On Simon Sarris' The Forest
On September 4th 2022
tweeted: “My strongest belief which I will elaborate in The Forest is that cities are not engines of culture. Instead culture is created elsewhere, and cities are where it goes to flicker and die.” I follow Simon with notifications and from my recollection he has only mentioned his forthcoming The Forest a couple times in the ensuing year plus. Although he hasn’t explicitly tweeted about it much, it has lived rent free in my head, and I look for hints in his tweets. This article is an investigation into what Simon could have in mind based on a few scant tweets.In addition to this thesis tweet over a year ago, here are a few more recent tweets and interactions:
On September 15th 2023, Simon tweeted: “Isolation creates culture. Cities, and scale, flatten it.” This was a QT in response to a tweet about how the culture and people from the “Midwest” don't resemble east coasterners and only slightly resemble west coasterners. I replied to Simon “when do we get The Forest?” and he replied “Soon”.
On December 16th, 2023 I guessed that some tweets were related to The Forest and Simon confirmed that he was presently working on The Forest by replying with a screenshot of the browser tab open for “The Forest”. Alas, he deleted the tweets that I asked about and I don't recall what they were about.
On December 21st, Simon tweeted: “In a big place you should be outward looking, in a small place you should be inward looking” and an hour later he tweeted “I have discarded more drafts than I've published, this year”. I believe he is indirectly referring to The Forest again here.
Here is what we know. Simon has been working on The Forest for at least 15 months or so. It is his “strongest belief”. The Forest is not just a blog post, article, or essay; it appears to be a treatise over a year in the works. Simon says cities are not engines of culture. Culture is created “elsewhere”. Cities are where culture goes to die. He doesn’t explicitly say that culture is born in The Forest; it is elsewhere. He could have said: Culture is created in The Forest. For whatever reason he doesn’t state it so directly. Regardless, given the title and these comments, I think it is safe to say that the thesis of The Forest is: culture is born in The Forest and dies in the cities.
Simon’s original tweet is very general, vague, even ambiguous. The vagueness of the terms ensures that the meaning shifts as you think about it. As you consider it, you question, adjust, and test the meaning. What exactly are creations from The Forest? Do you have to be born and raised in The Forest? Or is it enough to have been to The Forest a few times and you know the mystique of The Forest, and you spend 99% of your time in the city? Or is Simon speaking metaphorically? Perhaps The Forest is where the veil begins and Apollonian consciousness ends. “The Forest” is a metaphor for that mysterious wellspring of inspiration. As you leave the surrounding plains and enter The Forest, the trees and bushes occlude your vision, whereas in the plains you could see hundreds of yards. The Forest is animated by many other forces as you know if you stand still – there is rustling, snaps, creaks, twitterings. These sounds could be anything, unlike the plains beyond The Forest where there is nowhere to hide and you can easily see where sounds are coming from.
I am a fan of the gnomic mode of speaking, as Simon uses to great effect in his original thesis tweet. In fact, I think that wisdom originates with piercing epigrams in a gnomic mode. Before writing, we only had our very human memory which is not always sticky. But poignant and piercing sayings can stick—each time you return to them they strike you differently, they keep on giving. The subject of Simon’s tweet is culture, cities, The Forest, and the relationship between them. Culture is born in The Forest and dies in the city. Simon isn't saying that culture should be created in The Forest, he is saying that is the way it is. This is a very strong claim and perhaps it would be charitable to interpret Simon to be making a different claim. I will discuss these possibilities a bit later, but for now I want to take Simon at his word.
Let's assume that Simon is saying that the world already is this way, has perhaps always been this way, and will presumably continue to be this way. Assuming he is right, and given that the world is vast (at least to us) and ongoing, we should be encompassed with supporting examples since we are drenched in culture. Remaining extremely abstract, I suspect an equal or better case can be made that a great great many cultural marvels are created in the city by “city people”, so to speak. I suspect this is a relatively common assumption and thus Simon's claim will be striking to many because it contradicts this assumption.
If we admit that it isn't true that all culture is born elsewhere (i.e. The Forest), then perhaps it is true that most culture and/or the best cultural creations are born in The Forest. Like good scientists, we could try to weigh and count the cases for both and see who has the most – The Forest or cities. I’m not suggesting that this is what Simon has in mind (because he hasn’t released it) or is even feasible at all, but only that this is one way to make this argument. If we are counting cases, it would not be enough to just point out some paradigmatic cases of culture coming from the city or The Forest. To make this point one must also show that the contradictory evidence is inadequate or otherwise suspicious. Without demonstrating that the contradictory evidence is weaker, you may have a preference or a recommendation, but we are only learning something about you and not about the world. Again, my guess/intuition is that more, and more highly refined culture is produced in cities.
Back to the public facts: Simon’s tweets. On December 21st 2023, Simon tweets: “In a big place you should be outward looking, in a small place you should be inward looking”. I assume he is referring to The Forest here. First, Simon is perfectly vague and ambiguous about what are big and what are small places. Cities are often thought to be big compared to towns and villages. As The Forest encroaches on the community, at the limit there is no community, only wilderness. In cities, most people don’t have much space to call their own. And The Forest, which may not be owned by anyone, is deep and dark.
The next thing that stands out in the Dec. 21 tweet about big/small places is that he uses the word ‘should’ here. In the original tweet about The Forest, Simon says culture is not created in the city yet dies in the city. Now Simon is speaking of shoulds. So, perhaps Simon might loosen his thesis and say that, although it may not always be, The Forest should be the seedbed of culture. In this sense, we might say that culture can arise anywhere, but culture should arise in The Forest, because the creations are objectively better by some measure when originating there. Perhaps The Forest inspires something within our soul resulting in superior creations and The Forest is an undervalued and neglected source of inspiration. Or perhaps Simon actually means something closer to: big places are conducive to looking outward and small places are conducive to looking inward. Perhaps The Forest is a metaphor for the mysterious engine beyond our rational mind.
In Simon’s original thesis tweet he uses the simple present tense: culture is not created in cities. But from these scant hints, perhaps Simon means culture should be created elsewhere and The Forest in particular. If you are creating in the city you have the right idea, but your creations could be much better. Either way, it seems obvious that there are plenty of cases of both:
Cultural creators who lived in cities, where there is a cultural scene and where creations are quickly drowned in the clamor unless they are deemed fit.
Cultural creators who were rooted in the soil and had formative experiences in The Forest and followed their own path.
Arguing from the qualitative/quantitative disparity between cultural achievements of cities vs The Forest seems intractable. The strongest case can perhaps be made by focusing on particular paradigmatic cases illustrating The Forest’s role in cultural creation, provide some theoretical speculation about why it is better this way, and otherwise invigorate your audience. Hopefully we shall soon see.