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
