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If only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
Rilke
There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more.
The Smiths
Table of Contents
SAVAGE GODS
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
