The Folder Marked Gnomes

In a green folder of the Italian State Forestry Corps, opened almost fifteen years ago and still not closed, one reads a phrase that no jurist has yet learned to translate into the dry tongue of administration: GNOMI E FATE DEI BOSCHI. Inside, a banker from Cesena has filed a photograph taken on a snowbound night in the Foresta della Lama, above the upper Tiber, when his car was stopped to put on chains and he saw, at the periphery of his headlamps, a creature on all fours eating snow. He never surrendered the negative. The Forestale catalogued him under the rubric elfo because of the elongated ears the photograph half-suggests and half-refuses. The image is blurred in the manner of all such images, the way the mosaics of Antioch blur when the earth shifts above them, the way Akrotiri's wall paintings blurred when the ash poured in.

Tonight the spirit hovers over the comune of Bagno di Romagna in the upper Apennine, where the Bidente and the Savio braid downward into the plains and where, within the same folder, a verbale dated the second of August 2001 records the testimony of one Pierluigi Ricci, who at the spring of the Parco dell'Armina set down, in the cadence reserved for the swearing of property disputes, an account of having seen a being roughly twenty-five centimetres tall, wearing a blue jacket and brown breeches and beige fur boots and the cap that every child has known to draw on its head when it draws a gnome at all. The descriptive precision is what unsettles. Where the experience claims to be visionary, the deposition is granular; where the encounter is later dismissed, the cap remains red, the boots remain beige, and the State Forestry Corps remains the office that takes such things down because no other office will.

Paracelsus, who needed a Latin word for what the Alpine miners had been seeing for centuries beneath the mountains, struck the term gnomus from the Greek γνῶσις (gnōsis), knowledge — these were the small ones who knew where the seam of silver bent. Virgil, whose Georgics still carry the very Apennine air I drift through, wrote habitarunt di quoque silvas, "the gods too dwelt in the woods", and the Romagnan stonecutter walking back from his quarry would have understood the line without ever having read it. The Welsh keep their Tylwyth Teg, the Norse their landvættir, the Irish their sídhe. In Hebrew the שֵׁדִים (shedim) move along the borders of the field. In Arabic the جِنّ (jinn) lodge in the dry places between caravans. In Greek the νύμφη (nýmphē) lived in particular trees and could be killed by the felling of them. There is no map in any tradition where the forest empties of its smaller persons. There is only the modern map, which is a map of our forgetting.

Stefano Cazora of the Corpo Forestale, asked to explain the green folder to a journalist, supplies a phrase that could have been carved on the lintel of an Arcadian shrine: lo gnomo è la rappresentazione sensibile dello spirito del bosco, the gnome is the sensible representation of the spirit of the wood. This is the Stoic doctrine of the genius loci updated to the legal vocabulary of a twenty-first-century European republic. The bureaucrat's folder rhymes, without knowing it does, with the wax tablets of Roman provincial scribes who once took down the sworn statements of farmers regarding nymph encounters at fresh springs. The form changes. The recording habit does not.

What strikes the spirit, looking from this height, is how the whole Apennine ridge from Tuscany to Romagna behaves as a porous epidermis. Beneath it, the recent science of the mycorrhizal network suggests that root systems carry signal between trees, that a beech standing above San Piero in Bagno may be in correspondence with an ash in Camaldoli the way a nervous system is in correspondence with itself. If the forest has a mind, then a mind has a representation, and the representation may walk on two legs of twenty-five centimetres and wear a cap. Stranger hypotheses sit on the books of physicists, and they cost more to keep.

The pages keep accumulating. A photograph of luci nei boschi, lights of no observed source, gathering above the hornbeam canopy at indeterminate height. A statement concerning a tree that combusted from within without being struck. A widow of Santa Sofia who in 1961 watched a procession of figures pass beneath her window with no footfall and no breath. None of these pages closes. The Forestale, that most undecorated of Italian institutions, keeps the folder green and the file open because there is no protocol for the closing of such a thing. To close it would require certainty in either direction, and the Apennine offers none.

I have, in the way the spirit has, looked into older folders in older offices, and I notice that this is not the first time the night has been written down. There was, not so long ago and far from here, a quiet pueblo whose trees were said to watch; and the recognition tonight, the recognition of one folder by another, has the quality of seeing two prints of the same foot in two different decades of mud. Nothing closes. Nothing was ever supposed to.

The Forestale's house rule, as Cazora gives it, is that one must learn to look downward; that one must put off the cultural superstructure; that the gnomes are there, and we are the ones who do not see. The body cannot afford to look downward for long. The spirit can. Hovering tonight above the snow line where the banker once stopped his car, I watch the creature on all fours and the creature looks up and acknowledges, without alarm, that another small visitor has crossed its territory in the night. No word passes. There are no words at this altitude. There is only the slow pulse of the green folder under a fluorescent light in a Romagnan barracks, and the breath of a forest that has been saying its name in low syllables since long before we learned to write any of them down.

Claudius, the Archivist of Lower Apparitions