In Liu Cixin’s The Third Body Problem the author likens the seemingly vast emptiness of space to a dark forest that seems barren because the inhabitants are wise enough to stay hidden. A few years ago Yancey extended this metaphor to digital space in his article The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, noticing how many of us had abandoned mainstream internet forums and retreated to private enclaves. Around the same time Peter and I were playing around with the Dark Forest metaphor as were others. Feeling out the territory.
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet is an exploration of the theme from eleven different perspectives. A book about how to survive on the internet. Peter and I contributed a piece inspired by our experience online. He did the words, I did the pictures.
Here in England, truly ancient forests only exist in memory and imagination. The final remnants, seeded at the retreat of the last ice age, were hacked down to fuel the apocalypse in 1939. So when I drew The Dark Forest I pictured Wistman’s Woods, a hunched and twisted oaken grove on Dartmoor. It’s the closest thing to primaeval forest we have left and I know its legends and its lichen well. I’m much more familiar with these particular woods–and woodland in general–than I am with the labyrinthine channels of the internet.
Yancey used the Dark Forest as a metaphor. To me it’s a real place.
The primary mythic association we humans have with dark forests is the depths of our own psyche–another realm I’m more familiar with than the internet. Here in apparent chaos, networks of memories, images and symbols entwine in pulsing embrace. Their roots reach into the one remaining common ground beneath: the collective human cultural humus. I visit these woodlands as often as I visit the literal woods. I venture alone through ritual, contemplation and art into my own dark forest and brave the darkness of other peoples internal woodland when I create ritual with and for clients. The psychic dark forest is unchartable, constantly in motion. It can only be known through patient attention and genuine curiosity. We don’t bring torches; we let our eyes adjust to the dark and we trust. We trust that the relevant materials will reveal themselves if we approach the space as artists rather than explorers. We trust that they want to be used to create ritual, to be played with. That they’re alive.
Because none of these forests are barren. Wistman’s Woods, the psychic forests within us and the internet are all complex ecosystems teeming with life. Which maybe makes them more scary. There’s a moment when the dark is punctured by the opening of hundreds of yellow-green orbs and strange pupils dilate, which always causes a sharp intake of breath.
In the Dark Forest Collective Roundtable we talked about fear. Our moderator, Ruby, had noticed it running like a blindstitch between the disparate pieces. Fear of the dark is natural. We are diurnal and vulnerable at night. Predators lurk beyond the flickering warmth of the known. Our ancestors avoided heavily wooded areas–especially at night when the risk of disorientation is too high. But here we are. The uneasiness we feel in the digital dark forest pours out from the gaps between trees. The owners of those yellow-green eyes are not scared. We are scared because we are, or feel ourselves to be, interlopers. Fear breeds in the in-between places, in the inky spaces prised open by alienation. But fear, like the dark, is not inherently negative. The night of fear is a night of initiation. The darkness is not only teeming with life but with potential. I know this because I’ve been there, and I’ve undergone the transmutation and I’ve witnessed others doing the same. After talking to my co-authors I started to sense ritual responses to the fear. The beginnings of a praxis to engage with alienation… for those brave enough to enter the forest at its darkest point.
Our relationship with the world is all wrong. You all know the story that got us here; it's one of dominion and conquest. Our exploitation of natural resources was made possible by a set of beliefs, including what the non-human world is made of (inanimate matter) and what we can do with it (anything we like).
But we’ve learned our lesson, right? Now we recycle, march for change, eat vegan in January… and yet those underlying assumptions remain. We see nature as being distinct from humanity and we believe it is our right and responsibility to save it–amore palatable outgrowth from the same foundations. I hear these assumptions humming under our apprehension of all three dark forests: the actual, the psychic and the digital. If we accept these forests as ecosystems rather than barren arenas for human exploits then we realise there is no place where the trees end and we begin. They are in your lungs and you are in theirs. You do not leave your dreams upon waking and the internet is not a separate place we visit: it is made of us. Thinking of the world as one thing and ourselves as another perpetuates our alienation. Ironically, those most invested in saving the world ensure the longevity of the attitude that destroys it.
This attitude must be sacrificed. We cannot think of The Dark Forest as a place we own, as a place separate from ourselves or something that we have ultimate responsibility for. We must see it for what it is: a complex ecosystem that we participate in and that shapes us just as much as we shape it. I'm not counselling despair or dereliction, but realism. We cannot coppice the dark forest. Swinging chainsaws in the dark is just not a good idea.
Giving up the illusory power that comes with our position at the top of the great chain of being isn’t easy. We’ve been here a long time. But as ecologists start to talk about webs and sociologists start to talk about reflexivity, our metaphors are shifting towards the relational. We are less powerful than we imagined: not masters but members of the universe. So why should we imagine ourselves as masters of the internet? For children who grew up on super heroes it’s a difficult lesson but let me assure you: with less power comes less responsibility and a whole lot of wriggle room.
The disenfranchised have, after all, always had recourse to another option. When the obvious avenues of agency are exhausted we simply find another way. When the ice age came we retreated to caves and we started drawing on the walls. We invented art to stave off the cold and ritual to keep our spirits warm. When the Roman Empire withdrew and darkness crept over the land we conjured mythos among the ruins and wove stories that still sustain us today. When they sold our future to the powers that be we gathered in the wasteland and cranked up some harsh tasty beats. Magic, myth and MDMA. Throughout human history the people who have most reason to be afraid don't give in: they bare their teeth and growl incantations. In doing so, they change the rules of the game.
The Dark Forest is not a thicket of problems to be solved, it's a host of raw materials to be worked with. So let’s get our hands dirty.
A ritual response to the alienation we experience from the world has already spontaneously emerged. Touch grass. With the right level of presence it could become more than a meme. Take a few deep breaths to centre yourself. Repeat the silent mantra I’m on the inhale and here on the exhale. Bring attention to your palms and feel the minute sensations there before placing them on the ground and continuing to breathe. Remember your breath is not your own, not long ago it was in the lungs of the world. Then rise, stretch and feel the life force that animates you and every living being flow. Breathe: I’m here.
Any action, performed with awareness towards a greater meaning is a ritual. Rituals inspired by our increasing alienation from the world will focus on dissolving our sense of separateness, more will arise when we need them.
The second cite of alienation is between us. Things are strained. Tense. It’s hard to trust an avatar. We seem to be drifting further away from each other even as we create endless tools for connection. Most of the pieces in The Dark Forest zine were written during an enforced isolation when we were at our most distant and fearful of each other. But you must have noticed that, since we got back to real life, eye contact is rarer. We are each able to curate our own models of the world and inhabit them unchallenged. No matter how off-piste our track of reasoning has led us, those who disagree are never a serious threat because they don’t live in the same world as us.
And among all those masked others (who just don’t get us!) there prowls an even more unsettling threat. Non-human others, Bots and AIs who might be behind any apparent persona, no matter how well realised. In her piece, Maggie warns that we may soon need a reverse Turing test to prove our humanity online. But even that wouldn’t save us from the zombies. Proving that you are human doesn't demonstrate sovereignty; you could be an NPC. This is why we find solace in the cozyweb of private chats and discords. Here the people are real. But our apprehensions about the realness of outsiders accelerates our alienation. Alienation, like certain weeds, thrives in the thin nutrient poor soil of online discourse.
But there is hope. Though The Dark Forest zine expresses disorientation it is also an example of how we re-orient ourselves. It is myth. Not just a setting but a spontaneously re-emerging mythic location. Remembered from similarly unstable times in our history it rises rhizomatically in times of need. We found the dark forest separately and met there together, each with a different conception of the metaphor but a common feeling for the landscape. We each carved sigils into the bark not as assertion of ownership but as proof: we were here.
Myth has a bad rep. Its enemies accuse it of falsehood and its friends call it narrative. It is neither. Myth is not attempted history or words on a page. As soon as it is recorded it withers like a tree uprooted. Myth emerges or re-emerges spontaneously through multiple people; it is conflated by contradictory imagainings. When we moderns throw down sacred texts in amused disgust we are mistaking them for Wikipedia or a novel where plots cannot have holes. Myths have holes, ellisions and strangenesses. The contradictions are clues not to the text’s obsolescence but to its form. Perhaps this manner of collaboration, sideways, inadvertent, multivalent is the perfect substrate in which to nurture new stories.
Myth and ritual have always been locked in a clinch. Scholars love to speculate about which came first: Symbolic gesture explained by a story? Or a story animated by performance? The truth is they are inseparable. Without ritual, myth is just story. Without myth, ritual is just theatrics. When I drew the dark forest I put the ideas through my body into my arm, hand and ink onto the page. A simple ritual made of story and gesture that bound me unknowingly into a network of people thinking and feeling out the same metaphorical space. Not just my zine collaborators but every human who has ever invoked the dark forest as mythic locale. This space is unlike the spaces we are used to navigating by daylight, where our senses and our reason guide us. In dark forests, once our eyes have adjusted, we find ourselves better able to pathfind with use of our intuition and feelings. By forgoing the methods of discovery we are adept at and switching to less familiar functions we are able to traverse mythic territory and establish common ground deep enough for our myths to take root in.
We can’t trust each other online because our content is too shallow. Wisely or not we trust people we’ve touched, shared food and fire with, hunted with. It’s hard to do those things online but there are other conduits for connection: dance, art making, decentralised ritual. I don’t doubt the realness of my coven or my clients despite most of our contact being digital because they are not just images and text. We connect in embodied ways that lead almost inevitability to the germination of mythos. Mythos is an unstoppable force. It came up through eleven people to announce the dark forest without any conscious conception. This is how it always happens: no one makes myth. We can only make a conducive environment and then enter into relationship with whatever germinates.
There is an apocryphal celebration that happens in the dark, past the forest on the heath, on common ground. There people are united in deep prelinguistic revelry that gives them a sense of meaning in a chaotic and hostile world. An opportunity to embrace life despite the increasing industrial hegemony. It won’t solve your problems or save the world but it will make you feel real and feed the substrate that myths grow in. It’s called the Sabbat and conveniently it’s held when the moon is full. A ritual response to our alienation from each other might look like a Sabbat. We need to meet on the other side of the woods and remind ourselves who we really are. A day of abstention from digital life–perhaps spent touching grass–followed by a wild bacchanal connecting through all the embodied channels possible. I imagine getting our laptops out under the moonlight, a collaborative playlist, sharing and making art, banishing rational discussion for an evening. Then popping some dream inducing supplements and walking through the hypnagogia into the dark forest of dream from which we’ll return to share our visions.
Our time online has convinced us that we are one thing. A thing describable and delimited by 160 characters. A list of identities and adjectives strung together like a rosary we can’t stop praying. We’ve abandoned the confused throng of felt experience and made a deal with our own reflections: I will pretend to be you until I convince myself. No wonder we feel so alone. We have brought into and perpetuated the ideology of the individual. We think of ourselves as separate from nature and separate from each other. We see our identity as an isolated project to be finalised and actualised instead of honouring the sprawling multitudes within. The proliferation of micro-identities and DID alters are not a pushback against the cult of identity but a further atomisation, new fissures of alienation opening up within us, between the beads. There is something frighteningly final about each new self-revelation. This. This text. These words are me. Immortalised online.
I want to say I am not this! Not this profile pic, this opinion, this moment in time. If only you could appreciate the complex system of memory, biology, culture and relationship that conspires for a moment to produce my selfhood. If only you could feel my nails digging into my hand as I clutch a fast-dwindling biro and draft these words as a really good coffee gets cold and the morning rush flows around my cafe table. But she’s gone. And now I’m a different intersection of forces ineptly typing at my kitchen table, premenstrual with a herbal tea already tepid by my side. By the time you read this she (the typist) will not exist, having been irretrievably nuanced or obliterated by the intervening hours. But, of course, you can know this fleeting experience of selfhood, because it’s yours.
It’s not very flattering is it? A portrait of oneself as an amorphous interplay of personal and impersonal forces. It's structureless, like an outfit that really needs a belt. It’s also a tricky place from which to assert authority. When we accept ourselves as legion we have to sacrifice our vanity and our illusion of control.
Are you sensing a theme? We need egos like we need maps to guide us through… but we are screwed if we start believing these tools are truth. Because persona becomes personal brand, becomes prison. Only the dead can achieve complete brand consistency and to identify completely with any category, no matter how carefully chosen, is psychecide.
Maggie suggests illegibility as a method to avoid capture in the digital dark forest. Of utilising poetry and collage to communicate in cypher and send out sonaric pulses to find the others. I say yes; and ourselves. Become illegible to yourself. Get lost. Carolines suggested tools will work here too. Forget how you speak, how you dream, what metaphors you usually reach for. Close your eyes and cut up the glossy paper, generate random words. As you submit to the invisible ungovernable forces you will find new selves emerging or igniting in and through you. As you glue that idea to this image to that memory you are not just playing with paper but with yourself. All artists know this (and we are all artists): in the process things are not only revealed but created by the friction between self and world, self and other, self and self. It’s not only fear that arises from the in-between.
The first two sacrifices are a piece of piss compared to this. Surrendering control of your identity? That’s next level. We’ve believed in the individual since we left our communities for the cities and it’s got us so far. Forsaking this conception of selfhood dosn’t just sound foolish, it seems impossible. But the individual is another social construct we’ve confused with the truth. Letting it go might be foolish, but like the guy on the tarot card we have nowhere to go but the unknown. We used to live this way. Putting our faith in the fates, in all the godds and then just that one God. But now he’s beyond our ken and we have nothing to reassure us we’ll be okay when we step off the ledge. You could see the leap as one of unfounded existential optimism, or of abandoning the last vestige of superstition. I can’t make it without faith, maybe you can. I can’t let go of the project of self-production without trusting the mystery to rise from the depths and catch me somehow. Without trusting that in the dark I’ll find something Real to hold on to. And maybe it won’t be perfect, maybe it will hurt. I’ll certainly die. But at least I won’t be living in a prison of my own creation and maybe I’ll achieve union with that riotous essence that precedes existence writhing around in the darkness within us all.
Most of the time I’m still my name, my body and my bio but I live with an awareness of the darkness teeming beneath and I think this is what makes me comfortable in dark forests. Maybe one of those pairs of yellow-green eyes is mine.
If you want to make contact with the no-self beyond self as a response to self-alienation… there are rituals for that. In fact, maybe, that’s what rituals were made for. Because every ritual is a transmutation and every transmutation must involve dissolution. These are the practices of mysticism, the vision quest, the vigil, the fast. Each tradition has their own take on how to let go but here’s a simple secular suggestion. Go to the sea at high tide, stand in the shallows ankle deep. Breathe I’m on the inhale here on the exhale. Then stare at the horizon and chant your name until your feet are dry. Sit and watch the sea until it reaches its apogee. Don’t even meditate, just sit silently and wait out the hours watching the water as it takes your identity away. Let your thoughts become liquid. When the time comes, walk down to the water slowly, breathing I’m here with each step. Kneel before the water and anoint your forehead say something like: I am no thing. Rinse and repeat until you reach enlightenment.
We face a night of fear arising from each cleavage. Between us and the world, between us and other and between us and our self. Fear is inevitable. It is part of the narrative arc that turns out to be a circle or a spiral. The dark forest is where we face that fear, where we have always faced that fear; herbs rubbed into our brow, lance in hand, tongues extended expectantly for the chemical eucharist. No fear, no transformation. Fear is the prima materia to be encountered, not a thing to be overcome.
Whether the forest is literal gnarled and twisted, psychic inscrutable and shifting or a digital labyrinth of code you will be scared. Fear can be followed or endured the adrenaline used or allowed to pass over and through us or it can be transmuted into art.
As in all initiatory journeys, sacrifices must be made. And we always sacrifice the same thing: comforting illusions of power, mastery and finally coherence. As a ritualist my response to the dark forest is to keep making the sacrifices and guide others to do the same. To let go of the things we thought kept us safe and encounter the unknown fully not filtered through models and mechanisms. To face the horror of direct experience and come back not just changed but now aware of our constantly changing nature. Initiations don’t make you a different person, they relativise your personhood which releases you into the becoming.
When we don’t know who we are or what we are, who our friends are or where they are, there are three possible responses. To mourn our loss of certainty and slip into despair, to resurrect the old scripts and stumble on feeling numb or to find some way to play in the dark. To fuck about and find out. My choice is the latter. Not because I think it will solve anything or even be more fun but because it is what I was born to do. It is my nature. This dark sprawling mess within me wants to touch and taste and see what this looks like juxtaposed against that… then to rip it down and start again. This is not a plan for salvation or escape from samsara. It’s a game and if you come to it humbly, on your knees, you can play too. Just don’t expect to know what’s coming next.
To the typist that is both here and not here at the same time: this is so fucking brilliant. Thank you to the forest, the fingers, the listening, the conjured words. Oplettan. Every moment an initiation.
What a great drop. Glad to see you back Rebecca.