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 they live in. Some sense of belonging. That first book of mine, written when I was a young, fiery activist, dedicated to bringing down global capitalism and ushering in a regime of worldwide economic justice—it turned out to be a little misleading in the end. It was supposed to be a travelogue, a series of visits to the heartlands of resistance to economic globalization. But I kept moving the goalposts, widening my search so that I had an excuse to spend time with people like the Papuans, or landless Brazilian farmers, or Indigenous people in southern Mexico. The middle-class Europeans blockading summits and waffling about Negri and Fanon bored me to tears. They were rootless; they were as lost as me. They came in by plane or train from some other European city, they put on their black masks and Palestinian scarves, shouted at some fat cats, got tear-gassed and then went home. Empty gestures, empty words, and I was empty too. But in the Baliem Valley in Papua or the Lacandon jungle in Mexico I found something else; something older, deeper, calmer and very much more real. I found people who belonged to a place. I had never seen this before. Where I grew up, there was nothing like it. It had—it still has—more meaning to me than any other way of human living I had seen. I wanted to know: what would that be like? And could I have it?
8.
My family is from the lower middle class, the most derided class in England. Not callus-handed and romantically oppressed like the working class. Not classy or rich like the gentry or the aristos. Not possessed of degrees or home libraries or big wine glasses like the haute bourgeoisie. Not exotic and in need of stout liberal defence like the migrants. We are the class snickered at in Roald Dahl books. We come from suburbs and have family cars and watch the telly in the lounge and live in medium-sized towns in unfashionable places and have never been to the theatre and regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper. I’m not speaking personally. I don’t regard the Daily Mail as a good newspaper, though I do think it has quite a fetching logo.
And anyway, I escaped. My great grandparents were policemen, housewives, snipers on the Somme, union men, Methodists, proper old inter-war socialists in cardigans who lived in tiny terraces with outside loos and never touched a drop. My