowan-berry lips.

  We have lost touch with The Theme nowadays, says Graves— writing in 1948—because we are locked into the Machine, and the Machine is a demon which destroys both poetry and truth. This is the tragedy that has made both our poetry and our culture rotten:

  ‘Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as ‘auxiliary State personnel’. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.

  Until poetry returns to its wild roots, there is no hope for civilization. Until civilization returns to its wild roots, there is no hope for poetry. To start this process, Graves blasted the Canon: the history of literature in Britain, he declared, should not begin with The Canterbury Tales, but with “Song of Amergin,” an ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet which is the Great Spirit made word, the green fuse written down, the oral tradition pinned to the paper by symbols still living, still twitching:

  I am a stag: of seven tin
es,

  I am a flood: across a plain,

  I am a wind: on a deep lake,

  I am a tear: the Sun lets fall,

  I am a hawk: above the cliff,

  I am a thorn: beneath the nail,

  I am a wonder: among flowers,

  I am a wizard: who but I

  Sets the cool head aflame with smoke?

  71.

  Recently, at a conference in America, I watched Martin Shaw, my mythologist friend (everyone should have a mythologist friend), tell the story of The Odyssey over the course of a week to a crowd of 200 people. It was quite something. When you hear an accomplished oral storyteller tell a story, you are brought up hard against a fact that everyone in a pre-literate culture would have known from experience: a story is a living thing. When the storyteller begins, some strange animal lurches into the room, curls around the roof beams, intervenes, changes everything. A story is a summoning from the otherworld. And some tales want to have their way with you.

  Stories live, especially when they are freed from the chains imposed on them by the written word. Even within those chains, there is freedom of movement. I have written two novels from the strange space of unknowing which grows around you when a story approaches and makes demands. I have had demands made of me by magical goldsmiths and pagan gods and black cats, and after a while you learn that there is nothing to do but open yourself up. There is nothing to do but be open.

  When you hear an oral tale told well, you often find that a particular scene or image will lodge in your mind, and refuse to be shifted. There is usually a reason for this; you just have to discover it. As I heard The Odyssey, I found myself clinging, with Odysseus, to a piece of broken raft, after Poseidon the sea god has tried yet again to drown him. Poseidon does this a lot. Ino, a nereid of the ocean and no friend of Poseidon, sees Odysseus clinging to his broken vessel, and makes him an offer. She hands him a flimsy veil. I imagine it being multicolored, for some reason; rainbow silk. Take off your clothes, she says to him, and tie this around your body. Then let go of the raft. The veil will support you and take you to land.