16.00 pm
It took a while to find the spot where we would pitch the tent and make our camp. We found a suitable clearing, we put some things down to mark the spot, and then did the repeated trips to and from the car, a lot of lugging and climbing in the heat of an August day, but eventually we settled into our new camp. It felt great to get down and begin to crawl – as badger.
11.00 pm
We are in a rhythm; the nerves have subsided, my body knows what to do, my breath knows what to do. My skin is ripped to shreds from plunging belligerently into the bracken and brambles, finding pathways in. I can hear and feel Hannah deep into the experience behind me, and around me. We are moving in sync, both equally excited and lost in the darkness and lights from the camera’s – hers and mine, we leave the torches off.
Midnight
I was so excited; crawling was exhilarating. I plundered through the undergrowth. I was back n the rhythm and familiarity of crawling again; it felt fantastic to be down there, on my hands and knees. I had an unexpected feeling of going home. Doris, the Hungarian badger head, stayed on my back, the glass dome didn’t come apart or break – success!. The wood, a hopelessly inadequate noun, had started to reveal itself, unpeeling leaf by leaf; unfurling ferns, biting bracken, thick waterlogged moss, lichen, ivy, leaf litter, warm dry earth, hair grass, crackling branches, woody piece by woody piece, woodily presented itself, in sharp focus, all of us enveloped by a lingering wall of warm air.
01.00 am
I was definitely ‘in’, I felt a little weird, trippy, raw and a bit wild. I felt abandoned, fragmented and belligerent, determined to find a way through and on by whatever means I could, I both yielded and pushed into the resistance that I met at every hand and knee step, I was bodily. Hannah and I were connected, in the dark, but silent, I could hear her stumbling around me, she was following me and my camera lights and head torch. I was led by my cameras, my consciousness transported to each camera, imagining what they were seeing.
02.00 am
I was in it, I was wood; I was badger; I was sick – all of God’s slimy, multi-legged, eight-headed, winged, bulging-eyed creatures crawled between my bare fingers; it was abject, wretched, exhilarating; I was going further in.
03.00 am
I decided to take the path; I was tired, and my knees were sore. My consciousness was fractured, splintered; each GoPro camera strapped to my trunk, limbs, head, hands, and mouth were looking for me, catching me, my body in black Lycra, plunged and plundered through the understory, belligerent, brave and badger. I was moving out of human-ness with every knee step.
04.00 am
It’s wet, cooler, I missed the night, it felt like ours, the wood and the night felt like ours, now it was everyone’s else’s again, but we weren’t just visitors, I knew this place, it was my patch, I was cocky, I knew where to go and how to get there, I was like an animal that had slept through a storm, sniffing out the safe air, a bold wet nose, familiar.
06.00 am
We did it, we made it through the night, the first bird that sung its first note at dawn was beautiful, the light was beautiful, the morning was beautiful. At last I could see further then a leaf, a branch, my hands. The night was dark and deep, for a few moments I was badger, or something, not me, I was the body of something else in a smell that was thick, in a wall of warm air that clung to the ground, I was in it.
0 7.00 am
We did it; we made it through the night. I heard the first single, simple bird note; it broke the night, it declared morning; I did it. Only 11 more crawls to go. Five layers of foam in the knee pads now; Doris was getting heavier. Our night wood became less opaque, quickly, bathing in flirtatious, fickle dappled light.
08.00 am
Wet, cooler, I missed the night; it felt like ours. The wood and the night felt like ours. I now understood the secrets of the nocturnal wood, the thicker smells, the deeper sounds, the richer tastes; I missed it. But I also wanted to cry with pain, and more than anything, I wanted to sleep.
11:00 am
These morning hours were the hardest.
15.00 pm
The last crawl, 10 layers of foam in my knee pads, I winced at every knee step. Time to go underground with the Badgers, or to go home for a bath and an inspection of the scratches and wounds; I chose the latter. For a few minutes, in the deepest wood night, I think, I possibly crawled out of being human and into being badger. Now, forever, roaming in the digital wood (in the video), I am something new, not human, not animal, not plant. I am feral, lost, in a digital wilderness. A futuristic cyborg, head, limbs and lungs appearing and disappearing as the timeline moves me, makes me and then swallows me.
The End