Читать книгу Savage Gods - Paul Kingsnorth - Страница 11

1.

Writers are lost people.

Nobody would write a book if they weren’t lost. Nobody would write a book if they were not in search of paradise, and nobody would be in search of paradise unless they believed it might exist somewhere, which means out there, which means just beyond my reach. Writers can see paradise, but can never touch it. Writers want to belong to a place that is just beyond their reach, because if they were to reach the place they would have to do the hard work of being in it. Writers don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone, and they do not want to. They are driven by some severance and none of them understands it. Not just writers. Painters. Musicians. Artists. Art is the search for intact things in a world in which all things are broken.

That paragraph was dishonest. I am going to rewrite it.

Here goes.

I am a lost person. I wouldn’t write books if I wasn’t lost. I wouldn’t write anything at all if I wasn’t in search of paradise, and I wouldn’t be in search of paradise if I didn’t need it; if I didn’t think I would be less lost if I were to find it. So I write to find it… but no, not that either, because I am nearing middle-age now and I know there is nothing to find. I know now that my paradise is not in a cave on a South Sea island or in the montane rainforests of Borneo where the gibbons call or in a finca in Patagonia or down the side streets of Mexico City, in a blue house with yellow doors and shutters that the sun comes through and wakes me, and orange trees. There is no paradise out there, so I write to create my paradise on paper or on this blank, flat screen, but something in me always sabotages it and turns it dark. So then I write to reorder the world so that paradise might look possible again even for a moment, for someone. I don’t belong anywhere, or to anyone. I am driven by some severance and I don’t understand it.

That’s better.

I am sitting in a field in the west of Ireland. It is a long, thin field, grass and dock and plantain and ground ivy, hedged in with thorn and sycamore and elder. The air is primaveral. The field is impacted with thin plastic coils, each about two feet long, pointing up to the sky, about a hundred of them. It’s as if something up there has been throwing darts at me. I sit among the coils. Each one encloses a young tree which I planted this winter with my wife and my two young children. This is our field.

I thought that if I had a field then I would feel less lost. I thought that if I had some land I would belong somewhere. And sometimes I feel it has started to happen. Sometimes I think the place is looking out at me, curious. He’s been here for a while. What’s he up to? Other times I sit in the field, in the circle of Scots pines we have planted on the highest point and I feel I am not here at all. This is my field, but it doesn’t feel like mine. What could it ever feel like to own a piece of ground? I have never felt like I really owned anything. If you don’t believe you really exist, you can’t believe you own anything. Sometimes I can sit in the field, like I am sitting here now, and feel like I am floating on air and through it and on into empty space.

2.

This field: it belongs to us, to me and my wife, because we paid for it and we have a piece of paper lodged with a lawyer somewhere that proves it. But my lifetime will flicker out and this field will still be here, as it was before I came. I am passing through this field like the heron sometimes passes above it and foxes come through every night and red-tailed bumbles drone past on their way to the hedgebank petals. I am here now, and then I will be gone again.

So the field does not belong to me, really. Do I belong to the field? Probably not that either. I would like to. But I have only been on this land for three years. I have only been in the country for three years. I am a blow-in, as we are called in these parts. You can’t just turn up in a place and claim it. A place needs to claim you. People belong across two axes: time and space. My neighbors’ names are on the tombstones ’round here, and mine is not. How much does that matter? It is not everything, I think, but neither is it nothing. Money whips us around like a tornado, money and capital, greed and ambition and hunger and power, they uproot people and scatter them about and we all keep our heads down as the Machine passes through, drizzling us across the landscapes of the world, breaking the link between people and place and time, demanding our labor and our gratitude, hypnotizing us with its white light, transforming us into eaters, consumers of experience and consumers of place, players of games, servants.

Is displacement good? Is it good to be lost and far from home, even if you are still at home? Are we all lost and far from home? I think I could build an argument around that. I think the world is lost and far from home, and that all the people flooding across borders everywhere, from village to city, from country to country, fleeing the hardship or chasing the money, dug up by the Machine and dumped on the concrete, working to keep the wheels turning and to keep us all from being able to belong anywhere ever again—well, what do I think about that? What do I think, really?

No. I am going to avoid building any arguments. I am going to refuse to stake a claim, to build a case and then defend it. The minute you circle the wagons you are vulnerable. What if you didn’t even want to defend that territory? What if it was not worth dying for? Everyone is picking fights out there. In the streets at night, on the feeds when they should be working, in 140 characters with borrowed opinions and impossible levels of anger. I can’t do it, not anymore. It’s all wasted energy, the flaring of a billion daytime candles. Why light them? What do they illuminate?

I felt far from home even when I was young and at home. Now I have come to a foreign country to make a new home because I could not make a home in my own country, because in my own country a small house and a field is beyond the means of anyone who does not earn a lot of money or who refuses to get into debt to chase a dream. I think there is something wrong with this. But I like being here, and now, if I go back to my home country I miss my new home. I feel that something in this new home—the place itself, the work we have put in, the trees we have planted—is softly calling me back.

Sometimes.

But there are other times, and I have only recently allowed myself to really see them. These other times, I think to myself: I came here to belong somewhere. I came here, at last, to have a home. I wandered the world driven by this severance, thinking I needed a home, thinking that the work of being in a place would still my unquiet mind. Now I have a home, and I like it. I like planting trees, building walls, collecting eggs from my hens. I like scything down the grass and pitchforking the hay. I like splitting logs, I like the sunset over the field, I like the silence and the birdsong. I like building up, slowly, a wildlife haven and a family haven. I would rather be here than anywhere else. I appreciate the gift of it.

But my mind, and the fire that was long ago set beneath, it remains unquiet. There is some small, insistent animal in me, still restless. Did I tell myself that life was a climb up steep cliffs to a green plateau, and is it not that? Did I think that being here would be enough? What if it isn’t enough? What if I want to belong precisely because I can’t? What if the things I thought were anchoring me were only stories, which blow away when the wind changes? What happens when the wind changes? What happens when the animal escapes?

What happens when your stories don’t work anymore? Your words?

3.

I had a plan. I always have a plan. Without a plan, I am lost and fumbling. It’s a skill, making plans like this, containing your life and direction within them, a skill that can get you to places you always wanted to be, a skill that can get you out ahead of others who don’t have plans, who don’t have a direction. Ha ha, you think, as you sail by, look at me! Look at my plan! I am in control of my life! I know how to sail! Usually you think this right before you hit a squall and end up in the sea, clinging to a plank of splintered wood. You are not as good a sailor as you thought you were.

That’s the trap. A plan can become, in an eye-blink, a cage arrayed around you like swords in a tarot deck. Sometimes you find that your plan is so good that you can’t escape from it. You get to where you wanted to be, and there is nothing else there. Only you, suddenly lonely and with no way back. I inherited my compulsion for plan-making from my father, whose need for control eventually killed him, so I should really have learned my lesson. But lessons don’t work like that, do they? Not for me, anyway. I don’t think I have ever learned a lesson in my life. I don’t watch somebody make a mistake and conclude, well, I’ll make sure I don’t do that, then. We pretend that we can learn lessons like this because the alternative is to face the music: to accept that most of what we do in our human lives is driven by some deep, old compulsion we can neither understand nor control, and that when it comes upon us, all we can do is hold on to the wrecked boat and pray. Or laugh, depending on our personalities.

I had a plan. The plan was to settle, to have some land, to root myself and my family. To escape from the city, to escape from the traps. To grow our own food, educate our own kids, draw our own water, plant our own fuel. To be closer to nature and further from the Machine. To be freer, to be more in control. To escape and, at the same time, to belong. To learn things I didn’t know anything about but wanted to, because I felt they’d make me a better, rounder adult person: planting trees, keeping hens, managing woodland, carpentry, wiring, building, all the small skills required to run a few acres of land and to be part of it. On top of that, to bring up our young children at home. And on top of that, to write books: truer books than I had ever written before. To write something great, something real, something so intense that nobody could read it without dimming the lights first.

It’s good to be ambitious. Or is it? I don’t even know anymore.

We—my wife, myself, our two young children—moved to this small townland in Ireland when I was 41 years old. Our house is on a small rise, on good sandy loam, a few miles from the River Shannon, which divides the east of this island from the west. We are in the west of the country, just, which means we are in the Romantic bit. The house is a little two-bedroom concrete cottage—can you have a concrete cottage?—built—poured—in the 1950s, to replace an older stone-and-thatch affair. The history of Ireland is a history of people escaping just as soon as they could from the tiny, picturesque, damp, cramped, white-wash-and-thatch cottages which people from the rest of the world still associate with Ireland.

Our house is small and a bit damp. It is not surrounded by breathtaking mountain scenery or sweeping white beaches, because we could never afford to live anywhere like that. It is quite an ordinary little place—modest compared to many new rural homes—which suits me somehow, because I feel I am quite an ordinary person, and I could never live in a big house. The land around it is gentle: crooked fields, still owned by small farmers, home to beef cows, a few sheep, the odd goat, and occasionally a strip of wheat or barley. The fields are divided by hedges of thorn, elder, oak, ash, sycamore, lime, under which streams run and past which old lanes wind. It is a pleasant, unspectacular, nooky, modest sort of landscape. It is my home, though I am still a stranger in it.

We moved here from a small Cumbrian market town where we had lived for five years, though I’m not from there either. Where am I from? I was born in Worcester, lived in Malvern until I was two or three—I don’t remember it—then moved to the suburbs of northwest London, near to where both my parents had grown up. When I was 11 we moved to High Wycombe, an ugly town in Buckinghamshire which had been an attractive town in Buckinghamshire before the 1960s got hold of it. Then we moved to a small village near Bath, in the west country, the kind of village with no farmers left in it. When I was 18 I went to university in Oxford. Then I moved to London. Then back to Oxford. Then to Cumbria. Now to Ireland. Meanwhile, my parents had moved to Surrey, then to Cyprus where my nan, a Greek Cypriot from Famagusta, had met my granddad in the war. When my dad died in Cyprus, my mum moved back to England: to Yorkshire, then to Cheshire. My two brothers are currently in Reading and Warrington. We’re not done yet. See how we run.

My wife, Jyoti, had it different. She was born in Darlington, but from a young age she lived in Leamington Spa, in the same 1930s semi where her mum still lives. Her mum is a Punjabi Sikh, as was her late father and gran. The family moved from India to Britain in the late 1960s, invited by the government to plug the gaps in the British labor market; a fair exchange for a few centuries of colonialism. We occupied your country—now come and drive our buses! Jyoti’s family moved across half a world, but now they’re more settled than I am. She still has a family home. I wish I had a family home. I can remember when I had one. I couldn’t wait to get away.

4.

My plan went wrong almost immediately. When I first arrived here, instead of feeling liberated, I felt like crying. I had loved the little town we lived in, where my son was born, where my daughter went to school, where I joined the fell running club and labored up and down mountains every Tuesday night then went to some small rural pub for sausages and beer. I had felt more at home there than at any time in my adult life. I wrote my first novel there, which I could afford to do because Jyoti was a psychiatrist who earned actual money. But psychiatry was killing her, her role was not to cure people but to medicate them, to stick plasters on the wounds the Machine had gouged into the people at the bottom of the pile. There was nothing she could do about the wounds, and they kept coming. We had always talked about owning some land, moving to a smallholding. Jyoti thought about her mum’s village in India, where her mum had tamed a wild mynah bird, where her granddad was the village wise man, where her gran milked the family buffalo, where there were bombardments of morning birdsong that would wake you from your sleep on the flat roof. I thought of little farms I had seen and camped in on long walks with my dad over the hills of Britain as a child and how they represented something to me that was very different from the flatness of the suburbs. I thought about sheepdogs and hens and lambs and the still of the tangled banks. The green stillness. In Cumbria, only the rich can afford their patch of the green stillness.

We left Cumbria because we weren’t millionaires, but we also left because I was driven by my severance, my lifelong companion, and I needed to push away, as far away as I could push from everything I had known. I was getting complacent. I was starting to enjoy myself. I had friends and hobbies and a hometown I liked and this was intolerable. I could see myself getting fat and cozy and staying in the same place forever and this vision filled me with horror. I had to go because I was starting to get comfortable, and I have always run from things—houses, towns, jobs, girlfriends—when they started to make me feel comfortable. Until I was 35, I ran away from being at home, and then I wanted to be at home. Don’t ask me to explain this. How would I know how to explain it? I’m a writer, not a therapist.

5.

Maybe that does explain it. I’m a writer, and to me this has always been a calling, a duty. It has always been my guiding light, my personal mythology. I have built my life around it: what the writing needs, the writing gets, and all else is secondary. Maybe this sounds pretentious or affected, but I can’t help that. It’s what I’ve believed and cleaved to for longer than I can remember. I am a writer. Writing has controlled me and now perhaps it has become me. Writing has been put, always, before everything else, because if you don’t pay obeisance to the god then the god will abandon you.

And so I have always run, or so I’ve told myself, because the writing needed me to. The writing needed me to stay on the edge, to stay burning, to stay ahead. The writing needed me, at some level, always to be unhappy. If I settled anywhere and got too comfortable, I would soften around the edges and the fire would die. I would end up writing bland memoirs or ghostwritten books about cats. ‘You must stay drunk on writing,’ advises Ray Bradbury, ‘so that reality cannot destroy you.’ Alice Thomson goes further, saying art that doesn’t come from pain is just entertainment.

Pain, severance: it took me so long to realize their importance, their inevitability, their necessity. The grinding wheels of opposition are where the words are milled. The creation comes from the pain of the grinding. It is the heart being ground. It is the longing that creates the art, or the attempt at art. For that to happen, you need always to not quite be who, or where, you are. You need always to be under pressure, like a layer of sedimentary rock or a steel girder holding up a skyscraper. From the pressure, from the pain of the contradictions you carry and embody, from the wrenching of the oppositions that tear you, comes the energy that bursts into words, comes the flood, comes the pouring. You must always be not quite where you want to be, and you must never quite know where you want to be, and nothing must ever be enough to bring you contentment. Contentment is your deadliest foe. The fruit must always be just out of reach, and the world you walk through must always be a shade greyer than the one you can make yourself from what lives hidden in your heart.

In your multiplicity, in your contradictions, in the pulsing thrum of all your wanting and all your loss is your chance to make something that might matter; is your chance to capture the pure, intense moment, in all its light and rage, as if time were cast away from it forever.

6.

These are the people that I am. I want to sit with my tribe around a fire for all eternity, telling the stories my ancestors told as they listen over my shoulder, feeling at home, among my people, comforted. In the precise same moment of time I want to sit up on the mountain, looking down discontentedly at all these idiots around the fire, irritated by their stupid, comfortable complacency. I want to sit always outside the ring of people and observe them, alone. That’s what writers do: we sit outside and we observe, alone. It is not a choice, and there is nothing to be done about it.

I want to do all of these things at once—be a called writer, be a rooted family man, be a tribal elder, be an outcast shaman— and this is ludicrous, impossible. Art that doesn’t come from pain is just entertainment. And what does that mean for a man with a young family and three acres of land, a man with responsibilities and a burden of ideas in his head which he has just realized do not serve him anymore, and may not do so again?

7.

For five years or more, Jyoti and I talked about where to go. I favored the extremes: Chilean Patagonia, the French Pyrenees, Romania. The writer was pulling me, kicking me, playing with me, I think now, though it didn’t occur to me then. I only knew that something in me wanted to be thrown onto the rocks, utterly alien, far from the world I knew. Jyoti, without saying much, had other ideas. She knew the gulf between my desires and what I’m actually capable of. Ireland, though, seemed workable. We had friends there, we liked it. It was across the sea, but practically so. It was still an adventure, and a new start. We could afford it, just. I worried that it wasn’t radical enough, but time was pressing. Time is always pressing. Nothing presses harder, or is so relentless, so unforgiving.

So I wrenched myself away and when I got here, I wanted to cry. I had thought I felt like this for a few weeks, but Jyoti recently informed me that it was more like a year. I was angry with myself for running, for breaking what I had had. Maybe it had been necessary, but that didn’t make it painless. I was English; I had always lived in England. It was my home, it was where I came from, and I was attached to it. This was an unfashionable attitude, but what was I supposed to do about that? I’d even written a book about that attachment, and yet I was still surprised to find that, when I left it to move abroad, my insides felt wrenched. Suddenly I felt I had made a terrible mistake. I felt homesick. This wasn’t my place. I didn’t belong here. What was I doing? I was a fucking idiot! This would not be the first time that my Romantic dreams had screwed up my life, and those of others around me, but it might end up being the most serious.

Something I’d been writing about for years, in that book and elsewhere: human cultures come from places. They arise from them, curl out of them like smoke from hot ash. People do too. We’re not free actors. We can’t just skip from peak to peak, buzz from city to city with no consequences. I knew this, so why didn’t I know it? Cultures come from places. My culture comes, most recently, from the southeastern suburbs of England. It’s a culture of hard work, of ‘getting on,’ of English Protestantism channeled into secular ambition. It’s about settling down and having a family, contributing, progressing, climbing up; not bad things, necessarily, not for a lot of people. But it’s also about selling up, moving on, about property ladders and career ladders, about staking your place on the consumer travelator that represents progress in a burning world. It’s about feeding the Machine that rips up the people and rips up the places and turns them all against each other while the money funnels upwards to the people who are paying attention. This is the crap our children are learning. There is not much sign at all that the tide is turning.

There’s a story I’ve told a lot in recent years. I told it in my first book, which was written 15 years ago, and then I forgot about it. Recently, though, it has returned to me, and has been hovering about. It wants something, I think.

It’s a simple story. I was in the Highlands of West Papua, in New Guinea. I was 29 years old and had snuck into the country undercover, disguised as a tourist, because journalism was prohibited and I didn’t want to spend time in an Indonesian jail. West Papua was—still is—occupied by the Indonesian military, and its tribal people and culture are being systematically wiped out and replaced with the culture of its mostly Javanese occupiers. I was spending time with people from the Lani Tribe, who were telling me stories of military executions, corporate land theft, the destruction of the forests by loggers, and the poisoning of the rivers by gold mines.

Three or four men were walking me through the mountain forests from one tiny collection of thatched huts to another. We were going to meet someone who could tell us stories about what the military had been doing beyond the world’s gaze. The men walked in front of me, spears over their shoulders, occasionally pointing out the call of a bird-of-paradise or offering to scramble up the trees and catch one for me. (‘Good feathers!’ one explained, as I tried not to look horrified.) Then we reached a break in the trees. Looking out through the gap, I could see a great sweep of ancient forest rolling off towards the blue horizon. Green, blue: there was nothing else. Everything could have been here at the Creation.

The men lined up, then, with their spears over their shoulders and they sang, in a language I would never know, a song of thanks to the forest. It was all very matter-of-fact. They didn’t do it for show, they didn’t explain it to me—I had to ask them later what had happened—and when they had finished we just kept walking. That song must have sat within me for years until I was really ready to hear it. Only recently have I rediscovered it and started to examine it.

What does that incident carry for me? Only this: some sense of reciprocity between a people and the place they live in. Some sense of belonging. That first book of mine, written when I was a young, fiery activist, dedicated to bringing down global capitalism and ushering in a regime of worldwide economic justice—it turned out to be a little misleading in the end. It was supposed to be a travelogue, a series of visits to the heartlands of resistance to economic globalization. But I kept moving the goalposts, widening my search so that I had an excuse to spend time with people like the Papuans, or landless Brazilian farmers, or Indigenous people in southern Mexico. The middle-class Europeans blockading summits and waffling about Negri and Fanon bored me to tears. They were rootless; they were as lost as me. They came in by plane or train from some other European city, they put on their black masks and Palestinian scarves, shouted at some fat cats, got tear-gassed and then went home. Empty gestures, empty words, and I was empty too. But in the Baliem Valley in Papua or the Lacandon jungle in Mexico I found something else; something older, deeper, calmer and very much more real. I found people who belonged to a place. I had never seen this before. Where I grew up, there was nothing like it. It had—it still has—more meaning to me than any other way of human living I had seen. I wanted to know: what would that be like? And could I have it?

8.

My family is from the lower middle class, the most derided class in England. Not callus-handed and romantically oppressed like the working class. Not classy or rich like the gentry or the aristos. Not possessed of degrees or home libraries or big wine glasses like the haute bourgeoisie. Not exotic and in need of stout liberal defence like the migrants. We are the class snickered at in Roald Dahl books. We come from suburbs and have family cars and watch the telly in the lounge and live in medium-sized towns in unfashionable places and have never been to the theatre and regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper. I’m not speaking personally. I don’t regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper, though I do think it has quite a fetching logo.

And anyway, I escaped. My great grandparents were policemen, housewives, snipers on the Somme, union men, Methodists, proper old inter-war socialists in cardigans who lived in tiny terraces with outside loos and never touched a drop. My grandparents were shopkeepers, postmen, train and bus drivers, immigrant workers in camera factories, members of reserved trades, weekend coarse fishermen, allotment gardeners, rosette-winning attenders of dog shows. My dad left school at 16, became an engineer’s apprentice, and set out to prove his own dad wrong. My mum met him at school, left at the same age, became a comptometer operator (look it up), then a school classroom assistant, a housewife, our mum, the still point in a not-often-still home.

Me? I’m an Oxford University graduate who writes books for a living. Look! I’ve worked in the jungles of Borneo and the villages of Mexico. I’ve done book tours of Australia and the USA. I don’t have any money, but I have—no, I had—my father’s ambition and I know how to look like I’m one of them. You know: one of the kinds of people who also have all these things but who somehow, unlike me, feel they have them by right. Who grew into them, or who always had them, or who grew up surrounded by people who did. At Oxford I would see these 19-year-old boys in tweed jackets, who wandered about full of louche, angular confidence, and they didn’t seem any smarter than me but they seemed a lot more sure of themselves. I knew nothing about the world, or myself, or how to behave, and I didn’t know what I was doing there, or anywhere else. But they did. They were all confident, while I was not. At least I thought they were. Now that I write this, I realize I’m not so sure. Maybe they were looking at me the same way. Where did this chip on my shoulder fall from? I think my dad must have dropped it as he was passing. It’s not attractive. I wonder if I will pass it on to my children. I am trying not to.

This is me: a wanderer through words and through the world. A wanderer who is often sick of wandering, who is not a natural at this, who wants to put down roots, or feels he would be a better and more whole and more productive member of society if he did, and who was brought up that way. At the same time I am someone whose soul drifts like a cloudbank, someone who feels sick at the very notion of being productive, someone who wants to be anything but a member of society, thinks society stinks and has nothing to do with him. There is the battle, maybe within us all. The West battles the East, the old battles the new, modernity battles tradition, inside all of us, all of the time. It’s exhausting, don’t you find?

This is the battle I have used my words to document for so many years. Now, suddenly, something is happening that I never expected or prepared for. All the words are dropping away.

9.

Three years ago, I arrived here, in my new green stillness, in a land that had been stripped bare for centuries by people from my land, and I started to fragment. I felt like I was falling apart. After the first few weeks, the initial anxiety dissipated, but I still felt the scales dropping off my skin one by one. All of my comfortable certainties looked less comfortable. Surrounded now by people of different origins, classes, ages, backgrounds, I saw more clearly than ever that for most of my adult life I had been hanging about with people like myself: middle-class graduates, liberal-leftish, urban, left-brained, intellectual, floating, disconnected. That stuff wouldn’t wash here. Suddenly it all seemed painfully self-conscious and individualist, and so did I. In the city, in the town even, there was no real need to talk to your neighbors if you didn’t want to. I had never really learned how to do it properly; I was not good at talking to people at the best of times, which was probably another reason I had become a writer. But out here, everybody knew your business, especially if you were a blow-in like me. You had to talk to your neighbors, and they felt like neighbors, not just people who happened to be living in the next house along for now, before they moved on to something and somewhere better.

The position I had painfully staked out in the world began to fragment. I began to fragment. I am still fragmenting, I think. Sometimes it scares me, sometimes it excites me. You have to come apart to be put back together in a different shape. You have to be reformed, or you rust up, and all your parts stop moving.

Soon enough, my writing began to fragment too, because the kind of words you create to speak to the urban crowds of the alienated West don’t come from places like this. This old land out in the west, this ground will not give you what you need in that regard. It has no intention of helping. I mean that. I think, more and more, that words come from places, that they seep up into you and that places like this will not give words to people like me that speak to the things I used to be and used to believe. The words that come from this place, that bubble up from it, don’t even always make sense to me. I don’t know what they are trying to say or what they want. But they want something, and it is not what I once thought I came here to do. All I know right now is that my words don’t work the way they used to. I used to think words were my tools. Now I think it might be the other way around.

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 desperate 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.