Savage Gods

"That’s right. He’s always written about places, and it seems to me that he’s always written about places in an attempt to grope towards a notion of ‘place.’ He served a strenuous apprenticeship in environmental activism before he decided that the activist agenda assumed an optimistic view of what was possible, and that in prosecuting that agenda as it is conventionally conceived you have to jump into bed with the forces of environmental destruction: become part of the machine; part of the problem. He decided that all that we can do is to recover and to re-tell the stories that have formed us as humans: stories that tell us how our shapes have been determined by the pressure on us from the non-human forces of the world. For me to say ‘all we can do’ is a stupid way to put it. There is colossal creative and redemptive power in these stories. So he left activism of the old kind, and then he left the UK, and now lives on the west coast of Ireland with his wife and his two young children. His whole ethical and literary life had been determined by a sense of dispossession. So he bought a field in Ireland thinking that by doing so he might finally come home. That he might finally know home. That he might finally know a place and therefore know what place itself was about. “He says that he can’t write anymore; that he may never write again” It’s not clear if he’s been successful, but if he has, it’s been – at least for the time being – at the expense of his writing. He says that he can’t write anymore; that he may never write again. That’s for two main reasons. First: to be a writer, you’ve got to be uncomfortable. You have to be an outsider. You have to deny yourself many reassuring certainties – not least because the only certainties in the real world are distinctly un-reassuring. You have to allow the generation in yourself of pressure that will eventually spurt out in prose or poetry. Second, and more fundamentally, language itself – and I’m sure this is your experience too – doesn’t correspond at all faithfully to the world. It always stalls; it always becomes self-referential and self-reverential. It’s also wedded to dialectic, which is an agent of that evil machine, which is the enemy of the natural world. And so it’s our enemy – whether or not we are writers – because all humans are part of the natural world. So this book is Paul’s reaction against the damage that he sees language doing to him, and the damage that he sees language and dialectic doing to the world more generally. Yes. Increasingly over the last few years, my writing has said, as Paul is saying: Please don’t read this book of mine. Because it’s written in human language, it necessarily misrepresents. The only experience worth having is direct experience, and language gets in the way of that direct experience. All I can do as a writer is to annoy my readers so much that they throw down the book and head outside, where, if they’re open to it, something worthwhile will happen to them. I’m overstating things rather hysterically! Because I’m a writer, I have to believe – for my mortgage payments, my own peace of mind, and my own mouldering sense of self-worth ­– that there must be a way of using language in a way that undermines and subverts language and makes it do its proper job of relating to the world and relating the world. But there are moments (no, there are whole weeks) when I’m not at all convinced about that. Maybe I should resolve to use only onomatopoeic words; which have embedded in them something of the wind or the wave; to reject any words – and particularly words from the romance languages – which invoke abstractions rather than the concrete things out there. You can tell I’m having exactly the same sort of crisis as Paul. The difference is that I’m trying to write my way out of it. He’s more honest and radical than I am. It’s very dangerous to put words into Paul Kingsnorth’s mouth, but I think he’d say that, in order to get your epistemology right (what a pompous word: it’s mine, not Paul’s: I mean ‘knowledge of the way that things are’), you have to try to see things through children’s eyes. Paul’s children are his main educators, as my children are mine. It’s not the digging of the garden itself that has given him the connection he feels with the natural world, but digging the garden as his children dig it with him. That’s the one of the great insights of the romantic movement, isn’t it? We’ve got to become like little children again. Children have forgotten so much less than we have forgotten about the things that matter."