It would be. That’s the stuff of a good human life, and I want it, but with conditions. I want to be in a place, but I want to be able, simultaneously, to write my way out of it. When I was younger, writing was my form of escape. To escape from everything the world loaded onto me, to go somewhere else, to be free there. To run upstairs, away from the family gathering or the family argument, to sit in my bedroom and scribble. All my young writing, before I was in my mid-30s, was about escape. Since then it’s been about what the Ancient Greeks called Nostos—homecoming. I thought that was a simple pattern and a natural one. Young man is fire, older man is water. It’s the oldest of old patterns. I was starting to enjoy it, until the cracks appeared.
But it occurs to me now that wanting to root yourself somewhere can also be a form of escape. As a young man, running away from stability and solidity towards adventure and excitement is pretty standard behavior, but you can’t keep it up forever. I thought that the next step was to settle down and dig in and gain some contentment from stillness and rootedness. But when I look back at how I have written about this over the last several years I can see only now—and how did it take me this long?—that wanting to be rooted is also a search for escape, only this time a different kind of escape. Wanting a stable home on an unchanging plot of land is a search for stability, and that in turn is a search for freedom from the whirling, unmoored, unpredictable reality of living inside a single human mind that cannot and will not ever stop seeking, asking questions, racing across the skies like the winds race. I wanted, perhaps more than is healthy, for this place to protect me. I wanted this plot to be the answer. And it wasn’t, because if there is an answer—if there is ever an answer to anything—it is never to be found outside.
Wanting to be pulled down to earth, into water, is a desire to escape from the fire. It is a desire no longer to be burned by the world, or by yourself. But what if you can never escape the fire?
What if you are the fire?
Nostos is the theme of all 24 books of Homer’s The Odyssey. And when Odysseus finally arrives back in Ithaca, after 20 years of exile, after fighting off the Cyclops and the witch-goddess Circe, after being pursued and wrecked by Poseidon, after negotiating Scylla and Charybdis, after losing so many men, after being shipwrecked and drugged and seduced and nearly destroyed—when he finally arrives back to the green shores of Ithaca,
then the real work starts.
36.
This urge to run and at the same time to belong: how does it fit together? Only in the way that all the impulses contained within our individual skins fit together, which is to say, they don’t. Really, the notion of ‘fitting together’ is almost comical. Nothing we do fits with anything else, if by ‘fits’ we mean ‘makes up some kind of cohesive whole.’ Being a grown-up is the business of integrating our chaotic multitudes. We all want 17 contradictory things at once, and only puritans and ideologues have ever believed otherwise.
So I can tell myself that I am still looking for my lost indigeneity, and it’s not an untrue story, but the reality of this drive is probably only to be found down at the bottom of that boiling lake, where my conscious mind can never go. Perhaps I just have to ride it out, like the early Christian monks rode out the winter storms in their tiny stone oratories on the Atlantic seaboard of this old green island. But when do you cling to the rock, and when do you let go and trust the weather? What does deliverance look like?
Place. Culture. Identity. Belonging. They are entwined things, beautiful things, powerful, deep, and necessary things, toxic things, limiting things, primitive things. I have long believed they are the stock at the base of the human soup, but what is the price I pay for believing things like that? At its worst, it is a head always turned to the past, where this phantom ‘belonging’ might once have been found: to the lost Garden, the primitivist Eden where all was well. But there is no past, never, and no future, only this ongoing moment, only this now, and if I can’t belong to it here, now, I can’t belong to anything.
The search is the thing and the search is the danger, the search is what makes you ludicrous if you never find and never learn; learn that the desire to belong and the refusal to belong might be entwined too. Learn that you can get stuck in the search. Patrick Kavanagh, peasant poet of Monaghan, knew the price well:
Culture is always something that was,
Something pedants can measure,
Skull of bard, thigh of chief,
Depth of dried-up river.
Shall we be thus for ever?
Shall we be thus for ever?
Kavanagh’s poiesis was a process of shedding skins, of casting off personas, of dropping notions and ideas and poses and beliefs until he was, by the end of his life, stripped down to bare soil. He began as a poet in 1930s Ireland by hymning his rural peasant upbringing for an urbane Dublin audience. Later, in reaction to their comfortable applause—for Kavanagh, too, couldn’t abide comfort or acceptance for long—he took to angrily deconstructing that same upbringing, using his poetry to rub his readers’ noses in the hardship of rural life, most famously in his famine-poem The Great Hunger.
The hungry fiend
Screams the apocalypse of clay
In every corner of this land.
But he didn’t stop there. In stripping away the Romance of the soil, he found himself reacting against the poetic nationalism which was still so predominant across Ireland. Kavanagh set himself up in opposition to the poetic vision of W. B. Yeats, he of the grand house and the Ascendancy and the faeries and the ‘indomitable Irishry.’ Kavanagh opposed Yeats’ nationalism with his own poetic project: parochialism. Nationalism, he said, was false and totalizing: the Irish nation was a constructed political fiction and literary ‘Irishness’ was thus ‘a form of anti-art.’
Kavanagh’s parochialism offered instead a celebration of a proud local particularity. A parochial writer, he said, was ‘never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish.’ Poetic reality, all lived reality, was to be found under the poet’s feet. All else was fiction or grandstanding. If you couldn’t see it or really know it, you shouldn’t write about it. One small piece of earth: that was all a man needed, and all a poet needed too. It had ever been thus. ‘I made the Iliad from such a local row,’ he has Homer say in one of his poems. ‘Gods make their own importance.’
But Kavanagh couldn’t settle onto his plateau either. His parochialism might have been a good place for a poet to raise a flag, a sound and distinctive and marketable manifesto to build a career on, but he didn’t stop moving even when he reached the dark wood. Soon he had grown dissatisfied with parochialism too, dissatisfied with his need to identify stances and projects and positions. Poets, he concluded, and artists in general, should avoid positions and manifestoes the same way they avoid gainful employment. Polemicism, to Kavanagh, was now the enemy of art. In that mood, he repudiated The Great Hunger, still his most famous poem, which he now saw as a politicized, and therefore dishonest, piece of writing. ‘A true poet is selfish and implacable,’ he declared. ‘A poet merely states the position and does not care whether his words change anything or not.’
Kavanagh knew that by rejecting what he referred to as ‘the tragic thing’—the poetry of rural misery and hardship, the story that a certain audience wanted to be told—he was potentially committing commercial and critical suicide. He knew what people wanted from him, and what he represented to them. ‘But I lost my messianic compulsion,’ he explained. ‘I sat on the bank of the Grand Canal in the summer of 1955 and let the water lap idly on the shores of my mind. My purpose in life was to have no purpose.’
I wonder what that feels like. To have no purpose. I can see the attraction. Sometimes I would like to stop giving a shit about anything. I would like to stop work on all my construction projects. I would like to retire. I would love to be a historyless person, a placeless person, unclaimed by the past, by the skulls and thighs, and by the future, by the causes and factions. No place, no name, n
o home, no past, no future. That’s freedom.
But isn’t it also death?
37.
The weight of running, the weight of staying, maybe they balance out in the end. I wonder if they are like weights on each side of a balance. I wonder if to encompass, to contain, both is as normal as the sea. Why would I imagine that the landscape inside me would be smooth and level and manageable like some suburban lawn and not heaving with ragged, unending conflict like a torrent in a forest gully, bright with ever-coming rain?
Wanting to run, wanting to stay—are they waves in the same ocean? Or, as Galway Kinnell sees them, the two movements of a windscreen wiper—run /stay / run / stay. You are not the first and will not be the last who will never be able to choose:
The windshield wipers wipe, homesickness one way, wanderlust the other, back and forth.
This happened to your father and to you, Galway—sick to stay, longing to come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over.
38.
In the Kavanagh-versus-Yeats battle, I try to remain neutral. I like having them both in my life and on my side. Yeats appeals to my Romantic side, which is not really a side, more of a core. He speaks to the side of me which paints big pictures, which sets out notions, which listens to the winds and sees spirits in the hedges. Kavanagh appeals to my anti-messianic aspect, the wanderer, the kicker-against-everything, the soul that drifts like the clouds and sticks to nothing at all.
My inner Kavanagh regularly battles with my inner Yeats. My inner Kavanagh is bloody-minded and self-destructive. It wants to strip away the world’s delusions and my own, detach from all notions, be joyful, have fun and do good work and screw the rest. My inner Yeats wants to go hunting for wandering Aengus in the Burren at dusk, prefers the inner flame to the outer ashes and is constantly disappointed that his imagined world is nothing like the real one.
Coming here has been a good lesson in the limits of Romanticism, and that has been good for me. It’s easy to romanticize farming until you live among farmers, just as it’s easy to romanticize nature until you have to feed yourself. Once you have to clear the rats from your compost heap and the slugs from your raised beds, once you have to protect your young apples from starlings and your newly-planted asparagus from rooks, once you have to build a 200-yard fence to keep the fluffy bunnies away from your beans, then you begin to identify less with Peter Rabbit and more with Mr McGregor. I have found that I actively enjoy excavating this side of myself. It’s the side of me that has to make a living and feed my kids, even if rabbits and starlings get in the way. It’s the side of me that hangs around in the farm supply shop nodding approvingly at rat traps and thinking about buying a shotgun. My Romantic side flowers and roars out when I spend a lot of time with words. The more time I spend building fences and topping docks, the more Yeats retreats into his tower. Did he ever build a fence? I don’t know, but I doubt it.
But I love Yeats, all the more so because he is increasingly as unfashionable as Lawrence amongst the apostles of techno-conformity, and for many of the same reasons. Yeats is an anti-Machine poet, a man tuned to the old mysteries. A Machine age, dominated by those who can most loudly express their aggressive commitment to a totalizing progress, can do nothing but mock him. I need Yeats in my life, and I need Kavanagh too, for balance. I need R. S. Thomas for my dose of dark Welsh mysticism, Dylan Thomas for alcoholic visions, Edward Thomas for nostalgic English pastoral. I need Neruda and Dickinson, Wordsworth and Rilke, Szymborska and Graves, all squabbling away inside me as I net the asparagus bed against the rooks and the blackbirds.
Words, words, words. But beneath the symbols, something stirs.
39.
For the first 20 years of my life, my primary influence—or, rather, my most dominating and direct influence—was a selfmade father who channeled me in the same direction he had channeled himself, which is to say in the direction of somebody who never stopped pushing towards goals, somebody who had something to escape from, somebody for whom movement was not a means to an end but simply an end. I was brought up to push beyond, never to look down, never to stop moving.
For the next 20 years of my life, I took this ongoing movement and applied it to the entire world. As a kid, I’d felt most at peace on mountains, in woods, in fields—away from the town, the house, the ongoing movement and all of the pressure that went with the ongoing movement. I’d loved animals and birds and the still of soft-flowing streams. Then I went to university, I discovered environmental activism, my family strictures fell away, I met people with dreadlocks who hated The System and could show me how to chain myself to things to stop green and peaceful places like the ones I had been formed by being bulldozed for houses and roads. You start with the houses and roads and then you start to think about the things that power the houses and roads and the forces that create the need for them and before you know it you’re against capitalism, climate change, the entire industrial economy and everything humans have ever done since they discovered fire or planted seeds or dug the first seam of coal.
At this point, the world is still as simple as it was when my dad taught me that there were winners and losers and I had to choose which I would be, only this time there are Earth Killers and Earth Protectors and which one are you, whose side are you on? And all of this is exciting and true and real and necessary and now the planet, the world, everything, needs to be saved, by me and a few true others and this is urgent, it must happen now, there is no time to lose, it must happen now and
and
and it is impossible.
The resulting collapse of will and hope is a necessary stage in the journey towards maturity, I think now, and I’m sure the old stories would have something to say about it. Still, it hurts. I think it hurt me for years longer than I admitted it. For years, I wrote about this collapse, tried to dig into the feelings that welled up from it, tried to explore the meaning of living in a world whose doom is delineated in parts per million of carbon and glacial melt and extinction rates. It consumed me for years, but it was a heavy weight to carry; heavier than I would admit to. All that darkness. It was a strange kind of literary therapy. And the work turned into grief work, it turned into growth work, it turned into a burden, in the end, and it sat on my shoulders and it weighed me down and I didn’t even know it. And then one day, one day a few months ago, the day I began writing this book, the day I sat up until 2 a.m. in a college bedroom far from home, beginning this book before I even knew what I was beginning— that day, suddenly, for no reason that I have yet been able to understand, all the weight just slid away.
40.
If I believed for too long that the world was controllable—that we could perfect it if we all just worked hard enough—it was an idea I got from my father; the primary idea he drove into me as a child. It is an idea that can serve if you remember it is just that—an idea. If you mistake the map for the territory, though—if you start to believe that reality will bend to your will if you just grip it hard enough—then you are asking for trouble.
My dad was the kind of man who was brought up like this by his dad, who was also that kind of man, I think. There are too many men like this in the world. He was the kind of man whose own father made it clear to him from a young age that he was a failure who would never amount to anything. He was the kind of man who spent the next 40 years advancing up the ladder from apprentice to company director to prove his dad wrong but who, I think, must always have felt like a scared child somewhere inside and who dealt with this by treating everyone else in the world like children also. He walked through the world carving a sharp path. Everyone would fall before him. Everyone would obey him, especially his family, and when they didn’t there would be hell to pay. The explosions that resulted when any of us—especially my mum—did not follow his instructions are some of my most reliable childhood memories. Duck, or run for cover: these were your choices.
This is a partial picture, and therefore an unfair one. If a dozen people live inside me, if a h
undred do, then the same would have been true for him. He could be kind, and he could be fun. He spent time with his children and supported his family. He did the things dads are supposed to do, or some of them. He tried.
But underneath everything, always, was this rage and this need for control. I idolized my dad as a small boy, because that’s what small boys do. Then, at some later stage, probably as a young teenager, after years of exposure to his controlling aggression, I started to look at him the way Bruce Springsteen looked at his father in his song Independence Day, and I made the same vow: they ain’t gonna do to me what I watched them do to you.
Them? My dad had found his place in the world of business, a world which matched his own outlook on life and justified it: you were strong or weak, you won or lost and you had to make sure you were on the right side of the fence. My dad was always on the right side of the fence, the side in which he was a winner. In my dad’s newfound world, in which he came of age as Thatcherism swept all before it, everything came second to profit, to setting targets and meeting them, and this brought out the worst in him and dissolved the best.
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