Medieval Woods

You journey into the middle of the imaginary forest you have read so much about, the Arthurian woods of merry old England, forest that covering most of the storied island you went to again and again in your quiet moments. In those woods, you might encounter the fragments of Arcadia, that marvelous first place.

You might see Arcadia on the cusp of its disappearance.

Certainly, you would also come across landscapes that held moralizing tales. For example, the tale of fortune’s wheel. Rising to the precarious top of a beauty and daring a tree rides sidesaddle along the edge of a hill in the process of being undermined. Of that process, it takes no mind in its fullness.

Then, when that pride and daring was greatest, Fortune turns her wheel. In fact, this happens as the winter that followed melted away—and you come across the fallen tree, and a landscape that has turned the color of dismay.

In the labyrinth of the woods, you encounter temptations after temptations. One of the most serious of these trials is the wild dance, one that grips its participants and traps them forever. It is the dance of death.

It is a dance that can only happen in imagined forests, you imagine. But this you find isn’t true. Small groups of these dancers return to their rooms in the city where they are unable to forget their forest bacchanalias. In their urban bohemias, they make hand-blown images of the deep forest to which, on moonless nights, to which they are again and again attracted for over-the-top revels.

If they ever wake up from this obsessive partying, they return to the rooms that they thought were their homes, only to discover that their apartments had been converted to coops and sold to strangers.

If medieval forests rang with the hunting horns of Lords and Ladies, contemporary forests also echo, much more quietly, with the whispered come-hithers of a different kind of hunt. The reason is that Medieval woods live a spectral life again in some of your present forests, and numerous holes of passage open up to allow echoes of the old to leak though into the now.

If you manage to survive the dances of death, you may experience and enjoy these echoes.

The photograph below is a very rare capture of one of these strange chases. The great artist Albrecht Durer had a large hare escape from one of his woodprints, and has pursued it across the centuries.

Another escapee. This one from an illustration from the Ormesby Psalter.

In the act of taming and captivating a Unicorn, the Virgin appears. You remember that unicorns were understood to be dangerously wild, savage beasts; Virgins were used to trap them. Here, you see a knight standing to the right of her, in the act of pushing his cruel lance into the unicorn’s side. All this appears before you in an extra-lush landscape. Phallic lances and phallic unicorn horns both hint of the lance that killed Christ. Is this a triumph of the Christian over bestial paganism? Or does it signal the violence involved in deflowering the pure? Or is it a cruelty necessary to release the wondrous fertility of the green world? Or is it a revelation of the contorted gender norms and fantasies of Western culture, and its domination of people and nature? You simply do not know what this escape from the remote past is trying to tell you. Only the forest knows.

Without ever seeing a single painting by Gustav Klimt, the woods has channeled the palette and style of his signature work for this rendition of Arcadia Restored. You may feel blessed to have encountered that golden world the painter (whose work you love) also saw. But you have to be really careful. Trees, along with their colleagues, leaves, are notorious plagiarists.