by Mark Boyle
That’s the theory. But theory is one thing. Practically trying to extricate yourself from clock-time is something entirely different.
I have no watch, no phone, no clock. But I’m out chopping wood when the postman drives past. That means it’s 9:10 a.m., more or less. My mind knows this. Packie strolls down the bóithrín, takes a right turn in the direction of his sister’s house where, every day – Saturdays excluded – he has lunch. That means it’s 1:55 p.m. Previously I took great pride in knowing what clock-time it was from looking at the position of the sun, but now that knowledge comes back to haunt me. I have this inexplicable urge to spend just one day of my life seeing things as they really are, without reference to numbers or man-made concepts or anthropomorphisms or any human-ascribed qualities. Even one minute. And with that thought I realise just how far I still have to go.
~
Wash night. Sometimes it happens three times a week, sometimes only once, depending on what I’m doing.
It’s a clear January night, the air outside cool with a razor-sharp breeze coming in from the north. I take off down the bóithrín with a couple of demijohns to collect water from the spring. It’s a new moon, and I can barely see my nose, but my ears lead me to the source of flowing water, and the unmistakeable whirr of a bottle filling up tells me when the demijohns are full.
Back at the cabin, I light the fire, get the pot on the boil, and bring the bathtub in from outdoors, where it hangs on the spruce cladding. It’s set in front of the fire, and into it goes a round wash bowl which is used to mix boiling water with cold. Depending on what body parts I’m washing, I’m either kneeling in the bathtub or hunkered over the wash bowl, splashing around or using a flannel.
It takes over an hour, and it’s not a relaxing, soothing hot soak. It certainly isn’t sexy or romantic. I’ve plans for a wood-fired hot tub outside, which has the potential to be both sexy and romantic, but for now, needs must.
Feeling fresh, I sit back in front of the fire and get out my book. Beside me, the cat licks herself all over before going out for a night wander, after which she’ll no doubt be the perpetrator of crimes that no one will even notice tomorrow.
~
There is something quietly reassuring about a well-stacked woodshed. Henry David Thoreau, who went to live in the woods – because, as Lars Mytting noted, ‘modern American society had become too hectic for him (that’s right, in 1845)’ – once wrote that ‘after all our discoveries and inventions no man will go past a pile of wood’. I’m not convinced that this sentiment still holds as strong today, but I can certainly relate to it, and find myself prone to episodes of woodpile-envy as I walk past the harvest of another person’s axe. A good woodpile suggests that I’m prepared. Therefore I’m never fully content until the following winter’s firewood is in, ideally by the end of February.
The forest this morning feels calm and at peace with itself. All I can hear is a chorus of melodious birdsong – territorial claims, flirtations, warnings and conversations in birdspeak – along with the whinnying of an impatient horse off in the distance and the sound of my crosscut saw chipping its way through the years of a spruce. The air is full with the smell of citrus as my saw bursts bubbles of pine resin. A neighbouring robin stays in close attendance, surely expecting food.
As I cut through one log, the bark rips off the wood and exposes an entire tribe of woodlice. Their young fall into the dense jungle of the forest floor, while the old scurry around, their world ripped apart by a phenomenon so big they will never understand the nature of it. For them it is an apocalypse, their young dead or lost, their home destroyed, all broken. Whether it is an act of terrorism or a natural disaster seems to be of no interest to one woodlouse next to my foot. She is hell-bent on survival, looking for her young among the arboreal rubble.
~
A friend tells me that he once saw a 1970s German bumper sticker that said ‘Everyone wants to go back to Eden, but no one wants to go on foot.’ I want to walk. Eden doesn’t exist, never has, but what is life if not the walk towards it?
~
I bump into a friend in a nearby village. I haven’t seen him in a while, despite the fact that we live within cycling distance (18 kilometres) of each other and that he’s one of my favourite people. We go for a pint, and after a few more than planned he tells me that he hasn’t been calling over so much because of my views on the world. He disagrees with some, while others, he says, hold a mirror up to parts of himself that he feels guilty about. He says he doesn’t mean for such things to get in the way, but they do. I had no idea, as I do my best to not talk politics anymore, especially over a pint. I assumed he had been busy. The thought that it may have been for ideological reasons never even entered my head. It’s not an easy thought, but I’m glad I know.
As we finish our pints, I promise him that I’ll call round and give him a hand in his garden within the next week, and he says he’ll do the same. We both know how much more fun weeding and transplanting seedlings are when you do it with friends.
~
I arrive back from the woods for lunch to find a frozen deerskin lying outside my door. There’s a note from Conor, a local carpenter, saying that he’s never going to get around to using it and that there will be many more where that came from later in the year.
I’ve no fridge or freezer, and the skin is thawing out in this unusually mild January weather, so I spread it out on a 15-centimetre-thick spruce pole and get to work. Scraping flesh from the skin, out in the drizzling rain in the back of beyond, the twenty-two-year-old business graduate in me is wondering how the hell I arrived at this point in my life. To be fair, the thirty-seven-year-old vegan and animal rights activist in me is wondering precisely the same thing too.
~
A few weeks before I was set to reject industrial technologies, the Guardian got in touch to see if I would be interested in writing a column about the decision, and my experiences of doing so. I agreed, but I was aware that it would pose challenges that editors of international newspapers haven’t had to deal with for a long, long time. The media world is now very much a digital one, built on speed, social media, twenty-four-hour news, devices, multimedia and all sorts of other things no longer at my disposal.
To my surprise, the editor there was accommodating and understanding. I get the sense he’s even intrigued to see how it all works, and once worked. Our conversations went something like this:
– The articles are going to have to be hand-written.
– I hadn’t thought about that. Okay, of course.
– I’ll not be able to take photographs either . . .
– Oh, that could be a problem.
– . . . but my girlfriend would be happy to illustrate the column instead.
– Interesting, that could work nicely.
– I won’t be able to comment on the online version of the articles.
– Again, I hadn’t thought about that. We do like journalistic engagement, but it’s not a problem. I’ll choose a few representative comments from each article and forward them on to you when I reply.
I post him the first article, and with that my control over the process ends. I have to trust that he won’t make any significant edits, as editors are often prone to do. I’ll never get to read the article, online or in print. I’ll never know how many people ‘liked’ it or shared it. Which is exactly the way it should be. For as soon as journalism becomes a popularity contest – rewarding sensationalism, groupthink and deceit over honest exploration of complex matters – people and places lose, and those who need to be held to account win. Win, that is, for a short-sighted moment.
Soon I receive a letter from the editor, along with hand-written letters people have sent in and a small sample of hand-picked comments from the online edition.
I start to read the comments pages. People are calling me all sorts of things, as predicted. Luddite. Smelly hippy. Middle-class, privileged white man. Misanthrope. Idiot. There are also a couple of thoughtfu
l critiques, most of which I might have pre-empted if I hadn’t been limited to twelve hundred words. I understand where all of the criticisms are coming from, as at various points in my life I could have written any of them myself, so I feel no ill will towards those who wrote them. Some I even agree with.
I open the letters. They come with real names and addresses, effort, and the unique style of the writer. There’s a thoughtfulness about each one. Some are supportive, some are curious, some are critical. All are friendly. Most tell me that it’s the first letter they’ve hand-written in years, and that they’re really enjoying writing it.
The editor has asked me if I can respond to a selection of the comments. I think about it for a while, until Wendell Berry’s words, in his poem ‘A Standing Ground’, come to my mind:
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
The time for red berries is still six months away, but there is cider to be made.
~
When I managed an organic food company in Bristol, in England’s West Country, my life was full of keys. House keys, bike keys, a whole other set of keys for work. I never really thought about it at first, but as time passed they slowly came to bother me. I didn’t want to live in a place where everything had to be locked, and I wondered why I had chosen to live among people whom I clearly didn’t trust. I sometimes thought about whether I owned the things I locked up, or if they were slowly starting to own me. Yet out of necessity – I had six bikes stolen in a three month period, five of which had been locked – I would have to carry around a keyring of jingling reminders of a way of life that I was beginning to doubt.
Ten years later, out for a walk, I realise that I’ve absolutely nothing in my pockets. People sometimes suggest to me that I lock the cabin while I’m out. I usually laugh and ask them to look around and tell me what they think could be worth stealing. My wooden mug? My carving knife? The artefacts which dwell in it are only valuable to me.
Sometimes my old ways kick in and I consider getting myself a bike lock, but don’t. I know that something of greater value to me would be lost if I did. By resisting that urge, I find myself spending less time in places where I feel a lock would be appropriate.
A minor adjunct to this is that I no longer have to spend time looking for keys. I wouldn’t bother mentioning this at all if it weren’t for the techno-utopians of the transhumanism movement, who have taken a wholly different approach to the ‘problem’ of lost keys. According to Mark O’Connell, author of To Be a Machine, transhumanists – who, simply put, argue that our bodies are a ‘suboptimal substrate’ for our minds, which would be better off cased in machines (through mind uploading and other means) – cite the £250 million worth of time which British people annually ‘waste’ looking for keys as a sort of symbolic justification for what they call ‘human enhancement’ – words that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1930s Germany – through such things as human implants and smart drugs.
That such a figure is derived from an assumption that every moment of our lives should have a financial valuation seems to be the least worrying aspect of the whole thing. The more worrying aspect is that many of the heads of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech companies (some of whom, apparently, want be the heads-in-a-jar of Big Tech companies after they die) are powerful and wealthy transhumanists, and that they and others are pumping billions of dollars into a future for us as cyborgs. Those involved include PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Google’s Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil and its former CEO Eric Schmidt, now technical advisor to its parent company Alphabet. The latter has said, ‘Eventually, you’ll have an implant, where if you just think about a fact, it will tell you the answer.’
I wonder who is going to be programming these implants, and what their answers will be.
Now that I think of it, though, we’re only one step away from that point anyway. As O’Connell points out, our lives are ‘increasingly under the influence of unseen algorithms, whose creators effectively control what version of the news we read, what we buy, what information we consume, even the romantic relationships we end up having. Schmidt’s chip will simply mean we don’t have to bother typing it into the search engine he runs any more. That way Google can know every single thing you think. Those who write the algorithms will rule the world. Perhaps they already do.
~
Packie has an old keg of Guinness at the side of his house. It has been here longer than me, and longer still. He has no idea how it got there, which considering it is entirely empty, I’m not surprised about. A few years ago he asked me if I had any use for it. I didn’t, but Kirsty has just told me that she is missing having a hot cup of tea in the morning – no electric kettle or gas cooker – and so I decide to take him up on the offer and make a rocket stove out of it.
Making sure it is unpressurised, I cut a hole in its side and top and fix an elbowed flue pipe through its centre, finishing a few centimetres from the top. I insulate it with a natural material called vermiculite, which I found lying around in the shed, and with that we have an outdoor cooker for the times when it makes little sense to light a fire inside.
Rocket stoves are efficient. A handful of twigs is enough to boil a kettle, within minutes. The downside is that it has only one hob, which means that vegetables in the summer are usually eaten raw or steamed over a pot of potatoes. No bad thing.
I place the rocket stove on a cut of cordwood in our fire-hut, next to a box of dry twigs. The next day, at dawn, I see Kirsty wrapped up in woollens on a bench next to the new cooker, with a slight waft of smoke sifting up through the surrounding willow and shiny-green holly. There’s an icy bite coming in on the north breeze, but she looks content, and I remember how much I admire her.
~
While I want my outdoors to be as wild and rugged as it wants to be, I prefer my indoors to be clean, tidy, calm and in order. Surprisingly, many wild animals are the same. I would go as far as to argue that most wild animals are entirely domestic in that they belong to a place; that is, their home. Domestication, in its truest sense, does not imply a lack of wildness. Domestication is an issue of control – of being controlled, and of trying to control others. One tends to follow the other, as we search for balance and attempt to wrestle back some semblance of control over our lives. I’ve yet to meet a truly wild person – a self-willed person not under the sway of mankind’s opinions and its society – who has shown any desire to control others. The extent to which you are controlled by others is the extent of your domestication. It is the extent of your civilisation.
It’s early, and Kirsty has the rocket stove roaring already, making the day’s meal from the vegetable garden and the morning’s tea – sage, lemon balm, chamomile, horsetail, mint, vervain – from herbs she dried last autumn. While the tea is brewing, I decide to clean the cabin. It’s only one room, so nothing arduous. I sweep the floor with a wooden stick whose end is tied with a dried plant called broom (hence the alternative name for a brush). I clean the surfaces with water, and use the waste water for the house plants. I’ve not used sprays, detergents or even natural cleaners for over ten years, during which time I’ve also not seen a doctor. Some people use vinegar for cleaning – we make ours from apples – but I prefer to drink it and maintain my health from the inside out.
The cleaning is done just in time for tea. Kirsty is wrapped up in a blanket, and we sit together in silence.
~
After almost twenty-five years off, this morning I began fishing again from the shore of Lough Atorick, a nearby lake hidden from all but locals among a stand of spruce and expanses of bog. I was fishing for pike, but caught nothing; except, that is, for a small tyre which, for a split second, I thought was a monstrous fish. No such luck. Someone must have come to the conclusion that this idyllic lake was the best place to dump it, or the cheapest at least. I later find out that Lough Atorick is one of the few major lakes in the area without pike in it. The
journey home is long. My friend Paul Kingsnorth, a writer and smallholder who lives a few kilometres up the road, tells me that I should write The Vegan Guide to Fishing, a step-by-step guide to always coming home empty-handed.
A local fisherman offers some advice. He says I’ll need a boat if I am to have any joy in Lough Atorick. One of the couples in the farmhouse, Elise and Jorne, are experienced sailors and boat-builders. In 2006, Jorne set up a company called Fairtransport with two fellow captains in the Netherlands. Fairtransport ships cargo – including its own rum, coffee and chocolate, which has been fairly traded with small producers – from the Caribbean to Europe, by sail only.
It’s certainly not a get rich quick plan, as it’s almost impossible to compete with the gargantuan cargo ships and the advantages which cheap fossil fuels and scale confer. To ship a bottle of rum with one of the behemoths costs roughly one pence. On one of Jorne’s sailing boats it’s more like one pound. And instead of taking days, it takes months. Despite these competitive disadvantages, some businesses are only too enthusiastic to ship with Fairtransport, so it continues to struggle and fight and survive.
But while I’m standing, hungry, by the shore of Lough Atorick, Elise and Jorne are back in the Dutch port of Den Helder, fixing up their houseboat, making it seaworthy to sail over here to the west coast of Ireland. That will take months, so any dreams I have of building a currach with them are on hold, for now at least.
~
I was born in the year the Pope came to Ireland, May 1979. I was given the names Mark Joseph John by my parents, and would later take the name Luke at my confirmation. This was Ireland pre-Father Ted. My surname, Boyle, is quite common in Ballyshannon, the oldest town in Ireland and the place where I grew up. A coastal town, its green rolling hills are separated from the Atlantic Ocean by miles of beach, home to some of the best surfing spots in the world, a fact few of us knew back then. In the 1980s we were glad to have a decent pair of shoes, let alone a surfboard.
My father, Josie Boyle, often told me that the River Erne, which flows through Ballyshannon into the Atlantic, was one of the best salmon rivers in Europe when he was a child. It was so wide it needed a fourteen-arch bridge. Against much local opposition, the Erne was dammed – and therefore damned – in 1952, to create hydro-electricity and jobs, or so the locals were told. After 1952 it needed only a one-arch bridge. Jonathan Bardon, author of A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes, recalled: