In my PhD research, I marginally investigated the topic of the forest as a place of loss. Enchanted, haunted, feared and attractive, the forest has always embodied a wide range of human emotions and feelings.
This is what I wrote in my PhD dissertation and that I might use as a starting point for a new project:
This is what I wrote in my PhD dissertation and that I might use as a starting point for a new project:
"...These places [in the forest] are clearly and intentionally connoted as sacred areas which, before you leave behind the realm of the civilization, introduce and warn you that you are entering the archaic realm that preceded the human world, which was in the darkness before the light (Harrison, 1992, p. 17). And it is still there in the common imagination.
The forest is the place of initiations, of the moment that irreversibly changes human destiny; it is the site of obscure rites, whose mystery lies concealed thanks to the complicity of the darkness that reigns there; it is, moreover, the space that surrounds the other world, through which passes the path to that dimension (Propp, 1995, p. 91-92). Indeed, the forest is the margin of margins. It is the location of otherness, of an otherness that responds to a dichotomy which, as we have seen, has always opposed the human habitat to the superhuman habitat – comprising wild nature, mythical beings, dead ancestors, monstrous creatures - and has always also opposed the order of the regulated and controlled space ruled by human rationality with the chaos that is manifest when this same order is shattered (Nicoletti, 2006, p. 95). In the forest, as in ruins, this chaos has vitality: a vitality that lies not only in the aesthetic movement of nature, but also in memories of an obscure past, in perception of gloomy presences, in the labyrinthine geography that continuously changes as if under a mysterious spell: a “subtle life” that forms the active soul of the forest and transforms the forest into an “enchanted forest”, a “haunted forest”."
