The Forest

It was a dull day. The sky, in a state of subdued irritation, let a fine drizzle fall on the traffic and pedestrians in the hippodrome. He cut a line through it all. The Sainsbury’s Local receded into the distance behind him. Beyond the traffic lights, and the traffic they congested, he came to the coffee shop where I was sitting – the heated hub from where I could see him striding through the adverse conditions. He walked through the door, ordered a coffee and nothing more. Then he took a seat in the corner. 

I hesitated for a good while, trying to catch his eye, and when that didn’t work, stealing furtive glances at him. It was all to no avail. So I realised my only option was to approach him. It was an awkward situation, and I spent several minutes dithering and trying to pluck up the courage.

Eventually, I took a deep breath and I stood up. I went to sit next to him. 

‘I have seen you in here before,’ I said. 

‘In here?’

‘Yes, that’s right. You come in here regularly. You always sit in the same place, too. And you are always reading a book.’

‘I’m a creature of habit, I suppose.’

‘I’ve thought about coming to talk to you several times, to be honest.’

‘Yes?’ 

‘It’s the books you read. They are … I was going to say that they look interesting. Maybe that’s what I mean. But it’s more that they are odd. And different. Or perhaps they are odd because they are different.’

‘That could be it.’

‘I’m Michael.’

‘Nice to meet you.’

‘I’m sorry, I expect you want your peace. Normally, I wouldn’t … because it’s quite intrusive and a person’s privacy … But I noticed that, this time, you don’t have a book with you.’

‘I suppose I could have it hidden about my person.’

‘Do you?’

‘No.’

‘You know, I think the real reason I wanted to come over was because people just don’t do this sort of thing any more. Whereas, in origin, we had the coffee-house culture of the eighteenth century and the ferment of radical discussion, transgressive ideas … or never mind that, just debate – heated debate. All of that.’

‘So you saw me and you thought of the eighteenth century?’ 

‘I’m afraid I did. It must be the books you read. You know, I can even remember some of them. Let me see. That’s it – Spinoza. You were reading Spinoza. I mean, come on, who reads Spinoza in a coffee shop? Then another time it was a history of the Holy Roman Empire. And then I can even remember seeing a book that was so obscure that I didn’t recognise it; a medieval philosopher or something like that. It all seems quite unusual to me, and I found myself thinking, who reads those sort of books? A historian, I suppose? Or a philosopher? Perhaps a historian of ideas? Am I getting close?’ 

‘I’m none of those things, I am afraid. Though I am interested in the history of ideas.’

‘Then you just read for pleasure, I suppose.’

‘I do.’

I thought for a moment. All the initiative was with me and I could detect in his blunt, even slightly defensive, answers that he was reluctant to talk with me. Except I didn’t want to let this rare opportunity go. 

‘I know this is a little unusual – you might even be feeling a little frightened, I don’t know – but can I make you a proposal? Of course, you can tell me to mind my own business and I will leave you to your leisure. I won’t be offended.’

‘What’s your proposal?’

‘Let’s rekindle a little of that eighteenth century spirit. Let’s defy the hedonistic materialism – let’s make our short while in this establishment more than a matter of flat whites and brownies made with expensive continental chocolate. Let’s discuss. Let’s talk about those books you read. Let’s debate. Maybe it will even get a little heated – but so much the better as far as I am concerned.’

‘Are you an academic?’

‘No, I work in public policy.’

‘Which means you have plenty to say, I am sure. It certainly sounds like you do.’

‘Plenty of people in public policy don’t – believe me. In any case, as I said you can tell me to go away. I won’t mind.’

My wary new friend yielded a discernible shift of trust. 

‘What would you like to talk about?’

I laughed. 

‘Well, now you have thrown me – because I wasn’t expecting to have this conversation and I am not prepared for it. But let me think; I will take up the challenge. I am sure I can. I suppose I have always wanted to hold a conversation like this, and that, in itself, is something worth discussing, don’t you think?’ 

‘What do you mean?’

‘Coffee shops are not the usual place for an improving discussion. Not in our culture, anyway.’

‘But you think they should be?’

‘I just wonder if things might be improved if we were more prepared to discuss public matters in places like this. If you think about it, where does this happen now? We have public debates through democratic institutions; but, there, the debate is professionalised and codified in quite a rigid way. These sort of debates enter public awareness through the media. Perhaps in a watered-down way, families or friends discuss things privately and that filters through to what they do in the ballot box. Except my guess is that’s the exception rather than the rule. This is all very extemporary but I am sure you can begin to see the sense of what I am saying.’

‘I can, yes. At least, I think I can.’

‘In a way, it is extraordinary, especially with all the information now available to us. And yet, misconceptions run wild and ignorance of what is actually going on is widespread.’

‘You have talked very vaguely so far – ‘things might be improved’, for example. What things? Or misconceptions about what? Ignorance of what?’

‘Good questions. I can see you want to get down to business. I guess I was just being cautious. These days some people feel very strongly … about things.’

‘Politics, you mean? The turn of recent events?’

‘Yes, politics for sure. But it could be wider than that.’ 

‘So, if more people were to hold a discussion like this, they might have come to a correct conclusion?’

‘I suddenly feel like you are being deliberately provocative.’

‘Hardly! What makes you think that?’

‘Well, maybe you are right. I suppose that is what I was thinking. Sort of, anyway.’

‘But are you making assumptions? Are you assuming that if more people were to hold these kinds of discussion, they would all reach the same conclusion?’

‘Well …’

‘Because if that is the assumption, then I disagree with it.’

I thought about what he had said. He had put the matter bluntly. Or so I thought. Something was lurking behind his tone, but I couldn’t tell what exactly.

‘I am not assuming anything. But isn’t it an assumption of any claim that by availing ourselves of the necessary information and with the willingness to engage in a discussion about it, we can arrive at something at least proximate to a correct or sensible outcome.’ 

At this, my new friend pulled himself up in his chair. For the first time, it felt like I had secured his attention. 

‘The tone of conversations like this – whether they take place in a coffee shop, a radio station, between the pages of a book or in the law-making chamber of a parliament – always makes me uncomfortable. The thing that makes me uncomfortable is that they don’t admit any eccentricity or madness. The strategy consciously tries to winnow out those sort of peccadilloes, or where they occur, to pass over them with a polite cough. It is exactly as you say – with the right information and a mature way of thinking about it, an answer of sorts will be found. That is the way of the eighteenth century coffee shop. But here’s an alternative way of thinking about it. This is a hypothesis – and keep in mind that I am only setting it out as a hypothesis.’

‘Okay.’

I could not see where he was going. 

‘Suppose that a conversation like ours is not a straightforward description of reality, or a series of points that map onto the detail of what we can both observe. Suppose that the way you talk about reality reflects a way of thinking about it and that the words and thoughts when they are strung together, when they are assembled in a great colloquy of nations, come to define reality. Suppose, in other words, that thinking is not a matter of neutral observation; it is not, in the mode of the eighteenth century, a case of stepping back and observing the matter of things objectively. Truth is not a possession that the person with the richest faculties for apprehending it can grasp. Instead, words and thoughts are acts of creation; they may not make the material stuff of things, but they provide a frame or an armature for their interpretation. 

‘If you entertain that hypothesis on the one hand, and then you assume that we live in a world that has normalised a loose version of positivism  – the kind of reasoned discourse you have envisaged in which facts resolve to determinate conclusions – what do you have? You have a world that has yielded its most elemental contribution to the dance of life to a fixed and regulated, artificial reality.’

‘I guess I can see what you are saying. But you’ve got to admit that it’s … questionable.’

He gave a loud laugh.

‘That’s the spirit. And there speaks the eighteenth century. But that’s it; I want my conversations to be full of characters, not arguments – or, if they have arguments, the arguments must come from the characters. I want them to be mad in the exactly the way human beings are mad. Not reasonable.’

I must have looked perturbed by him and it showed on my face. 

‘Don’t look so worried. I understand where you are coming from, and I can see that my position is eccentric. If you accept the view of things assumed by your beloved eighteenth century, then I also accept that I am wrong. But that’s what I want to get to – that’s what I want to challenge. The managed, coolly observed universe on which all the technocratic instruments of modern society depend – the economy, democratic politics, the expanding horizon of scientific knowledge, technology, modern healthcare, improvements in living standards … on and on it goes – is, for all its considerable achievements, just a picture. It is a figment suited to our needs. And for all the many great things it has done, don’t you think it has something sterile about it? Exactly for the reason that it doesn’t want to get swept off its feet, but contort its brain into an unnatural act of physiognomic gymnastics and fix the things it sees into a manageable mould. Once you are in that mould, you can feel your whole being start to atrophy. And I want to rebel. I badly want to rebel.’

‘I mean I … I don’t know quite where to …’

‘Lately, I have found myself thinking about strange things. Until now, as you have noticed, I have read a lot of academic literature. History, politics, philosophy and literature. They all interest me and I suppose they still do. But I am weary. I feel so weary and disillusioned. So I explored some strange ideas. The sort of unpalatable ideas that the worldview you assume would dismiss as wild conspiracy theories – the delirium of cranks and outsiders who are beyond the pale.’

‘What sort of theories?’

‘Oh you know, aliens – aliens and shit like that.’

‘Aliens? You mean that western governments are covering up UFOs?’

‘Not exactly, but I found myself getting drawn into the idea of aliens. There are all sorts of bizarre theories about them. Not just that these are other creatures who have travelled from other planets and star systems.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That they are ‘inter-dimensional’ beings, for one thing (whatever that means). That they have been living among us for centuries. That they have a direct connection to what we call religion. That they are the Sumerian Annunaki. That they are encouraging human beings to a higher state of consciousness. All that kind of stuff.’

‘And you mean that you believe that?’

‘No, I just found myself fascinated by it. Obsessed by it even. Every day I would find myself thinking about it – reading articles, watching videos. Even looking at the sky.’

‘Okay.’

‘But to a point of obsession, you understand. I mean the appeal of all that mad stuff was somehow greater than reading Spinoza and trying to understand new theories of political economy. Emotionally greater, I mean. Why? Why should that be the case?’

‘I can’t tell quite what you are saying.’

‘But what would it mean to believe in them, given what I have just said? I don’t think it’s just that they are a set of wacky-woo notions at the margins of intellectually acceptable debate, which are somehow refreshing. To me, at least, they represent a challenge to the picture with which we live. That sterile, dull, managed, controlled, regulated, neurotic view of the world that progressive people of good sense are so anxious to defend. And, by contrast, there is something liberating about all those mad ideas – I find myself yearning, longing for a new version of reality, one that is deeper, that connects, that isn’t a schematic diagram. 

‘I guess you can become inured to anything, really. And dwelling on aliens – and other wild ideas – makes me realise how claustrophobic I find the world in which we live and how deep my longing for release from it is.’ 

‘So – tell me if I am wrong – you are not saying that you believe all these … things you have been reading about. You are just saying that they are sort of crutch that leverages a different perspective.’

‘I am not saying that the esoteric and marginal should be reduced to the terms of the mainstream. I am not saying that any of the peculiar notions I have entertained should be understood as rival versions of the measured, empirically reasoned truths for which our civilisation stands. Instead, they question that method as the basis for knowing anything. If they have a claim to the truth, it must be something different. Perhaps they exercise their influence in the way that a dream might or with the sort of inscrutable influence of a song.’  

I thought about what he had just said. My first instinct was to think that it was just crazy, but I was prepared to continue in our conversation. 

‘I’m not sure I really know how to engage with that.’

‘I expect you don’t. Does anyone? But the starting point is not the methodical accumulation of knowledge on which we have come to rely. Not that the methodical accumulation of knowledge isn’t a precious achievement. Clearly, the advancements in knowledge we have seen are … they are very important, but they should not be understood as the point at which reality begins and ends. When that becomes the vision, it has a stifling effect on the natural creative instincts and sense of people. I think that’s what I want to claim, and it produces a scream, a sort of desperate cri-de-coeur – which can become truly dreadful. (The horror is written in our history.) I find that I walk around and, in a sense, I am not really here. I have checked out of my body, but that is literally all it has become – a body, or a univocal and determinate matrix of stuff. It really is enough to make you go mad. And frankly, I want to go mad.’   

This was not what I had expected at all. Now, I wanted to withdraw from the conversation, from the overture I had initiated. Except part of me wanted to believe that there was something to retrieve. Was he just being deliberately provocative? Or did he genuinely believe what he was saying? If he was as studious as he appeared, then surely I could reason with him, or bring the conversation back to a measure of good sense. 

‘Maybe you should forget what I have said about aliens. I don’t really know much about it. It just became a sort of craze. I’m sure it will pass. But the older I get the more I feel weary with the world in which we live, for all the reasons I have given. It is so flat, insipid; for all the great efforts it goes to preserving and extending life, building up the ‘quality of life’, it is peculiarly lifeless. Because it pushes everything – and everyone – towards that prize possession. It alienates them from the spirit at the core of their existence. I don’t want that version of reality. At times, I would even say that I hate it. And whether aliens, or any other seemingly bizarre notion, have any basis to them, I am convinced that the picture with which we live is just as Plato said it was; a shadow projected by a fire lit from behind us which we can’t turn our necks to see. There is a truer light in which to see the world.’

I thought about what he had said. Then I gave a short laugh. 

‘Well, it’s fair to say that this isn’t the sort of conversation I had hoped we might have.’ 

‘And least you haven’t coughed politely and walked across to the other side of the room. I expect that’s what the eighteenth century would have done.’

‘But surely … yes, let me just say this … surely, you must agree that we must have conversations and that it is possible those conversations can come to some … I don’t know, discernment of the truth?’

‘Yes, I do. But through the manners of people. And they, in the end, are inimitable.’

I thought again. 

‘Here’s a thought – again, this isn’t at all what I had expected to say. So maybe there is something to this conversation, after all. But I wonder if I actually have a hankering after something more prosaic and mundane. You talk about a sort of pent-up frustration, a spirit that is stifled by the mores and modes of our time. Except perhaps that frustration is something that, if you want to live in this time – or any time, for that matter – you must accept. It is just something you must endure. Because without enduring it, nothing can be achieved.’