Paul Kingsnorth - Beast

Within each square on the map I had drawn two sets of five parallel lines running from north to south and from east to west and crossing each other at intervals so that the whole thing looked like a chessboard. It meant that to cover each marked square I would have to walk ten miles. For the first mile I kept my mind entirely focused on my task. I felt the muscles in my legs move as I walked across the heather and I felt the still hot air passing my ears. I walked at a medium pace. My left leg still spasmed with every step. The ground was springy and the heather was woody and dry. There was nothing but peat and heather not a stream bed or a combe or a stunted tree. This square mile of moor was a great rounded shoulder of heather and in the middle of it was the giant’s grave.

The giant’s grave was my goal. I was going to walk in complete stillness and silence until I reached it. According to my map it would be about three miles of walking until I got there. Three miles of sameness three miles of heather. I picked up the pace after a while. I was getting bored. There were no signs of anything up here. No big animal would be up here surely it was too exposed there was nothing for it. There were no holes in the ground nowhere to hide nothing to eat. If it had walked here I would not have seen any tracks beneath the heather anyway. But I kept going. At any moment things could change and I had a system and I was going to stay with it. I had seen something and it must be somewhere. I would find it.

I reached the giant’s grave after what must have been an hour or so. It consisted of three great old slabs of granite one lying horizontal and the other two resting at angles on top of it. All three stones sat on top of a slight mound. I took off my pack and put it on the ground. I took out the water bottle and climbed up to the highest point on the stones and sat down. I surveyed the landscape. I was at the highest point on the dome of heather which sloped down towards the edge of the moor. There was a kind of heat haze around the edges. I could see the tower of the church beneath the trees where the lane was. I couldn’t see the town. It was silent. No bird sang. I drank some water.

It was the heather that brought the falling man back into my mind. The smell of the heather the roughness of the purple buds the texture all of it spread around me and seemed to raise something and I remembered a man who fell over a man who had some meaning to me. I felt it was a memory. I was young perhaps. He fell and he didn’t rise. Or perhaps he didn’t fall perhaps he jumped but he went down and didn’t come up and that was everything then there was nothing after. I don’t know what this is. Perhaps when we die the world just ends. Perhaps everything stops when we do which means that we are everything. I wondered: what if each of us is everything? What if everything is concentrated in every part of us? All of the essence of everything is in every tiny cell and every particle. So nothing can survive without anything else which means that when one thing dies everything dies and then it is all instantly reborn again in a new form.

What if we are not all sharing this one world but instead every one of us creates their own world and that is true of everything that is? It is true of you and me and every other human and it is true of every other living animal and every bird and every fish and every tree and every mollusc and every bivalve and every arthropod and every virus and every fungus and every germ floating in the air and all of the rocks too all of the grains within them everything constantly dying and the universe ending with every single death and starting again at precisely the same moment so that there is no time as we think we know time there is only this constant ending and this constant birth?

Or what if it is all about kindness? What if that is the secret? What if everything is about kindness what if that is the great kō an that the world offers up to us? What if this is the big secret what if this is the answer that once everyone is kind to everyone else and to themselves and to everything that lives even the rocks and the rivers then the world will end and we will be done? Or what if everyone is given just one tiny task in this life what if we come into the world with our own tiny task but we don’t know what it is? Maybe our task is to write a great book or speak a certain word or love a certain person or discover a certain thing or walk a certain street or kill a certain creature or dream a certain dream. What if each one of us has to find their task and then complete it and if we don’t complete it we are born in another form and given another task and everyone and everything will keep being reborn in every form there can ever be and given these tiny tasks to find and complete and only when all of them are done will everything be done. Maybe then all the suffering ends maybe then the game ends and we find out what’s really going on behind the scenes and who the gamemaster is.

Everything is rising and falling expanding and contracting the universe grows and shrinks a million times every second. Or there are eleven universes all running in parallel and whatever you are doing now you are doing in all of them. Or there are hundreds of these things hundreds of these universes thousands of them rising and falling expanding and contracting beating like great hearts entwined. Sometimes it all falls away and there you are beating with all of the other hearts with every heart in every universe beating and beating. You are a cell in the heart you are part of it and it cannot beat without you. You are hurtled into the void and then catapulted back towards the beginning again. It takes a billion years and happens a million times a second and here you are and there is the void and it is everything and it is coming for you and it is fine. This is just how it should be. Everything is the same anyway.

I drank almost all of my water up there on the stone. It was too hot. One bottle wasn’t enough. I still wasn’t hungry. I slid down the stone I felt the roughness of the granite beneath my hands. The stone was warm like it was alive and it comforted me after all the heather. I felt a kinship with these stones. Lying here like abandoned lovers like sleeping elephants like the dead with all of their sadness they comforted me. Everything was so still so silent so white. How long had it been since I had seen another creature? The stones felt like creatures to me. I wanted to throw my arms around them and nobody was watching so I did. I leaned on the biggest stone and I embraced it and it seemed so long since I had been embraced and I wanted to be. I wanted arms around me I wanted to be comforted. I remembered arms around me now I remembered someone who did that and for a second I saw her face and smelt her and saw what was in her eyes for me and then it was gone and all I had was stone. I needed something I could slip into because this was too much now this was all too much. I needed a heart to speak to mine but there was no heart there was only rock. I wanted to stay here but there was nothing here for me and so I had to keep walking.

It took a few hours to complete the grid. I saw nothing. No evidence of any creature no evidence of anything except heather and one dry stream bed and in the end the footpath that took me back home again. But that was fine. I had completed my first task. Tomorrow I would complete my second.

In a wood a man rose from a bed of leaves by a pool. They were autumn leaves dead and brown and the man was brown also and covered in hair. There was thick orange fur all over his body. There was a drumming sound in the forest all around him it was the rain the sky had opened up and had woken him from his sleep. He knelt and looked up to the sky. He tilted his head up and opened his mouth to receive the rain. The rain was falling over everything in the world. The surface of the black pool was dancing with it.