***
Year 14 of Henry’s forest farm.
The aspiration of every Pliant Vine tribesman was to build their farm up to the point that it could talk. When one had cared enough for the farm, it would reciprocate the care by communicating back, giving the farmer encouragement and tips on how to best handle it.
This effect was not a feature of Saana's plants acquiring magical sentience. Rather, it was the usual tendency of pre-modern people to sometimes view their most complex intuitions as having an external origin – Michelangelo glimpsing an angel in the marble, a shaman hearing his rain-god’s forecasts.
Henry, a modern youth of 2050, interpreted this voice-hearing phenomenon from a non-mystical perspective, as a confusion at the self having achieved the highest levels of understanding and mastery. After one internalised the deepest aspects of any climb, the more wholistic, unconscious part of one’s mind became capable of deriving intuitive solutions whose logic wasn’t always immediately comprehensible by the mind's more constrained, conscious part. From another angle, after the subject/artist absorbed enough of the object/material, the two had a propensity to merge psychically, the boundaries between them dissolving and the personhood of the self bleeding out into the material, imbuing it with one's own animacy. Combine these two elements, along with the pre-modern ignorance or underdeveloped notion of the unconscious, and it became easy to mistake the guidance from this murky part of oneself as arising from a wiser, thinking, external agent.
That was a drastic oversimplification of the phenomenology, glossing over the hidden advantages of the pre-modern view. Nevertheless, the mechanisms behind voice-hearing were much less consequential to Henry than what happened by obtaining this state. It signified a critical merger of man and his forest, the arrival at a creative summit. At this peak, the forest, through mental assimilation, became something one could manipulate with the ease, fluidity, playfulness, and expressivity of thought.
He’d already ‘heard the voices’ of multiple mountains, some within a few months of study. For his 11-dimensional forest farm, impeded by many sources of resistance, like the unstable weather, this achievement took him almost a decade and a half.
But, eventually, his forest farm allowed him to add it to his domains of expertise.
Depending on the season, its crammed four acres could now house more than a thousand unique cultivars of fruits, nuts, mosses, tubers, bamboos, creepers, herbs, and spices. No cubic metre of space, horizontal or vertical—ranging 76 metres high with the tallest giants and 12 metres underground with its deepest geophytes—was spared from the mission of sprouting edible life. In certain sections, it became easier to move through the branches like a monkey than to tangle one’s toes in the thick carpet of leafy greens, leafy yellows, leafy reds; in others, the canopy was no less dense. To squeeze together, every plant had learned to make concessions, to balance the sweet gains with the bitter losses. The food was still quite bitter - although no plant’s individual ideal of taste might have been reached, Henry, after years working out the arguments between them in the kitchen, managed to find a place at the table for each; through the transformative mediation of knife and fire, many stubborn defects evolved into unique, appreciable flavours. The mechanistic Arcaneworker supports were also far from gone, but their rigid forms had been assimilated into the forest by the forest, swallowed by berry bushes and nested inside of by placid critters. One artificial absence was the farm’s outer fencing, which’d been removed completely. The job of fending off invaders had been reallocated to semi-domesticated monsters, who cleaned up the gardener’s unwanted excess and who, after they’d fattened up enough, the gardener ate.
Finally, Henry and the forest found an aesthetic. The original Pliant Vine forest farms resembled vivid paintings imbued with a primordial, fever-dream quality of the deep jungle, stuck in a point of fixed time and heat and moisture. Henry’s farm, harmonising with its own seasonal variations, became more akin to a costume theatre. To the music of the shifting seasons, a perpetual cast of colourful produce was arriving on stage, demonstrating their delights, and drifting away. Without any defined acts or end, the performance ran through sunshine and snow. The theatre’s director, meanwhile, operated unnoticed in the backdrop. Sneaking about, he made minor repairs to costumes, set each season’s program at the beginning, and hired new cast members for the latest debuts. One recent successful addition was a network of Cloud Vines, a type of natural substitute for a sprinkler, whose fuchsia tendrils could discharge a steady mist of moisture for trunk-grown mosses during the dry summers.
On this fairly relaxed day, Henry was swinging in a hammock in the shade of this forest whose contours mirrored those of his inner mind, both the elements in ceaseless operation and those settling into peace. Nevertheless, not forgetting to resist the complacency, he read to himself and his forest a poem by one who’d proceeded them.
“I woke to the crunch of a scout’s boot stamping outside my home.
I prayed that his death would cleanse it all,
That, along with his disintegrating corpse,
Would vanish his evil trail,
The trail by which his war-party followed.
I prayed to not wake up tomorrow in a foreign grove
Amidst the monotonous wall of green and brown,
To fill my palms with my own soil,
To return to sleep beneath my Frognuts,
While clutching a palmful of my own soil.
The sun and the moons had blessed me with a ladder,
A forest so tall that by climbing it I could almost touch them.
The sun and the moons had blessed my arms with so many lofty children
That not even all their seeds did I carry out.”
“Did you hear that?” Henry asked. “Don’t bother growing too tall. The war-party's coming.”
In the distance, a Scorpion-Buffalo a couple weeks from transforming into a steak hiss-mooed its lamentations.
***
The 16th year.
Henry, taking the philosophy of detachment contained in the Pliant Vine forest farm and embracing it to the extreme, chose to detach from detachment itself, terminating this exercise three years early when he’d gained from it all that he needed.
At such a moment, the Pliant Vine tribe, driven by the expediency of fleeing danger, would simply turn and run. Henry, who was not those people nor subject to their conditions, picked a different conclusion.
His farm project had begun in a winter, been planted in a spring. Now, as another spring was transitioning into another summer, he climbed a hilltop overlooking his four-acre creation, he took a seat on a tree-stump, and he did no more.
Right before his eyes, in the scorching, clarifying early-summer light that allowed nothing to be missed, the forest farm carried out the destiny that'd been contained in its first seeds. The overcrowded occupants of its 11-dimensions, confused by the abrupt removal of their restraints, began to eye each other up, to frown, to ponder, to imagine, to plan, to reach...slowly...across.
So began the violence.
On the third day, a lovely section of Dwarf Spinning Top Berry bushes wilted when a hard-negotiated ceasefire with the White Cherry Mushrooms at their base was broken, the mushrooms’ unchecked expansion choking out the bushes’ roots. By the seventh day, there was no trace of either faction. Both disappearing in the cover of a Spinach Grass that’d escaped its isolated patch, smothering them and absorbing them. Thus, the bushes and the mushrooms perished, taken unawares by a third party; thus, they passed into their annihilation.
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This one small annihilation overlapped with innumerable other annihilations, a few lost every hour, the pace quickening. Henry shied away from none of it.
The most drastic die-off happened three weeks into his observation, when a species of watercress finished spreading upstream to the forest’s main irrigation pond. Having achieved a secret goal hardwired in its DNA, the watercress committed suicide, the whole rotting mass igniting an explosive growth of bacteria, poisoning the forest’s water supply. A fifth of the forest followed in the watercress’s example, vines uncoiling and dropping like a rain of dead snakes, shrubs shrinking and turning brown. Amongst the survivors of this poisoning, the weakened Normal Apples, while not dying themselves, lost their fruit to a fungus. This, in turn, caused a residential eight-legged Spider-Mammoth that’d been enticed by these trees to scuttle away. Following the giant guardian’s departure, outside creatures who’d been kept back by its presence descended like a hornet swarm. With a remorseless frenzy, they gobbled up the weaker resident monsters, denuded branches of fruit, tore berry bushes out by the root, and unearthed bulbs mature and young.
Amidst the gluttonous orgy of destruction, the living, breathing, multi-layered costume theatre, so elaborate yet unified by the decades-cultivated synthesis of forest with its gardener-director, was shut down. Some cast members, observing the abduction of their compatriots, grew timid and refused to come out. Trembling, they locked themselves in wardrobes in wait for a less hostile time that would never again come. Other brave souls, true artists who believed that the show must always go on, emerged alone to belt out sad, solitary versions of once bombastic ensembles. Rewarding their courage, the crowd ripped them from the stage and devoured them, too. The consumed performers were then silenced by the deconstructive onslaught of stomach acids, salts, and enzymes, their vibrant forms breaking apart into unrecognisable constituent minerals, which would be dispersed and returned to the wilderness through animal droppings and—eventually, many years from now—the decaying of muscles and bones.
Henry did not glance away from the annihilations, bearing witness through night and day. As the indifferent hand of nature swept through his forest mandala, erasing the forms he’d spent years carving into it, he did not seek refuge in the detached musings of the Pliant Vine sages. He'd already absorbed their wisdom, and he'd climbed beyond.
His feelings on the matter of detachment had taken a while to settle. For what uses this ritual in cultivating this skill had, it’d become apparent to him the longer he’d walked this path that it went in the wrong direction, that detachment was rife with limitations.
Firstly, the Pliant Vines' fanatical prioritisation of detachment was egocentric. The constant need to stir up and reinforce detachment from the forest betrayed a more fundamental issue. One doing this—perhaps due to having concentrated too long on their personal project—revealed that they'd forsaken the other attachments that should have made abandoning the forest trivial: the attachment to one’s life, the attachment to the lives of one’s partner, one's children, one's parents, one's siblings and cousins, one's wider community.
The community - rising beyond the pairing of the individual farmer and their multi-dimensional forest, what appeared was a long tradition of farmers, who—through this egocentric struggle of berating their unspoken attachment with the noisy reminders of detachment—were sustaining a community. Attachment enabled the one to build up a beautiful forest that fed many. Detachment enabled the one when a greater existential threat arrived to move on with the migration of the many, to lay the next garden, to feed the next generation of farmers, as a previous farmer had once fed oneself. For the continuity of the community, both the attachment and the detachment were desired. The farmer was more productive when inhabited by this paradoxical conflict, by losing themselves in the forest to the extent that they almost couldn’t let go at the end. For the community, one should be a paradox striving for resolution but never obtaining it.
For the community, true detachment was an illusion. The ‘detachment’ practised by the individual farmer was only a reshuffling of communal attachments, the individual attachment to the farm that’d run its course losing its priority to the collective attachments. Properly ascertained, it was a tool employed by and against the individual for the community, a tool no more spectacular than a hammer or a shovel. As a tool, it should be drawn upon sometimes but not always. Sometimes, one should detach, but not always. If anything, detachment should be utilised almost never in comparison to the greater tool of attachment it was purpose-built to uncouple from. The final act of oneself leaving the forest was barely anything relative to the preceding acts of building the forest for others.
But, from the egocentric perspective of the farmer and their forest, could either take much comfort in their placement in the community both had long forgotten? Still, the worship of detachment felt flawed to Henry - even for the hermit confronting the definite, unavoidable loss of their forest. In circumstances where one was struggling to let go, it may have been useful to resort to detachment, to relinquish the internal past making this divorce painful and to return to the worry-free moment. At times, this might be the sole path forward. Yet it still seemed to him like an unfortunate, non-ideal end. For, by resorting to detachment, one was discarding not simply the anguish but the love – the love for the forest that had been infinitely more monumental than the anguish, the anguish being nothing but the sting of love’s departure. This was a catastrophic price to pay. It might be the greatest price - making too much of a habit erasing the past for the sake of the present also erases the present, which must one day become the past. Detachment should only ever be a last resort, one begrudgingly accepted after every other option had been exhausted. The more ideal response to inevitable loss might actually be to reject detachment, to reject the tempting impulse to retreat into the unburdened moment. It might be preferable to endure this misery for a while, just long enough to gain some objective distance from the current scene. The tragic view before you is love’s receding back as it walks down from the stage and exits the theatre. By gaining some distance, you might be able to see the grander drama of existence in which this painful separation transforms into only a momentary downtime, a quiet hour for the custodian to mop the stage before the next show. And by not forfeiting one’s most agonising attachments, by latching on to them until the love behind could restate its muted presence, one might just achieve another transformation, finding some way to lessen the heartbreak of this sad coda. Even just a little bit. Rather than staring passively at your feet while love leaves you, rather than conceding to the feet's nagging to flee in the opposite direction, you might choose instead to make them sprint forward. You might catch up with that figure passing through the exit, you might escort it a few steps further to the taxi stand, you might recount the good times along the way, you might lift your heavy arm and wave love farewell into the night.
Henry watched and meditated on his forest farm’s annihilation for a month, stopping when his tree-stump seat collapsed under him from rot. Springing to his feet, he ventured one last time into the dying forest. There, he spent a couple of hours scattering native seeds to hasten the reclamation and digging up an armful of unfound snacks for the voyage home.
Days later, returning to his cabin on the riverbank, he was welcomed back by a different mess of overgrown trees, their canopies chirping at him with a restored population of the ugly-looking winged crabs.
***
Monster-Self Veneration.
Stated simply, through his ‘supreme martial art’, A Thousand Tools, Henry’s ultimate ambition had been to unlock the neglected cerebral potential in Saana’s duelling. Each of his 84 arts contained small strides towards this goal. The eventual collation of their loose fragments would form a map illustrating a practical path by which the arena, what one might call the native realm of the acting body, could be invaded by the thinking mind.
Throughout this enterprise, however, it should be known that this was an invasion. All his attempts at cerebralisation were in opposition to the established, body-centric order. They were an effort by the mind to pervert the rule of the body. Ultimately, as a mere opposition, the mind being introduced by A Thousand Tools would have the limits of its takeover decided by the body, who constituted the more significant component of the arena. Because a complete conquest was impossible, the foreign mind would always have to cooperate with the native body. It would have to learn when it could seize control, when it should recede back and assist, and when it must vanish and wait for the next opportunity. Only through the creation of an immaculate harmony with the body could the mind hope to surpass the body without the mind.
To obtain this harmony, it was essential for the mind to understand the body. It had to perceive the full range of the body’s capabilities, had to plunge down into the body and touch the base of its depths, had to feel out the inner walls against which the body might, with assistance, break free.
Henry, to explore the body’s extremities, the monarch he sought to usurp, spent the last years of this Overdream session studying The Venerators of The Monster Self.
The Monster-Self Venerators, a group of fanatical Western Continent Earthfriend monks in the former territories of Old Rangbit, were so repulsed by higher-level, abstract cognition that they abstained from all speech—an outward manifestation of thinking—except when collecting Nature Energy charges. Much more strictly, they abstained from abstract, verbal thought. Staying 24/7 in their
This fanatical worship of the body manufactured a ‘person’ diametrically opposed to Henry and his aims, with a monstrous Physical GQ but pathetic Mental GQ. The monks were sort of like that Justinian kid. It was difficult to decide if their hardcore monster roleplay made them less or more reprehensible than that guy; on the one hand, their savagery, rightly, kept them out of civilised humanity’s disgusted gaze; on the other, they were kind of dangerously close to furries.
But Henry, again, had no prejudice against whose techniques he would steal.
Behind the strange methodology of the Monster-Self Venerating monks and their sect’s name lay a curious Old Rangbitan phenomenology, one even more intriguing and nuanced than the phenomenology of talking forests. Alas, their alien self-view could never be explained by the silent monks themselves, nor by Henry now proceeding in their wordless, thoughtless pawsteps.
End of Volume 3, Part III - Love in the Time of Cripple
Next up: Volume 3, Part IV – An Intimate Evening with The Cripple