The Forest That Swallows Sound

This house is no random set piece. As a child Simon was sent upstairs “not to get in the way”, and there, under a heavy blanket, he learned the first lesson of this place: here you can scream — and no one will knock. Back then that knowledge was about his own defencelessness. Now he turns it the other way around.

“As a child, that knowledge frightened him. Now it soothed him” — a two-line formula for how violence is handed down. The place where no one heard him will become the place where no one hears Jacob; the father’s inheritance — the house, the tools, the very logic of a deaf forest — is being used as intended. The circle the father began closes inside the father’s walls.