Can Odysseus trust her? Should he let go of the raft, which provides him at least some small security in the storm? Will the veil save him or will he drown? He doesn’t know. He has to answer a stark and impossible question: do I trust this, or do I not?
Everything I have clung to, for too long: I am sinking under it. Now I have to take the veil and strike out into the storm. It might drown me. But I’ve come far enough to trust this instinct, and to know at least one thing for certain: if I don’t let go, I’m dead.
72.
You know your problem? shouts Loki, from the top of a storm-flecked wave the size of a tower block. You’re not curious enough!
He shouts something else, something inaudible, through the lashing waters, then heaves a breath.
You know your other problem? he continues, almost screaming to be heard. You actually believe in answers!
73.
All year, especially in the spring, we are awakened at dawn by a wall of birdsong. This place is alive with the song of birds, more so each year as we plant more trees, encourage more insects, and allow them to build nests in all sorts of ridiculous places. It’s so common, so wide and deep in the air and the land, that I’m in danger of taking it for granted.
This word—‘birdsong’—is it accurate? Birdsong? It sounds like singing to us, it sounds melodic and beautiful, or some of it, but this word has the wrong resonance, surely? Song, in human cultures at least, is something created for pleasure, for entertainment, for ritual, for worship. Song is beauty, creativity, religion, art, song is common to all human cultures but is also non-essential, beyond the everyday business of eating and hunting and working and shitting and sleeping.
But for a bird, what we have labeled song is a tool to be used for those essential things. The sounds being made by birds in the field at dawn, as far as humans can tell, are not the joyful melodies of creatures welcoming the beauty of the sunrise. They are birds seeking mates, warning off predators, warning each other of threats, staking out territory. They are conversations, perhaps, or boasts, or threats, or seductions. Some birdsong appears to be the equivalent of a human fencing in a piece of land and putting up a NO TRESPASSING sign. Sound is used to build a wall.
Last year, a single swallow roosted on a beam above our back door all summer. He covered our doormat in white and purple shit, but none of us minded. Jeevan christened him Fluffy, and wrote a story about him. When he left at the end of summer, we all missed him. Then, this April, he came back. From Africa, from southern Europe, from wherever he had been, he came back over thousands of miles of land and ocean and he found the same small beam and now he is back there, shitting on the mat again, sometimes balancing on the washing line or catching insects in mid-air. It’s a small incredulity, and it lifts my heart.
You’ll never see a swallow on the ground unless it’s dead. If they come down to earth they find it hard to take off again. They are always on the move, but in cycles, in repeating patterns, like Yeatsian gyres. They belong to the movement and the patterns that they live on. Each evening, in the summer, Fluffy sits up on the electricity line above our back garden and he sings. Or rather, he makes an exhaustingly curious litany of sounds: chirrups, stutters, whistles, clucks, buzzes, always in the same order. It’s an amazing thing to hear. What does any of it mean? I have no idea. But he isn’t ‘singing.’
Birdsong is a story we have told ourselves, but it is not a story the birds tell. We tell stories about ‘nature’ all the time, and one of those stories is that there is something called ‘nature’ Out There, beyond the human, beyond ‘civilization,’ which is another story. ‘Nature’ is often somewhere we go to find peace: this is what it was for me for so long and still is. The green stillness. I can find great peace, great stillness, in my field, but the field is never still. Everything is busy. The grasses and the trees are photo-synthesizing, the insects are searching for nectar, the birds are nesting, chasing food, finding mates, fighting, the streams are ever-flowing, even the air currents are always moving. I come to places like this and sit here cross-legged and castigate myself for being so busy in my mind and in my body, load myself up with Puritan, or indeed Buddhist, guilt for not being still enough. But nothing else here is still. Everything is working all the time and if there is a difference between the grasses and the human who sits sometimes on the grasses, it is that the human doesn’t just get on with his work, he thinks about getting on with his work.
She doesn’t consider / what she was born to do, writes Mary Oliver of a turtle:
She’s only filled
with an old blind wish.
It isn’t even hers but came to her
in the rain or the soft wind,
which is a gate through which her life keeps walking.
The human sitting here, the me perched on the grasses, constantly considers what he was born to do. He doesn’t just do, he watches himself doing. He stands outside himself and is aware and can judge and his mind, the watcher, is his burden, it is the thorn which he carries with all of his kind, lodged deep in his flesh always. He can see himself and his work, he represents himself and his work in stories, he creates a language to hold them, and he writes it down.
Is language the trap? The field is full of language. Everything is speaking to everything else, and some of it I can hear and some of it, because of my biology or my cultural inheritance, I am not equipped to. All nature is a language—but none of it is written down. Writing: converting a living, dancing speech, a pattern of sounds from a pulsing animal body, to dead, unmoving symbols on a page. Writing: fossilizing life, replacing life with representations of life, representations which can be more attractive than life itself if you’re not careful. Look: I have shown you my field. Probably you will never see it, and even if you do, you will not see what I see, because you are not me. All you have is my words, but my words are not my reality. I have nothing for you but black marks on white, which fire neurons in your brain. What if they fire the wrong neurons? What if I am setting off a chain reaction which will echo down the centuries and shade out reality, truth, with some bright white light?
If I read nothing for a year and if I wrote nothing for a year, would I, could I, begin to clear away the scaffolding which language, written language, conceptual, abstract language, has built up around my poor right brain? Could I fend off the assault which logic, reason, empiricism, analysis has been raining on my inner poet all my adult life? Could I silence the watcher? Could I split the gauze? Could I crawl out from under the barrage intact and begin to see what the world was before we remade it as a mechanism which could be taken apart and examined, before we measured the parts and sliced them up and fed them into the Machine? Before electric lights and asphalt and schooling and algorithms began to remake us? Could I please the gods that way? Could I burn my words like meat on an altar to appease them?
Would it be possible? I think I would give everything.
74.
Could I write like a tree would write, like a river would write, like an air current under a swallow’s wing, the head of a plantain in the south of the field, a sycamore leaf falling to ground in early autumn? Could I sing the mathematics of it all in poems and watch them dance away and be lost beneath the umber loam? Could I write like a myth, like an intuition, like an animal hunting, a cloud skimming, could I write from the shores of the boiling lake, is there truth down there and can it ever be planted in symbols on a page?
It is what I have tried to do for years. But what if it is impossible? What if there can never be writing in these places, what if there are no written words on that shore, what if writing is their enemy, what if it shrivels them, burns them up like grass in a brown drought? What if writers are not welcome there
unless
75.
So often, the very act of trying to write anything down, of trying to dissect it like a spavined insect, to lay it out on the white cloth ready for examination, kills the delicate thing I am trying to convey. The signifier cannot comm
unicate the reality of the signified. The marks on the vellum are no longer the shapes of animals. The language dies and rots into the soil. Communication breaks down, misunderstandings happen, positions are taken, wars are started.
‘We really ought to free ourselves,’ implores Nietzsche, ‘from the misleading significance of words!’
If you have never seen my field with the sun shining on it, if you have never lived inside me and I have never lived inside you, if we have never broken each other down in the spring air to see what the other is made of and then heard it well and carefully, then none of this can ever work. I can’t ever know anything but what I see, feel, experience, and even then I can never really know it. I can only try to listen, to pay attention, to get myself out of its way as it speaks to me or at me.
I thought I wanted to belong, because I am lost. Remember that? I told you that a hundred pages ago and I haven’t become any less lost since then, and that’s fine. It’s fine to be lost, though, just as it’s fine to be quiet. It’s necessary, sometimes. You don’t start causing trouble unless your loss starts to burn the world around you, you don’t start causing trouble unless you don’t know that you are lost or why. If you do know, if you have paid attention—well then, you are just a seeker like everybody else and that’s fine too, that’s wonderful, in fact. And maybe sometimes in your seeking you will be granted a glimpse through the gauze, always uncalled for, always unexpected, often gone almost as it comes, but in the fragment of time you are given it, you will gasp then, and you will say:
Oh.
76.
My words have always served a purpose I set. They have always obeyed me. But my wizard’s power is fading. My staff has been broken and my messianic tendencies, like Kavanagh’s, are draining away. Messianic tendencies are such hard work. Suddenly, for the first time in my adult life, I have no agenda. I have words, but no master for them to serve. And I see now: I was never the master. I just thought I was.
‘Creation is like anything else good,’ said Charles Bukowski. ‘You have to wait on it; ambition has killed more artists than indolence.’ On his simple grave slab in the hard sun of California are engraved two words: Don’t try.
77.
I thought I wanted to belong. I thought I needed to have a place, a people. But every time I find a place, I don’t fit into it. Something takes me away from it, from the campfire to the slopes of the mountain. Every time I could belong, I push it away. So I suppose this must be who I am. Or, this must be one part of who I am, one faction, jostling with the others, Kavanagh wrestling with Yeats in mutual affection and resentment. I am lost, and is that what life is, what modernity or post-modernity is, a rolling sense of being out of place, of being tangled up in the gauze, of being alienated by language, perception, of having eaten the apple and fallen, and is fall another word for life?
Or are these just words? Just more words?
I like it here. Slowly, I am sinking into this place. As I regularly tell myself, I am lucky to be here, lucky to be alive here or anywhere, to be able to sit around and write books instead of worrying how to feed myself or escape a war. I don’t want to leave—it would be another wrench—but I don’t suppose this place will ever contain me or satisfy me, because who can ever be contained or satisfied? And why should this poor little plot of land have to bear the weight of meaning that some wandering primate has wanted to layer upon it? Why should anyone or anything have to bear the weight of our stories?
When I think about this word belonging I get tight in the chest. I build up narratives, I set boundaries and targets, theories and concepts begin to creep up on me from behind. The words which try to contain belonging are tight, clear, carefully punctuated, they move in order, one after another, like lines of soldier ants on dimpled leaves. But being can’t be contained in any words at all. Being is freedom and responsibility all in one, and as hard as either, as impossible and easy. Maybe I could be here but not belong here, or maybe I will belong here in time, or maybe that’s not my decision to make, or maybe, maybe, it doesn’t matter at all because these are all symbols I arrange in my head while the world goes on around me and I wander the garden, chattering and buzzing like the swallow on the line, trying to get my story straight. And everything else is just getting on with things. Everything else is just busy.
Something calls me again: Be quiet now. Be quiet.
78.
At midsummer in the west of Ireland, the sky is never really dark. Night doesn’t fall until nearly midnight and dawn takes hours to spread across the wide sky. Whenever you wake, it is light.
It is the middle of June as this book stumbles to its close, a few days out from the solstice. I am awoken at 5 a.m. by a sound at the window. A tap-tap-tap on the glass. I rise and go out into the garden. Loki is sitting on the bird table, swinging his legs.
Message from Mercury for you, he says.
Mercury’s a Roman God, I say. You’re Norse. How does this work, exactly?
It’s the 21st century, my friend, he says. We’re all multicultural now. Listen, the gods have a deal for you. An offer. You want to hear it?
No, I say, but I suppose you’ll tell me.
Simple deal, he says, breaking open the bird feeder and picking at the peanuts. They’ll let you live a bit longer if you promise to shut up.
Shut up? I say.
Just for a while, he says. Maybe. I mean, could be forever I suppose. I didn’t inquire about the time limit. But yeah, shut up. Stop writing. Stop talking. Just be. Let the silence in. Let go of all your ideas, all the structures you built, all the stories you have. They’re blocking everything. If you want the words back, you have to give them a space to play in. Be attractive to them. Have some style. Stop pushing them around. Let them run free in the field. Dissolve like that caterpillar. Let go of the raft. Poseidon has promised to behave himself if you do, though I’d never trust a sea god myself. Brooding, they are, like the ocean.
I suppose I’ve known about this offer for a while, I say. On some level, you know?
Of course you have, he says. For the last forty thousand words at least. But you know what you’re like. Things have to be written down before you believe they’re real.
He picks another peanut out of the feeder and examines it like a jeweler with a loupe in his eye and a strange brown pearl between his fingers.
So, he says. What’s your answer?
79.
I wondered how to end this book, this book that I never really planned to start. The important thing was always going to be avoiding conclusions. I have always come to conclusions. I have always wanted to tie things up, lay them out cleanly, send you away happy or inspired or at least not too confused, not too let down. Now I need to leave all the threads loose and hanging. It is not my job to tie them, it is not anybody’s job because they are not to be tied this time. There is nothing that can contain this, and conclusions are lies, cop-outs, offerings of weak comfort. For a while I thought maybe that if I just ended the book suddenly, just stopped somewhere, maybe even in the middle of a sen
80.
No, it isn’t going to work.
So let me just say what I need to say, whatever that turns out to be.
The old folk tales of Europe are full of men and women being dragged through the mire towards something new and necessary—wisdom? truth?—but they pay for it. They are consumed, they die and are reborn, they are flayed and tortured for small errors. The witches come to the court and drag them by their hair into the black forest, and if they emerge alive they are marked. The woman has three strands of grey hair, the man has a limp, and these things will never leave them. They have old eyes in young faces, now. Something has been sacrificed to pay for what they have seen. They have not bought their revelation cheaply, and neither can we.
The Zen nun meditates in a cave for 12 years, and when she comes down from the mountain she says, everything is just as it was when I left, and she says, everything is changed.
The women go into th
e river. The men go out to the bush.
Things come at you and break you, other things inhabit and form you. Words descend to help you explain, and sometimes they even manage it.
Some things remain inexplicable, now and forever.
I am being split apart in the sun. I don’t know what will be exposed. Maybe nothing. Maybe there is nothing there and never was. Maybe I am deluded. I have been deluded many times.
But I understand the deal. It seems cruel. I suppose cruelty is as necessary as summer.
I want to see ahead, to try to understand where I am going, to direct myself. But in the dark wood, what looks like a path is as likely to be a dead end. I am no wizard.
Not this time.
Right now, lost in the undergrowth, I don’t know anything. Who I am, where I am going, where I will end up, what I will do or should. I know none of it, and that’s all I can see and come to. It’s kind of wonderful. To be empty of all certainty, to have no answers, no wagons circled, no theories and no promises. I’m not sure I’ve ever been here before.
This is not a conclusion. Nothing is being contained here. I don’t have a message, a comfortable ending to this uncomfortable book, a series of bullet-pointed calls for action. I have nothing to sell you. I have no conclusion, but I do have a suspicion. I suspect that all the paths out of the wood lead to the same place and all of the questions are the same question, and I can never shut up about anything and so, again, though I tried so hard not to, again I have written it all down. And here it is. And I offer it up to you. It is all I have.
Savage Gods Page 11
