There is the theory, the practice and the small sacrifices that we are forced to have whatever principles we have. The writer Paul Kingsnorth (Worcester, 1972) does not have a smartphone or credit cards, he has educated his two children at home... but he is aware that he needs a computer to write some books that are printed on paper, or that to participate at the 42nd festival –which comes to an end on Sunday at Fabra i Coats– I had to fly to Barcelona by plane.
He began as a journalist to move on to environmental activism from which his literary work draws, in which after essays and poetry he came to narrative with the Buckmaster trilogy, three books written independently but with parallels and some protagonists of the same lineage but at the same time. over two millennia, because if the first installment, Wake, is set in 1066, the second, Beast, takes place today, and the third, Alexandria –just published in Catalan by Amsterdam– travels to a future world, post-apocalyptic, where England had been before, where only a few survivors remain, closely linked to the land and nature. In this environment, Kingsnorth makes its protagonists speak with a very marked language, which in Xavier Pàmies's translation comes to be a curious mix between old Catalan and colloquial, very lyrical and with songs as if from an immemorial religion.
“I believe in historical cycles, civilizations rise and fall throughout history. You have a great crescendo, you reach the peak of civilization and from there it falls for whatever: the resources, the environment... and and so on over and over again”, reflects the author. In about a thousand years, in this book, we have deliberately returned to tribal life, because the previous civilization collapsed because of what we had done to the Earth. These people don't want it to happen again, so they live with a lot of awareness of the land and animals, putting limits on technology."
The book helps him to ask himself "what does it mean to be human, and what are the mind, the soul and the body, if they don't go together": "I explore the relationship between people and the place where they live and the relationship with nature, with the non-human world”, to confront the transhumanist theories that try to create supports where we can download our minds to free ourselves from the body.
"The transhuman world scares me and I think it's false, we cannot be humans without a body and we are intimately related to nature, and perhaps that makes us as violent as it is cooperative," he says, adding that "we live in a culture in which we do see that we are not animals, that we are not part of nature, that we have a civilization in which we do not need to look outside, but we do, and everything we do to the world returns it to us, we see it with climate change."
Catalan version, here
