motes and beams
When I was a child, I wanted to live in a pine forest. Or, to be more accurate, a pine plantation. […] The tight ranks of conifer trees, planted so close together that most of their branches die for lack of light, and which acidify the soil for miles around, are hated by ecologists, landscape lovers and most local wildlife, which barely ventures into them. Perhaps that’s what I liked about them. There seemed to be some kind of dark, mossy mystery in that maze of pillarlike trunks.
The quincunxial confines of a tree plantation, with the precarious balance of artifice and nature, have always struck me as unheimlich (although not, at certain moments, entirely lacking in aesthetic appeal). Yet even as a child I knew that the desire to walk off into the woods (whether planted by nature or planted by humans) should be indulged with caution: the forest is lovely, dark and deep – but folks who go to the woods to live deliberately usually have a fairly robust support network.
Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine is a book of anxiety, and it is sad to see the effects that anxiety can have on the abilities of a human being to face the world with compassion and clarity. There is much that is sympathetic in the early chapters, with their hand-wringing about the decline of west, and it is odd to find mentions of books that I have read with interest (Small Is Beautiful or The Art of Not Being Governed) or pleasure (Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots) embedded in an overall argument that ultimately seems facile and a bit mean-spirited.1 But I cannot tell if he is leaning into hysterical emotionality/enthousiasmos (with a veneer of argumentation) as a way of deliberately pushing back against Enlightenment modes of ratiocination (Hamann, Horkheimer, and Adorno did it better), or if, despite his reading of the Jungian Bly, he is avoiding the shadow-work that he seems to think we (the West? the world? Orthodox Englishmen living in Ireland?) so sorely need.
I don’t know. I find it confusing. I suppose that’s why I’m typing away about it here, trying to make sense of it – both my own confusion, and my dissatisfaction with a book that, based on the thought-provoking exploration of creativity and writing in Savage Gods, I had been looking forward to. It is perhaps the undercurrent of hypocrisy that bothers me.2 He does not like cars, yet has a car rather than doing without or choosing to live where a car wouldn’t be necessary.3 Trans people make him uncomfortable,4 but rather than questioning his discomfort (the only thing, perhaps, over which he has some control), he gripes about medical interventions – and yet one suspects that, if he had pneumonia, he would seek antibiotics, and if he cut off a limb with his scythe, he would wish to consult a surgeon.5 Perhaps this is a result of conversion, a turning away from the rede ‘an harm it none’ to his new (old) faith. I don’t know. I can only close the book and walk in the woods.
Then go back to Burton and Spinoza.
- Why get your knickers in a twist because the monks of Mount Athos have smart phones?[↩]
- See, I can look at my shadow.[↩]
- Same here, but I generally don’t complain about it publicly and I’m also not setting myself up as a casual sage pointing a path to civilizational betterment; I can barely keep my own house in order.[↩]
- I suspect that people make him uncomfortable, but he does not fully explore that possibility, as it might make his crankiness more apparent. A young man shaking his fist at the injustices of the world has its (limited) charm, but there is nothing charming about a middle-aged man shaking his fist at someone, a stranger, who is trying simply to exist, to be themselves in the world, in the best way they can. But what do I know?[↩]
- There is some privilege that could use some checking, in other words.[↩]