Sinkhole of Trees
my neighborhood is surrounded by forest. most of it isn't all that thick. the bulk of the trees have been divided into cookiecutter borders around houses by their property lines. there are a handful of areas where you can actually wander around, though. the biggest stretch not in somebody's backyard is by my old elementary school. it's in a depression. it's not very well-kempt, they 'clean' it out every 5 or 6 years after nature retakes the path through it. i like that about it. it feels as old as my childhood because it literally is. it feels like it will change as much as it. i've lived in the same neighborhood all my life, so i've grown up around this forest. but, honestly, it doesn't carry a lot of nostalgia for me. it's not like the smell of grandma's house or some shit. i used to play in it, yeah, but it's too old and constant for it to feel warm. my friend tried to kill himself in it.
i walk by it very often, or i used to. i tend not to walk in the neighborhood much anymore. i've seen all there is to see around here. i would expect for the forest to always have an aura of tragedy and doom, always knowing what could have happened in there. but it doesn't really. obviously it does to some extent, but it's less of a feeling and more of a thought every time i come by, "he could have died in here, more than just once". it's habit, but i remind myself that consciously. that fact is important for me to consider.
i don't know all the details of those nights. i never will, nor would i ever want to. if i did, i wouldn't tell you, either. it's like a dream to me, like wandering outside of the invisible walls in map of a video game: the mass psychosis of reality would drop itself after one chooses to wander outside of it, alone to be imprisoned by total abstraction. this would be death. i don't know what he would have tried to do in the forest, but i know the plan was to leave it. i think of the forest as a gate or a pit to no one afterlife, but i do think of it as itself a kind of damnation. on those nights, the forest would itself would be hell, regardless of what came after having entered it. i wonder if my friend is alone in truly knowing what the forest can be like.
i walked through it again today, after i forced myself to leave the house. like i always do, i thought about what has happened there, but this time i stayed longer. i wanted to feel it more than i thought it, so i walked in to it, literally. i stared at the tree tops being swallowed by dusk. looking at the sky always takes me aback a bit, especially when surrounded. the trees felt like grandparents and older brothers: tender but worn. huddled in a crowd like a family by a hospital bed, they all knew more than me, but cared for me just the same. none of them have faces, it doesn't help they can only all be seen when they're huddled all beside each other, blurring the clarity of their appearances as the white poplar bark crisscrosses into sylvan static. but i felt they cared for me and everyone that has ever been through the forest, like grandparents or God. but i wondered, if the forest felt so saintly in that moment, why would it let my friend try to take his own life under its watch? how could God love him if He did nothing? but i guess something did happen, given that i still talk to my friend every day. he's still alive. the forest still makes him weary, he used to refer to suicide as "going back to the forest", but again, he's still here. so perhaps the forest is nurturing. at least it felt that way as i laid back against a tree, alone with the others, and for the first time in i don't know how long, feeling hugged by the ground itself. i sank into it looking back up at the sky with the rest of the forest. somehow, again, it was all going to be okay. it felt like when my mom would sing to me under the covers as a child, rocking me to sleep with her words, feeling just as tender as them, but as faint as the memory itself.
i only wish it could have done the same for my friend. perhaps the forest is still not to be trusted.
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i wonder if Logan Paul still thinks about the dead guy he recorded in the Aokigahara forest (that's what the Japanese suicide forest is called if you didn't know). i would if i were him. i don't think he does, though, which bothers the shit out of me. it bothers the shit out of me that he would even make a video about it. it was truly fucking obscene. there's this scene (the only one i have watched so far, because the versions available online have no subtitles and a DVD copy is like $400, no joke) from Jean Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma where he makes this point about film initially being black and white because they're funeral colours, as the image murders reality by being recorded, so it mourns its death at the same time as its killing it. i believe that wholeheartedly. that's what's obscene about the Logan Paul video to me, it's like the murder of a suicide. that ties directly into what's so interesting to me about the Paul Brothers, they're just total spectacle-worshippers, real triumph-of-the-object-type shit. it's like American Psycho, the book more so than the movie.
