Savage Gods Read online

  If a woman’s water draws her back to the Earth, a man’s fire tears him away from it. Women are born attached to the Earth, but men are born apart from it, and this makes men more dangerous. A man’s initiation, his rite of passage from boyhood to manhood, is external. The men disappear for months or even years into the mountains or the bush, and there they encounter death. Some will not come back from the journey, but those who do will have been drawn into the adult world by this meeting with death. They are taken away to learn to come back again, and when they come back, and the women come back, fire meets water and the dance begins.

  If the sexes are divided by the elements, says Campbell, so are the two halves of our lives, all of us, men and women. The first half of our lives is fire, the second water. In our young lives we rage away from the Earth, from each other, from our families and our given roles, from strictures, rules, and places. We are pulled by ambition, desire, excitement, greed, the seeking of newness, the need to break away. The second half of our lives is water: it is a dropping back towards Earth, a making of families, a sometimes painful understanding of self, a rooting in place, a coming home. The transition between the two phases, from young to old, youth to midlife, is a process of cooling fire, of moving into water time. Where Campbell comes from, this means that the soul, or the pysche, or the true self, is calling us home. Sometimes we resist the call, hold on tightly to the fire, believe that without the fire we are dead. In fact, without the fire we are just beginning to live again, only as something subtly new.

  Sitting now in this little wood-paneled room, listening to the softly spoken man, I recognize myself. I recognize my turn away, my retreat to my new place, the simplicities I was seeking and maybe why the simplicities are not enough either. Nothing is ever enough if you go out there looking. Hearing this, I understand why I often wake up in the morning now wondering why I bother to do anything at all. I understand why these days I can’t write, or increasingly even talk, about politics, why I shy away from expressing strong opinions in a way that would once have seemed unfathomable to me. I understand why I am sometimes overcome by an unruly desire to be a hermit or a monk, why I sabotage myself the minute I begin to do anything that feels like ambition. I’m being pulled down into the water. It is not my fire time. Not anymore.

  As he finishes talking, Campbell wonders whether humanity might be experiencing a midlife crisis. We have been fire, we have built and controlled and expanded and triumphed. Now we look around at our triumph and suddenly we feel we can’t understand the meaning of any of it. What was it for? What was the point? We look at the changing climate and the fallen trees and the plastic in the oceans and the anomie of our phone-drugged children and something tells us we are disconnected but we don’t know what to do with this feeling. We need to move, are called to move, from fire to water, but there is nobody holding this ritual for us, nobody to organize our trip to the river or the mountain. And so we stumble on alone, and our smartphone apps and robots that can order a curry for us from the Internet and toy drones for Christmas and regular doses of antidepressants and celebrity TV—all the great swirling ocean of bullshit we have surrounded ourselves with in lieu of life, in lieu of living—this is our civilization’s equivalent of a middle-aged executive buying a red sports car and sleeping with his secretary.

  But you get through a midlife crisis, don’t you? Or you should. You could. If you handle it well, you mature and you learn. You move from fire into water. You let go and the water pulls you down over the falls and you end up nowhere near either where you started or where you thought you would go. The fall is as inevitable for us as it is for rain. By clinging to fire, we get burnt. By falling into water, we float.

  Or, we drown.

  Where Campbell grew up in Southern Africa, when the adolescent boys went out for their rite of passage into the wild places, they either came back a man or they didn’t come back at all. Perhaps we are all together now, heading for the bush. Perhaps it is time. But I only want to bow my head and be silent. I only want, now, to be swimming away.

  15.

  This business of silence: it has been crawling towards me for years, like an injured man begging for help. I said earlier that I felt called. I often feel called now. Sometimes I think I am being called by God, and that seems embarrassing to write down, and self-regarding. Still, others have felt the same. R. S. Thomas wrote of the function of silence in searching for what he called, in his poem of the same name, ‘The Presence’:

  It has the universe

  to be abroad in.

  There is nothing I can do

  but fill myself with my own

  silence, hoping it will approach

  like a wild creature to drink

  there, or perhaps like Narcissus

  to linger a moment over its transparent face.

  If it’s not God, perhaps it is my true self I can hear, whatever that means. Perhaps it is the water in me. Perhaps it is my psyche or my soul. Perhaps part of my unconscious mind is telling part of my conscious mind, for its own good, what it needs to do to survive, which right now is to shut up. To pay attention. To reconsider. I don’t know. I’m not a theologian or a physician or a psychiatrist. I’m a writer, which means that I aim myself at all of those things but fall short at all of them most of the time. Writers fall short at everything except creating sentences. This is what we really like to do: put words in an order which can conjure something real but unseen in the air around us, and around you when you read what we have put down. Really, this business of sentences is the only thing we can do and the only thing that motivates us. All the rest—the stories, the characters, the metaphors, the morals and the messages—they come later, with varying degrees of success. Everything is built on the sentences. We just love sentences, and we can’t get proper jobs.

  The silence: it has been crawling at me, and I have been walking fast from it, afraid. I grew up thinking that words, sentences, metaphors, were what I did, that my work was to get better at them until I could blow away the world and myself, and get the girls in the process. But for years they have been surrounded by this creeping silence, which has soaked towards them like an ink spill and threatened their very definition. Every time I turn around there it is, a little closer now.

  The silence tells me that the words are a problem. That the talking is a problem. That what I need is stillness. It was the silence that took me from England to Ireland, from the town to the country. It was the silence that made me close down my social media accounts, withdraw more and more from the Internet, stop reading the news or writing about it. It was the silence that pulled me away, inward, pulled me down like the rain into the ocean. I didn’t know what was going on at all. And now the silence, sometimes, tells me that the journey will not be complete until these words are silent too. That’s the bit that frightens me. That’s the bit I hold off with verve and fear. The silence says: now is not the time for words. The silence says: pay attention.

  Can you write from silence? Could I write a silent book, consisting of nothing but blank pages? John Cage did something similar with music. Some people thought he was ludicrous, others profound, but Cage knew that silence itself was a quality, not simply a gap between noises. He first realized this on entering a soundproof booth in a recording studio and discovering that it was not, as he had expected, devoid of sounds. ‘I heard two sounds, one high and one low,’ he recounted. ‘When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.’ Silence had its own soundscape. It was not an absence of something; rather, it was a different quality of something. It had a personality. It was.

  Where I live, I can hear the wind, the birdsong, sometimes a tractor, often the rain; and I can hear the silence, in between and around and creeping through all of these things. In the city I heard cars and people, sometimes airplanes. I heard the twittering and chirping of civilization. But no silence, not even in the deepest hour o
f the night. We are building a world in which silence is a crime: a waste of something. An empty thing which must be filled. Ours is a world of metaphors and sentences, unpunctuated, flowing on faster and faster, building in rhythm and urgency until they crash, fatally, into the last page of the book.

  I don’t know what this is. But even when I try to write myself away from it, it comes back around. It is after me. It has nearly caught me. Do you see?

  16.

  I feel like I am being broken open by something, cracked like a nut, split in the sun and left to dry. I feel like there is a hole in the sky through which the words have always poured down into me, and that if the correct ceremonies are not directed to the correct gods the hole will close up and that will be the end. I feel like that would be the end of me. I feel like writing is an act of service, or should be, and that you must decide who or what you are going to serve. I feel like that decision is sometimes taken out of your hands. I feel that is happening to me right now.

  I feel like a person is a process, not a thing. I feel like the hole in the sky shifts with the cloud banks and the winds, and that you have to follow it. I feel that there is no plateau, ever. I feel that it is good to spend some time by the campfire, that we all need it, that I need it, but that I have to retreat back up the mountain after a while. I feel like I can’t take too much warmth. I feel like I have no choice at all in any of this.

  I feel that words are savage gods and that in the end, however well you serve them, they will eat you alive.

  17.

  A commissioning editor writes to me. She has heard that I have a new book coming out. Would I like to write an opinion piece for her newspaper to promote it? I tell her that I try not to have opinions anymore. She explains that the opinions don’t have to be political. In fact, they have too many of those. Everyone has political opinions. I could write about something else if I liked—something domestic, for example, or artistic. Anything, really, as long as it has ‘a strong line of argument.’

  A strong line of argument. Ten years ago, even five, I’d have leapt at the offer. I could argue about anything, everything, and I did. I was that kind of writer, that kind of person, for a long while, for too long. I thought the world could be patterned and marked and laid out labeled on a table. I thought I could argue my way around the gap between the ideal and the reality.

  I thought I could make it all fit if I could just muster enough cleverness.

  But the world is not short of cleverness and not much is right. Now I know this is a god my words refuse to serve. No more cleverness. No more opinions. Opinions are easy to come by. Stillness is the really hard work. Not knowing is the hardest work of all. Even writing those two words fills me with anxiety. Not knowing. Not knowing. Not knowing anything at all. But that’s where we all find ourselves, most of the time. We just won’t admit it.

  ‘Can we remain unmoving?’ asks Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck. ‘Can we keep our mouths shut until the right action or the right word arises by itself? Most of the time, there’s no harm in doing nothing. Most of what we do doesn’t make much difference, anyway; we just think it does.’

  Can I keep my mouth shut? I’ve never even asked that question before.

  Now: is this why the silence is coming for me? Because my writing, for so long, has been a struggle, a battle to the death between a poet and an evangelist, and that I will the poet onwards, but the evangelist has too often come out on top? Perhaps the evangelist can be smothered with the silence. Or perhaps that’s idiotic: perhaps fire needs water, perhaps poet and evangelist must work together or else there would be too much fire or too much water in these words.

  I don’t know about that, but I know about this: I can’t write about politics or ideas anymore. I can’t write in theories, I can’t draw out grand concepts until they are stretched so painfully thin that they snap. I can’t tell you how to live. Not a line of it, not a word.

  Free thinker! Do you think you are the only thinker on this earth in which life blazes inside all things? Your liberty does what it wishes with the powers it controls, but when you gather to plan, the universe is not there.1

  Once I had a thousand feelings and I tried to pretend they were thoughts. Now I have somewhere to belong to but I still feel lost, and I don’t know what that means. Can words, can writing, bore a hole through this dimness? Sometimes, more often each day, they seem like a veiling, not a revelation.

  1“Golden Lines,” Gérard de Nerval, translated by Robert Bly

  18.

  What is writing? It is the basis of civilization, or one of them. The others are agriculture, cities, war, and government. Once you have agriculture, you need to count—to keep a tally of how much grain you’ve grown, how many cattle are in your herd, how much tax you have to pay to the newly powerful rulers growing fat on your surplus and building armies with the resulting income. The first written accounts are just that—accounts, on clay tablets. But this kind of writing, the kind I am doing now, this baring, this strange persuasion: what is it? This kind of stuff is not a direct reporting of external realities, it is the representation of internal experience. But what is it for? Why write it down? Am I trying to direct your thoughts here, or mine? I have been doing this all of my adult life, and I have never asked this question. It has seemed enough to feel something strongly and then rush to get it on paper. Some passion will descend, sometimes at the most awkward moments, some sentence will make itself known, something will become clear, and if at that moment you don’t have a notebook you are doomed. I don’t usually have a notebook. I find myself squatting on station platforms, scribbling on the back of receipts. I find myself at parties, running to an upstairs bedroom and rifling through strangers’ drawers for a pen. I find myself in a green wood in summer, sifting through my raincoat for any scrap, any stub. I am woefully unprepared, always, for what comes.

  Now I ask myself why I do this and I don’t know what the answer is. I have never had, before now, to even ask. I had never thought I would. And here’s my fear, I think, here’s what is perhaps at the root of my loss of confidence in these black symbols on white paper: I worry that all words are lies. That all abstractions are figments, and argumentative words, the construction of positions, the worst lies of all. Maybe the form builds the shape of the lies. Californian poet Robinson Jeffers explained why he only wrote poetry by saying, ‘I can tell lies in prose.’ What if all prose is a lie? What if all words are as fake as a scratch on a clay tablet denoting a cow? It is not a cow. It is a scratch. It will never be anything other than a scratch. To see the real cow, you have to go outside.

  19.

  The cultural ecologist David Abram, in his book The Spell of the Sensuous, claims to have identified the moment when written language jumped the boundary from rootedness to abstraction. The building blocks of Semitic written language—the aleph-beth—he explains, were a series of characters each based on a consonant in spoken language. There were 22 of them, and with their advent ‘a new distance opens between human culture and the rest of nature.’ Why? Because, unlike every written language before it (Egyptian hieroglyphics perhaps being the best-known example) the aleph-beth—which later became, via the Greeks, our own alphabet—was made up of written characters which no longer directly represented an actual thing out in the real world.

  The original letter A, writes Abram, may once have represented the shape of an ox’s head; O may have been an eye; Q the back end and tail of a monkey. But once the Semites got hold of them, turned them into abstract symbols and wrote them down—with the Greeks later finishing the job—the link between culture and nature was finally lost. Written language was no longer visually tied to the world of physical, real, naturally occurring things. Letters were now only marks, signifying nothing but their own internal meaning.

  These gestures on parchment could not be used to sing to a forest, only to speak to other people. Human language now pointed to nothing but itself. It was a code which only other humans could interpret, and
it formed an auditory loop, like a guitar held too close to an amp, forever issuing screeching feedback into our minds.

  20.

  ‘In the middle of the journey of our life,’ writes Dante, in the very first lines of Inferno, ‘I found myself in a dark wood, where the straight path had been lost.’

  I think I have walked into some wood, and lost sight of my words in the dimness. I thought I knew what words were for and how to use them. But I thought I knew a lot of things and suddenly, now, in the last year perhaps, none of them seem to matter at all. Where did my strong political views go? I used to know how the world ought to work. I used to know what I wanted to say, to think, to write. Now I don’t know why I would ever have thought that. I used to know that living on a smallholding with my family would be the end of a journey, a contentment. I used to think, or pretend to think, that a racing, restless soul could be stilled by grass and trees and the daily work of being. But whatever pushes my words out into the world is not still or calm. That small animal never sleeps and it never will. And I am tired from wrestling with it for so long. I am so tired now.

  When I reached the plateau, there was no view of the landscape around and beneath. Instead there was this dark wood. There was no wood on the map I was carrying.

  A reader once emailed me about my novel The Wake, in which pagan gods and broken Anglo-Saxon warriors converse for 300 pages in a language I made up for the occasion. The email was so good that I kept it. oh my fucking god paul kingsnorth, it began, promisingly and all in lower case. the wake is quite the deepest darkest wood to wander in. so disorientating. writing it must have led you to some strange strange places indeed. i can barely imagine spending the day wrangling that beast and then going down to make dinner for the kids.