In The Forest

In the forest we find these things at least: plants comprising trees, shrubs, bushes, ferns, mosses, and sundry smaller plants; fungi of the toadstool sort and of the shelving sort and of the spreading sort and of the sort made of invisible threads meshed through and through the fallen leaves and earth and roots; and animals; bugs that fly and bugs that crawl and bugs that dig and bugs that do all of them; and animals with scales and animals with fur and small animals that scurry and climb and animals that slink and hide and animals that lumber and decline to hide although even they are often shy and animals with wings and feathers that flit or soar and that sit on twigs, on branches and others that cling to the side of the tree with skewed toes and some that hop on the earth below. I suppose there are also algaes and lichens down among the fungi and painted peeling on rocks and trees and anything else that holds still enough.

It is the trees, though, that we see. Hanging from the sky with roots gently brushing the earth grasping at the earth dangling from the clouds trees infinitely long to us below who gape up from the ground they seem barely to touch, although we know really that there is as much tree underneath as there is tree above.

This is what we see. What we hear, mostly, but mostly do not see are animals. Chitter. Chirp. A scurrying rustle and cry of alarm or of rage and the whomp of wing stirring the air and the rattle of a beetle and on and on. Left to their own devices, the trees would make no sound at all except, rarely, the crunching crashing bang of a falling branch or stem grown too far for too long and succumbing finally to the infinite patience of gravity. The movement of air encroaches from time to time, fluttering leaf on leaf, creaking limb on limb here and groaning trunk there but otherwise, the trees in even a small forest a thousand thousand tons of fiber and living tissue go about the business of living in complete silence. The umwelt of the tree is empty of the animal kingdom, contains nothing of humanity perceived if at all as instantaneous incomprehensible violence no more experienced than we experience quantum mechanics, a violence that kills in the interval between two moments or which leaves a wound that heals slowly. The trees get on with the business of living, of starving the other plants of light and water and life, of murder and of symbiosis all at a pace no more perceptible to us than the axe to the tree.

The enormous indifferent mass of trees from sky to earth muffles sound with the mass of wood, of leaves, and the mass and volume of air enclosed within the trees pinned to the clouds swallows up the chattering and scuffling and rattling of rootless mobile life, renders the sounds soft and distant. The largest groves the eldest the tallest, lift the sounds up and away into the distant canopy leaving almost nothing but silence behind a silence we sometimes pretend to in our largest cathedrals our most ancient and holy dwellings.

The forest, like the sea, is indifferent. We interpret with desperate hope with overweening optimism this indifference as a kind of sacred benevolence, hoping that the trees individually and the forest collectively will somehow bless us and make us fruitful or at any rate successful or if not that at least not dead too soon. It is no accident that some of our earliest gods are the gods of forest and of sea of the vast indifferent forces in and around which we first scrambled out a small living for a moment or two but our gods never perceived us. Our first gods ever so concrete and real and touchable lacked the ability even to notice us to notice our deference our supplication our placatory attempts to weasel out some little favor for ourself or perhaps a similarly short-lived and suspiciously hairless ape which we happened to love for reasons the trees would never, if we could somehow make them see it, understand.

And so it is that we perceive the forest as both sacred and terrifying and eventually also and at the same time mundane. The forest is indifferent and vast and we are imperceptible to it. We are free to worship or to flee or to gather mushrooms for our dinner, and perhaps we will be killed and perhaps eaten by some creature larger and even more violent than ourselves and the forest will not care or even notice. Most likely, though, the mushrooms will be excellent.