In The Wild Places Robert MacFarlane mentions the unusual way time and space operate in forests. It’s a strange, abstract concept that intrigues me and that I am still trying to articulate.
Time is kept and curated in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them.
Robert MacFarlane, The Wild Places
The quote makes me think about how it feels to be in a forest. The muffled, hidden way that sound has of closing in one’s attention. Far-off sounds are absorbed by the trees, drowned out by the rustle of twigs and leaves, and a bird barely a few feet above my head will sing out loud and clear and unexpected from its hiding place in the canopy, as if it were the only voice in the world. Mysterious rustlings being our mind into high alert and we start to move in the eternal present.
The horizonless, visually compressed sight-lines of the forest lead to another space-time property:
Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories of forests, different times and worlds can be joined.
Robert MacFarlane
Certainly fairy tales make use of these portals into other worlds. In many Scottish fairytales the protagonist steps into a forest glade and is snatched by the elves. These portals appear in contemporary novels as well. In Ben Okri’s Starbook
He was careful to return through all the gaps, thereby making sure that he left nothing of himself behind and that he didn’t get trapped in the forest, or lost in a world he did not know, a world, maybe, of forest dreams, and legends.
Ben Okri, Starbook
After the Norman invasion of 1066, this was literally true in England. The forests that had sustained the people became Royal and protected, leading to legends such as Robin Hood.
[Forest Law] created…a space where the legal could become the heroic. People can vanish into the forest as they cannot in open land, and so step outside of the law in order to contest it.
Sara Maitland, From the Forest
