Beast

by Paul Kingsnorth

  And I didn’t hesitate I just jumped in and my head went under and it was freezing and the water was all over me and I surfaced and looked at the boys and they were all lined up along the edge of the pier looking at me. And I said I can’t swim and they said you can swim sir if you choose to but there is nothing else we can do for you now. We are glad that you came back. And I could see the other shore of the lake and there were rushes growing and a small boat was hidden in them a small wooden boat and I could swim and I started across the lake and things tugged at my ankles as I moved there were things under the water. I kept swimming.

  The morning routine was the same every day now and I had come to enjoy it. Wake up clothes on two mugs of water pack bag boots on pick up stick open door step out into the white heat. It was as white as quiet as empty as ever. As before I headed across the stream and up the shoulder of the moor and over it towards the church and the town. But this time I stopped before I went through the gate that led down off the moor and into the lane. I took out my map and I walked until I was exactly in the corner of the first marked grid. The lines that crossed it back and forth on my map were not related to any footpaths or trackways on the ground. They were just lines on the map and in my mind and I would follow them as best I could. I would move slowly and steadily. There was no hurry. I had all day.

  I decided that the challenge was to follow the lines precisely. I would walk the straight lines I had drawn on the map no matter what obstacles I came across on the ground. This would keep me going. It might be fun. Who knew what I would find. I would watch the ground on which I walked and I would keep my eyes on the horizon and anything that happened I would see immediately. Nothing else moved there was no other life there was only the hot and the white and so anything that came to me I would see.

  On the map this was an empty grid. Some of the others had features in: ponds streams woods cairns paths. But this was an expanse of heather. The only landmark in this square mile was a giant’s grave. I turned the words over in my mouth as I began to walk. Giant’s grave. Giant’s grave. To be in a land with giants’ graves in it. Some great old menhirs fallen in on each other and what was beneath? To just walk past these things without a second glance and everything they once were. I would love to dig down and expose the skeleton of a ten foot tall man with a bronze shield at his feet. Yes there were giants in the Earth it was all real all of it. All of the stories they told you when you were a child they were all true. Imagine that. Imagine if adulthood is the fairy tale and childhood is the reality. Imagine giants’ graves all over the land and the motorways roaring past them and it is the motorways which are the romantic lies. Beyond the places you can walk to there is a field of buttercup and clover which rolls down to a river and that is where the life is that is the reality and here you are walking through a grey dream.

  Within each square on the map I had drawn two sets of five parallel lines running from north to south and from east to west and crossing each other at intervals so that the whole thing looked like a chessboard. It meant that to cover each marked square I would have to walk ten miles. For the first mile I kept my mind entirely focused on my task. I felt the muscles in my legs move as I walked across the heather and I felt the still hot air passing my ears. I walked at a medium pace. My left leg still spasmed with every step. The ground was springy and the heather was woody and dry. There was nothing but peat and heather not a stream bed or a combe or a stunted tree. This square mile of moor was a great rounded shoulder of heather and in the middle of it was the giant’s grave.

  The giant’s grave was my goal. I was going to walk in complete stillness and silence until I reached it. According to my map it would be about three miles of walking until I got there. Three miles of sameness three miles of heather. I picked up the pace after a while. I was getting bored. There were no signs of anything up here. No big animal would be up here surely it was too exposed there was nothing for it. There were no holes in the ground nowhere to hide nothing to eat. If it had walked here I would not have seen any tracks beneath the heather anyway. But I kept going. At any moment things could change and I had a system and I was going to stay with it. I had seen something and it must be somewhere. I would find it.

  I reached the giant’s grave after what must have been an hour or so. It consisted of three great old slabs of granite one lying horizontal and the other two resting at angles on top of it. All three stones sat on top of a slight mound. I took off my pack and put it on the ground. I took out the water bottle and climbed up to the highest point on the stones and sat down. I surveyed the landscape. I was at the highest point on the dome of heather which sloped down towards the edge of the moor. There was a kind of heat haze around the edges. I could see the tower of the church beneath the trees where the lane was. I couldn’t see the town. It was silent. No bird sang. I drank some water.

  It was the heather that brought the falling man back into my mind. The smell of the heather the roughness of the purple buds the texture all of it spread around me and seemed to raise something and I remembered a man who fell over a man who had some meaning to me. I felt it was a memory. I was young perhaps. He fell and he didn’t rise. Or perhaps he didn’t fall perhaps he jumped but he went down and didn’t come up and that was everything then there was nothing after. I don’t know what this is. Perhaps when we die the world just ends. Perhaps everything stops when we do which means that we are everything. I wondered: what if each of us is everything? What if everything is concentrated in every part of us? All of the essence of everything is in every tiny cell and every particle. So nothing can survive without anything else which means that when one thing dies everything dies and then it is all instantly reborn again in a new form.

  What if we are not all sharing this one world but instead every one of us creates their own world and that is true of everything that is? It is true of you and me and every other human and it is true of every other living animal and every bird and every fish and every tree and every mollusc and every bivalve and every arthropod and every virus and every fungus and every germ floating in the air and all of the rocks too all of the grains within them everything constantly dying and the universe ending with every single death and starting again at precisely the same moment so that there is no time as we think we know time there is only this constant ending and this constant birth?

  Or what if it is all about kindness? What if that is the secret? What if everything is about kindness what if that is the great kō an that the world offers up to us? What if this is the big secret what if this is the answer that once everyone is kind to everyone else and to themselves and to everything that lives even the rocks and the rivers then the world will end and we will be done? Or what if everyone is given just one tiny task in this life what if we come into the world with our own tiny task but we don’t know what it is? Maybe our task is to write a great book or speak a certain word or love a certain person or discover a certain thing or walk a certain street or kill a certain creature or dream a certain dream. What if each one of us has to find their task and then complete it and if we don’t complete it we are born in another form and given another task and everyone and everything will keep being reborn in every form there can ever be and given these tiny tasks to find and complete and only when all of them are done will everything be done. Maybe then all the suffering ends maybe then the game ends and we find out what’s really going on behind the scenes and who the gamemaster is.

  Everything is rising and falling expanding and contracting the universe grows and shrinks a million times every second. Or there are eleven universes all running in parallel and whatever you are doing now you are doing in all of them. Or there are hundreds of these things hundreds of these universes thousands of them rising and falling expanding and contracting beating like great hearts entwined. Sometimes it all falls away and there you are beating with all of the other hearts with every heart in every universe beating and beating. You are a cell in the heart you are part of it and it cannot beat without
you. You are hurtled into the void and then catapulted back towards the beginning again. It takes a billion years and happens a million times a second and here you are and there is the void and it is everything and it is coming for you and it is fine. This is just how it should be. Everything is the same anyway.

  I drank almost all of my water up there on the stone. It was too hot. One bottle wasn’t enough. I still wasn’t hungry. I slid down the stone I felt the roughness of the granite beneath my hands. The stone was warm like it was alive and it comforted me after all the heather. I felt a kinship with these stones. Lying here like abandoned lovers like sleeping elephants like the dead with all of their sadness they comforted me. Everything was so still so silent so white. How long had it been since I had seen another creature? The stones felt like creatures to me. I wanted to throw my arms around them and nobody was watching so I did. I leaned on the biggest stone and I embraced it and it seemed so long since I had been embraced and I wanted to be. I wanted arms around me I wanted to be comforted. I remembered arms around me now I remembered someone who did that and for a second I saw her face and smelt her and saw what was in her eyes for me and then it was gone and all I had was stone. I needed something I could slip into because this was too much now this was all too much. I needed a heart to speak to mine but there was no heart there was only rock. I wanted to stay here but there was nothing here for me and so I had to keep walking.

  It took a few hours to complete the grid. I saw nothing. No evidence of any creature no evidence of anything except heather and one dry stream bed and in the end the footpath that took me back home again. But that was fine. I had completed my first task. Tomorrow I would complete my second.

  In a wood a man rose from a bed of leaves by a pool. They were autumn leaves dead and brown and the man was brown also and covered in hair. There was thick orange fur all over his body. There was a drumming sound in the forest all around him it was the rain the sky had opened up and had woken him from his sleep. He knelt and looked up to the sky. He tilted his head up and opened his mouth to receive the rain. The rain was falling over everything in the world. The surface of the black pool was dancing with it.

  Something was different the next morning. I supposed it was the morning. I felt like I’d slept for a long time. It had been a hard day yesterday. But something was different and when I had climbed out of my sleeping bag and moved over to the table for my morning mugs of water I realised what it was. The air was cooler. It had been so hot and still for as long as I could remember but today it was not so cloying. Through the window I could see that the sky was still a uniform white but I could see something else as well: tiny spots of water on the glass. I looked down at the area of stone floor directly under the hole in the roof and I saw that it was darker than the stone around it and that it glistened.

  I went to the door and opened it and stepped out into the yard. It was still warm but nothing like as hot as it had become recently. And it was raining. There was a drizzle a slight fine silent drizzle almost like a mist descending. I could feel the drops on my skin the tiny drops of water but I couldn’t hear anything. It was so fine such a fine drizzle and it was a joy. Something was happening. The sky was still alive. The ground in the yard was damp and when I ran my fingers across the door handles and the windowsills they were damp too. In the night a gentle rain had begun so gentle that I had not heard or sensed it. I hoped it would continue. I hoped the rain would get harder I hoped there would be a downpour and that everything would be washed away.

  I went back inside feeling light. I realised how heavy I had felt for so long. Since the accident everything had felt like such a burden I had felt like something was clinging to my back but today I could step lightly again. I didn’t know why. I sat down and drank three glasses of water. Today I would walk the second grid. Judging from the map it would be a more interesting walk than the day before. There were a couple of streams to cross and there were some hut circles with a ditch around them. It would mostly still be heather because everything was heather up here but at least something would break up the pattern. And today I would walk with a light step. It was fun. It would be fun. Everything was fun. Why not?

  I packed and set off down the track along the combe. I packed quickly because I was eager to be out in the rain. With my rucksack on my back I stood out in the yard and I spread my hands out and I raised my palms to the sky and I stood there until my muscles began to hurt so badly that I had to lower my arms again. I stood there and let the fine mist fall onto my hands and my exposed forearms and I turned my face up and the rain fell onto it the fine thin rain. The rain was warm like the sky and it was beautiful. It seemed to bring life with it and it brought the lightness that I could now feel inside me.

  I felt like skipping down the track I felt like dancing. I closed the gate and headed down the combe and I tried to skip I tried a merry dance down the track but my left leg would not stand it and I stumbled and fell. I fell onto my back and I lay there and laughed and felt the fine rain falling onto my face. How long had it been since I had laughed? It had been so long. I couldn’t remember ever laughing in my whole life. Perhaps I never had. I lay there for minutes giggling and feeling the water settling on me. Was there any reason I could not lie here all day laughing in the fine rain?

  When the laughter had run its course I lay there feeling empty and light. After a while I thought I should get up. I still had a job to do. I rolled over on my side to push myself up with my arms and I found myself gazing into the mat of grass and plantain and dock that grew alongside the track. I had never paid much attention to grass but now that I looked I could see that there were different kinds growing together entwined. There was a short wiry ferociously dark green kind and there was a kind with a long pale green stem with white seed heads at the end and a shorter kind with what almost looked like bright orange flowers on the top. There was every shade of green there were oval red seeds on tiny white stalks furring out from long stems there were flat blades and serrated needles everything was down here.

  All of these grasses wove into the plantain and the dock and together they made a forest and looking at them from down here I saw them as trees I saw them creating a canopy. This was the whole world down here and I walked past it every day sure that I knew what the world was. But maybe this is where life was really going on. We blunder about with our heads in the clouds with our hearts in outer space and here is life going on amongst the woven grasses and it doesn’t care about us and it will be going on long after we have burnt ourselves out. I could lie here all day and look at this I thought. I could lie here all year and look at this and perhaps if I did that I would learn something because up until now up until this very moment in my life I have never ever learned anything at all.

  Then as I lay there about to begin the laborious process of standing up I heard a noise. It surprised me so much that I started. I was so used to the silence out here now I was so used to the hot white silence. I had seen and heard nothing since my accident except the thing in the lane. Nothing had moved nothing had spoken there had been no sounds at all. And yet now as I lay here in the fine drizzle under the white sky I distinctly heard a sound above me high above me. It was the sound of a bird. A skylark. A skylark singing up above the whiteness somewhere its high song its chatter rising and falling. It lasted maybe ten seconds and then it stopped abruptly and the silence returned. But I felt even lighter then. The sky was alive and something else was singing. Something other than me could still sing in the world.

  I got myself up still feeling light and I followed the path over the moor as I had for days heading towards the designated grid. I felt now like my body was floating with the lightness. I felt happy. Had I felt happy before? I couldn’t remember but this felt like happiness to me. I was light and floating I had seen the grasses and heard the skylark and here I was just walking. Perhaps I would see the thing today. It didn’t feel like it mattered so much now. All I wanted to do was put one foot in front of the other. Per
haps I could just do this forever. Perhaps all my trials were over.

  I was walking over the tops now and I felt my feet through my boots I felt every bump in the ground I felt the roots of the heather through the springy peat. And as I walked as I steadily moved I suddenly realised that I was not the owner of my feet. These were not my feet. They were not an extension of me. They were me. I was this foot and I was this hand I was these fingers I was these eyes. This body was not a vehicle carrying this mind around. Everything was me.

  It is so hard to put into words into these clumsy words that say nothing. But the shift was real and total. I knew that I was not the owner of my body. I was my body. I nearly fell over in surprise. I kept walking and feeling both the feet touching the ground and feeling the knees bend as I moved. But now everything in the world was different. I came up onto the high point of the moor and I saw the lowlands fading off into the haze. Now I was this body everything was me and the sense that my mind lived in my head and that my trunk and limbs served it broke down and kept breaking down. Now I was my body but I was also what my body walked upon. I was the grasses all of the different grasses and I was the peat of the moor and I was the heather and the skylark I had heard and I was the thing in the lane and these were not ideas they were not concepts they were not thoughts this was just how it was. I was everything. Here and now I was everything that was and had been and I was everything to come.

  I stopped walking. I stood still in the middle of the track and I surveyed the landscape around me and I understood that the eyes which did this had lived a million times before. The way I scanned this horizon was the way the horizon had been scanned by my ancestors fifty thousand years ago as they walked the savannahs with spears between their toes. They had made me. I had learned it from them. Everything my body did the way I curled my fingers and bent my elbows the way I turned my head when I heard a sound. I had learned it from them and they had learned it from the apes before them and the apes had learned it from the fish and all of us had come through this together. Everything led up to me and everything I was would lead beyond me there was this great chain and I was a link in it. The past and the future they were nothing they came together and parted again and everything was rising and falling and swirling around everything else.