A Perpetual Collapse In Spectacular Silence

Contemplation's in forests and on trains

Here’s short contemplative essay about colossal change.

Credit: Jonathan Foster

Part 1

Throughout the ceaseless Swedish winter oceans of gently tumbling snow fall in heavy waves for months on end as the heavens perpetually collapse in spectacular silence. Colossal storm clouds bruise the sky while the blue black of all creation twinkles above and the snow entombs the land in a tender light below. The dog and I traverse the string of storms like two ghosts haunting a winter wonderland.

During the slender summer, where the light stays up all night to meet the morning with arms outstretched, there’s an orgy of luminous blooming to balance out the dark cold hush of winter. The great forest pines and birch becloud the land in waves of pollen and an endless blue sky rests as the earth shines out across a dark universe. The dog and I pass through the sweltering heat like two petrol-shimmying castaways looking for an exit where none exists.

Spring and Autumn weave these great seasons together with their formidable thread of life and death. The blooming and bursting plentitude of spring and the rich and crackling finality of autumn. Seasons bursting with such kaleidoscopic beauty that the heart sings like a lone crow cawing in a misty valley.

But these scant words are but a chain of broken nothings skulking beside the great majestic beauty of this mystical world.

Over the twenty years I’ve been walking the forests of Sweden, I’ve seen unheralded changes happen around me. Whole geologic time scales marching past as the dog and I are caught in the confusion like two unwilling witnesses. I’ve seen the forest become unsteady and bewildered as the ancient rhythms stumble and the world loses its footing.

I’ve seen the air bright with the promise of thaw in January, as if the spring had flown in unannounced. A certain light. A certain fragrance. A deep animistic feeling that beckons from the future. I feel it in my heart and in my bones and I see the dog feels it too as he checks his nosing and looks curiously across the sloping forest. The smell of oncoming clear warm evenings. Water dripping and running at the time of frozen days. The promise of spring. But it’s January. These signs should never come in January.

I’ve seen the warnings. The smokey tinge in the summer air, where not-so-far-off fires crackle through the pines like whirlpools, churning and spinning as if a tide of fire were flooding across the land drenching everything in smoke and fear.

And the dryness. Yellowing sage and kelp green moss that once held moisture and carpeted the forest floor like sponge, now crackle underfoot in brittle desiccation, breaking into tiny clouds of their own dry pyre. The dryness so pervasive it reaches far into the following season. Last winter I came across smoke billowing up through the snow. The parched earth below the roots of a mighty pine had ignited from a reckless campfire and was smouldering underground, the smoke rising through the snow like a terrible vision of Hell having finally frozen over.

Credit: Jonathan Foster

The dog doesn’t notice these shifts and changes encircling us. He lives very much in the moment and has no sense of forever time. I sometimes envy him his demeanour that protects him from the background anxiety these colossal transformations incite in me. And sometimes I pity him as one pities those embarking on the Titanic, as they blissfully head toward certain tragedy, unaware and blameless.

On our walks through the deep quiet of the forest, when there’s only the sound of the snow or the dry pine needles underfoot, there’s peace enough to fall into a meditative contemplation where the past and the future feel like coping mechanisms, evolved to deal with the vast emptiness of time. In these moments I see that all moments are one and the same as they describe infinite time as casually as they do our fleeting daily routines. Immense incomprehensible stretches of time bursting out of a flicker, like a flowing and rolling Möbius strip. And in this peaceful thought I am struck by our utter infinitesimal insignificance.

Last winter, during the cold and dark of early February, the dog and I came across the tracks of some fellow forest wanderer, boot prints trailing away through the snow. I scouted their tracks, the path they took, the way they steered through the trees and tracked across one ridge to another, and I was reassured that I would have taken the same route, steered the same path, and I felt a camaraderie with this unseen wanderer as an ancient brethren of humanness came trailing from the past to rest inside me.

We followed the tracks for a good while till we come across a kind of thrashing snow angel where, on a shallow slope, someone had slipped and fallen on a sheet of ice hidden below a duvet of new snow. I could feel the twist of their body and the backward arch of their spine and I could see their hand as it streaked through the snow to catch their fall. And I saw, half submerged in the glistening blueish white crystals, a fluorescent lighter, lost in the fall. As I reached for the little plastic butane bomb I felt, all of a sudden, hugely significant, not a trespasser in this world but an expression of it. Not born into it, but born out of it and I was overwhelmed with connection to everything and everyone through time and space. And deep in this feeling of connectedness was a fury at the utter wasteful stupidity of our current predicament.

Part 2

I’m sitting on the top deck of a high speed train catapulting through the Swedish landscape on a sweltering day. The air conditioning is holding the carriage temperature to a perfect 20ish, with the occasional cool waft, as if someone momentarily opened a frozen food freezer nearby. The super comfortable seating and interior is constructed of warm light wood and weaved brown wool and the windows are lightly tinted as if the carriage was wearing expensive sunglasses. The design is clean and cocooning and the whole effect is quite wonderful. And it’s quiet too. The compartment is so highly engineered and insulated that at 200 kilometres per hour I can hear the light conversation between a couple four seats down from me. Outside the window there’s nothing but shimmering forest, farmland and lakes blurring past.

As I sit on this train I feel the confusion of colliding realities. I experience a dissociated and pompous privilege as I’m propelled at ludicrous speed through the very same forests that I know are stumbling and collapsing under the weight of imposed human rhythms. I am seduced by the train as easily as I am by the car, and the screen, and city, and all the other “take-for-granted” technologies and their supporting values that propel me through life like a pampered demigod.

The lakes that mirror the deep blue sky are left over from the glacial melt that finally liberated Scandinavia from several kilometres of thick ice sheets that slept across the land many millennia ago. The land still rebounding heavenward like a waking giant as the incomprehensible magnitude of the earth’s rhythms dictate the reality through which I swoosh in my insulated envelope. I pull the recline seat lever and close my eyes to think about these colliding realities and I’m quickly overtaken by a deep burning fury, like last winter’s smoke billowing up from under the snow. I am made furious by our blind capitulation to the will of our current ruling Shopkeeper Kings and their unforgivable stupidity.

We are such genius design-Apes that we’re able to conceive of and manufacture incredible wonders like this train, and yet we are such moronically shortsighted and greedy Apes that we’ve abandoned ourselves to these foolish trinkets. Shopkeeper Kings have merrily emptied the world of meaning and harvested the majesty of life for their deathly vision. We’ve failed to fight back as they’ve suffocated and starved and drowned that which they cannot profit from, whilst fattening and worshiping and endorsing only that which engorges them. This train hurtles through a world that glorifies the trivial and the shallow and dismisses the serious and the essential and I am blinded by the light we no longer see. I am deafened by the sounds we no longer hear. I am burning with the love we no longer feel.

The train is taking me to Stockholm. Another city. Another place where the world has lost balance and fallen, like a stumbling blind drunk spewing across the land. Another epicentre of a massive human quake that’s shaken the Earth. Another urban citadel of the Shopkeeper Kings where we’re all glued to our screens, entombed in a never-ending avalanche of bullshit. A place where no-one can make any sense of the ceaseless emptiness pouring over us. A place where everything of the past has been made archaic and pointless and thoughtless and childish and without substance or truth or value. A place where we have been recast as a people who have nothing to say and nothing to teach, as a people with only things to sell and things to buy, including, and especially, ourselves.

Credit: Jonathan Foster

As I walk from the station to my house I pass the place where one winter a child sat with a hand-written sign exclaiming to the world that she was striking from school. “The house is on fire,” she proclaimed and the world became inflamed with her message. She was applauded and platformed and taken to the inner sanctum of the most powerful of all of us as she begged for the fire to be extinguished. Heads were nodded and tears welled. But the fire burnt on, with greater and greater intensity and eventually, as the most innocent and delicate were thrown on as fuel, we were told that she was too young to understand, but in the future, some other generation could, would and should do that which we most certainly will not.

In the meantime, the ShopKeeper Kings build space rockets for themselves and their puerile fantasies. They cook up philosophies that privilege the future over the present and unborn digital entities over today’s beating hearts as they imagine a diaspora of humanity through the blue black of all creation with themselves as pathfinders. I stop in the shade and look at that tiny little place from which a child pointed out the nakedness of our Shopkeeper Kings and I sigh.

I walk on through the Old Town, filled with waffle shops and souvenir shops and themed restaurants and bars and places to buy clogs and viking hats on narrow streets heaving with tourists taking photographs of themselves and each other. I walk across the bridge and up the hill toward where I live, past more shops and more restaurants and more galleries. There are people swishing along on e-scooters, drunkenly calling to one another as they slalom past the parade of parked cars that line every street in the city like loyal thugs. The street might as well be an enemy fortress because I’m not welcome unless I take out my wallet, my proof of membership, and participate in the Great Purchase, buying something, anything, everything. I suppose I could browse, but what would be the point in that?

The dog will be waiting for me at home and together we’ll head into the forest where the deer and the fox and the beaver and hare and badger, and sometimes, when the birds and squirrels chirp and bark their warnings, wolves too will tramp the lonely trails under the glowing orange pines, and the dog and I will make our way beside them like spirits passing unseen through a once loved dream. And we’ll remember that we are born out of this Earth and we are but one more beautiful flicker in the flame of our ancient brethren, of our human and shared condition and we’ll wait for these Shopkeeper Kings to be found out for what they really are. And hopefully, it won’t take too long, for time is eternal, but we are not.