Apocalypse and bush turkeys (again)
The baby bush turkey has been savaging the communal herb garden. Someone more dutiful than me has been sweeping up after it, tidying away the clumps of mulch it scatters over the path with its digging and scraping. Thanks, neighbour!
And the rain has been falling for a week - today is a good long soaking and I feel cosy curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea and a Paul Kingsnorth book.
You don’t feel cosy for long when you read Paul Kingsnorth, though. He’s a writer who has gone through several incarnations - the raging green idealist, the bold novelist inventing a language. His current self, it turns out, is an uprooted writer who is losing his words and trying to write through it.
What I’m reading
Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth is an extraordinary book. It is an extended meditation on place and belonging and writing and meaning, and is every bit as unusual as that sounds. Formal innovation is kind of his thing: in his Booker Prize-longlisted novel The Wake, told by an English farmer who loses his lands in the Norman Conquest of 1066, he created a kind of Old English vernacular that is not historically accurate but accurately purges every bit of French or Latin-derived verbiage from the language. But this is completely different - he’s taken apart the very mechanism of a book and left it on the floor for you to look at, the IKEA chest of drawers in all its disassembled glory.
Much like The Wake, it takes a while to get into it: could you read a book whose every other sentence is a question? Would it irritate? Would you want him just to make a statement already, to conclude something, to let your brain have a break from the endless upward inflection at the end of every sentence? Well, tough. Kingsnorth is determined not to make any conclusions.
But he does have a thesis of sorts. A few years ago, he moved from Cumbria with his family to an acreage in rural Ireland so he could grow food, home-school the kids, write books, “be closer to nature and further from the Machine”. He wanted “to belong somewhere. I came here, at last, to have a home.” Yet not only does not feel at home, but he is losing what he came there to do: his writing. “Words, for me, have always been everything,” he writes, and yet, “All the words are dropping away.”
Place and belonging are inextricably tied up in this strange happening, he suggests. “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 of this is abstract but urgent. You’re watching him, on the page, work out what he’s thinking. It feels raw and real - it reminds me of Olivia Laing, who refused to let herself edit her novel Crudo because it was so much set in a particular time that she thought editing would have polished away the truthy jagged edges from it. Kingsnorth’s words feel worked-on, turned and examined, but that process, I think, happens in his mind before he ever commits the words to paper.
And if, in the quote above, the edges of your mind are twitching towards the concept of indigeneity, that’s exactly what he’s talking about. He tells the story of his trip to West Papua as a journalist. He was walking through the mountain forests with his guides, who suddenly stopped. “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... and when they had finished we just kept walking. … 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.”
It is impossible not to think of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, who are much closer than anyone of European ancestry to that belonging. But Kingsnorth is aware of the pitfall of romanticising people and lives he can’t truly understand. Besides, he wants to defend words even as he is losing them. “Where is my indigeneity, who are my ancestors, what is our lost place and who will tell us its stories?” he asks - but to this question, at least, he does have an answer: “The words. The writing.”
Kingsnorth borrows from his friend the Botswanan mythologist (yes, he has a Botswanan mythologist friend) the concept that the first half of life is fire - eager, hungry, thrusting outwards - and the second half is water: inward, reflective, coming home. Humanity, he speculates, is coming into a water phase: “We have been fire, we have built and controlled and expanded and triumphed. Now we look around at all our triumph and suddenly we feel we can't understand the meaning of any of it. ... 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.” A global midlife crisis, in other words, that neatly coincides with his own.
So yes, he correlates his midlife crisis with the state of the world; he talks about the Muse; he has conversations with Loki, the trickster god; and he has revelations about Being during his Zen meditations, and look, if all of this sounds incredibly annoying, I get it. But I think all of art is witnessing someone struggle to think, to believe, to make meaning and to understand. Kingsnorth’s big revelation is: “Life is not the shape of a book.” Yet he writes them and at the heart of every good book is a series of questions. And if he leaves his questions on the floor for us to assemble ourselves? That’s OK with me. And if he documents the visits of the Muse, the process of summoning the magic? I say we need all the magic we can get.
It is the time for this kind of book. Outside the rain is falling and the fires are burning and we only have 10 years to save the earth. The apocalypse is now - or if not now, very soon. Best write and read and think - and placate the savage gods - while we may.