I wonder what they want me to make.
What does a writer do when his words stop working? I don’t know. All I know is that I am churning inside and everything I knew is windskipping like brown willow leaves in a winter gale. I am afraid and sometimes I am excited. I feel like something is waiting for me, and I don’t know what, but I fear that I do know. I fear that I am being called, and I am taking too long to answer. But who is to say how long it should take?
I don’t know. I don’t know much at the moment. It feels like all the things I was so sure about have dissolved away from me. I don’t even know who I am now. When I came here, I thought I would at least know where I am, but that, too, the longer I look at it, turns out not to be quite true either. The more I look at anything, the more questions I seem to have about it. All the stories I had are dissolving away. None of the scaffolding holds.
All the words I used to have: once they would have closed these paragraphs comfortably on the page. Almost without me thinking about it, they would have offered up a well-wrought conclusion, a rallying cry. They would have rounded-off, tied up, concluded. Words used to hold up my world, to construct it, to protect me from it. Now they are transparent and suddenly fragile. Now, they offer me no comfort at all. Now, they say: giving comfort is not what we do. Not anymore. Now we do something else.
And I ask: what?
And they say: find out.
10.
It’s a Sunday in April and I am at home. I have a whole day to spend outside. We have herbs to plant, and onion sets, and heather. We have beds to dig and grass to cut. Spring is roaring out. Time is pressing.
My nine-year-old daughter, Leela, appears by my side. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ she says. ‘Would you like to come to my stone-carving workshop?’
‘Er,’ I say. ‘Yes, that would be great.’ She leads me to an upturned box in the porch on which lie a selection of scratched stones she has found in the garden. She hands me an awl and a lump of sandstone.
‘How long will it take?’ I ask.
‘About 20 minutes,’ she says.
‘I’ve only got 10,’ I say, instinctively.
‘Oh, that’s OK,’ she says. ‘You can still do something good. You have to decide what you want to carve. Maybe a lady’s face, or maybe Quincy.’
Quincy is our dog. I sit on a stool and begin to carve the dog’s face on the stone. Shit, I think to myself, for the eight-hundredth time. I am a terrible father. The thing that has haunted me throughout my children’s lives has been the remembered moments. We all have them: standout images from our childhood, times, pictures, events, things which sank in, good or bad. But there’s no rhyme or reason to them. You never know what they will take with them into adulthood. Will Leela always remember the time we camped together in the woods by Lough Gill, just yards from Yeats’ Isle of Innisfree, and cooked dinner over a fire? Will she remember us playing vets together in a garden beneath a volcano in Chilean Patagonia? Will she remember us sheltering from the rain in a Cumbrian wood? Or will she remember the time I couldn’t spare 10 minutes because I had to do something which I had told myself was more important than being with her, because it was ‘work,’ and ‘work’ is always more important than living?
Part of my plan, when we came here, was that my newfound rootedness would spread like a slow mist into every other area of my life. My restless energy would be channeled into planting trees, clearing brambles, building treehouses, hacking down long grass, hefting stones and all the other heavy, ongoing work of running a working smallholding. The time I spend in my head, writing and thinking, which in the past had nearly eaten me alive so often, would be balanced by time outside, in the sun and rain, using my hands instead of my brain. I would tame my monkey mind, force myself out from my internal world into the external one, at least for a little while, and this would save me and those around me.
This wasn’t such a bad plan, and it has worked to a degree. There is nothing like setting a rat trap or carrying a bucket full of shit in the rain to force you back into the real stuff of life. But if you have that monkey mind, as I suppose all writers—all humans?— do, this stuff is not going to keep you occupied for very long. The dark truth, which any writer or artist, or indeed reader or music-lover, will know is that the worlds we create inside us are often simply better than the one we are forced to live in. I don’t want this to be true, but it is. I still enjoy carrying buckets of shit in the rain, and I enjoy catching rats too. Everyone’s inner sadist needs a regular, healthy outing. But being here has not calmed me as I hoped it would. It has not saved me and it is not going to, and I have taken too long to understand that.
Here we are, staring into the timeless gulf between ideal and reality. I have come to hate idealists like the one I used to be, as a born-again non-smoker hates the smell of tobacco. Ideals are a pox on humanity: if you have ideals, you will go out into the world as a destroyer. You will always see what doesn’t work rather than what does, you will always be able to leap into the space between things as they are and things as, in your narrow view, they should be. Then you will try to close the space, to heal it, and you will end up either clinically depressed or running a series of death camps, or—the worst possible outcome— both. As any Buddhist master will tell you, repeatedly for several lifetimes, the only way to free yourself from this trap is simply to be. To pay attention. It is what it is, they will say, patiently, as your Western, university-trained mind screams, what it is isn’t good enough! Make it better!
I talked to Jyoti about this. I said: I wanted to be one of these dads who plays with their kids all day, who crawls about on all fours with them riding on his back, who is genial and avuncular and never impatient. I was going to be rooted and stolid and reliable, like an old tree. But I can’t turn my head off. And she said: you were never going to be that kind of dad, if they even exist, so why don’t you stop trying to be one? They love you for who you are. They can see that you live in your head, because everybody can. They know you’re like Uncle Quentin out of The Famous Five. Why did you think that was going to change?
I thought the land was going to change me, I mumbled.
Oh, honestly, she said.
I thought I’d get here and reach a plateau, I said. I thought the journey would be over then, and I could concentrate on just being. Digging in, honing my skills, becoming calmer, wiser, steadier. I thought I’d arrived. But maybe it’s not a plateau after all. Maybe there aren’t ever any plateaus.
The plateau, she said, comes when you’re dead.
11.
I wanted to be a tree, but I am not a tree. I wanted to sing to the forest, but no one ever taught me the words, and I don’t suppose they ever will because there is no one in my world to teach me. Nobody here has known the words for centuries. I was born in those rootless suburbs and they have given me a rootless soul. I am not a tree. I am some kind of slinking animal in the hedgerow. I am a seed on the wind. I am water. I am coming to the rocks at the lip of the fall.
12.
I was writing a book. I usually am. Last winter, I started writing it. It worked for a while, and then it ground to a halt. This is common enough. Books stop and start, they go through rough patches and charmed patches. But this time, something different was happening. I could feel it. There was something missing; some energy. It wasn’t ‘writer’s block,’ because I could still write—here I am, still writing. So what was it? What was happening here?
I realized, after a while, that anything I have ever written in the past which has even approached being any good at all has been written from some place of desperation. It has been written from the edges: from the dark slope of the mountain, not the warmth of the campfire. I have been writing in, not writing out. I have been shouting something, in the expectation that I would never be heard. Now I had to face—I still have to face—a possibility I don’t know what to do with. Maybe I can’t write anything from the campfire. Here, in this settled place, in this comfortable place. Maybe I need to be desper
ate again. Maybe I need to be bare and hungry on the mountain. But what does that mean? What would it look like? Where did the words go, and what do they want? I don’t seem to be able to write anything but questions anymore. See?
Out in the field now, among the poppies and the cornflowers, among the creeping buttercup and the walnut trees smothered by couch grass, under the elders and the daytime moon, something is whispering to me what the headless statue once whispered to Rilke: you must change your life.
Oh, God, I think. Not again.
13.
When did magic disappear? When did stones stop talking? When did birds stop relaying messages to me, and tree spirits stop replying when I left gifts for them in the knots of their trunks which twisted around and reached upward at the same time? That’s what children have that adults don’t. That’s the Garden we can never get back to. Maybe that’s the glimpse we have of the kind of mind that sings those songs to the forest. Sometimes Leela sings to the field or the trees, though she likes to do it in private. She does it less now than she used to. She is on the cusp of losing it. I don’t want her to know it.
The cultures of the Papuan Highlands developed in isolation for tens of thousands of years until the 20th century, when airplanes and empires began the unraveling. The Papuans have suffered decades of colonization, convincing claims of attempted genocide, aggressive Christian evangelism, the pollution, abuse, and theft of their land and all of the other horrors that settled civilizations always inflict on tribal people when they find them, as if they were ashamed of what they had become and wanted to wipe out the evidence that it was still possible to be something else. Patricide, matricide, slaughter of the ancestors. But the Papuans still sing to the forest. We grow out of that when we’re about 10. What are we missing that they can still see? What took the songs away?
Leela and her six-year-old brother Jeevan have an area of our land they call Wildy. It’s a strip of undergrowth, trees, and chaotic unkempt hedgerow that separates our lane from the neighboring field and they live in it, sometimes, when the fancy takes them. Wildy is strewn with old upturned wooden chairs and plastic tubs and bent pans they have been using in some domestic drama. Adults are barred from Wildy; it’s a place where children talk to fairies and birds and trees and the spirits that inhabit them.
When I first got here I strained myself to rediscover the lost magic, to see if I could hear the songs. I thought that maybe— just maybe—if I paid enough attention I could enter the Garden again. It was always a longshot, but I had to try. I listened to the birds a lot—our land is ripe with birdsong—and I watched them. I tried to watch them without naming them, though it went against my intellectual, analytical instincts. I didn’t always succeed, because I can’t resist the impulse to catalog. I’ve been making a list for three years of all the birds that visit our land in the course of the year. Wagtail. Bullfinch. Dunnock. Wren. Collared dove. Robin. Long-tailed tit. Goldfinch. Swift. Swallow. Blackcap. Coal tit. Willow warbler. Sparrowhawk. Fieldfare. Pheasant. Heron. These are the edited highlights.
It’s spring as I write this. A few months back, in February, I got up early most days and walked from the house to my writing cabin in the field before anyone else was up and while it was still dark. Often, as first light appeared, there would be a fat yellow-bellied song thrush on the very top branch of the old elder tree near the cabin, and he would sing, in repeating patterns, the same tune twice, then another, then another. I would stand on the porch and listen and tell myself to give him the correct quality of attention. My kids would just have heard him, reacted, moved on, but I stood there listening rapt while, at the same time, berating myself for not having the kind of spontaneous experience of the thrush’s song that I wanted to have and I felt I ought to be able to have, especially if I was going to write books with thrushes’ songs in them.
The Earth, says the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, wants to be admired by us. Rilke agrees: ‘Everything beckons us to perceive it,’ he tells us, ‘whispers at every turn, Remember me.’ Does the thrush want me to perceive it, to admire it? Does the world want to be remembered? Don’t we all? Why else would anybody write a book?
14.
The land is warming with the approach of summer, and the budding season has begun. The green fire is flashing out from the tree tips, the broccoli is flowering, the grasses are heaving themselves into life again. The air above the field is criss-crossed with traffic patterns of rooks heading for the spruce trees with beaks full of dry couch and whitethorn. It’s time to sit down by the fire with our basket of seeds and plan what to plant this year and where. It’s time to talk about getting hens and how to keep the foxes away from them and how to build a rabbit fence and what varieties of potatoes to get to avoid the blight that killed most of the crop last year.
But instead I have to go away. Because I am not a real farmer I have to make my money in other places. I need the Internet or the Dublin-to-Holyhead ferry and sometimes both to put food on my family’s table. I can only live here without being here sometimes, and although I want to change that I also don’t want to change that. I want to write, not drive tractors to and from the slurry tank. Still, when spring calls me away just as life is roaring out I get resentful. This is the time of year when, more than any other, I find I can sometimes actually be here; can sometimes feel I am close to belonging. I don’t want to leave, which has to be a good sign.
I don’t want to leave, but I have to. When I feel like this, I remind myself that I could instead be sitting at a desk in an office every day doing a job I hate to pay a mortgage on a house I don’t like in a town I never wanted to live in, and that instead I live on a piece of beautiful land and write books for a living and get to teach interesting people sometimes and so I should shut up and check my privilege.
This time around I am teaching a course at a college in Devon. It’s a course I helped to design, about making art in times of crisis. I don’t really want to be here. The people are interesting, the college does good work, two or three years ago I would have been enthused, but something is happening to me or is continuing to happen, the thing that began when I arrived here or was brought into focus by that arrival. Everything is being upended inside me and I don’t know what is happening or why. A chapter in my life is ending and I have been putting off that reality for too long, holding it at arm’s length. But being here, doing this, a thing which I have outlived now, has made it clear that I must run home and jump. Into what? I don’t know. But you never have a choice when the wheel turns like this. You jump, or you will be pushed over the side.
There’s a little outdoor classroom in the woods here. It’s a lovely space, some curved wooden benches surrounded by Scots pines and oaks. My teaching colleague and I sit on two small benches in front of 24 assembled students, who look at us expectantly with their notebooks open. The birds sing, clouds pass above the blue, the air breathes us in. My colleague is talking at length about something or other and I listen to his words flow out of his mouth up into the trees and dissolve in irrelevance. The trees don’t care. The birds aren’t listening. The students are listening, the humans are paying attention, to us the words are connections, they have meaning, but I see suddenly that his words and mine, all the words, are just crackling into the light of the day, spreading like ash, rising like smoke invisible. The concepts, the air.
None of this is real. The Scots pine is real, it is a being, a presence, the birds are real, the solidity of the Earth is real and the words are nothing. Nothing. The words are not alive. The words are not quickened, they do not dance or stagger, they are not inhabited. They are hammered survey stakes, acrylic falsehoods that die in the reality of the place. All humans do is talk. Talk talk talk and out come the sounds and like poetry they change nothing but we talk talk talk anyway and we mistake the sounds for meaning or action, and the trees stand there silently and we just talk. My words do not dance because there is no magic in them, and unless there is magic in them nobody should speak word
s. How would we live if the only words we spoke were as solid as this great giant of a tree that has been standing here for a century? Has there been a culture, a people, for whom that was true?
What if I just shut up?
In the evening, I go to a talk put on at the college by a mythologist from Botswana named Colin Campbell. He grew up amongst the San people and, despite being white, has been a sangoma, a traditional healer, from a young age. He is grey-haired and slight and softly spoken but can hold the silent attention of 50 people for half an hour by telling a story which, in our terms, doesn’t necessarily even make sense. Take a story from a place and drop it into another place and it doesn’t necessarily make sense, at least not at first. Like people, stories don’t always travel well. Nothing belongs everywhere, and some things only belong somewhere. But some stories, when they travel, can spark strange new things in unmeasured hearts.
Colin talks about fire and water, the two elements, the two archetypal forces within us. They turn and dance around each other hourly and daily and their dance makes our life. Fire seeks to evaporate water, water seeks to put out fire, neither triumphs and the dance goes on. Fire is the upward force. It roars out, overcomes, climbs, triumphs, pushes above and beyond. Water is the downward force. It drags you back to places, wants to belong, holds you, spreads you out, tugs you within. In traditional Botswana, says Campbell, men are fire and women are water. When a girl begins to menstruate she is taken down to the river for her initiation, which is in the water. A woman’s blood connects her with, draws her back into, the Earth. The women gather in the river to initiate the girl into the tribe, to bring her into her womanhood, to mingle her body’s blood with the water that flows down to the sea.
Savage Gods Page 3