by Mark Boyle
I pick the pencil up because, sore necks and unfulfilled arboreal dreams aside, something still implores me to. I suppose I just have to trust that feeling and to keep informing it with the intellect, the heart and the soul. Moving from laptop to pencil was a big step for me, one that I didn’t think I would be able to make. But the pencil has enabled me to really start enjoying the process of writing. The writing itself is slower, yet somehow I manage to get more done in less time. The pencil has changed how I think, slowed me down, and made my words human again.
If the feeling to keep picking up the pencil does persist a little longer, I tell myself that next time – when I’m more competent – I’ll write entirely with my own pen (quill), ink (ink-cap mushrooms) and paper (birch polypores and dryad’s saddle fungus). But one step at a time, I have to remind myself, over and over and over again.
~
Friday, lunchtime and I’m in the hot tub with Edward Abbey. All 336 pages of him. It’s almost too hot – almost – so I dangle my legs over the sides into the chilly air outside. Yesterday’s warm front (persistent rain) is predictably followed by today’s cold front (sunshine sporadically interrupted by showers). One moment the sky above is blue, glorious, unlimited, and I feel blessed for such a spectacular existence; the next, all is dark, ominous, enclosed, and I feel blessed for such a spectacular existence.
Raindrops appear as hundreds of small, clear spears of bathwater shooting skyward. The road to the south sounds unusually busy for this phase of the day and week, and I remember that it must be the last shopping weekend before Christmas. Like the clouds above me, I know it will blow over soon.
As I lie back, gazing towards the heavens, my thoughts unexpectedly turn morbid. As rain pounds my head, refreshing me, I ponder death.
The death of this thing I think of as me. There will come a time, sooner or later, when I’ll never walk the beach with my mother and father, will never work and eat and drink with people I care about, will no longer experience the world and its breathtaking web of life through these particular eyes and ears, this particular nose and mouth and skin. A hard thought, but an important and inescapable one.
The death of this place I now call home. One day, hopefully after buzzards have gouged out my eyes, our cabin will also return to the land from which it came, leaving no trace that it ever existed. Perhaps someone will build their own dwelling, in the fashion of their own soul, where ours stands now; or, better still, an oak will become ancient here and provide shelter for a thousand different species. A comforting thought.
The death of all things. The sun will eventually burn itself out, leaving nothing, but not as we know it. It’s difficult for my meagre, mediocre mind to grasp the fact that the land under this hot tub will, in a few billion years or so, be no more. Not just that it will be transformed into ocean or desert or glacier, or be populated by creatures I cannot even imagine, but that it will not even exist, gone without a trace of me or them or it.
I notice Packie stutter past in his tractor, white smoke splurting all around, his engine chugging along. He’ll be gone one day, too. Yet the fact that one day he is going to die somehow makes it feel more important, not less, to take good care of him between now and that inevitable moment.
~
Standing on the white sandy beach of the Great Blasket again, it’s hard not to feel pensive as I look towards the abandoned village above. Stone cabins that once homed laughter, folklore, tears, prayer, song, gossip, feasts, grief, hunger, warmth, tiredness, despair, friendship and hope – the whole gamut of human experience – now sit silent, lonesome, fossils of an extinct people.
But as I turn back towards the wild, indifferent expanse of the Sound, it strikes me that the Great Blasket may now be more inhabited by life than during any other period over the last three hundred years.
Basking in the warm midday sun, a colony of seals – perhaps a couple of hundred strong – are enjoying post-human life on An Trá Bhán (the White Strand), free from the fear of being clubbed to death. As I walk up the hill towards An Dún, I meet a couple of researchers, on their hands and knees, making audio recordings of the Manx shearwater, who nest on the island at night. Storm petrels are breeding in their thousands. Looking at the warrens, I don’t suppose the rabbits are mourning the lack of children releasing ferrets down their holes. This uninhabited rock is now home to black guillemots, puffins, seagulls and razorbills, all living in abodes humbler still than small stone cottages. There are probably a thousand other creatures, too, if only I had the eyes to see them. While small human settlements have come and gone, these creatures are still here, stubbornly staying put, living on the cliff edge, making their living from the ocean, or stealing chips from tourists on their own self-propelled trips to Dingle.
As I walk back towards Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s old house, it crosses my mind that perhaps this small insignificant outcrop may be better off without human civilisation, at least until we are prepared to learn how to live in dialogue with all things wild once again. And maybe its role for now is a bit like ‘the red dust and burnt cliffs and the lonely sky’ of Edward Abbey’s Utahan desert: a sanctuary of solitude for those willing to brave the place and, through doing so, come face to face with themselves and the rocks and crashing waves and raw elements of life.
With that, my mind drifts back to Knockmoyle. Will it go the same way? Hard to say. Maybe the small farms which comprise it will merge into bigger and bigger mechanised operations run by fewer and fewer people. Or maybe, as small family farms give way under the tyranny of urbanisation, industrialisation and rapacious capitalism, something else will happen. Maybe wildlife, wetlands and woodlands will return to the financially unviable green fields of grass and rush and create thriving local economies for those myriad creatures which we, in our foolishness, forgot and forgot and kept forgetting. Or maybe a miracle will occur, as miracles sometimes do, and the young men and women who moved away will become tired of being farmed in cities, and instead long for something new, something old, something a bit wilder than getting pissed in a chain bar on a Friday night, and in doing so reinvigorate places like this with youth and song and dance.
However things unfold, the wheel of life will keep turning, regardless of whether we keep in tow with it or not. Still, I can’t help but feel Knockmoyle wouldn’t be the same without Packie.
~
Sometimes, when I catch myself emptying a bucket of my own shit, butchering a deer, shifting manure in the pissing rain, or doing any of the thousand other small things which make up my life – things that, at other times, would have seemed hare-brained, unethical, absurd – a feeling of ‘how the hell did I get here?’ comes over me. This was never part of the programme. Like everyone, I had dreams of success and the good life, but somewhere along the track, a place I can’t quite put my finger on, the definition of those words began to change, and my life with it.
People ask me all the time if I will continue to live in this way for the rest of my days. No more than the next person, I cannot see what the future holds. But after ten years of letting go of the trappings of modern life, I feel like I have only just begun to scratch the surface. There are depths to the human experience that I still can’t even imagine, buried as they are under the layers of ambition, plastic and comfort that we’ve all been cloaked in, through no fault of our own, from the moment we were born. If anything, I want to explore these depths further, to see what treasures hide below. I certainly have no longing, as I write these words, to fall back into a way of being which sells comfort for the price of everything it is to be human.
If it’s possible – and I’m not convinced at all that it is – I want to take off the manufactured lens of industrial civilisation and see the world through my own eyes, on its own terms. At our most fundamental level we’re animals, yet I’ve still very little idea of what that really means. Many years ago, I decided that instead of spending my life making a living, I wanted to make living my life. That feels as true to me today as it
did then. For as Patrick Kavanagh said, I no longer wish to hawk my horse, my soul, to the highest bidder. I’ve tasted the grass ‘on the south side of ditches’, and I’ve found it to be sweeter than that on the farms.
At a talk I gave a few weeks ago, someone asked me about what I will do when I get old. I said that, like everyone, I will die. I have no desire to be the man who made it safely to death, wearing an oxygen mask at eighty-eight, afraid of letting go, terrified of what might come next. Our relationship with death profoundly changes our relationship with life. It’s all too easy to live a long, unhealthy life without having ever felt truly alive.
What will happen between this present moment and having my bones licked clean by a ravenous wild animal? As I say, I don’t know, as I’m no longer blessed with the certainties of youth. The more I explore, the less I seem to know, and I’m starting to like it that way. If someone comes along and convinces me that all of the impedimenta of contemporary society – the screens, the engines, the switches – are actually life-enriching, life-affirming, life-giving, then I’ll change tack and start sailing towards that shore, to see if they’re onto something. But for now, I’m going to try to stay in the only place that makes sense to me: the bloody, sublime, mucky, sweaty, breathtaking world of life.
What I can say, right now, is that I’ve fifty willow cuttings to put in the ground, and that if I don’t want to feel hungry tomorrow, I’d do well to get off to the river, to see if I cannot better understand it.
The Complexities of Simplicity
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.
Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace (2002)
Before I go, I should say a few words about one confusing little word: simple.
My ways are often described, sometimes by myself, as ‘the simple life’. Interpreted one way, it is entirely misleading, as my life – my livelihood – is far from simple. It is actually quite complex, but is made up of a thousand small, simple things. In comparison, my old life in the city was quite simple, but was made up of a thousand small, complex things. The innumerable technologies of industrial civilisation are now so complex they make the lives of ordinary people simple.
Too simple. I, for one, got bored doing the same thing day in, day out, using complex technologies which I suspected made those who manufactured them bored too. That’s partially why I rejected them. With all the switches, buttons, websites, vehicles, devices, entertainment, apps, power tools, gizmos, service providers, comforts, conveniences and necessities surrounding me, I found there was almost nothing left for me to do for myself; except, that is, the one thing that earned me the money to acquire all the other things. So, as Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in Human Scale, my wish became ‘to complexify, not simplify’.
But while the technologies and bureaucracies of industrial society are complex, the society itself isn’t. The agricultural scientist Kenneth Dahlberg described it best when he said: ‘Industrial societies are “complicated” (like a clock which has many interlocking parts but only a few “species” – gears, springs, bearings etc.) . . . [They] are not complex.’ Sale added in Human Scale that: ‘It is our modern economy that is simple: whole nations given over to a single crop, cities to a single industry, farms to a single culture, factories to a single product, people to a single job, jobs to a single motion, motion to a single purpose.’ Compared to industrial civilisation, a thriving wilderness is remarkably complex.
Interpreted another way, there is a timeless simplicity about my life. I have found that, when you peel off the plastic that industrial society vacuum-packs around you, what remains – your real needs – could not be simpler. Fresh air. Clean water. Real food. Companionship. Warmth, earned from wood chopped with your own hands using a convivial tool whose only input is care. There’s no extravagance, no clutter, no unnecessary complications. Nothing to buy, nothing to be. No frills, no bills. Only the raw ingredients of life, to be dealt with immediately and directly, with no middlemen to complicate and confuse the matter.
Simple. But complex.
All of this talk of complexity and simplicity is starting to hurt my head. I notice the chickens have put themselves in and are waiting for me to close the door – like all domesticates, they’ve grown used to being looked after by somebody else – and I’ve a few of those other thousand things to get on top of too, so I had best get on.
~
Kirsty has come to visit. It’s only a flying visit, but I intend to savour the moments life grants me from here on. My love for her has not diminished one iota, even if its expression is now taking another form. Our friendship will never be in question. Having her here has emphasised how any way of life, no matter how rewarding, can feel lacking without love, without that daily reminder to recognise the beauty in everything and everyone around you.
As I am about to put my pencil down, perhaps for a long time, I notice her across the cabin, crunching up dried herbs, storing them, making labels for each one individually, all in her own fashion. She is so absorbed in it that she has no idea that I am watching her. The complexities of simplicity haven’t always been easy for her, just as they will not always be for anyone from our generation who grew up with too much comfort and convenience. I know this too well myself. But with time, the complexities do become beautiful, and she has become a more complex person in the most beautiful sense, even though I will no longer be the one to appreciate it on a daily basis. She’s a natural herbalist; natural, because she loves it.
She finally notices me watching her, and smiles. I could want for nothing more than what I have in this moment. Its brevity is irrelevant. I go over to her, and when I’ve got her off guard I tickle her under the arms until she is lying on the floor and laughing in that uncontrollable way that I know no other person in the world laughs. When she can’t take it any more I let her up, and we go about storing selfheal, yarrow and silverweed together. Those other jobs can wait until tomorrow.
Postscript
A couple of months after finishing this book, every word of which was written and rewritten by hand, it started to become increasingly clear to me that, if it were ever to see the light of day, it was going to have to be typed up. Publishers, my agent, even a few friends – they were all saying the same thing. Throughout the writing process, I had always held out faint hope that there might be another way, that these words could be presented in the hand-crafted form of the person who had thought them. But deep down I always knew that, for various understandable reasons, they were going to have to be turned into the easily readable, easily editable, easily publishable form of type.
Still, I stubbornly resisted for a time. That was until I realised that the situation was simply asking another variation on the same question that has followed me since I gave up money a decade earlier. From the moment I decided to reject much of what civilisation has to offer, I’ve had two options. One was to ‘go native’, as they say, and let industrial society go to hell (where, as I understand it, it seems hell-bent on going anyway). The main criticism of this approach has always been that it’s a form of selfish escapism, and that in doing so you’re helping no one but yourself. Though I disagree with both the logic and practical experience of such criticism, it has never been a course of action that I’ve felt comfortable with myself.
The other option has been to live the life I want to lead, but to do so as part of the society whose ways I seek to question. The main criticism of this approach is hypocrisy, as it inevitably means engaging in the ways of that same society, ways which are often diametrically opposed to your own. Yet there is something about this approach, something beyond the kind of hardline ideology that I’m all too often prone to, that feels true to me. Even so, I’ve never really understood why hypocrisy has such a bad reputation anyway. As David Fleming wrote in L
ean Logic, ‘There is no reason why he [the hypocrite] should not argue for standards better than he manages to achieve in his own life; in fact, it would be worrying if his ideals were not better than the way he lives.’
As you are reading this, it’s obvious that I chose the hypocrite approach. Once I agreed to have it typed up, my options forked off again. It became a choice between getting someone else to type it up for me – Wendell Berry’s wife types up his words on a Royal Standard typewriter, bought in 1956 – or to type it up myself. As I knew no one for whom such a task would have been a labour of love, I took the difficult decision to make a one-off, as-brief-as-possible exception to my tech-free life. I typed it up myself.
I had, and still have, big reservations about that decision. I wonder if there really was no other way, if the decision was coming from the right place, or if I should have just binned the manuscript and taken the first option instead. Either way, I won’t try to defend the decision. It was a conscious choice, weighed up, and in the end made for reasons that I felt were more important than trying to be right or some misplaced notion of ideological purity. Walt Whitman understood this sentiment when, in his poem ‘Song of Myself’, he wrote:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes).
As I said in the prologue, which was hand-written long before this postscript, these days I prefer to explore the complexities of both living and communicating this older way of life, in the modern world, than to pretend that the situation is always black-and-white. It’s not. It never has been.