Explain the dark forest or I will fucking kill you

by Rachel Rose O’Leary

Anoir agus aniar agus adtuaiḋ agus andeas, ó gaċ áird as a séideann gaoṫ, ar gaċ raon aerḋa dá leanann éan, ṫángadar ag freagairt na coinne: síol daraċ, síol beiṫe, síol iuḃair, síol sailiġe, síol caorṫainn, síol cuilinn, síol an ġiúis ġairḃ Ġaeḋealaiġ. Agus d'ḟás gaċ síol díoḃ ina ċrann, agus do ġein gaċ crann de réir a ċinéil, gur éiriġ na homnaí ur-árda an-troma agus na beiṫe breaġṫa breac-ṡolusṁara agus gur ḟoirḃiġ cruaiḋ-ċuileann agus giús Gaeḋealaċ agus gaċ crann de ċrannaiḃ na Coille de réir a aimsire. Ba ċlos annsin i n-uagneas an ḟásaiġ ceol ur-nuaḋ ag freagairt sean-ċeoil na fairrge, .i. Cláirseaċ na Coille ag seinnm go fíor-ḃinn fíor-ċuṁaċ ar mbaint a dtéad do ṁéaraiḃ do-ḟeicseana na gaoiṫe.

Ba ċlos an ceol sin ar fud na díṫreiḃe ḋá ḟuagairt d'il- ċiniḋeaċaiḃ an aeir agus na talṁan go raiḃ port dídin agus árus coṁnaiḋṫe ḋóiḃ fá sgáṫ duilleaḃair na hóg-Ċoille. D'ḟreagradar an ċoṁġairm.

From east and west and north and south, from every airt from which a wind blows, by every aerial path that bird follows, they came answering their tryst: seed of the oak, seed of the birch, seed of the yew, seed of the sally, seed of the rowan, seed of the holly, seed of the rugged Irish larch. And each seed of them grew into a tree, and each tree produced after its kind, until there rose the towering ponderous oaks and the lovely dappled- lightsome birches, and until hard holly and Irish larch waxed strong, and every tree of the trees and the wood according to its season. Then was heard in the loneliness of the desert a new music answering the ancient music of the sea, to wit, the Harp of the Wood playing very sweetly, very sadly, whenever its strings were plucked by the invisible fingers of the wind.

That music was heard throughout the wilds proclaiming to the many tribes of the air and the earth that there was a haven of refuge and a dwelling place for them in the shade of the foliage of the young Wood. They answered the summons.¹

I: Becoming-desert

1. The codification of paganism in Ireland corresponded with its death. This is embodied by the Senchas Már, a document of indigenous Irish law compiled by anonymous monks in the seventh century, some three hundred years after the arrival of Christianity to Ireland.

The Senchas Már is a calcified contact of an ancient oral tradition with Christianity. The traditional poetic law was constructed around sacred geometries (the number three, the number seven, multiples of three and seven) and orally maintained by druids. In the Christian-codified version poetic geometries remain, but all references to prep-Christian spirituality have been erased.

The Senchas Már begins with a fictional account of its own origins. St. Patrick calls for an assembly at Tara to purify the pagan law, referred to as the “law of nature.”² Three kings, three bishops and three druids (referred to as poets) are appointed to transcribe the indigenous code while censoring pagan passages.

The effort is presented as follows:

Whatever did not go against God’s word in the law of scripture and in the New Testament, or against the consciences of the faithful, was fixed in the system of judgement The whole law of nature was acceptable, save (in what concerns) the faith and its proper dues, and the knitting together of church and kingdom. So that is the Senchas Már.³

In the foreword, poets are represented as an elite legal institution that mediated the pagan law of nature and spoke “in dark tongues.”⁴ The passing of power from druids to monks is described as a transition from darkness into light: “After Patrick’s coming, all kinds of authoritative speech is subject to the possessors of the white language i.e. of the scriptures.”⁵

The reference to “dark tongues” as distinct from a “white language” has been used by as evidence that the druids practiced encrypted speech. Scholars have argued that the druids maintained a culture of secrecy so strong that it extended to a spiritual prohibition or geas against writing in general. The alleged geas has been used to explain the complete absence of surviving literature from the pagan period.

Counter evidence to this exists. In a biography, St. Patrick is described destroying druidic books. Whether by choice or by sabotage, the pre-Christian period in Ireland is irreversibly encrypted. The Senchas Már, a censored view of the ancient culture, is itself only a partial document. The original Senchas Már has been lost or destroyed.

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2. At the time the Senchas Már was compiled, Ireland was covered a rich tapestry of rain forest and was densely populated with animals. The forests were protected by the legal system defined in the Senchas Már: a legacy of the pagan era that held trees as sacred.

A patchwork of tribes observed the law and amended it using the pagan institution of assemblies. The laws, language and forests of Ireland defined the contours of a tribal culture.

Christianity modified this culture but did not destroy it. The first major shock was the Norman conquest in the twelfth century that claimed most of the territory.

In the wake of the invasion, the forest became a breeding ground for guerrilla resistance. The Cethern Coille (rough translation: forest-forces) wore light garments and launched hit-and-run attacks from the undergrowth. The natural encryption of the forest functioned as a force-multiplier, giving a disproportionate advantage to the Cethern Coille.

By the late Middle-Ages traces of the invasion were nearly entirely erased. The new settlers were transformed and absorbed by the tribal patchwork. This period of cultural reforesting has been referred to as the first Gaelic Revival.

Devastation recommenced in the 16th century. The Cromwellian invasion used scorched earth-strategies to subdue the Irish population. This included tree-felling and the mass slaughtering of animals. The conquest sparked multiple famines and a centuries-long extinction process that resulted in the mass death of people, animals, forests, language and the law.

The environmental devastation is immortalized in a 1710 song, Lament for Kilcash:

A mist on the boughs is descending neither daylight nor sun can clear. A stain from the sky is descending and the waters receding away. No hazel nor holly nor berry but boulders and bear stone heaps, not a branch in our neighbourly haggard, and the game all scattered and gone.⁶

History remains only in fragments. The Irish language itself bears traces of this extinction. The true name for the moon, a central deity in pre-Christian Ireland, has been lost in time. It is only known obliquely through a euphemism as gealach, meaning “brightness.”⁷

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3. Faced with extinction, the surviving culture was forced underground. Generations of agrarian secret societies like the Oak Boys used guerrilla tactics to terrorize British rule. These efforts eventually culminated in a revolution.

The cultural force behind the revolution is what is known as the second Gaelic Revival movement. The first Gaelic Revival (1250-1400) had been compelled into being by the sheer potency of Celtic culture. The second Gaelic Revival (1880-1920) was assembled from scattered and falsified fragments of a broken culture: synthesized into existence from near-zero.

A leading figure of the second Gaelic Revival movement was Pádraig Pearse. He founded a school for boys, St. Edna’s, that taught myth, language and self-defense.⁸ The subject of history was instructed “in close association with the geography and physical features of the country.”⁹ Literature and legends were discussed outside, in the school’s expansive gardens, so that the subjects became entangled with the landscape.

The 1910 prospectus of St. Edna’s states: “The History teaching thus merges into Geography teaching, and Geography again into Nature study.”¹⁰ Nature study was “an attempt to inspire a real interest in and love for beautiful living things.”¹¹

The students of St. Edna’s learned about weapons and fought alongside Pearse in the Easter Rising of 1916. According to Pearse’s diaries, they observed a geas or spiritual prohibition that prohibited the killing of wild animals:

Milo McGarry found a fine specimen of a Red Admiral Butterfly in the school garden today. It was dead already (we are under geasa not to kill wild things) so Arthur Cole undertook to mount it for the museum.¹²

At the time of Pearse’s school, Ireland’s population had just been cut in half by famine. The legal system described in the Senchas Már had long been illegal to practice. The land had been transformed from a densely-populated rain forest into a desert with the lowest forest coverage in all of Europe. The language was practically extinct.

Three years prior to his execution for his role in the Easter Rising, Pearse declared that modernity was backward. In a scathing attack on the British education system in Ireland, he wrote that the past was full of “rich and beautiful social organizations” and “self-governing democracies” where “the rich did not grind the poor.”¹³. Modernity had laid waste to this diversity in all its forms.

He wrote:

We preen ourselves quite ridiculously (and unnecessarily) on our modern progress In some directions we have progressed not at all, or we have progressed in a circle. Perhaps, indeed, all progress on this planet, and on every planet, is in a circle, just as every line you draw on a globe is a circle or part of one.¹⁴

2: Becoming-forest

1. The Irish word for secret is rún, a word that is a synthesis of seemingly disjointed concepts: secrecy, love, secret love, mystery and resolution. A related word is comhrún, which means both shared secret and common purpose.

In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss claims philosophy is an art of secrecy — of encrypting and protecting truth. Truth is dangerous and usually met with persecution. Philosophers, according to Strauss, practice hidden writing.

Strauss argues that philosophers employ two main information-hiding strategies. One is esoteric writing. Esoteric writing can only be decrypted by the possessor of a secret language: a cipher shared only with the initiated. Esoteric writing excludes the non-initiated from engaging in philosophy — it is vertical encryption.

In critique of esoteric writing, Strauss argued for a form of literary encryption in which the cipher is shared transparently with the reader, a horizontal encryption that he called “exoteric.”¹⁵ Exoteric books do not require initiation. The secrets of the texts are revealed to whoever is studious enough to search for them.

The books of Abdullah Öcalan are an exoteric prophesy disguised as a work of history. Öcalan authored a five-part manifesto from a prison island off the coast of Turkey, where he has been imprisoned since 1999. The original language of the books is Turkish. Of the five-part manifesto, only three have been translated into English.

The books, written in extreme conditions of protracted solitary confinement, speak in several voices at once. They are authored to communicate with multiple parties: the Turkish state, the European Court of Human Rights and his most argent followers. At their centre, the works express a comhrún: a collective secret and common purpose that has sparked revolutions.

The books contain an intellectual elaboration of a strategic shift within the PKK, the Kurdish guerrilla movement founded by Öcalan. Originally focused on establishing a Kurdish nation-state, the PKK changed strategy in the 2000s. The PKK’s new directive was to transcend the nation-state paradigm through what Öcalan calls “democratic modernity.”¹⁶

In the third book The Sociology of Freedom, Öcalan describes democratic modernity as follows:

Each community, ethnicity, culture, religious community, intellectual movement, economic unit, etc. can structure and express itself autonomously as a political unit Every selfhood (kendilik), from local to global, has the opportunity to form a confederation.¹⁷

Here, Öcalan adopts the Turkish word kendilik to describe the basic political unit of democratic modernity. Kurmanji is the dialect of Kurdish that is spoken in Rojava, Syrian Kurdistan. The Kurmanji word for kendilik relies on letters that were illegal in Turkey at the time this book was authored: x and w.

The deeper meaning of the passage only unfolds when translated. Kendilik in Kurmanji is xwebûn: from xwe meaning self and bûn which means both being and to become.

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2. The Sociology of Freedom begins with a reflection on freedom. Freedom manifests as “pluralization, diversification and differentiation.”¹⁸ Differentiation echoes fractally across all spheres of nature. Speciation is an expression of freedom. Human societies decouple and differentiate where freedom flows.

Freedom generates what Öcalan calls “moral and political society.”¹⁹ He defines morality as “the solidified state of freedom, the tradition of freedom, or the code of freedom.”²⁰ He defines politics as the articulation of morality — “the language of democratic modernity” and “the art of freedom.”²¹

For Öcalan, free society is both moral and political. Morality corresponds to a society’s ability to create new values — politics to the ability to put those values into practice. Morality is the being of a society. Politics is how it becomes.

The nation-state is corrosive to society’s morality and politics. It dominates society and takes away its ability to differentiate — to create values and put values into practice. Thus, the revolutionary objective is to restore moral and political society:

“The task of revolutionaries cannot be defined as creating any social model of their making but more correctly as playing a role in contributing to the development of moral and political society.”²²

Since 1923, the Kurdish nation has been split between four hostile nation-states: Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. Following the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, the people of Rojava (West Kurdistan, Syria) put Öcalan’s books into practice. They declared de-facto autonomy from the Syrian state and began a process of regenerating moral and political society.

Academies were formed to cultivate xwenasîn, meaning self-knowledge: the study of the myths, history and language of the Kurdish people. Local militias were established for xweparastin, self-defense, for the protection of the society’s freedom. Different aspects of society (such as agriculture, technology and education) formed autonomous political formations, xwebûn, that connected with each other in a revolutionary fabric of democratic confederalism.

A similar process took place in Bakûr (North Kurdistan, Turkey). In 2015, dozens of Kurdish municipalities declared their autonomy. Thousands were killed and towns were destroyed by the Turkish nation-state in the sieges that followed.

One of these places was Sûr, the historical city centre of Amed (Turkish: Diyarbakir). The 2019 film The End Will Be Spectacular depicts the events of the siege and includes a speech by Nûcan, the female guerrilla fighter who led the defense of Sûr. Nûcan describes the concept of xwebûn with reference to an apricot tree that grows in her village, known as “xwedayî.”

She tells a group of young fighters:

“Xwedayî apricots grow without any human intervention. That’s why it is called xwedayî, meaning it creates itself, it is itself, [it is] pure.”²³

Xwe means self. Dayî means “given.” Xwedayî literally means self-given. Figuratively, xwedayî means self-creation, self-generation, self-causation, a force generated by itself. Xwedayî is closely linked to the Kurmanji word for God, xweda. In her speech, Nûcan compares xwebûn, the self-being and self-becoming of the Kurdish nation, to a self-creating fruit that blossoms from a tree.

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3. The concept of a self-creating fruit has roots in the ancient cultures that preceded contemporary Kurdistan. Nûcan’s anecdote invokes a Mesopotamian hymn first recorded 3000 years ago:

Fruit, created of itself, grown to full size, good to look at, with whose beauty one is never sated; womb, giving birth to all, who has settled down in a holy abode.²⁴

The hymn is addressed to the Mesopotamian moon god Nanna. According to scholar of religion Mircae Eliade, the sacred image of a self-creating fruit is at the centre of all lunar symbolism.

The moon is one of the most ancient divinities. Evidence of lunar cults go back to the earliest human societies. The sun is worshiped less frequently. Usually, sun worship emerges from hierarchical societies and its essence as a deity relates to death. From Eliade’s research however, lunar symbols invoke reversible extinction and the reproduction of life.

According to Eliade, something is lunar if it has crossed into the underworld and returned. In its looping passage across the night sky, the moon lives and dies, dies and is born again, “inexhaustible in its own regeneration.”²⁵ The new moon represents a passage into the underworld: three days of lunar darkness that are always followed by a return.

Lunar invocations or “hierophanies” — Eliade’s word for manifestations of the sacred — are far-reaching and diverse. The moon’s many manifestations compose a network of entangled threads: death and rebirth, rhythm and asymmetry, forests and water, serpents and spirals, witchcraft and prophesy, cycles and weaving. Yet this complex web contains a hidden structure. According to Eliade:

If you want to express the multiplicity of lunar hierophanies in a single formula, you may say that they reveal life repeating itself rhythmically.²⁶

The moon is a cipher for self-regeneration. The being of the moon is becoming itself. Eliade: “Becoming is the lunar order of things.” The secret centre of all lunar symbols is the ever-decaying, ever-blossoming rhythm of that which returns: the relentless spawning of insects in a landscape devastated by floods, flowers blooming in a forest replenished by fire, an ancient struggle for freedom renewed by self-sacrifice.

According to Eliade, the quintessential lunar myth is the Kali Yuga or “dark age.” In Hinduism, the Kali Yuga is the final stage of a series of cycles that constitute history. It is believed to have begun five thousand years ago, roughly the same time state-based civilization emerged in Mesopotamia.

The Kali Yuga is a time of profound chaos and suffering. At its furthest point, the cosmos itself disintegrates. But the end of the Kali Yuga is the beginning of a new, regenerate era: the dawn of a golden age. For Eliade:

It is the same symbolism of larvae in the dark, of hibernation, of seeds bursting apart in the earth so that new forms can appear.²⁷

3: Return

1. The foremost thinker of eternal return is Friedrich Nietzsche. In Ecce Homo, the last book he authored before he died, Nietzsche called eternal return “the highest formula of a Yea-saying to life that can ever be attained.”²⁸

The eternal return is typically cast as the eternal return of the same: the idea that time is a circle and that everything that happens will happen again. However, Gilles Deleuze insists that this is a mischaracterization. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, Deleuze argues that the eternal return is not a closed loop that folds back on itself in static equilibrium. Rather, it is an open spiral: the continuous and dynamic unfolding of being, “the being of that which becomes.”²⁹

The eternal return of the same implies being is static — looping and repetitive but essentially unchanging. Yet Deleuze argues that Nietzschean eternal return is the key to unlocking the “thought of pure becoming.”³⁰. Eternal return is a continuous transformation that integrates being as the being of becoming itself:

“What is the being of that which becomes, of what which neither starts nor finishes becoming? Returning is the being of that which becomes.”³¹

At the heart of the eternal return is a spiraling interplay of forces in complex, dynamic interaction with each other. Forces are the energies that constitute our world. Forces burn with an internal fire that Nietzsche calls “will to power,” the “inner will” that directs forces.³²

The will to power should be confused with the will that wants power. The will to power is not capable of desiring anything. It is not human or animal. It does not desire — it burns. The will to power is an inhuman flame that constitutes and generates forces.

Deleuze defines will to power as “differential” and “genetic,” terms that correspond to the quantitative and qualitative differences in forces.³³ Will to power is “differential” because it can by defined by the differences between forces — “genetic” because it generates forces and is the genesis of a force.

The dynamic interplay of forces gives rise to a new kind of philosophical analysis that Nietzsche calls genealogy. The task of the genealogist is to decrypt these forces — to trace their origins and interactions, causes and consequences. Through this precise analytical art that Deleuze compares to chemistry, genealogists become philosophers of the future — agents of destiny who can create new values. Deleuze writes:

The genealogist is something of a fortuneteller, the philosopher of the future. He does not foretell a critical peace but wars such as we have never known.³⁴

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2. Affirmation and negation are examples of qualities of the will to power. These qualities become dynamic when manifested within forces. Embodied within a force, affirmation transforms into becoming-active — negation into becoming-reactive.

Forces are either active or reactive depending on the quality of the will that possesses them. Active forces are affirmative and reproduce difference through affirmation. Reactive forces are negative and tend toward unification and the denial of difference.

A reactive force is an active force that has been separated from what it can do — a society severed from its morals and politics, being abstracted from becoming. Reactive forces are possessed by a negative will: a will-to-nothingness that denies difference. Reaction is contagious: reactive forces subtract the affirmation from active forces, they “separate active force from what is can do; they take away a part or almost all of its power,” turning them reactive.³⁵

Fake hierarchy is what Nietzsche calls the triumph of reactive forces over active forces. This is the inverted and tragic hierarchy that flows as a result of reaction. Reactive forces hijack active forces. They “place themselves on high and entice active force into a trap, replacing masters with slaves who do not stop being slaves.”³⁶

This reactive contagion manifests as an entropic drift toward reaction, a becoming-reactive that is amplified in the eternal return. The eternal return is a multiplier, eternally replicating reactive tendencies. This is most strongly expressed in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The first time Zarathustra encounters the thought of the eternal return (his “abysmal thought”³⁷), it manifests a sickening vision.

Zarathustra finds himself suddenly alone in the wilderness. He is surrounded by wild black cliffs etched with a desolate moonlight. After a moment, he notices a writhing figure lit by the moon — a young shepherd turning in agony, choking, his face distorted by pain. A thick black snake is hanging out of his mouth.

Zarathustra runs to the shepherd and tries to help him. He struggles with the snake. Overwhelmed with emotion, a voice wells up within him and Zarathustra shouts: "Bite down! Bite down! Bite off the head! Bite down!”³⁸

Nietzsche describes what follows as “a prophesy.”³⁹ The shepherd bites down hard and spits out the head of the snake. He leaps to his feet. He is:

No longer shepherd, no longer human — a transformed, illuminated, laughing being!⁴⁰

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3. The snake is what Eliade calls a “lunar animal.”⁴¹ Lunar animals typically appear as a symbol of regeneration after the end of the world. Eliade says that snakes “know all secrets, are the source of all wisdom, and can foresee the future.”⁴² They represent “immortality through metamorphosis.”⁴³

Eating a snake gives a person the ability to speak with animals, especially birds. The second time Zarathustra encounters the thought of the eternal return it is triggered by the “babbling” chatter of his animal friends, the snake and eagle that accompany him.⁴⁴

Following his encounter with the shepherd, Zarathustra collapses as if dead and cannot eat for seven days. He is stunned by the negative depths of the eternal return. When he finally recovers, he finds himself surrounded by gifts of fruits and aromatic herbs from his animal friends.

The snake and eagle tell Zarathustra:

To those who think as we do, all things themselves approach dancing; they come and reach out their hands and laugh and retreat-- and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs eternally.⁴⁵

Zarathustra is disturbed by the statement and again blackens at the thought of the eternal return. Eternal return appears to Zarathustra as a war on difference, a cruel dance that hijacks active forces and causes the small, reactive and the negative to reemerge infinitely.

The thought twists around Zarathustra like a heavy black snake. Sighing and shuddering, he cries, “Oh nausea! Nausea! Nausea!” — the same words he uttered before collapsing seven days prior.⁴⁶ This time, something is different. The animals offer an antidote.

They advise Zarathustra to “Speak no more” and to:

Go outside where the world awaits you like a garden. Go outside to the roses and bees and swarms of doves! Especially to the song birds, so that you can learn to sing from them!⁴⁷

We find ourselves at the centre of the dark forest. The first secret of the eternal return is presented to Zarathustra under the light of the moon, entwined with a thick black snake. The shepherd bites down on the snake and is transformed.

The riddle tells us that eternal return is a selection. The will-to-nothingness can only return if it transcends itself to become an active destruction. Otherwise, it cancels itself out, “Nihilism vanquished by itself thanks to the eternal return.”⁴⁸

The second secret of the eternal return is transmitted to Zarathustra through the songs of birds. Active forces are recursively affirmed in the eternal return. Repeated an infinite number of times the negative tends toward the infinitesimal. Affirmation tends toward infinity: “developed, reflected, raised to the highest power.”⁴⁹

Do ġluais aimsir imċian. Do ċuir Éire a céad maol di. D'ḟan an tSean-Ċoill ina Coill. Do ġluais aimsir eile, aimsir an-ḟada. Do ċuir Éire a dara maol di. D'ḟan an tSean-Ċoill ina Coill. Do ġluais an treas suim aimsire. Lá dá dtáinig do cluineaḋ fuaim ur-nuaḋ uaṫṁar sa gCoill. Buillí toṁaiste troma tuaiġe. Do cluineaḋ na buillí sin ar feaḋ na mbliaḋanta. Do gearraḋ a lán d'aḋmad na Sean-Ċoille. Do fágaḋ lom arís guailne na mBeann agus cúim na ngleann. Aċt níor gearraḋ na crainn ar fad. D'ḟan Duḃ-Ċruaċ ina Coill. Tá Éire ag cur a treas ṁaoil di, aċt tá an méid sin de'n tSean-Ċoill ina Coill i gcoṁnaiḋe. Duḃ-Ċruaċ agus an gleann atá fúiṫi agus imeall-ḃuird an loċa atá i lár an ġleanna: tá an méid sin ina Coill fós agus béiḋ ina Coill go lá an Luain. Giḋ beag í indiu, tá an tSean-Ċoill ann i ndeireaḋ na saoġal, í féin agus a ḃfuil innit de ḋúiliḃ beoḋa aṁail doṁan beag innti féin. Mo cíon díḃ, a ṡíolta buana biṫ-ḃeoḋa na Sean-Ċoill!

A long time passed away. Ireland put her first bareness off her. The Old Wood remained a wood. Another time passed away, a very long time. Ireland put her second bareness off her. The Old Wood remained a wood. A third period of time elapsed. One day that came there was heard a new and terrible sound in the Wood; the measured heavy blows of an axe. For years those blows were heard. Full much of the timber of the Old Wood was cut down. The shoulders of the Bens and the hollows of the glens were once more left bare. But all the trees were not cut. Dubh-Chruach remained a wood. Ireland is passing through her third bareness, but that much of the Old Wood is woodland still. Dubh-Chruach and the glen beneath it and the borders of the lake that is in the middle of the glen; that much is still a Wood, and will be a Wood until the Day of Doom. Small though it be to-day, the Old Wood is there after all the ages, it and the lives it holds, like a little world in itself. I hail you, O steadfast, ever-living seeds of the Old Wood!⁵⁰