Beast

by Paul Kingsnorth

  And outside the church where they go to worship God is god humming in the air god who is the air the unmeasurable and strange thing. This god who is not in books and did not live or die and is not a father or a mother and will not be obeyed and will not be denied. god who is the molecules and the air and the trees this forcing light this strange light roaring out. Before words before language before thought before speaking everyone must have been able to see this clear white light. Now it is all clouded. But you can make the cloud fall away or it can fall without you and then you can see again what is underneath the trees the soil the ideas the opinions what was always underneath them. The light has nothing for you it makes you no promises. It is in the small things it is in the tiny things we walk over and past the tiny things that run the world and we never see them because we believe we are running it ourselves and we are walking past to lay our claim on it first. The beetles the bacteria the earthworms the centipedes the viruses the mycelium the seeds lying dormant in the soil waiting for us to burn ourselves out. For the meek shall inherit the earth.

  I was a stranger here I could see it now I was a foreigner an invader an immigrant and they were turning on me. The trees the hedges the beetles the things that live in the soil they were turning on me hissing at me they wanted me out they wanted me gone. The anger inside me had shifted and now it felt like a fear like a great anxiety. I felt all alone in the world I knew there was nothing here for me nothing at all. A bottle of water a walking stick a pair of boots was all I had between me and the trees the grass the gods and the gravestones and they all wanted me gone they were coming for me. This was their world and they would take it back they would take it back from me soon there would be no lane here no church no paths I could see the future and in it was nothing but trees nothing but the things living in the trees and in the soil a great silent green orchestra spread across the whole of the world. I had walked out too far. I had walked to this lonely place and now I was surrounded and they would eat me.

  I had to leave. I had not seen what I came for but I didn’t want to not now. It was ridiculous it was impossible it was nothing. I raised my stiff body up and I began to walk back up the lane towards the farm. I carried myself across the moor as fast as I could but it was not fast I leaned on my stick and my rhythm was awkward and all across the moor I felt there were things in the heather surrounding me coming for me I was being watched some great force was just behind me shadowing me stalking me and I couldn’t turn and look back. I just kept walking with this fear this anxiety inside me I didn’t know what it was but I walked I had to walk and I didn’t look back.

  It was some time in the afternoon when I got back home. The first thing I did was to light a fire. It was still hot but I wanted a fire. I needed something else in the room with me I needed some other life something else that moved I needed a friend out here alone surrounded. I needed a friend and in the dancing of the flames and the warmth of their movement I had something at least that understood me and that I could speak to.

  The next morning was different. I awoke to a sense of trying to hold on. In my sleep I had been moving and trying to hold onto things and there was one more thing to hold onto and I knew that I had to hold onto this because if I couldn’t I would fall and then it was over. I wanted it to be over I wanted to fall because then the struggle would stop and the struggle was so tiring everything was so tiring. But I had to grab onto this thing it was my last chance that was the compulsion I wanted to fall but I had to hang on and I was flying then and I woke.

  I lay there staring at the gaps in the roof and remembering. Everything that had happened yesterday seemed ridiculous. It was clearly ridiculous. The fire was out and the room was warm and outside the window was the whiteness the stillness and the silence and what had been happening? There was no fear now and the fear I had felt yesterday seemed so far away that it was as if someone else had felt it. It was nothing to me. Trees and a church it was nothing to me and there was nothing to feel about it. This morning I felt calm and level and inside my mind I saw a whiteness that matched the colour outside the window. I levered myself out of bed and in my movements as I crossed the room and pulled on my clothes there was a stillness as well. I wasn’t thinking and everything was like crystal. Here I was and out I would go again and that was the way things were and what was there to be afraid of what was there to feel about anything at all?

  I sat at the table and poured a mug of water from the jerry can and drank it slowly. This would be my routine now. I would rise when I woke and dress myself and sit and drink a mug of water and look out of the window at the whiteness and everything would be still. And then I would slowly put on my boots and take my stick and pack my small bag and walk out and I would cross the moor and go to the lane and wait for as long as I needed to. I had all time if time was even passing. This would be my routine until I saw it again. What did I want to see and why? I sat and I drank my water and this wasn’t clear to me but it didn’t seem to matter. Not very much seemed to matter. There was an emptiness all around me and in me. I was sure I cared about a lot of things but I couldn’t think what they were. What was the great work of my life I wondered and was it underway?

  It was a quiet day. Every day was a quiet day now. I walked steadily down the track across the stream up and over the moor. I reached the lane with no expectations. All was still. Today I didn’t enter the churchyard instead I sat outside with my back against the stone wall on the grass verge by the track. I took out my bottle of water and I placed it between my legs in front of me. I put my rucksack on the ground next to me and I folded my hands on my lap and I waited.

  Everything was benign. I remembered the fear I had felt yesterday. I looked across at the same tree I had been looking at then but I couldn’t imagine how it had stirred those feelings in me. The huge whiteness of the sky curled over me like a dome and seemed to sit with me. Nothing would happen here I knew that now I had known that as soon as I had sat down. Nothing would happen here even I would not happen here. I would only sit in the whiteness with nothing around me. But I felt like I was happy to do that all day and maybe all year. It was so still. Nothing flowed through me or around me. Life was nothing and this was how it should be I felt as if this was how it should always have been. I would just sit here.

  I had brought no food because I didn’t have any food I only had water now and anyway I still wasn’t hungry. Food seemed like a form of pollution. I drank water and this was fine. Perhaps I sat there for a couple of hours. I knew I would see nothing and I was happy about it. Nothing was fine. Nothing was good. This was how it was meant to be.

  And then it changed suddenly just as it had changed the day before. I took a swig of water from my bottle and I closed its cap and put it down on the ground before me. When I looked up again I saw nothing that I had not seen before and yet none of it looked the same. This time I wasn’t frightened. Instead I felt despair settling slowly and gently down upon me. There was no panic and no urgency. There was nothing to run from. I accepted what I felt almost immediately. But there it was: a gentle, strong, loving despair enveloping me. I felt like the nature of things was laid quietly out before me like the wares on a market stall. For a moment the world cracked open and I saw myself as the wild creature I was as one caged wild creature among billions as atoms as meat as animal as prey. As another small victim the world would not mourn because the world did not mourn it just went on. The wheel of blood and sperm and death and life kept turning and none of it needed me none of it knew me for there was no me and never had been. I saw the abyss open up and I knew I would be swallowed by it and I knew that everything in my world everything I was and everything I thought and felt and cared about and refused to care about had been carefully constructed only to help me survive any glimpses I might have of this.

  What was all this? Everything was so silent and still and sad. There was nobody here but me no creature no noise and it seemed clear to me in this moment that it was driving me insane. How could i
t not drive me insane? The silent hot white place and everything I had been drifting away on the stream so far that I could no longer see it. I accepted it all. It was fine. I had no desire to change it but at the same time I was clear what was going on. It was horrible. I was so alone. I was so alone and that was all there was and would ever be and there was nothing to be done about that now.

  I got up and I turned and walked to the churchyard gate. I walked down the path and I pushed open the church’s wooden door which was ajar. The building was cool and close and immediately I felt different. The despair seemed to be hanging in the air outside like mist. Inside the building it dissipated. I sat on the very last pew at the back of the church and I held my cold water bottle in my hand like a relic like something that connected me to a world I felt I was floating away from. The whiteness came through the stained glass window at me. To make a window like that. To make this altar and these carvings and these windows to make a spire that points to heaven and to put one in every settlement in the land. What did you have to believe to do that and would it dissolve what was hanging in the air? Did beauty dissolve what was hanging in the air could beauty dissolve anything or was that a lie? Did people make windows like that anymore or did art die with God in the twentieth century? If a tower doesn’t point to heaven why build a tower? If your hands are not folded in prayer what are your hands folded around? As the white light walked through the many colours did it bring the despair with it and would it settle on me again? What did this window tell me as the light came through and this unknown saint rose in red and gold and pointed his staff at me? That there is art and there is god and everything else is a waste product.

  I sat in the pew and I breathed and it was fine. It was all fine. Everything was as it should have been. How could I ever have thought otherwise? I liked churches. Eventually I rose and went back to the door which was still ajar and closed it behind me. Outside the despair was still drifting gently around in the air. This was a waste of time. It was obviously a waste of time to sit here waiting for something which would never come. I didn’t mind that I had wasted my time. I didn’t feel that I had anything better to do. But I didn’t feel like wasting any more of it so I put my pack on my back and headed up again onto the moor.

  On arriving back at the farm the first thing I felt was a strong urge for a drink. But not water. I wanted beer or whisky or wine but of course I had none of these. I filled up the lone mug on the table from the jerry can and drank more water instead. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d wanted a drink. Now I wanted to be drunk. I wanted to be pissed for days. I wanted to fall onto the floor and have visions and wake up sick. I wanted to pick up a dirty woman in a bar and fuck her upside down in a car down some filthy lane. I wanted to smoke weed and fly and curse and sing I wanted to run screaming through neon streets I wanted to sit in dark corners in underground clubs I wanted to puke everywhere and bounce off the walls and go to sleep forever. All of this whiteness all of this silence.

  I drank two more glasses of water and took a number of very deep breaths. It became clear to me what I needed to do. I needed to create a system. A system would lock out the fear and the silence and the despair and the whiteness. I needed a curriculum to follow. This sitting this aimless sitting day by day it was getting me nowhere and there is madness in nowhere. That is where real madness is to be found in the middle of nowhere sitting in the whiteness unthinking that is where it all breaks open. Nobody can survive that. You need to run from that when you see it coming over the hill.

  I would make a plan. I was going to find the creature and I was going to be systematic about it. There was no point in just hanging around where I had once seen it. If there was something if there was some big creature and if it was living around the moor it would be moving about. It would probably have a big range. It must be living somewhere. There would be somewhere it went at night a cave or a barn or a tree or a hole. It probably had a circuit on which it hunted. There were probably places it liked to go at different times of day. It would have habits. I would learn the habits and I would use them to track it down. I would see it and then I would know.

  There were two maps of the moor on the table with the books. I took them from the tabletop and laid them out on the floor so that they fitted together like a jigsaw. On one of the maps I found the church and the lane and I circled them in pencil. Then I started drawing. I sat on the warm stone floor cross-legged with my mug which I filled up at intervals from the jerry can and I measured and drew. Time seemed to sink into the moment as it does when you’re not thinking about it. Time didn’t pass it just coalesced around me like jelly. I had no notion of how long I sat there. It didn’t get darker outside but I hadn’t seen darkness for days. It was light when I went to sleep and light when I woke up and because I had no watch I didn’t know how long I slept for and because I didn’t know I didn’t care. I sat there in the even light with my mug and my pencil and my two maps and I drew.

  When I had finished I had what looked like an uneven pencilled spiderweb connecting the maps. In the centre of the web where the spider would sit were the lane and the church. Around them I had marked a grid comprised of eight mile-square sections. Within each of these squares I had drawn a series of lines which divided them further into smaller areas. Around these eight squares I had marked a further sixteen which I had also crosshatched internally with the same regular lines.

  It was a simple geometrical system and the plan that went alongside it was simple as well. The square in the centre of the map covered the place I had been for the last three days. I had already walked most of this area in going to the lane and coming back again and exploring the fields around. I had satisfied myself that there was nothing there. I didn’t know if the thing I had seen would ever come back there but it was the only place I’d seen it. So I would treat it as the centre of the area to be explored and I would systematically explore the land around it. Each day I would select one of my marked squares and I would walk along the crosshatched lines within it until I had systematically walked the entire area of the square. I would walk slowly and quietly and I would look for any signs of the creature. The next day I would do the next square in the same way.

  In eight days I would have covered an area of nine square miles centred upon the lane. If I had still not seen it again or come across any sign of it by this point I would proceed to the outer circle and explore the next sixteen squares. That would take me just over two weeks. If I’d still not turned up anything I would start again in the centre of the grid where the lane was. This way I would cover an area of twenty-five square miles in slightly less than a month. I would repeat this cycle until I found it.

  This was a good system. This would work. I stood up stumbling slightly and steadied myself on the edge of the table. My left leg was numb again as it so often was when I sat still for too long. My lower back ached. I took another sip of water and looked down at my map. I had no desire for alcohol anymore. The despair had gone. It seemed like a strange mirage now and I couldn’t imagine where it had come from. This would work. I was pleased with this. It was a net that would close around whatever I had seen. It would bring it to the surface so that I could examine it. I would see it again and then I would know. I would start tomorrow.

  The next morning I was in a city. It was boundless it seemed to stretch to all parts of the horizon. It looked like a Third World city it was full of slums all of the buildings were strung together with corrugated iron and plywood and bits of old crate and cardboard and barefoot little black children ran around in the streets laughing and kicking deflated footballs and open sewers ran down the edges of the roads and none of the roads were paved. There were women washing clothes in the river talking together as they worked there were men trudging home over the hill in flip-flops and shorts walking back from some pain they had been paid for. There were skinny dogs with their ribs showing lurking in doorways. The sunlight was blazing down. There was hunger and there was poverty but the place was full
of life people knew what they were hemmed in by and nobody was lying to themselves about what they could be and nobody had come to tell them what they weren’t and so they just lived.

  I was walking through this but nobody saw me. I was an alien here. I came down to a lake and the lake was clear and some boys were jumping naked from a rickety pier into the water screaming with laughter and pulling themselves up again onto the wooden struts their naked black bodies shining in the sun. One of them saw me and pointed and laughed and another one of them hid behind his bigger friends and I walked down to them on the pier and I saw that I was tall and white and angular and covered in cloth and a stranger to my own awkward body and to these children who were at ease in themselves. My pockets were full of money and I wanted to go across the lake but nobody would take payment. Can you help me across the lake I said to the boys and one of them said to me I will teach you to swim sir but you must take those clothes off. And so I took all of my clothes off and I stood there tall and white and pale and hairy amongst these small sleek black boys and the boy I was speaking to said you must jump in there sir and he pointed to the water.