The Living Wood

The dark wood of the first canto is a place, and a place that does not move is not a place, it is a photograph. Here there is one number, from zero to one, that rises and falls on its own, and it is read by the foliage, by the carpet of air, by the dust hanging between the trunks, by the falling leaves, by the patches of moon on the ground and by the flame in the lantern. A wind that moves the leaves without touching the sound, or a sound of wind over a wood standing still, are two lies that contradict each other.

The wind comes in gusts and not as a continuous wave: it rises in a second and six, falls in four and a half, and in between there is a calm lasting from seven to nineteen seconds. The calm is not a hole, it is the useful half: continuous noise frightens nobody, noise that stops does, and inside the silence come the sounds a wood makes by itself, a branch working up there, something breaking on the ground, a thud, a rustle in the undergrowth, and now and then a far off voice, low enough to be neither an animal nor a person. They are always between twelve and thirty metres away and always quiet, because a loud sound close by reads as a monster, and there are no monsters here. Every gust turns the wind a little, so it never arrives twice from the same quarter. The foliage moves at the vertex and not by turning objects, because the wood is a few meshes fused together and there are no trees to turn: how far a thing bends depends on how high it stands, two centimetres and two at the ground plus one and six for every metre of height, so a crown at twenty metres travels thirty four centimetres and a fallen trunk travels two.

Between the trunks there is air: a box twenty two metres across held around the head, with dust inside it, and the dust is there for one thing, to give the lantern something to light, so that the cone becomes a volume instead of a disc. The leaves come in bursts on the front of the gust and not from a tap. The storm passes far off and never arrives: the flash adds no new light, it turns up the moon that is already there, so every shadow stays where it was, and the thunder follows at three hundred and forty three metres a second from somewhere between a kilometre and a half and three, which is to say it puts a clock in the sky. The moon between the branches is a mask of patches that drifts with the wind, the breath shows in front of the face and stops when you hold it, and underfoot the step changes between leaf litter and scree. The first full gust arrives at the moment you pick up the lantern: the wind has not heard you, it is the canto turning the page, and it is the bargain of the chapter said without a line of text, because light is what you pay to see with and the first thing you see is that the place is alive. The wind does not know where you are, and a flame guttering inside a gust is the meeting of two things that ignore each other.