Paul Kingsnorth: Beast

I stood in the river up to my knees and the river was cold. The water filled my boots and made its way up through the fabric of my trousers towards my groin. Soon I couldn’t feel my feet, and soon after that I couldn’t feel my legs. The river sang and kept singing. I wanted to clamber out, but I stood still. Pain rose and tried to encircle me, but I stood in the winter torrent and watched the pain and after a while it fell back again, back down into the singing water.

Water came down from the clouds and sank through the black peat and passed over the granite and then went down through its channel to the sea. The water that ran over my legs and feet would never be seen here again but the river never changed. I climbed into the river in the early morning and I stood there until the sun was highest in the sky. I let the water take my body away from me so that I could see what was beyond my body. I let the river numb me and I understood that I had always been numb. The sky opened a crack, but only a crack. There was still something beyond that I could not touch.

Water, thorns, rain, black soil. All of the pain is an incident, a detail soon forgotten. From the east I came, from the dead fens, because of everything that grew there, because of what was lodged in the dark waters. I walked the streets, I sat on the couches, I passed through the sliding doors, I talked but never listened, I sold but never gave away. Everywhere there were voices and I added my voice to them and we spoke out together and said nothing at all. I became entwined in wanting, and it took me away from the stillness that is everything. I say it here daily now like a prayer, like an offering: it is everything, it is everything, and sometimes I glimpse it and then I am every storm wind that has ever run itself clean across the black of the sea.

From the east I came, to this high place, to be broken, to be torn apart, beaten, cut into pieces. I came here to measure myself against the great emptiness. I came here to touch the void, to leap naked into it with the shards of what I was falling around me, to have the void clean me of the smallness that I swam in. To come out white and empty with a small, sharp piece of that emptiness in me always, because it is all that can ever save me. To be open, to be in fear, to be aching with nothingness, to be lonely as the cold subsoil in winter, lonely as the last whale in the ocean, singing in bewilderment and no other to answer for all of time. This darkness.

This is the only life.

I haven’t been sleeping well. I see things when I close my eyes. Old things climb out through my mouth and set themselves free in the air. On the high moor there are patterns and in my small mind there are patterns, and my breath fogs on the windows here and when I leave a footprint in the yard it stays for weeks. There are movements at night and I don’t understand them. Strange things rise up when the cars full of tourists go home and the farm lights burn yellow on the far slopes. All the centuries drop away, and I am in the presence of something that does not know time.

Five seasons I’ve been here now. Five seasons, but I’ve never seen a storm like this. An hour or two back, I stood by the door and watched it rise over the shoulder of the moor. Winter here is one long storm, dark and roiling, the wind tearing at you, pulling you down. But this one is harder than usual, louder, stronger. It roars up the fields like a beast chasing the smell of blood. The rain is horizontal, it blows in from the west as if it has been arrowed in from the Atlantic. It forces itself through every crack, through every gap and space. It seeps through the walls, around the doors, around the windows, it runs down from the roof where the iron meets the stone, it comes through the openings where the plastic flails in the wind. It has been roaring now for an hour maybe, not much longer, but everything is getting wet. I’ve pushed towels and flannels and rags into every weeping cut and wound but still it comes.

I think that something is coming. I don’t know what. I wonder if it will thunder, if there will be lightning. Lightning is drawn to iron. There is iron on the roof, but there is iron too in the deep rocks of the moor. I am living on and under iron, there is metal everywhere, metal and flesh and wet, black trees. I look out of the window and I see sheets of water flowing across the yard, through the gate, down onto the track. The sky is a solid darkness. Last time there was a big storm, the track from this place, which leads along the combe about a mile down to the road, became so pitted and full of great gashes that I could barely even walk on it. It was as if something had attacked it. The wind here will throw you to the ground if it catches you, will tear the slates off the roof and make them fly. Rain like this will make the streams rise so fast that they foam brown and white and roar down the combes into the valleys where the people are. And here are the stone walls and stone floors turning darker with the water, as the rain comes through the roof, and here is the stove hissing as the rain drips upon it. I am surrounded.

Five seasons. Thirteen months. Thirteen months and eight days. I wonder what they are thinking now. I wonder what they think of me. All of the weight I threw down, my retreat from the encircling, from the furious thoughts and opinions, the views and the positions soldered together with impatience and anger, enfolding the world in underwater cables and radio waves, singing in the air, darting from brain to brain, jumping from raindrop to thundercloud, glueing the world up, roaring like a storm wave. All of the energy, depleting itself in slow motion across the frozen void, running itself out for all time with nothing done, nothing even touched, everything swerved around. The sloughing entropy and nothing come from it, the wasted cells, the long dance that ends in silence. All of the fingers, the hands outstretched towards me, set to shape me.

To shape me, or to hold me?

I worry that the roof won’t hold out. When I walked here shoeless over the moor from the east, with no light in the sky, I found the old farmyard dark and empty, the house and the barn echoing and broken, wet and unheld. All that passed for a roof then was a couple of twisted sheets of corrugated iron, bent back by the force of years. The rest was woodwormed rafters opening onto the blackness inside. But there was still a stove in this wet, desolate room, with its stone flag floors and its years of accumulated rot and vegetation, and the stove looked like it could be made to work, though it was covered in birdshit and rust. I had not known what I was looking for when I came looking. This old place, clinging to the moorside in the thick night, felt like an invitation.

I worked hard to shape it and make it mine. I scraped the birdshit off the stove, cleaned the windows, filled the gaps in the glass with anything I could find, scrubbed the floor clean, repaired the door lock which I had broken getting in, patched up the chimney. Then I climbed gingerly up to the roof and I nailed the bent iron back onto the soft beams as best I could. In the roofless barn across the cobbled yard I found a pile of stiff, crusted fertiliser bags beneath a cake of rotten straw. I slit them open and laid them and a worn tarpaulin over the gaps, and tied them all down with blue nylon rope. I was proud of my work, back then. This was to be my home, it was to be the place where I would sit in the silence and wait for the presence. But it is not enough tonight. The gaps between the sheets are starting to leak. Fertiliser bags can’t hold up against this. The iron is rising and falling, clanging like a hammer on the black beams. Things are tearing. It sounds like some of the nails are coming loose. I’m sitting here by the stove, not looking up, willing the water not to land on the back of my neck.