As I pass through this middle space of the forestry forest and the railway, where the town has spilled into the surrounding area, like the poison leaking from the Factory, I think of how different the trees look as they stand in their rows and columns, and how different they looked when all those years ago the old trees of the ancient forest were cut down. I would hear the saws from my place at the table in the kitchen, and the truck would come out of the forest to unload the freshly cut trees by the side of the road on the empty piece of land opposite my house. I would hear the engines of the truck and the thud of the logs as they were stacked into large triangular formations, rising parallel across on the other side of the road. And later, when the truck left, I went outside into the crisp early spring to smell the resin that filled the air, rising from the cut logs and discarded branches that were crushed beneath the heavy wheels of the trucks. The logs lay in their piles, with their verticality inverted and the space between them restricted, but still high, now with a different mass and a different weight, a sinking heaviness instead of a grand rising weightlessness. The street was covered with needles and broken pinecones from where the trees and branches had been violently dragged out of the forest and roughly handled by the big machines. The piles of logs would sit there through the summer, and the trucks came and built more stacks, nailing notes to the drying lumber, declaring who had bought the wood and hinting at what thing it might become, what use it might have, as if the forest itself was something prior or outside of the logic of use. Then late in the autumn, different, bigger trucks came and began to take the logs away, lifting them up onto the bed of their trailer before driving away down towards the coast. And all around the town, in patches and parcels where the trucks and machines could reach, the forest was cut and it slowly emptied, leaving the small cluster of houses and the old Factory and the Chapel seemingly standing in an open space of nothingness. The nothingness is still here as I walk along the railway embankment, even now when the trees are re-growing tall and straight again, even now. And in that very evenness, the spacing and in the uniformity of the rows that rise from the oncecleared earth, the emptiness lies there between them and in them, as if they do not really make a forest, but instead only another accumulation of empty objects. They are merely waiting to be cut and to become stacks of logs by the side of the road, ready to be loaded up onto trucks and taken away to another Factory somewhere, where they will become cardboard or tables or cupboards or floorboards or firewood. They do not really belong to this place now, they are not part of the forest or the town. It is as if the space that emptied around the town had only been filled with those boxes and tables and floorboards, standing here on either side of the railway, temporarily in the form of trees. But it is also as if they are already part of the rubbish heap of discarded pallets and chairs and boxes and cupboards, the wood and the timber and the trees are all the same, standing here as empty objects, things produced and made and bought and discarded. There is very little difference between the rubbish heap and the plantation of trees just beyond it, and very little difference between them and the objects that stand in houses and in cupboards and shops – the benches, perhaps, in the new bigger church where the Priest speaks and tells her stories, and maybe the chairs in the apartment where she lives, they may still contain a trace of the town, some of its wood, even though she does not think of the forest and the wood and the rubbish heap that she left behind. And I think of the roughness of the table in the kitchen in the house, built by my mother’s grandfather, and of the stacks and rows of firewood in the sheds in the garden, and how they burn in the stove, and the work as I split them with my axe and carry them inside. And I think of the fire and the warmth that spreads through the house, and the fire that spread through the house in the night, and how easily I can burn up with the wood and disappear into the smoke. And I think that it would almost be better if all of these trees were burnt up now, and if all of the trees that had been stacked across the street from my house had been burnt up before the trucks could come and take them away, if only a spark could have jumped from the stove then, out between the gap between the hinges of the door, and that spark could have flown out of the house and across the space to the pyramid-like stacks of wood, and it could have landed on them and sat there and smouldered and grown in its intensity as if fed by a breath, and then burst into flames and burnt through the stacks and through the plantation of trees around the town and through the rubbish heap of empty objects. The fire would have been full and close and the smoke would have risen up and filled the sky, and the world determined by the Factory would be removed, and even if everything that was left was grey ashes, it soon would have stirred in the wind and then people would forget that the town and the rubbish heap and the plantations were here, and even the people would have disappeared as well. All that would remain would be the grey ash disappearing within the grey stones and the thin soil of the heath. And perhaps the ice would return and scrape away the last of the town and push down on the land and the grey stones once again. Sitting tight and waiting until everything would be different, when the earth would turn again, but this time not just as it turns in its smooth path through space, but instead turns over and within itself, and takes the stones from here on the surface back down deep into itself, where it can remake them again and again through pressure and heat. And that disaster that came in the night, the burning fire and heat that I smelt on my hair and on my pillow, would be magnified, and I would welcome it, that other disaster. I would walk out into it, just as I walk now along the old embankment of the train track, through the even space of the tall straight trees planted on either side, and the empty space between them and the empty space within them, and through this subtle disaster that is all through and around the town. There is no fire here, but there is cold. And in a way that seems just as good, the cold that seeps in between everything, and while it seems still, it crushes everything. And I long for the return of the ice and its weight, its heaviness and slowness, the imperceptible eons, now here again, in place of the smell of rising smoke and falling ashes.
I continue, pushing my way through the powdery snow, along the mound of the track of the railway, quickly passing through the ruin of the forest, away from the town, towards the older forest that grows up from the swampy uneven ground of the heath, where the trucks and machines cannot drive, cannot cut and drag, where the older trees grow in their twists and turns, and the giant stones sit in ridges around the hollows of the dead ice, left like an older trace of something ancient. I rush to get there, away from this poison and evenness, away from the Factory and its order, which seems like an order of destruction and ruin. The trees are silent around me, and the stillness of the cold is there, clinging around my knees where the barrier between my skin and the world is the thinnest. I lift my legs higher and faster as I walk, but I still place my feet carefully, as at any place there could be ice beneath the snow, and I must be aware of how I balance and shift my weight and move. It is hard to push through the deep snow that moves beneath my feet. I have to press it down with each step until it compacts and becomes solid enough for me to push against it and lift my other foot and move forwards, even as my standing foot slides backwards under that pressure, and it feels as if each step must be taken twice, both forwards and backwards at the same time. If I turned and looked back at the tracks that I have made along those of the old railway, then 256 I would see a line of winding footsteps, wavering back and forth within the breadth of the embankment, and already the loose snow will have fallen back into the trough that I have ploughed, leaving only an indistinct furrow punctuated by the deeper divots of compacted snow from where I have set my feet. It is hard work as I continue quickly along the track, away from the town, leaving the town behind; walking towards the pale disc of the sun ahead of me, now almost directly aligned with the avenue of the train tracks, coming and going behind the clouds that are thick enough to allow me to see its shape without being blinded, and to follow it without feeling its weak winter heat. I walk towards the lowering sun, along the track, and now the ground rises up on either side of the embankment, becoming first level with it and then rising above it, so that I am walking through a cut in the higher ground. Now within the earth, I see the texture of the grey stone on either side of the track. Running down through it are indents of even, inverse, hollowed out cylinders from where the rock was drilled into in a series of even parallel lines so that it could be cracked and forced apart to make way for the railroad. Only half of each hole remains in the bare broken rock, a series of smooth furrows plunging downwards in parallel, their other half missing, if half of an empty space can be missing, 257 just at the rock that was cut away and removed is absent, cut and crushed and taken away, maybe poured through a sifter like the one I saw at the factory to sort it for other uses in other places. I look at the rising slabs of stone, and at the textures and cracks that play across their faces, and the thin ice and patterns of frost that run along the cracks to gather and thicken in icicles that extend out in rows, layer on layer of water held still. The lichen that grows across the surface is a greyish pale green, like an outline of a different landscape seen from a great height and distance, which only grows greater as I look closer. It flakes away from the stone leaving black tracks and rings that somehow seem bright against the grey of the stone, and somehow brighter still against the whiteness of the snow, a matt darkness that grows out of the stone itself – these stones, those that remained and resisted after all the thousands of years of heavy ice that pushed and ground them down, which left them exposed as everything soft was scrapped away, until only this hard grey bed remains rising from the heath. Until even these stones, those that survived the ice and the ages, were suddenly cracked by drills and explosives and were cut and opened, and the path for the railway was made level and everything here sped up. The stones that had been here for so long, through such slow timeless turmoil of the earth, were, in what seemed like a 258 moment, cut and removed, and the trains sped through this gap, almost too quick to register, across the track that was made up of gravel and dirt and wood and iron. I look at the indents made where the first holes were drilled down into the stone, and they stand out almost too straight against the hardness of the stone, like gaps where trees should have grown in the space of the stone. And the wall of rock becomes like a series of rough planks laid out next to each other, with gaps in gaps that have become solid again. And I think of the table in the kitchen and its surface of boards and how heavy it is and scarred by knives and pens and dirt. And it is as if I see three figures sitting close around the table, although I cannot make out their faces. Perhaps one is Rainer and one is the father of the Priest and one is my mother, but then, perhaps they are not, perhaps they are some others, some strangers gathered around the table to share a meal and some coffee. People who have travelled to the town even as everyone else has abandoned it, not to save the town but to be there in its emptiness, just as I have stayed here, waiting to be with the emptiness and the space and the quiet stillness of the nameless forest that draws ever nearer. And I see that there is another place at the table, and they seem to gesture to me to come and join them, to be a stranger among strangers, to share the space of the moment with them, take my turn in the still space 259 and sit with them and share a meal, to taste the warm bitterness of the coffee and the softness of the bread or sweetness of the fruit. And I think of the meals that I have eaten at that table. The way that my mother would bend her head before we ate, and how I could not tell if she was praying or thinking of her work to bring the food to the table, or just resting before eating, savouring the smell of the food and sitting there for a moment with a hunger that had grown through the day, and feeling it in her stomach and through her whole body, a body that was slight and thin, like my body beneath my coat. And with that thinness there is perhaps a place for me at the table with the other three, perhaps there is a small gap, a narrow gate or thin path through and out into that space left at the table. Not like this violent cut through the stone where my body passes easily, and which was made for something big and fast, loud and powerful; the trains that would rush through here, driven only by their destination. Passing so fast that they could not notice the lines leading away, horizontal between the stones, and vertical up from the stones, pointing into the sky before me and into the sky above me. My body is thin between the weight of the stone, as if I could disappear into one of the paths cut by the drill or cracked by the ice. Or not disappear, but join the three figures there at the table. But instead I must continue, walking through the stone, between the stone, until the land drops again and the cut shrinks down and I come out along the raised-again railway into a bare expanse of space, the last section of forest that was logged before the loggers and their saws and trucks finally moved on and abandoned the town, leaving only the proper expanse of emptiness that sits here, between the town and the forest. A stretch of land that was once forest but where now all of the trees have been removed and have not yet regrown like the earlier forest just beyond the town. Here there is only flatness, covered with a meagre growth of bushes, ferns and saplings, most of which are hidden beneath the even snow that stretches out and is only broken by the twisted shapes of old fence posts, or the tiny bare trees, which whisper and flicker against the field of whiteness, like small machines scribbled quickly across the landscape; and by the empty towers that line either side of the tracks here, looking out silently over the empty expanse.
Dead Ice is available directly from the author. Find him on Bluesky: @liamsprod.bsky.social
Liam Sprod is a writer and photographer. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Kingston University London, and has lived, worked, and studied in Australia, the UK, and Sweden (where he is currently based). Previous writings—including philosophical, literary, and exhibition catalogue texts—have been published by Zer0 Books, Mimesis International, Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Lydgalleriet, TACO!, Peter Lang, Adelaide Central Gallery, and 3:AM Magazine, among others.
minor literature[s] 