Paul Kingsnorth - Beast

Once, everybody knew this, and they respected it. The hermits and the saints would arm themselves for battle and they would head out into the wild to meet the foe, and anything of themselves that they needed to strip away, they would do it to ensure victory. No-one believes that stuff anymore. They’re all filling their pockets and their mouths, they’re all naming the parts, they’re all frantic with their unhappiness and their opinions, there is nothing you can tell them. They won’t let you leave, now. And if you leave, they won’t let you come back.

I never asked for any of this, so I cannot be held responsible. It is not my fault, I just followed it. I knew there would be damage. I remember what she said when she realised that this time, so late, I was finally going through with it. Are you looking for God or looking for yourself? she said. Can you even tell the difference anymore? She was clever like that. It’s easy to be clever when you’ve always had everything, easy to be clever when it’s all been laid out for you. Nothing was ever laid out for me, nobody ever showed me anything and I told her that. Six years, she said, it’s been six years, and you leave now, at the worst time there could be, and for nothing. It’s not for nothing, I said, I have tried to tell you. You are a child, she said, you always have been, and now I have two children. Yes, I said, I am a child, I can still see the world afresh, look at it, look! My whole life I have been sitting in silence, I have been sitting in the corner for thirty years and not speaking, now something has been shown to me, now it has all fallen away and look at me here, at last I am standing up, at last I have the guts to walk away, to walk towards what I could be. Would you stop me from being what I could be?

You do know, she said, that it is not all about you anymore? You do know that? What about her? She is barely born, she’s too young to know anything, she gets no kind of say, she doesn’t even get a memory. Just to walk out on her. Is this the kind of man you are?

What kind of man am I? I wonder what I think about that now that I have spent a year here, watching the layers peel off, stripping myself back. You peel and peel and peel but there is always another one underneath. Does the work ever end, is there a centre, and if so what do you find down there? Some promise, some jewel, some answer? When I came, I thought that if I could spend enough years away from all of it and all of them, then the thing that was in me, the colour that had descended, the song that was singing, the thing that I could still become might emerge like a butterfly in summer, testing its dusty wings and dreaming of the sun.

That was what I thought then. I wonder what I think now. I used to know everything when I was young. Now that I’m older, I don’t know anything at all. Now the mystery is the thing. There are sadhus in the temples and mendicants in the mountains, all of them struggling through in search of the mystery, in search of the white light in the grey. There are fires burning on distant hills, men standing on the prows of small boats roaring across the Java Sea, tiny people in giant canopy forests hacking through to unseen clearings while the monkeys hoot around them. We built a world of altars because we could never put the mystery into words. We tried to make the mystery human, we tried to lock it into shape, we made sacrifices to it, we sang its poetry and then we left the buildings empty and walked away. We don’t talk about the mystery anymore, not where I come from, but nothing has changed in the world except us.

Come to a place like this, though, and you can still hear it sing. I can tell you that from experience. Come to a place like this, far from the estates and the ring roads and the car parks and the black fields of beet and the screen-dumb people pacing out the slow suicide of the West around the pedestrianised precincts. Come to a place like this, shut your mouth and your mind and walk on the moor, walk in the wind and the sun, and you will understand soon enough that this world is a great animal, alive and breathing, that we walk through it, we breathe with it, we are its breath, that when we stand on a mountain overcome by the sunset and all that it brings, or fall to our knees in front of an altar in the presence of something greater than ourselves, then we are sensing the animal shift and turn beneath our feet. Then it is calling us home.

Or perhaps it is hungry.

St Cuthbert was called to be a hermit on Lindisfarne. This was more than a thousand years ago. There were only small wooden huts there then, and the wind and the wild sea and everything that lived in the wild sea. Cuthbert went out there to the monastery, but the monastery was not far enough and he was called out further. He rowed to an empty island, where he ate onions and the eggs of seabirds and stood in the sea and prayed while sea otters played around his ankles. He lived there alone for years, but then he was called back. The King of Northumbria came to him with some churchmen, and they told him he had been elected Bishop of Lindisfarne and they asked him to come back and serve.

There’s a Victorian painting of the king and the hermit. Cuthbert wears a dirty brown robe and has one calloused hand on a spade. The king is offering him a bishop’s crosier. Behind him, monks kneel on the sands and pray he will accept it. Behind them are the beached sailboats that brought them to the island. The air is filled with swallows. Cuthbert’s head is turned away from the king, he looks down at the ground and his left hand is held up in a gesture of refusal. But he didn’t refuse, in the end. He didn’t refuse the call. He went back.

We head out because the emptiness negates us. We leave the cities and we go to the wild high places to be dissolved and to be small. We live and die at once, the topsoil is washed away and the rock is exposed and it is not possible to play the games anymore. Now I am exposed rock. Like Cuthbert, I have been washed clean. What do I see?

I wonder if she misses me. I wonder if she remembers me. I wonder if she can walk yet, or speak. Has there been a first word? Perhaps she needs me. Perhaps I should go to her. Would that be the right thing? How do I know what the right thing would be? I look at it now, I have a year’s distance, I look at it now and I see myself illuminated from behind, walking away from light and into light. I was the questing hero and the treasure would be mine, and when I came back with it, when I came back changed, they would see that change even in the way I carried myself as I approached over the hill. Everything about me was different now, they would see this and a great joy would rise up in them, and when I reached them they would welcome me back, wiser and better, a better person, and they would forgive everything. They would forgive everything and everything would be better, and I would be better. That was how it would work. That is how it will work, when I see them again. Yes. I am sure of it.

The storm isn’t abating. If anything, it’s getting worse. The gap is getting bigger, it’s crashing around up there now, it’s coming apart, it’s all going to come apart and then what, then what? I’m going to have to go up there. It’s dangerous, I don’t know what might happen if this keeps up. It’s not safe in here. I’m going to have to go up there. If I don’t do something now, the whole roof is going to co

y eyes. I was lying wet wet through on wet stone slabs. It was dark. It was night. It was warm. There was no movement anywhere not in the yard I was lying in not on the dark hills around me not in the buildings around me not in the air. No movement and no sound. The silence was deep everything was silence.

There was pain everywhere there was so much of it that I didn’t know what to do. I lay with my eyes open. My head was bleeding there was blood on my face. I felt that things were broken. Some of my ribs were broken. My left leg was numb where I was lying on it. I thought that was broken too. I lay still and thought about moving. I was scared to move but I was scared not to. I wondered what had happened.