Perhaps it will end soon.
I haven’t been sleeping well. I think I said that. Just recently, I haven’t been sleeping well. I don’t know why. I’ve been having strange dreams. Distant lights out in the sea, fleets of swans flying, trees under water, old trees. Last night I dreamed that I was out collecting firewood on the ridge when I disturbed a hare under an ash tree. It was sandy brown, it had a white belly and black eartips, it was long-boned and sharp as the winter and there was something about its eyes that didn’t fit. They didn’t look like animal eyes, they seemed human, and this hare with its strange eyes it just stood there, it stood and looked into me as if it were about to speak, as if it had something to tell me, to promise, to warn me away from.
I’m used to this now. By day I walk the thin paths through the heather, I pace the farmyard, I sit cross-legged in this room for hours, I stand in thickets of thorn listening for the music on the wind. By night I dream. I wonder if home is calling me, if the flatlands want me back, or if this winter moor is just getting to me. Thirteen months is a long time to spend with only the wind to speak to. There are things out there at night that you don’t want to be in the company of. Stalking through the gully, muttering along the stone row, shifting and stammering in the woods. Perhaps I have been in this dreaming too long. Perhaps I am losing my mind.
I do hope so.
The walls are soaking now, the stone is weeping, the stain is spreading across the floor. There is a creeping blackness moving towards me. There is rain dripping on the stovetop, every drip hissing angrily as it lands. This storm, this storm. It’s ruining everything.
But the stove is still burning hard. A few drops of rain mean nothing to it. Often I have sat here staring through the cracked glass, watching the flames, unmoving. Daily I have sat cross-legged on the cold floor, silent, watching the unremarkable become transfigured. Stare at anything for long enough and it becomes fearful. To burn things, to burn so many things just to keep your body warm, to set this inferno raging across the world so that you can be warm and move fast, to churn the gases about, to shift the particles in the air, to slice wood with metal, to tear into the ground, to blacken the soil, to make so much heat. If I could, if I was strong enough, I would not have fire here. If I was strong enough I would never eat, I would never speak, I would never think or move, I would only sit. I would sit for two hundred years in the light and then I would know.
There is steam rising from the tin kettle now, the iron frying pan is on the stovetop and a triangle of half-frozen butter is starting to pool in it, which means that soon I can put the egg in. It’s Sunday, and every Sunday I allow myself an egg. Otherwise I live on bread, potatoes, beans, water and black tea. I allow myself one bar of chocolate a month, though sometimes I worry about that. St Anthony got by in the desert on salt, bread and water. But I have earned my indulgence, and I will have it, storm or no storm. I am hungry. I am so hungry.
I wonder if I should go back. Go back east, take them what I have found here. But what would they do with it? They would have nothing to say and I would not know how to tell them. They would draw round me in a ring, baring their teeth like apes on the savannah. Everything is prey to them, everything is clay for their hands to mould, they want to eat everything, chew it all up and then excuse themselves. Back there I was an item, an object, a collection of gears, a library of facts compiled by others, a spark plug in a universal engine, an opinion machine, I was made of plastic and bamboo canes and black bin bags, I walked like I was human and alive but I was neither. I could know anything in an instant and I knew nothing at all.
No. I need to be in the places where the light comes through, where people are thin on the ground, where the old spirits still mutter in the hedges and the stone rows. But how long do I stay, and when do I know? When do I go back? Do I ever go back, and if I don’t, what does that make me? What does that make this?
They grow fast. Everyone says that. You turn around one day and they’re gone.
But there was no staying. I know that. There was no staying and there is no returning, not until it is done. I will know when it is done. There will be some kind of sign, some kind of feeling. Things will become clear. And when I go back, when I tell them, when I show them, they will forgive me. The things I have seen. Every saint walked away. Every holy man, every prophet, they all walked away. That’s the bit they don’t tell you. They never tell you about what was left behind, about who was left behind, about what had to be broken. That part of the story is always swept under, but it’s the most important part of all. It’s the clean break that begins everything.
I liberated them, too. I gave them their freedom. One day, they will thank me.
There it goes! There goes the tarp. It looks like one end of it is still tied down, but the rest is flapping like some giant prehistoric bird up there, lashing against the roof, and the iron sheets are even looser. There’s a bloody great gap up there now, opening and closing with the wind and the rain is crashing down, sheeting in. I can’t stand the rain anymore, I can’t stand it, I can’t. I’ve had it with the storm, with all the storms, with all the roaring up there, with all the noise, with everything coming down on me.
I have to do something. I will do something, I will do it if this storm doesn’t slow down. I’ll give it five minutes, I’ll wait another five minutes, just to see if it dies back or the rain slows. I don’t want to go up there. But if I wait too long the whole thing is going to come off, and then I’m right back where I started.
Perhaps it will never die back. Why should it? Why should it make this thing easy? I wanted it to be hard. It was why I came, why I was sent here. A day comes, a time is presented to each one of us, once only in our lives, and we know when it has arrived, whether we acknowledge it to ourselves or not. Something settles into us from the sky on that day or rises into us from the ground, a great stillness, a huge colour, a bottomless well of nothing and everything, a balancing, extended moment in which there is no longing at all, no past and no future, nothing that will be or has ever been. Everything in the world has been leading up to this moment but you will never have any hope of grasping it, of following its lead, if you stay here walking these paving stones and slouching in these office cubicles and buying cans in these corner shops and standing in line in these supermarkets and waiting at these bus stops in the rain.
What is this? Is it a tiny piece of the great mystery? Is this what some people call God? Does it turn out that God is not a spirit, a lord, a king, an expression of the human ego, an instructor, a giver of rewards and punishments, a fixer, a maker of rules? Does it turn out that God is not like you and me and never has been, does it turn out that God is an emptiness, a space into which life is poured and from which life re-emerges, fecund and scrabbling in the void? And does it turn out that this thing, this mystery, this void, this truth, this God — that this can only be seen when everything else, including our minds, especially our minds, has dropped or been sheared away?
You don’t know. You don’t know anything at all, only that you have been shown this, though you never expected to be. What will you do with it?