Forestories #1: What is in a Name?
Long long ago, in a distant land, there was a mythical forest that lived, isolated from everything else in that world, popping up one day as a sudden dream, labyrinthine in its paths and ways and far older than reckoned the stories and legends that had sprung up in fear and awe of it. These legends often as not would speak of the many creatures and beings that had made a home there and I do not use the contrived hyperbolic when I say that there is no end to the number of stories written by adventurous and desperate storytellers who have gone forth bravely questing in discovery of that land, and who have written what we know so far about the Forest and its many attractions and ominous tourist traps, often one and the same, its plant life and creatures, beings and spirits, its haunted and otherwise mystical places and their powers and dangers, their allegorical troubles and treasures and so on and on in volumes of hard drives. Even I am not god enough to catalog all these stories.
In my own modestly adventurous travels though, I saw a cottage on the outskirts, the home of a couple awaiting their firstborn and it seemed to me that the truth and allegory derived from their life, would make excellent subject material and a unique and substantial grounding perspective with which to navigate my first foray into the annals of Forestories. And so I offer to you, my readers, the stories of this obviously ‘Adam and Eve’-esque couple, told to preserve and share the meaning of their lives for anyone who might care to know. And who might then walk away with something, anything of value or at the very least, a comforting hug and an escape from the troubles and times of personal despair. This endeavour is indeed an amateur undertaking, where the young make up for the tried and tested experience of the wizened by venturing boldly where none have gone before, thus making the very mistakes that teach experience in later days.
So in order to start our journey, we must first find our way there, travel hundreds of imaginary miles, cross vast oceans and mountains, indeed many thereof and pass through the portal of language, leaving behind our own world and hovering lightly over theirs. Our first story is that of the forest. We must once again set about opening for this familiar song and drama, begin with a little stylized creation myth beginning and narrate the humble home brewed backstory for the Khanolin Greenemere, the original magical forest .
Everywhere, the world is what we make of it, it is as vast as stretches our horizon, it stops where our perception, for whatever reason, can see no further. Things beyond that might as well not exist and most haven’t, to us at least. But to you dear reader, who are where I left you last, hovering over the vast green swathes of this Forest-world, only you can see the boundaries of this land, only you can say that it is not such a big or otherwise formidable looking forest at all. You might even feel the first pangs of disappointment at such a barely encouraging first glimpse. Such distance can generate only such perception. On the thick and well obscured ground, when clomping through the overflowing marshy undergrowths and across the sprawling treetops, Greenemere Khanol is an old old place sustaining the kind of living and life that has always been treated with the instinctive reverence that builds up amidst mobs and in distant towns, awe of something that we cannot understand and which beckons to us time and again. It is best to speak of this place in enigmas and parables; if one will forgive the initial cliches, their well-trodden but universal meaning will become more evident as one continues reading.
The Khanol is unspeakably dense, the famous Who, the scholar famously described it as, “bigger on the inside”, and we have not yet had a single explorer map it from within in its entirety and come out. The kind of place where all sorts of trees and animals make their living, which, for those that may be interested, include specimens of those that we have scientifically accounted for in our botany and veterinary books, and those from our fictional and mythical records and by the estimation of our oldest almost deified philosophers, roughly about 47% of everything living that lies beyond our collective human imagination. Which it must be said is relatively childish and in comparison to the other minds we have touched and felt, spread all over the cosmos, but I’m still quoting his venerated Who-minence. Most of these fantastical beings never leave the inner depths and I might employ the use of statistics one last time to say that the most popular estimation of the percentage of verifiable information we have over the Forest and its inhabitants is about 12%. That does make for very interesting speculation but I have yet to see that conversation rise above that level of truth and I certainly do not endorse that number nor yet that scientific approach to the mysteries of this Forest. I will soon expound more clearly on my reservations but as for any current certainty about the Forest, all that should remain prefigured in mind is that none can be found anywhere else in the world that live and die and have the Khanol Greenemere for their ancestral home.
And what an expansive and bewildering riddle of a home it is with so little known about its origins and current inhabitants and properties. Thus goes my first story about the Forest.
What is in a name? What is a name capable of suggesting? To children, a name is given to commence the process of Identification and to herald the creation of their self-hood. Gods and places, inanimate objects and symbolic beings also have names but fundamentally their naming is an act of claiming, done by those not themselves, to give them identities and stories that act as their characterizing and symbolic signposts in Language. So that becomes a referrant in speaking of them and signifies doing so but in the handling of the more sensitive poets, a name of a thing can be praise and an honouring of virtue, ability and story that is celebrated and in any other way, it becomes a word that seems to characterize their particular property of being, something that takes on a shadow of the thing it denotes. It is the first step to remembering them in time and also very importantly, the first step in a ritual process of the educated, partaking in trade and business with meaning and symbolism in reference to these things. For this reason, I have not and do not intend in these my records, to refer to the Forest by any other name than the one I have given to it. The word Forest itself is its species designator, a useful characterisation which immediately makes evident, the barest quality of the thing we are discussing. After that, my own name tells us everything we need to draw out a loose fitting and distanced outline of this story’s most significant character.
I chose to speak of the Forest as the “Greenemere Khanol”, and these papers are both the first time it has publicly been called in this way and an introduction to my own studies and perception of its being; and I’m not unaware of the admittedly vain attempt to write myself deeper into this story. Eitherway, Greenemere is a Celtic word- a sound from the old stories which refers to fertility and a more or less green-coloured verdant life that was often used to describe many forests of the myths, older and thus lost lands which luckily for their death, escaped the ravages of time and the greed of man’s machines alike. It is a hopeful yet fey word, a call for older, more savage and natural times that is in truth, a lament for all that is seen to be missing now and I thought it perfect to describe the dangerous and bewitching beauty of this land. “Khanol”, derived from the Persian word- Kanolhissa is a curiously feminine word, the formal poetic way to refer to an Oasis that is seen to come to us just as the desert seems almost to have defeated us. An unexpected boon when all seems to be lost. It has been used by many poets to refer to love, women and friendship, a sudden reversal of fortune, a reprieve of new life and beginnings just when it seemed that our death was looming over the horizon with his mossy sickle in hand.
And thus we have our setting. A not entirely new but still, beautiful idea of unfettered life somehow magically bursting forth in full bloom in the midst of a vacuum of nothingness, a void around it stretching for leagues in each direction. The Khanol in its unity is the only living entity, or at least one of any consequence in its world. But how can that be? One cannot make anything from nothing, there is always something to come from and something to become and time is the engine or rather the fuel spent in living that separates the two. When there is a logical progression between the two, we call our understanding of the same Science. and when there simply isn’t, it is Magic or as I prefer to call it, the Imagination. But howsoever, there is always something behind the curtain. So who is the master of the Khanol, that created it from nothing? Is it there for some divine or otherwise cosmic purpose? And what could that conceivably be and conversely, have we actually figured it out in in some or any of our retellings of its creation and current life? My own submission to that list of questions is- are we too human to be able to understand it? Is purpose and meaning and our measuring scales of time, causation and justice, simply too minute and human a conception of this dense deep unsounding vastness?
Thus thunderously, I end my first story. In the next part of this series, we will meet our human protagonists and see for yourselves, through their eyes their little cottage on the outskirts of the Forest. And don’t worry, I understand perfectly the consequences of my ideas on our beloved Forest, I don’t intend to let myself do any lighter than marvel you completely with this, my narrative accounts, of my serious theoretic study and rigorous physical exploration, (and all that at my age!) of the Greenemere Khanol, one of the last mysteries left to our current lot.
