A Walk in the Forest at Night and the Silence of Wizards

An unloved raincloud

Ged, apprentice wizard, walked with Ogion, his mentor, through the mountains, as they meandered their way to Ogion’s home. It was a long and silent walk, with a mage who wasn’t too fond of speech and a teenage apprentice who did his best to bite down his frustration. 

Ged was frustrated for more reasons than one. Ogion spoke in codes, took an interest in little things that seemed of no value, and didn’t do any spells at all. They went through the forests without making any magical interventions into anything, not even the weather. Magicians, sorcerers, mages, everyone knew, could change the weather. Send the storm away. In a land where sorcerers come thick, says Ursula Le Guin, you may see a raincloud blundering from side to side and place to place as one spell shunts it on to the next, till at last it is buffeted out over the sea where it can rain in peace. 

But Ogion let the rain fall where it would. I could understand Ged’s rage at having to be a normal person, and not even a comfortable and warm normal person. But I was very relieved that Ogion left the rain alone. The image of the cloud being tossed from side to side, carried this way and that by magical winds, was deeply exhausting. 

A silent walk through the forests, along the side of a mountain

When I was nineteen years old, I met Anna. This was at least a lifetime ago. In a village hugging the side of a mountain, flanked by forests. We were visiting Eddie, painter and local entertainer. As we crawled up the mountain, Anna charged impatiently down to greet us.

Eddie was painting abstracts. Emerald green, ruby red, ultramarine blue. They looked like the innards of jewels. His house was dark and light, smoky and warm, with an electric heater and a fireplace. I was stupefied by the smoke and the mist slowly making its way through the mountains. Everyone talked about ways to stay warm, because it was cold. Sometime around midnight, Anna said to me, come to see my place, you can spend the night there. 

And so we stepped out of the dim-lit warmth and into the night. It was a foggy night, and I couldn’t see anything at all. I didn’t have a light. I had a blurred view of Anna, just a few feet ahead, and I followed that. Once, I felt something chilly under my foot and realised I’d stepped in a stream. In one stunning moment, the fog seemed to shift and I felt the shape of the mountain I was on, and the ghostly presence of the next one. But mostly it was darkness.

I woke up early enough the next morning to wait for the sun to rise. There was a brief flash of gold just at the point where a forest of eucalyptus trees met the earth, and then it was swallowed by the clouds and mist. 

The house that Anna built

Anna’s house was made of eucalyptus wood. Doesn’t rot or catch termites. Mostly, though, it was made of glass. Two floors. The first was the kitchen. A chimney ran up into the second floor, which you could reach by stepladder. The second floor was a single room. A glass bubble with only forest to see, in three directions. A low ledge ran along the corners, covered in mini-landscapes of shells, pebbles. It gave you the feeling of being at the edge of the sea, looking into the heart of the mountains. A dizzying sight, every time.

The bathroom was part mountain wall, part open air, part curtained-off. Deep in the heart of it, surrounded by potted plants, was a mirror. You could only see yourself as nymph or wood-sprite, because the light never reached all the way.

The toilet was a dry toilet. This can mean a few things. In many places, it means you can produce shit but can’t clean it and can’t be bothered to invest in drainage so you get someone else to shovel it up for you. In other places, it means a hole in the ground. A privy. 

This was the second. A deep hole in the ground. Two slabs of granite to squat on. A tray filled with mud and a spade, a tray filled with ash and a spade. A bucket of water and a mug. Again, there was no door. Just an open doorway. A window. Many plants. Like everything else, it was beautiful. Like all privies once were, the structure would one day be moved to a place where a new hole would be dug.

I had a strange relationship with this toilet. I found it unusually beautiful, and, like everything else, a pleasure to try. But everytime I actually settled in there, I imagined a leopard walking in through the doorway. A leopard is more likely to walk into the garden than walk into a toilet, but there are few times that you feel more vulnerable in your life than when you’re taking a crap. I always had to tell myself that I couldn’t fight off or outrun a leopard even if I wasn’t taking a crap, to get myself to do it.

The silent eucalyptus army

The eucalyptus, Anna told me, was planted eight years ago. Eight years before I met her, that is. It only took eight years for most of the other plant life to disappear. For the landscape to transform. Anna’s garden was a solitary patch where eucalyptus and casuarina were not allowed to take over. It was bordered by a wooden fence. She pulled out everything that she could identify as an alien species or a hostile invader. African runner grass, she said, brought by the British. Weeds I didn’t recognise.

One day, I walked to the very edge of the garden. I noticed that the eucalyptus trees at the south border were almost pushing against the fence. For a moment, I froze. I almost heard a creak, the sound of a silent army of trees, marching very close to the fence, felt myself at the edge of an invasion.

I went back to the porch very quickly. But that was the moment I finally understood what Anna was doing, the enormity of it.

Life lessons

Anna taught me many things:

1. How to take a bath with cold water in cold weather (start with the belly, when your gut tightens you have the strength to take on the rest)
2. How to walk (lightly on the earth – she wore slippers on most of our little treks)
3. How to pluck invading species (I saw this plant tremble and I realised it was afraid of me)
4. How to be territorial (this is my home, and you are welcome to stay if you follow my rules)
5. How to let go (maybe you can stay here, when I move on)
6. How to gather a crowd (I’m going there, you can come along if you like)
7. How to collect water from a stream (a network of wooden pipes follow its trajectory down to a moss-covered mud pot which collects water and then overflows to let the stream keep going)
8. How to see in the dark (turn off the torchlight)
9. How to listen to the sound of the earth (just close your eyes and listen. Don’t know what I heard, but safe to say if you listen long enough you’ll hear something)

I used those lessons as little maps to navigate around wrongness, rather than signposts pointing to a right path. Because the most useful lesson, the most important one, is that each forest is different. You cannot use one to learn about the other.

The big and the small

Sometime back, a friend an I visited a cottonwood tree in a park. The roots of this tree spread out like rivers, in every direction, more than five feet tall. Its trunk is a whole world. We tucked ourselves into the roots and had the most wonderful nap, on that lazy afternoon.

We went back, a year or two later, to find the tree roped off, because it had caught a bad attack of graffiti. 

I always read the need to mark landscapes, trees, anything that looks more durable than the puny species that is witnessing it, as a resistance to fear. A moment when the human cannot accept its smallness and transience, and so attempts to smear the landscape as an act of defiance. Like all wild-eyed expressions of fear, it is ugly. 

Let the stone be a stone

Sometime later, Ged, still a frustrated teenager, but a more skilled wizard student, is learning how to make illusions. He can make a pebble into a diamond, but not for long. The pebble changes back, when the spell wears off. what must I do to make that diamond remain diamond? He asks.

The Master Hand replies, as old-school mentors tend to do, with a gently worded dismissal. This is a rock, tolk in the True Speech. A bit of the stone of which Roke Island is made, a little bit of the dry land on which men live. It is itself. It is part of the world. One day, he tells Ged, he will also learn to change this thing, the nature of the thing, to change its true name, to make a stone a diamond that will stay a diamond. But there is a but. There is always a but.

But you must not change one thing, one grain of sand, until you know what good or evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. The wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world…

To light a candle is to cast a shadow…

Ged is not any less irritated by Master Hand’s speech than he is by Ogion’s silence. Because the thing teenagers probably hate to hear the most is that they are smaller than a pebble. 

Babble

The sound of the earth is a very distant rumble to me now, because it takes a lot of silence to hear it. Though this has not been the most interactive year, it has definitely not been silent. The rule has been, don’t say it, scream it. What with all the competing screams, it has been difficult to distinguish words. I caught bits and fragments about the state of the earth:

CLImate GLOBE WArm it hot it too hot wegunnadie Sun BAD we make a BIG DUST CLOUD blocka BAD SUN wegunnadie BUY ELECTRIC CAR sunHOTglobeWARM humans bad bad humans too much humans inna world AAAAARjgireoirjgi GEOENGINEERING gonna save us all WE BE WARRIORS HEROES we savin the world TOO MUCH HUMANS bleeeuuurghaaaargh etc

It’s hard to think above the screams, but I did have a few thoughts about this:

1. Global warming, which seemed to be a complex, mutable problem, has now been simplified into humans be feeling hot.

2. The solution, the only solution, it seems, to destructive human intervention that endangers the lives of plants, trees, animals and humans is much bigger, larger-scale human intervention that endangers the lives of plants, trees, animals and humans. But that’ll be justifiable endangerment.

3. There are too many people in the world. Lots of people have said this lately, with increasing levels of seriousness, and have started pulling out data to prove it. And yet, none of the people who say it step up to kill themselves and rid the world of one more unnecessary person. Possibly, the people they have in mind are the unwashed suckers who move around and try to stay alive and can’t afford electric cars.

4. The laughable #stayhome = #earthishealing memes of a year ago are slowly being worked into #stayhometohealearth. Again, there’s a certain kind of person who should stay home. No one is telling the idiots who’re bouncing up and down into ‘space’ to stay home, even though they don’t use solar-powered rockets to do it.

5. Activists sternly demand that governments should bully and harass their most vulnerable populations even more than they already do, to save the world. They don’t tell the ‘space’ tourists to get off their fucking rockets and spend their summer holidays in their own backyard.

Humans and the earth

Maybe the most consistent message of the past couple of years has been that the unhygienic masses should stop crawling around over the face of the earth, because they’re just fucking it up.

That they can capture a piece of the pure white halo that vegans wear by cutting the grubby umbilical cord that connects them to the earth.

There is an underlying communication that this new breed of human, that stays out of the way of space tourists and spends its time masturbating on the metaverse, is somehow a better breed, that can be more trusted to care for this thing they know nothing about.

It’s funny how the question on everyone’s mind is what would the earth be without humans? Nobody likes humans. Humans don’t like humans. Everyone agrees that they’re a blot on the face of the earth. It’s easy to imagine how much better and prettier everything would be without them. 

What is much harder to imagine, though, is what would humans be without the earth? What new entity will be formed, what animal will be bred within the walls of the homes of the people with homes? Possibly the kind of entity that will not be able to do much else besides masturbate on the metaverse, which might’ve actually been the ultimate goal of all human evolution. 

There is a bewildering assumption here, that without knowing something, seeing it, touching it, smelling it or loving it, this new creature will even want to save the earth. It might be all that staying home and screaming, which addles the brain, that led to this bizarre conclusion.

300 days of darkness

This has been the darkest year of my life. This usually implies that bad shit happened, but this is actually a literal statement. We had, possibly, 300 days of darkness. That might not be an accurate number – it felt like more.

It feels like there’s only one season – rain, a friend said. Rain, fog and black skies. We had the smallest summer I can remember, which we spent staying home and saving lives.

During a three-month long tunnel of darkness, I started practicing chi gong, for the elements. Wood is spring energy, she said. Fire is summer. The instructions are simple yet esoteric. Part the clouds. Hold a tree. Look at the moon. Catch a star and turn it into the Big Dipper.

I realised, when I was doing these things, that it was an act of reconstruction. I made these things out of memory and imagination. Because rare as the sun has been, the moon has been almost invisible. I see it once in a few months. I haven’t seen stars in much longer, possibly more than a year.

I have to remember and imagine the sun, moon and stars. I have to teach myself that there used to be four seasons.

A hostile species

I have always loved the eucalyptus. There’s a wonderful relief in walking under those trees, especially if you lived in a rocky plateau where trees can be rare, in many places. 

Out in the rainy Ghats, though, the eucalyptus very quickly wiped out every other tree and plant species, because it has a capacity for endless self-replication, to rise up and eat the sun and block the growth of everything else. 

I used to wonder how Anna recognised a hostile species, but I also understood that they are not inherently hostile. That there is no universal list of hostile species, not even a universal list of hostile humans. In every world that exists within the world, there are things which grow and things which grow and block the growth of everything else. That is how you recognise a hostile invader.

It is the same reason for which a deer can be classified as a rodent in one place, and a thing to be saved in another. I saw a documentary long ago about an invasive species of starfish, and about halfway through, I started to feel terror watching them inch their way across the ocean floor.

It is often human intervention that turns a harmless tree or animal into a hostile presence. It is ironic that even humans who’ve learnt their lesson never actually learnt their lesson.

Gardens

Lately, I have been thinking about how it would feel to have a garden. I don’t mean that I think about what I will plant there, or what kind of flowers I would grow. This is not a dream.

I mean, that I can see, very clearly, a patch of dark earth, a bit of green and a bit of blue. Living in darkness teaches you something, too. It teaches you to seek out the light, with every cell in your body, every single thing that can reach or stretch or think or imagine.

To make a garden, a real garden, not some pretty fantasy, you need to also recognise what a hostile invasive species looks like. And to recognise in what territory it becomes a hostile invasive species. 

I think to myself, if I were to part those clouds, shut out that noise, erase the babble, I will be rewarded with a patch of sunlight.

This is what the darkness does to you: the reason my garden was so tiny was because I was looking from about an inch below the earth. I saw a bit of soil, a flash of green, a shot of blue. There was only one direction to look. Up.

The story of Ged’s learning years are told in Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.

Author: Priyadarshini John