a dying world is still a world
The morning is livid with wet and colour, the grass cool about the ankles as we pass further into the space between the either and the or.
I have brought my friends to the thinnest of places here in Singapore. Together we are threading an eastward path, along a strip of grassland that borders two worlds. On our left is the long, sharp line of wall, boundaries that mark where the property of each neighbourhood family ends and the next begins. On our right, as the low slant of a valley begins to cascade downwards, the world is shimmering with green. Pale lime of grass, emerald of fern, muddy dark bloom of trees older than memory reaching out of the last remaining primary forest beyond.
Edgelands such as these are particularly susceptible to the dislocations of the modern day. Land-scarce as the island is, forests are disappeared overnight, and what scars of earth remain are ceded just as quickly to concrete and glass. They alter and scramble the memory of a place in their rising. The pace of redevelopment means that the shape of the land changes faster than our ability to process it. Walking through a place as threatened as this, therefore, is an act of record-keeping. The land scapes itself into our feet as we move through it, etching its contours into muscle memory. To notice what is around us is to allow our senses to act as an archive – growing alive to what life still insists upon its here-ness, though the walls of the suburb on our left are ever-encroaching.
Quietly, Jacob recounts how cities were once defined by the presence of walls. They kept out the wilderness when it was still a thing to be reviled, in an age before the nostalgia of the pastoral yearned for it again. The residue of such tension remains, even this long since then. I watch the tremor of leaves reflected in long panes of glass, passing to wire fences, to steel rebar.
As we walk, the land falls and rises like the breath of a furled, sleeping thing. The babble of birdsong chases along the top of the slope’s upward curl, beyond what we can see. Something about this cacophony, so close to the forest fringe, seems out of place, and we realise why as we draw up the slope. A dozen cages hang from the boughs of the trees, and within them the birds are speaking. A magpie robin trills one lonely half of a song, drowned by the syrup water-trickle of the white-rumped shama’s whistle in the cage next to it. But the caged birds are not alone. Drawn by the familiar song, other shama have come, flitting through the trees in dark sudden fragments, singing back to the ones hung in their domes.
Miriam, reading aloud from her guidebook to the birds of Singapore, has learnt that the population of white-rumped shama in this forest is thought to have originated from released cage-birds. What do they say to each other, we wonder? To which side of the cages, swaying now in the wind, does the dream of home belong? Tail feathers dip curiously, catching light in the dappled shade like the glimmer of a midnight stream. Men sit by their van and eat their breakfast in silence, watching the birds rupture the currents of air with song.
Past the cages, a shock of bamboo has detonated out of the earth. Some three storeys high, the skyward fanning of the bamboo is an echo of birthing. There was an age in the young years of the earth when the bamboo forests were evidence that something was coming, that the steppes were about to be covered in flowing rivers of grass. Today they are much the same, proof of life. Bats nestle in the slats and slivers of space within their stems, a sign for those who look to know if a place is good for other things to grow.
Below the bamboo the earth stirs with memory. Rootbeds have been ripped clean, soil and mud rutted into troughs and trenches. These are the traces of wild boar, which are seen more often than the animal itself. At this hour, they are gone, retreated back to the groves and hollows of great trees. Such great divots and upturns of the earth are the muscular echo of their passing; freshly churned each morning, a dawn-time ghost of their presence from the night before.
“Boars are landscape engineers that alter the ecology of their woodlands,” writes the author Helen Macdonald. “Wallowing holes fill with rainwater and become ponds for dragonfly larvae, seeds and burrs caught on their coats are spread wide, and their rooting on the forest floor shapes the diversity of woodland plant communities.” Imagine the little worlds that form in these furrows—shrubs and flowers found only in deep forests, carried to and taking root at the fringe of human life. So displaced, they will die in time; the pools of water will dry out, pollinators will seek other fields. But a dying world is a world nonetheless.
I think then of the Great Forest Spirit in the film Princess Mononoke (1997), whose path is marked by abundance and decay. Fungi, grasses and flowers spring from its footsteps, growing then rotting in the same moment. The ruts left by boar are much the same; slower, but no less capable of such lushness. The forest megafauna of this small island – wild boar, sambar deer – are world-shapers and makers, and they make the film’s old gods seem curiously possible in these late days of the Anthropocene.
This morning, the ruts of the boar have come right up to the edge of the boundary wall. Soil and loam are compacted against the fence, branches at the forest fringe trampled clean into the dirt by sheer passing mass. I wonder what it must be like for the people who live in these houses, hearing the grunting and heavy tread of the herds each night as they emerge from the undergrowth. Do they listen with curiosity behind their fences, or familiar nonchalance? Or is it fear which has driven them to line the tops of the walls with shards of broken glass?
We live closer to the end of Princess Mononoke than its beginning. The old gods are gone from its world, the last Forest Spirit decapitated by zealous hunters. The flood of its ichor unmakes the towns and burns the deep wood into a scorched nothingness. But then the green insistence of the grass comes, a salve over a wound. Where the old trees have died, it grows shallow, but it grows anyway, thin new saplings complicating the borders of the town. The forest spirit is gone, mourns San the wolf girl, amidst the desolation of her sacred shelters and childhood groves. Some wounds cannot be forgiven, and she can no longer remain here. Ashitaka, the prince who must stay to rebuild the world of men, can only look upon the face of the girl whom he loves and cannot follow, as the grasses flow and flow about their feet.
The morning grows warm, unfurling the wings of butterflies and buzzards circling above us. We leave the forest fringe as the grass spills into the end of a cul-de-sac. Where the asphalt is clean and wet from last night’s rains, white fallen flowers scatter the grey like abandoned stars. Saksham plucks one of them from the floor. He recognises their name and shape from home. In Lucknow, he tells us, the Harsingar flowers scatter in the middle of October, and signal the coming of winter. The fall of flowers is a reminder for families to pull coats from cupboards, and keep each other warm. For Saksham, a ground so covered is also a sign that his mother’s birthday is coming. Tonight, he will think of flowers and call home.
Outside their house, an elderly couple pauses their game of badminton to ask where we’ve emerged from, as if we were ghosts slipped from the borders of another realm. When we tell them where we’ve been, they smile, and speak of paths they have walked through the grasses that lead deep into the nature reserve, unmarked on any map. I look back in the direction where they point, and just for a moment, the road appears momentarily to disappear beneath its blanket of moss, and the low wall of the houses seems to melt like the shadow of an open door into the shroud of leaves.
The forest spirit is all around us, insists Ashitaka to San in the film’s final frames, as the grass blurs where the buildings end and the forest begins. He is here, trying to tell us something—that it’s time for both of us to live.
Leonard Yip is a writer of landscape, place, and people. He holds a BA and an MPhil in English from the University of Cambridge, where his work on multimedia representations of Singapore’s edgelands was awarded the Members’ English prize for best overall dissertation. His essays and poems have been published with Moxy Magazine, Ekstasis, and the Nature Society (Singapore). He lives and works in Singapore, with a continued focus on the changing terrains and ecologies of the Anthropocene.