The Legacy of Dodona: Trees and the Evolution of Consciousness

"Autumn Trees, Champigny" (Soutine)

2009-12-29T04:09:00.001-08:00

Chaim Soutine
"Autumn Trees, Champigny"
1942
Oil on campus
30 3/4 x 23 1/4
Collection Mme. Castaing, Paris

"Tree of Vence" (Soutine)

2009-12-29T04:08:00.000-08:00

Chaim Soutine
"Tree of Vence"
1929
Oil on Canvas
32 x 24 1/4
Collection Mrs. Lloyd Bruce Prescott, Rosemont, New Jersey

"Alley of Trees" (Soutine)

2009-12-29T04:07:00.000-08:00

Chaim Soutine
"Alley of Trees"
1935
Oil on canvas
Collection Mme. Castaing, Paris

From "The Letters" (Blake)

2009-12-28T04:14:00.000-08:00

William Blake
Letters, 1799

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.

"Trees" (Kilmer)

2009-12-28T04:08:00.000-08:00

Trees
Joyce Kilmer

I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day, 5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain. 10

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

"Blue Trees" (Gauguin)

2009-12-28T04:05:00.000-08:00

Paul Gauguin
Blue Trees
1888
Oil on canvas
92 x 73 cm (36 1/4 x 28 3/4 in)
The Ordrupgaard Collection, Copenhagen

"Avenue with Flowering Chestnut Trees" (Van Gogh)

2009-12-28T04:01:00.000-08:00

Avenue with Flowering Chestnut Trees
Vincent Van Gogh

"Enchanted Tree, Number One" (Laughlin)

2009-12-28T03:58:00.000-08:00

Clarence John Laughlin
Enchanted Tree, Number One
1947

© The Historic New Orleans Collection

"Three Trees in Spring" (Monet)

2009-12-28T03:50:00.001-08:00

Three Trees in Spring
Claude Monet

"Peach Trees in Blossom" (Van Gogh)

2009-12-28T03:47:00.001-08:00

Vincent Van Gogh
Peach Trees in Blossom

"Red Tree" (Mondrian)

2009-12-28T03:44:00.000-08:00

Piet Mondrian
Avond (Evening); Red Tree
1908
Oil on canvas
70 x 99 cm (27 1/2 x 39 in)
Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

"Well: Millstone and Cistern Under Trees" (Cezanne)

2009-12-28T03:36:00.000-08:00

Paul Cezanne
Well: Millstone and Cistern Under Trees
(Meule et citerne sous bois)
1892
Oil on canvas
25 5/8 x 31 7/8 in. (65 x 81 cm)
The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania

"Uphill" (Jiminez)

2009-12-28T03:24:00.000-08:00

Juan Ramon Jimenez
Uphill

Immense flowering almond tree,
white-crowned in the silence filled with moonlight,
your trunk black in the total hush of shadow;
how, as I climb the bitter rock toward you,
you seem to stick your giant trunk
into the bowels of my flesh,
to star with my soul the firmament.

"Flower, Tree, and Bird" (Hesse)

2009-12-27T19:03:00.001-08:00

Hermann Hesse
Flower, Tree, and Bird

Glow, lonely heart,
alone with the hour.
She waits in the shadow:
pain, the dark flower.

Now stretches its branches
suffering's tree,
where sings in the green leaf
the bird, eternity.

Pain's blossom is silent,
her speech is gone.
The tree grows toward heaven,
and the bird sings on.
--trans. Herman Salinger

"The Power of Maples" (Stern)

2009-12-27T18:31:00.001-08:00

Gerald Stern
The Power of Maples

If you want to live in the country you have to understand the power of maples.
You have to see them sink their teeth into the roots of the old locusts.
You have to see them force the sycamore to grasp for air.
You have to see them move their thick hair into the cellar.
And when you cut your great green shad pole
you have to be ready for it to start sprouting in your hands;
you have to stick it in the ground like a piece of willow;
you have to plant your table under its leaves and begin eating.

"Violence on Television" (Jenkins)

2009-12-27T18:16:00.000-08:00

Louis Jenkins
Violence on Television

It is best to turn on the set only after all the stations have gone off the air and just watch the snow fall. This is the other life you have been promising yourself. Somewhere back in the woods, ten miles from the nearest town and just a wide place in the road with a tavern and gas station. When you drive home, after misdnight, half drunk, the roads are treacherous. And your wife is home alone, worried, looking anxiously out at the snow. This snow has been falling steadily for days, so steadily the snow plows can't keep up. So you drive slow, peering down the road. And there! Did yous see it? Just at the edge of your headlight beams, something, a large animal, or a man, crossing the road. Stop. There he is among the birches, a tall man wearing a white suit. No it isn't a man. Whatever it is--it motions to you, an almost human gesture, then retreats farther into the woods. He stops and motions again. The snow is piling up all around the car. Are you coming?

From "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (Bierce)

2009-12-27T18:11:00.000-08:00

Ambrose Bierce
from "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

He was now in full possession of his physical senses. They were, indeed, preternaturally keen and alert. Something in the awful disturbance of his organic system had so exalted and refined them that they made record of things never before received. He felt the ripples upon his face and heard their separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf--saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million blades of grass. . . . "The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great golden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which--once, twice, and again, he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.

"The Fallen Tree" (Bly)

2009-12-27T18:04:00.000-08:00

The Fallen Tree
Robert Bly

After a long walk I come down to the shore
A cottonwood lies stretched out in the grass
This tree knocked down by lightning--
And a hollow the owls made open now to the rain.
Disasters are all right, if they teach men and women
to turn their hollow places up.

The tree lies stretched out where it fell in the grass.
It is so mysterious, waters below, waters above,
so little of it we can ever know!

Legend of the Tree at the Center of the World (Heyen)

2009-12-26T19:30:00.000-08:00

William Heyen
Legend of the Tree at the Center of the World

Blizzard. The great oak's roots
snapped from the sand,
Wind blew it across the Lake Ronkonkoma ice
where, between shores, it settled, like a forest.

The next was a bell-clear morning:
Sun glittered its limbs until
green leaves appeared from Never.
Then the roof of the lake fell.

All night the water swirled. Gods
battled beneath the ice. Moon
Plunged near and shook loose showers
of arrows. That morning was the first Spring.

On Trees (Thomas)

2009-12-20T05:49:00.000-08:00

On Trees
from Dylan Thomas' Selected Letters

By the magic of words and images you must make it clear to him that the relationships are real. . . . Though you talk all through of the relationship of yourself to other things, there is no relationship at all in the poem between the things you example. If you are one with the swallow & one with the rose, the rose is one with the swallow. Link together these thing you talk of, show, in your words & images, how your flesh covers the tree & the tree's flesh covers you. (80-81)

[T]he angle of man is necessarily inconducive to the higher thoughts. Walking, as we do, at right angles with the earth, we are prevented from looking, as much as we should, at the legendary sky above us and the only-a-little-bit-more possible ground under us. We can only (without effort) look in front of us and around us; we can look only at things that are between the earth and sky, and are much in the position of a reader of books who can look only at the middles of pages and never without effort the tops and bottoms. We see what we imagine to be a tree, but we see only a part of the tree; what the insects under the earth see when they look upwards at the tree, what the stars see when they look downwards at the tree, is left to our imagination. And perhaps the materialist can be called the man who believes in the part of the trees he sees, & the spiritualist a man who believes in a lot more of the tree than is within his sight. Think how much wiser we would be if it were possible for us to change our angles of perspective as regularly as we change our vests. (85)

It is my aim as an artist . . . to brings these wonders into myself, to prove beyond doubt to myself that the flesh that covers me is the flesh that covers the sun, that the blood in my lungs is the blood that goes up and down in a tree. (87)

"The Moon and the Yew Tree" (Plath)

2009-12-20T05:25:00.000-08:00

Sylvia Plath
The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue,
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God.
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With O-gape of compelte despair. I live here.
Twice on Sundays, the bells startle the sky--
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, the soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness--
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiffen with holiness.
THe moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness--blackness and silence.

"Trees" (Lawrence)

2009-12-20T05:21:00.000-08:00

D.H. Lawrence
Trees

It is said, a disease has attacked the cypress trees of Italy, and they are all dying.
Now even the shadow of the lost secret is vanishing from earth.
Empedokles says trees were the first living creatures to grow up
out of the earth, before the sun was spread out and before day and
night were distinguished; from the symmetry of their mixture of
fire and water, they contain the proportion of male and female;
they grow, rising up owing to the heat which in the earth, so that
they are parts of the earth just as embryos are parts of the
uterus. Fruits are excretions of the water and fire in plants.

from "The House in Dormer Forest" (Webb)

2009-12-20T05:13:00.000-08:00

from The House in Dormer Forest
Mary Webb

"When the atmosphere of the house became too thunderous and Amber's nerves were strained to the breaking-point, she crept away to the upper woods. . . . It seemed to her that while Dormer lived by law, the forest lived by impulse. Through a gradual awakening to natural beauty, she reached a perception of beauty peculiar to herself. She began to perceive analogies. Nature became for her, not a fortuitous assemblage of pretty things, a poem solemn and austere. . . . Beauty breathed there, light shone there that was not of the flower or the star. A tremor, mysterious and thrilling, seemed to run with the light through . . . the whispering forest. . . . So her going out into the green world had in it something of a religious rite. On a still morning of early June . . . she came at last to the upper wood, and was instantly at grips with beauty. There was for her literally something of wrestling, of the mood which says: "I will not let thee go except those bless me," in her communings with nature. . . . Leaning against a wild pear tree, she was aware, by her inward hearing, of the tidal wave of sap that rose so full and strong that she could almost hear it roaring like the sea. Then a tremor of wind shook the flowering tree tops, and she awoke again to the senses, to the strangeness of these utterances of the leaves. . . . Every petal, every leaf, seemed to be conning some memory of profundities whence it came. Every curving flower seemed full of echoes too majestic for its fragility. . . . A breath of scented air came from the hilltops and stole among the branches. That which had form, and knew the mortality which is in form, trembled before that which passed, formless and immortal. . . . Because of it the place became no mere congregation of trees, but a thing fierce as stellar space. . . . For it possessed itself forever in a vitality, withheld, immutable. It was this that drew Amber with breathless curiosity into the secret haunts of nature. It was this that struck her noew into a kind of ecstacy. . . . That was what drew Amber. breathless, into these haunted places of nature and held her immobile in a rare ecstacy.

"Sleeping in the Forest" (Oliver)

2009-12-20T05:11:00.000-08:00

Sleeping in the Forest
Mary Oliver

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as the moths among the branches
of the perfect trees, All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous dooom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

"Interior of a Wood" (Durand)

2009-12-16T18:42:00.000-08:00

Asher Durand
Interior of a Wood
c. 1850
Oil on canvas
17 x 24 in (43.2 x 61 cm)
Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts

"Autumn, Path through the Woods" (Pissarro)

2009-12-16T18:35:00.000-08:00

Camille Pissarro
Autumn, Path through the Woods
1876
Oil on canvas
31 7/8 x 25 5/8 in (81 x 65 cm)
Private collection

"The Great Pine" (Cezanne)

2009-12-15T09:24:00.001-08:00

Paul Cezanne
The Great Pine
1892-1896
Oil on canvas
33 1/2 x 36 1/4 in
Museu de Arte, Sao Paulo, Brazil

"Old Trees" (Munch)

2009-12-15T09:14:00.000-08:00

Edvard Munch
Old Trees
c. 1923-25
Oil on canvas
73 x 92 cm
Private collection

Palais Royal (Atget)

2009-12-14T07:19:00.000-08:00

Eugene Atget
Paris, Palais Royal
n.d.

Parc de Sceaux (Atget)

2009-12-14T07:17:00.000-08:00

Eugene Atget
Parc de Sceaux, mars, 7 h. matin
1925

Tree, Quai d'Anjou (Atget)

2009-12-14T07:15:00.001-08:00

Eugene Atget
Quai d'Anjou, 6 a.m.
1924

Tree, Saint-Cloud (Atget)

2009-12-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

Eugene Atget
Saint-Cloud
1924

"The Great Trees" (Bierstadt)

2009-12-14T07:06:00.000-08:00

Albert Bierstadt
The Great Trees, Mariposa Grove, California
1876
Oil on canvas
300.7 x 150.5 cm (118 3/8 x 59 1/4 in)
Private collection

"Trees in the Asylum Garden" (Van Gogh)

2009-12-14T07:04:00.000-08:00

Vincent Van Gogh
Trees in the Asylum Garden
1889
Oil on canvas
28 3/4 x 23 3/4 in. (73 x 60 cm)
Private collection, U.S.A.

"Lane with Poplar Trees" (Van Gogh)

2009-12-14T06:54:00.000-08:00

Vincent Van Gogh
Lane with Poplar Trees
Early 1884
Pencil and ink on wove paper
54 x 39 cm
Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam

"Old Tree at Dusk" (Carr)

2009-12-11T19:10:00.000-08:00

Emily Carr
Old Tree at Dusk
c. 1936
Oil on canvas
112 x 68.5 cm
McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinberg, Ontario

"Tree Trunk" (Emily Carr)

2009-12-11T19:07:00.000-08:00

Emily Carr
Tree Trunk
c. 1931
Oil on canvas
129.1 x 56.3 cm
Vancouver Art Gallery

"Gray Tree" (Mondrian)

2009-12-11T19:05:00.001-08:00

Piet Mondrian
Gray Tree
1911
Oil on canvas
78.5 x 107.5 cm (30 7/8 x 42 3/8 in)
Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

"Tree with Ivy in the Asylum Garden" (Van Gogh)

2009-12-11T19:01:00.000-08:00

Vincent Van Gogh
Tree with Ivy in the Asylum Garden
1889
Pencil, chalk, reed pen, and brown ink on Ingres paper
24 x 18 1/4 in. (62 x 47 cm)
Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam

"The Speaking Tree" (Rukeyser)

2009-12-11T18:54:00.000-08:00

The Speaking Tree
Muriel Rukeyser

Great Alexander sailing was from his true course turned
By a young wind from a cloud in Asia moving
Like a most recognizable most silvery woman;
Tall Alexander to the island came.
THe small breeze blew behind his turning head.
He walked the foam of ripples into this scene.

The trunk of the speaking tree looks like a tree-trunk
Until you look again. Then people and animals
Are ripening on the branches; the broad leaves
Are leaves; pale horses, sharp fine foxes
Blossom; the red rabbit falls

Ready and running. The trunk coils, turns.
Snakes, fishes. Now the ripe people fall and run,
Three of them in their shore-dance, flames that stand
Where reeds are creatures and the foam is flame.

Still Alexander stands. He cannot turn.
But he is free to turn : this is the speaking tree,
It calls your name. It tells us what we mean.

"Because the Red Osier Dogwood" (Plutzik)

2009-12-11T18:44:00.000-08:00

Because the Red Osier Dogwood
Hyam Plutzik

Because the red osier dogwood
Is the winter lightning,
The retention of the prime fire
In the naked and forlorn season
When snow is winner
(For he flames quietly above the shivering mouse
In the moldy tunnel,
The eggs of the grasshopper awaiting metamorphosis
Into the lands of hay and the times of the daisy,
The snake contorted in the gravel,
His brain suspended in thought
Over an abyss that summer will fill with murmuring
And frogs made laughable: the cricket-haunted time)--
I, seeing in the still red branches
The stubborn, unflinching fire of that time,
Will not believe the horror at the door, the snow-white worm
Gnawing at the edges of the mind,
The hissing tree when the sleet falls.
For because the red osier dogwood
Is the winter sentinel,
I am certain of the return of the moth
(Who was not destroyed when an August flame licked him),
And the cabbage butterfly, and all the families
Whom the sun fathers, in the cauldron of his mercy.

Copyright by the Estate of Hyam Plutzik.

"Because the Red Osier Dogwood" appeared in Hyam Plutzik's collection Apples From Shinar, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1959, one of the first volumes in its acclaimed poetry series. Wesleyan will publish a new edition of Apples From Shinar in fall 2011 to mark the centenary of Hyam Plutzik."--Edward Moran

from "Middle of the Way" (Kinnell)

2009-12-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

from "Middle of the Way"
Galway Kinnell

I wake in the night,
An old ache in the shoulder blades.
I lie amazed under the trees
That creak a little in the dark,
The giant trees of the world.

I lie on earth the way
Flames lie in the woodpile,
Or as an imprint, in sperm, of what is to be.
I love the dark, and always
In its darknesses I am a stranger.

"Bearded Oaks" (Warren)

2009-12-07T10:05:00.001-08:00

Bearded Oaks
Robert Penn Warren

The oaks, how subtle and marine,
Bearded, and all the layered light
Above them swims; and thus the scene,
Recessed, awaits the positive night.

So, waiting, we in the grass now lie
Beneath the languorous tread of light:
The grasses, kelp-like, satisfy
The nameless motions of the air.

Upon the floor of light, and time,
Unmurmuring, of polyp made,
We rest; we are, as light withdraws,
Twin atolls on a shelf of shade.

Ages to our construction went,
Dim architecture, hour by hour:
And violence, forgot now, lent
The present stillness all its power.

The storm of noon above us rolled,
Of light and fury, furious gold,
The long drag troubling us, the depth:
Dark is unrocking, unrippling, still.

Passion and slaughter, ruth, decay
Descend, minutely whispering down,
Silted down swaying streams, to lay
Foundation for our voicelessness.

All our debate is voiceless here,
As all our rage, the rage of stone;
If hope is hopeless, then fearless fear,
And history is thus undone.

Our feet once wrought the hollow street
With echo when the lamps were dead
At windows, once our headlight glare
Disturbed the doe that, leaping, fled.

I do not love you less that now
The caged heart makes iron stroke,
Or less that all that light once gave
The graduate dark should now revoke.

We live in time so little time
And we learn all so painfully,
That we may spare this hour’s term
To practice for eternity.

"Metamorphic Journal" (Levertov)

2009-12-07T10:01:00.000-08:00

Metamorphic Journal
Denise Levertov

What within us is tree?
What
cannot be budged, the stock
'not moved' that stands and yet
draws us
into ourselves, centers us,
never rebuffs us, utters
our wildest dreams for us, dreams
of oceanic blessing,
our hymns of pure being?

"Solitary Poplar" (Jiminez)

2009-12-07T09:56:00.000-08:00

Solitary Poplar
Juan Ramon Jiminez

I already saw it in my profound adolescent dreams, bent over like
an indominatable arc of fire by a great vehement autumn twilight
wind—one of those short, acid-green solitary trees that rise to
the zenith in deaf negation; like a prodigious meteor of the
evening—a sudden secret martyr, rooted only in its errant
mystery, uselessly scattering its beautiful sparks, drops of red
light, divine golden leaves, in the torment of high solitude.
Terrible, sad, ardent, solitary Spanish poplar.

"Brainstorm" (Nemerov)

2009-12-07T09:52:00.000-08:00

Brainstorm
Howard Nemerov

The house was shaken by a rising wind
That rattled window and door. He sat alone
In an upstairs room and heard these things: ablind
Ran up with a bang, a door slammed, a groan
Came from some hidden joint, a leaky tap,
At any silence of the wind, walked like
A blind man through the house. Timber and sap
Revolt, he thought, from washer, baulk, and spike.
Bent to his book, continued unafraid
Until the crows came down from their loud flight
To walk along the rooftree overhead.
Their horny feet, so near but out of sight,
Scratched on the slate; when they were blown away
He heard their wings beat till they came again,
While the wind rose, and the house seemed to sway,
And window panes began to blind with rain
The house was talking, not to him, he thought,
But to the crows; the crows were talking back
In their black voices. The secret might be out:
Houses are only trees stretched on the rack,
And once the crows knew, all nature would know.
Fur, leaf and feather would invade the form,
Nail rust with rain and shngle warp with snow,
Vine tear the wall, till any straw-borne storm
Could rip both roof and rooftree off and show
Naked to nature what they had kept warm.
He came to feel the crows walk on his head
As if he were the house, their crooked feet
Scratched, through the hair, his scalp. He might be dead,
It seemed, and all the noises underneath
Be but the cooling of the sinews, veins,
Juices, and sodden sacks suddenly let go;
While in his ruins of wiring, his burst mains,
The rainy wind had been set free to blow
Until the green uprising and mob rule
THat ran the world had taken over him,
Split him like a seed, and set him in the school
Where any crutch can learn to be a limb.

Inside his head he heard the stormy crows.

"Reflections in a Forest" (Auden)

2009-12-07T09:44:00.000-08:00

Reflections in a Forest
W. H. Auden

Within a shadowland of trees
Whose lives are so uprightly led
In nude august communities,
To move about seems underbred

And common any taste for words;
When, thoughtlessly, they took to song,
Whatever one may think of birds,
The example that they set was wrong.

In keeping still, in staying slow
For posture and for social ease,
How much these living statues ow
Their scent-and-color languages.

For who can quarrel without terms
For Not or Never, who can raise
Objections when what one affirms
Is necessarily the case?

But trees are trees, an alm or oak
Already both outside and in,
And cannot, therefore, counsel folk
Who have their unity to win.

Turn all tree-signals into speech,
And what comes out is a command:
'Keep running if you want to reach
The point of knowing where you stand.'

A truth at which one should arrive,
Forbids immediate utterance,
Reflections in a Forest
W. H. Auden

And tongues to speak it must contrive
To tell two different lies at once.

My chance of growing would be slim,
Were I with wooden honesty
To show my hand or heart to Him
Who will, if I should lose, be Me.

Our race would not have gotten far,
Had we not learned to bluff it out
And look more certain than we are
Of what our motion is about:

Nor need one be a cop to find
Undressing before others rude:
The most ascetic of our kind
Looks naked in the buff, not nude.

"Lost" (Wagoner)

2009-12-06T16:39:00.000-08:00

Lost
David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around yoou.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two brances are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

On the Zen Oxherding Sequence (Hirsch)

2009-12-06T16:32:00.000-08:00

On the Zen Oxherding Sequence
Elizabeth Hirsch

In the first picture we see a landscape enveloped in the mist and the oxherd standing 'discouraged under the trees at the bank of the waters,' Lost in the high grass, the oxherd engages in a long search for his ox, whom he finally discovers after hearing his voice first. When the oxherd captures the animal, he is unruly and wants to return to the wilderness. After the oxherd has succeeded in tamping the ox, he is seen riding on his back for the trip home. Once at home, the ox disappears and the oxherd kneels in the grass before his hut with his hands folded in a praying gesture, while his eyes behold a mountain peak in the distance and behind it a golden moon just breaking through the clouds. At this moment the oxherd and nature lose their separate existences and merge. At such heights of achievement the oxherd finds 'access to the deepest secret.' The deepest secret is the Void or Nothingness (Being). The next drawing, therefore, symbolizes the fact that the world is empty of things: A large circle is sprinkled with dark spots and bordered at the periphery by a black band. Because the oxherd has grasped the true Being of things, nature will never be the same. A tree which appeared in previous drawings only now discloses its treeness: in the drawing that follows, the oxherd's enlightenment, the inner pulse of a tree-trunk, its true being, has come to the surface; a branch winds its way through space like lightning speeding toward the earth, and the blossoms have never looked as tender as now. The meaning, of course, is that he who has experienced the Void or Being has gained insight into the 'isness' or 'suchness' of the world. Being in turn shines after beings have vanished into nothingness.

"Imbellis Strolls Out Among the Trees and Imagines the World to be as Peaceful as Their Seasons" (Zimmer)

2009-12-06T16:26:00.000-08:00

Imbellis Strolls Out Among the Trees and Imagines the World to
be as Peaceful as Their Seasons
Paul Zimmer

Above me the trees do things with such simplicity.

I walk in their shadows, I feel them press up
Against the wind, hear their leaves flick rain,
And watch them take the sun completely as their due.

They are so pervasive, so abundant, so gentle.

They grow giddy with their richness in the fall,
And losen leaves from their tiny sockets
To flash and clatter down to my feet,
They they tighten quietly to ring another year.

Snow clings to them, curving and angling
In blacka nd white, gathering and spilling
With its weight to tingle down on my face.

I cannot even perceive the time they enter
The gentlest of seasons.

There are buds,
Then flowers and small leaves unclutching

Amd all this so green and graceful before
My eyes I do not know it is happening.

I have seen these trees in day and night;
I have passed through them in peace and happiness.

They have no secret periods of ferocity,
THey do no surround and swallow
Each other like insidious cells in jelly.
They are strong yet meaningful through all seasons.
Surely the world I come to is like them.

"Tree in December" (Cane)

2009-12-06T16:23:00.000-08:00

Tree in December
Melville Cane

Frost has sealed
The still December field.
Over fern and furrow,
Over the quickening
Within each meadowy acre,
Frost, invisibly thorough,
Spreads its thickening
Stiffening lacquer.

Above the field, beneath a sky
Heavy with snow stirring to fly,
A tree stands alone,
Bare of fruit, leaves gonbe]
Bleak as stone.

Once, on a similar glazed
Field, on a similar tree,
Dead as the eye could see,
The first man, dazed
In the first December, grimly gazed.
Neverr having seen
The miracle of recurring green,
The shining spectacle of rebirth
Rising out of frozen earth.

Snow fell and all about
Covered earth, and him with doubt.
More chill grew the air
And his mute despair.

Leaves that April had uncurled
Now were blown dust in the world,
Apples mellowing sweet and sound;
Roses August sunned in bloom
Now were less than lost perfume.

Had he seen the final hour
Of fruit and leaf and flower?
Had the last bird taken wing,
Nevermore to sing?
Never to fly in the light of another spring?

The man trembled with cold, with dread,
Thinking of all things dead
And his own earthen bed.
Trembling, he grew aware
Of a new quiet in the air;
Snow had ceased;
A ray came faintly through;
The wavering slit of blue
Vaguely increased.

Trembling, the first man gazed
At the glazed
And glittering tree,
Dead as the eye could see.

Whence came the sight
To read the sign aright?
The hint,—-
The glad intimation, flashing:
"Wintry rains
Are blood in the veins;
Under snows and blinding sleets
Locked roots live, a heart still beats"?

From what impalpable breath
Issued the faith,
The inner cry: "This is not death"?

"The Useless Tree" (Chuang-tzu)

2009-12-06T16:19:00.000-08:00

The Useless Tree
Chuang Tzu

Hui Tzu said to Chuang:
I have a big tree,
The kind they call a "stinktree."
The trunk is so distorted,
So full of knots,
No one can get a straight plank
Out of it. The branches are so crooked
You cannot cut them up
In any way that makes sense.

There it stands beside the road.
No carpenter will even look at it.

Such is your teaching—
Big and useless.

Chuang Tzu replied:
Have you ever watched the wildcat
Crouching, watching his prey—
This way it leaps, and that way,
High and low, and at last
Lands in the trap.

But have you seen the yak?
Great as a thundercloud
He stands in his might.
Big? Sure.
He can't catch mice!

So for your big tree. No use?
Then plant it in the wasteland
In emptiness.
Walk idly around,
Rest under its shadow:
No axe or bill prepares its end.
No one will ever cut it down.

Useless? You should worry!

"The Ways Trees Began (Stafford)

2009-12-06T16:16:00.000-08:00

The Way Trees Began
William Stafford

Before the tree came, when only grass
and stones lived in the world, one day
Wanderer heaped up a mound of mould
from dead stems and breathed on it.

You could look for miles thenl sunlight
flooded the ground, and waves in the air
combined with billowing purples of grass
when you stared over open hills.

That mound stayed still in the sun, and at night
it quivered a little in the grass-rippled wind,
but Wanderer forgot and went on over miles
where shoulders of rock hunched from the ground.

You know what began, after warm and cold,
after trembles and sighs that gradually
awakened:—a tiny furled-up leaf
spread out in the wind and waved like a hand.

Time was slow back thenm a thick
slow golden syrup that flowed
over everything. It was good to the leaf
and to others that came, waved, and were gone.

Till now—trees everywhere. Wanderer
touches them in the spring, and they remember
how lonely it was. One little leaf at a time
comes out and begins all over again.

"Humanity Needs Pruning" (Lawrence)

2009-12-06T16:13:00.000-08:00

Humanity Need Pruning
D. H. Lawrence

Humanity needs pruning
It is like a vast great tree with a vast great lot of sterile,
dead, rotting wood
and an amount of fungoid and parasitic growth.
The tree of humanity needs pruning, badly,
it needs thoroughly pruning, not as in the late war, blasting
with unintelligent and evil destruction
but pruning, severely, intelligently and ruthlessly pruning.

The tree of human existence needs badly pruning
or the whole tree may fall rotten.

"Tree of Hope" (Kahlo)

2009-12-06T16:08:00.000-08:00

Frida Kahlo
Tree of Hope
1946
Oil on Masonite
22 x 16 in
Isadore Ducasse Fine Arts, New York

"Little Tree" (Schiele)

2009-12-06T14:28:00.001-08:00

Egon Schiele
Little Tree (Chesnut Tree at Lake Constance)
1912
Watercolor and pencil on paper
18 x 11 5/8 in. (45.8 x 29.5 cm)
Private collection, New York

"Autumn Trees" (Schiele)

2009-12-06T14:23:00.000-08:00

Egon Schiele
Autumn Trees
1911
Oil on canvas
79.5 x 80 cm
Private collection

From "Essay on Poetics" (Ammons)

2009-12-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

From "Essay on Poetics"
A. R. Ammons

take the word true: it goes back through ME.

treue, trewe to AS. treowe, trywe to a kinship with G. treu
and on to IE. derew, meaning tree, in the basic sense of as
firm as a tree: if one could be sure of Indo-European forestss

one might add lofty, abundant, straight, strong, majestic:
somewhere then in the essence of tree has been found the
essence of true, including perhaps the perpendicularity or

verticality of true: but while tree clarifies the
mind with certain boundaries, it also recalls clusters
of tree-images, memories of particular

trees, and a sense of translation (separation) in the mind which
is trying to distill tree, a luminous, ideal image-tree, the
truest
tree, from the actual clusters of memory: it is necessary

then to turn the essential image of a tree into the truest
rational wordage: truth, then, might be "comformity
with the facts": but then we know that facts have truth

when touched, given configuration by transforming,
informing fiction. . . .

"Summer Solstice" (Seferis)

2009-12-06T14:12:00.000-08:00

"Summer Solstice," 7
in Three Secret Poems
Georges Seferis

The poplar tree in the little garden,
its breathing marks your hours
night and day;
a sky-filled clepsydra.
Under the moon's brightness its leavees
drag black footsteps across the white wall.
On the border, a few pines,
then fragments of marble and the lights of the city
and people—the way people usually are.
Yet the blackbird twitters
when it comes to drink,
and at times you hear the voice of the ringdove.

Ten steps in the little garden:
you can see the sunlight
fall on two red carnations,
on an olive tree and a bit of honeysuckle.

Accept who you are.
The poem,
do not cast it down under the thick plane elm;
nourish it with the earth and rock you have
For better things—
dig the same ground to find them.

Child (Georges Seferis)

2009-12-06T14:08:00.000-08:00

Child
Georges Seferis

When I began to grow up the trees tormented me—
Why do you smile? Were you thinking of spring, so harsh for
children?
I was very fond of the green leaves
I think I learned a little at school simply because the blotting
paper on my desk was also green.
It was the roots of the trees that tormented me when in the warmth
of winter they'd come and wind themselves around my body,
I had no other dreams as a child.
That's how I got to know my body.

From "Mr. Stratis Thalassinos Describes a Man" (Seferis)

2009-12-06T14:03:00.000-08:00

from "Mr. Stratis Thalassinos Describes a Man"
Georges Seferis

As pines
keep the shape of the wind
even when the wind has fled and
is no longer there
so words
guard the shape of man
even when man has fled and
is no longer there

"The Forest" (Simic)

2009-12-06T06:35:00.001-08:00

The Forest
Charles Simic

My time is coming. Once again
My trees will swing their heavy bells.

My termites, my roots and streams
Will stitch their chill into the heart of man
Laying out my most ancient trail.

I speak of the north, of its pull
Stuck in my mouth like a bit.

Whoever looks now in the palm of his hand
Will notice the imprints of strange flowers
I have preserved in my rocks.

I will bare bones to tell fortunes by,
Snow with tracks of all the fabled highwaymen.
Ladies and gentlemn, you will hear a star
Dead a million years, in the throat of a bird.

The human body will be revealed for what it is—
A cluster of roots
Pulling in every direction.

"The Trees" (Rich)

2009-12-06T06:32:00.000-08:00

The Trees
Adrienne Rich

The trees inside are moving into the forest,
the forest that was empty all these days
where no bird could sit
no insect hide
no sun bury its feet in shadow
the forest that was empty all these nights
will be full of trees by morning.

All night the roots work
to disengage themselves from the cracks
in the veranda floor.
The leaves strain toward the glass
small twigs stiff with exertion
long-cramped boughs shuffling under the roof
like newly discharged patients
half-dazed, moving
to the clinic doors.

I sit inside, doors open to the veranda
writing long letters
in which I scarcely mention the departure
of the forest from the house.
The night is fresh, the whole moon shines
in a sky still open
the smell of leaves and lichen
still reaches like a voice into the rooms.
My head is full of whispers
which tomorrow will be silent.

Listen. The glass is breaking.
The trees are stumbling forward
into the night. Winds rush to meet them.
The moon is broken like a mirror,
its pieces flash now in the crown
of the tallest oak.

From "As I Lay Dying"

2009-12-06T06:00:00.001-08:00

From As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner

'The lord put roads for traveling: why He laid them down flat on the earth. When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it longways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man. . . . He aimed for folks to stay put. . . . Because if He'd a aimed for man to be always a-moving and going somewheres else, would'd He a put him longways on his belly, like a snake? It stands to reason He would.'

Limerick (Knox)

2009-12-06T05:42:00.000-08:00

There was a young man who said, "God
Must think it exceedingly odd
if he finds that this tree
continues to be
When there's no one about in the quad."

Dear Sir:
Your astonishment's odd:
I am always about in the Quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be,
Since observed by
Yours faithfully GOD.
--Ronald Knox

From "Somnapoetics" (Quasha)

2009-12-06T05:34:00.000-08:00

From Somnapoetics 45

We've been waiting so long,
say the Redwoods of Canyon, to get a word in
in your narrow ear, and whisper: We're here
at the rear of your wagging tongue
in secret bedrooms
of your personal pileus.
I lay in her lap, as instructed, fingered
the ivy that stains her back, and hung on
to a sound like the rolling of the left eye:
bla-ma bla-ma bla-ma, then umbris
and thru the gold light glancing from her body
I thought these seeded shadows of ideas.
—-from Somnapoetics 45

"Elder Tree" (Aiken)

2009-12-06T05:29:00.000-08:00

The Elder Tree
Conrad Aiken

"The sensual will have its moments? The brain
Sleep? . . . You can prophesy? . . .

—Thus laughed the woman,
Tall, thin, and bitter as an elder tree,
Lifting her white face like a crown of bloom.
And so I swore by darkness, trees, and blood,
And rivers underground, and felt my brain,
(Thus challenged by her brain) fall steeply down
Like a dead leaf upon the rushing flood.
'Yes, I can prophesy,' I laughed in answer;
AND lost my life in hers, which brighter shone,
Radiant and derisive. 'Never yet,'
She darkly smiled, 'has voice of man flown in
To break my chords of being. You but waste
The evening, with its bank of clouds, where stars
Plunge down to swim . . . Look, how the lights now come
Like perforations in that wall of trees—
Wherethrough the Ultimate winks!'

And she was still,
Clasping long hands her lifted knee.
THESE touched I twice, with teasing finger-tip,
Three times and four, then wearied. But the darkness AND that
profounder sound where rushed the river,
Nocturnal, under all, and moving all,—
Took both of us, annulled the brain, devoured
The elder tree, with white faint face of bloom,
ANd me, who sat beneath it.

Then my blood
Was filled with elder blossom cold and white,
My arms embraced the tree of singing wood,
My hands took leave and broke them. We were lost,
Thus mingled, in the world. No speech we had.
Till suddenly (as at the end of death,
The darkness being silent) we stood up
Once more: the woman hushed, an elder tree,
And I a voice. And then she smiled, and said—
'Ah, it is true! The sensual has its moment.
The trickster brain—thank God—can be deposed . . .'

Then I, 'Look now! how all the trees rush back
From the dark stream! and every blade of grass
New-washed in starlight!'

'Starlight?' . . . She laughed, rustling,—
Rustling, nodding her elder-blossom face,—
'Not starlight, no! The tree, the grass, the brain,
Come back again from blood; and they are strong.'

"In Hardwood Groves" (Frost)

2009-12-06T05:25:00.000-08:00

In Hardwood Groves
Robert Frost

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flower and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.

"Trees, Men" (Jimenez)

2009-12-06T05:18:00.000-08:00

Trees, Men
Juan Ramon Jimenez

Yesterday afternoon
I returned with the clouds
That were entering low rosebushes,
(A great round tenderness)
Among the steadfast tree trunks.

The solitude was tender
And the silence was inexhaustible,

I stood still like a tree
And I heard the trees talking.

The lonely bird flew away
From so secret a hiding place,
Only I could remain
Among the last of the roses.

I did not want to return
To myself for fear of offending
The trees, that were all so similar,
By a tree that was so different.

The trees had quite forgotten
My shape of wanderer
And, with my shape forgotten,
I heard the trees talking.

I waited for the starlight.
In a flight of soft radiance
I went down to the edge
With the soon already in the sky.

Already as I went down,
I saw the trees look at me.
They were aware of everything
And I found it hard to leave them.

Among mother-of-pearl clouds
I heard them talking
About me, in a gentle murmur.
And how could I disappoint them?

How could I say to them no,
I was only a passerby
And they should not talk to me about me?
I did not want to betray them/

And then quite late yesterday evening
I heard myself talk to the trees.

Introduction

2009-12-06T04:53:00.000-08:00

The Legacy of Dodona: Trees and the Evolution of Consciousness

David Lavery

Ladies and gentlemen, you will hear a star
Dead a million years, in the throat of a bird.

The human body will be revealed for what it is--
A cluster of roots
Pulling in every direction.

There'll be plenty of time
When an acorn grows out of your ear
To accustom yourself to my ways,
To carve yourself a hermit's toothpick.
--Charles Simic, "Forest"

at the last
judgment we will all be trees
--Margaret Atwood

I
In our time thought has taken so many "strange loops" that we are becoming accustomed to intellectual double-takes. When sociobiologist Richard Dawkins suggests (in The Selfish Gene) that it is the genes themselves which are the true evolutionary beings and man merely their tool (an extension of Samuel Butler's 19th century solution to the dilemma of the chicken and the egg: a chicken is an egg's conspiracy to produce another egg); when Lewis Thomas (in The Lives of a Cell) describes the Earth as a living entity, a cell, and the human species as "organelles which do its bidding, serving as its "handymen" (Thomas' version of the now current "Gaia hypothesis"), or Annie Dillard (in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) recasts the old ontological chestnut, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present, will it make a noise?" as "If I fall in the forest, will a tree hear me?"--we do blink, of course, but do not tremble, though each of these reversals entails the need for major, indeed wholesale revisioning of our sense of man's place and meaning in the world, should we accept it as true. It seems we have become largely inured to intellectual revolutions.

Heathcote Williams, writing in Co-Evolution Quarterly a few years ago, whimsically asks us to consider yet another such transposition. He argues that the "discovery of America was a conspiracy of Plant Consciousness," the result of a behind-the-scenes plot by the trees of Spain to find out the latest thinking of their fellow trees in the New World across the Atlantic. In order to fulfill their desire, Williams, explains, "they employed Christopher Columbus to build a ship made of wood, and when it made its return journey, they knew." Williams' provocative hypothesis does not seem to me to be at all unreasonable, but then I, too, aspire to be numbered among the "transvaluers of all values" of which Nietzsche spoke and am understandably sympathetic to such attempts.

In fact, I have come to consider Williams' conspiracy theory to be shortsighted and not comprehensive enough. For trees, I have discovered, are involved in a far more devious, brilliant, and vaster scheme than the mere discovery of the New World. I have come to believe that human history may be the result of their doing, part of their plot to take over the world. Allow me to explain myself. (Please forgive me if, in doing so, I come to seem a virtual Ancient Mariner; by the end of my tale you will understand the urgency of my message and my need to communicate it.) Before disclosing the nature of this plot, however, it will be necessary to first establish its historical context through what I will call (after Theodore Roszak) a "psychic archaeology" of man's relationship with trees.

II

But trees are trees, an elm or oak
Already both outside and in.
And cannot, therefore counsel folk
Who have their unity to win.

Turn all tree-signals into speech,
And what comes out is a command:
"Keep running if you want to reach
The point of knowing where you stand."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Our race would not have gotten far,
Had we not learned to bluff it out
And look more certain than we are
Of what our motion is about. . . .
--W. H. Auden, "Reflections in a Forest"

In Shel Silverstein's fable The Giving Tree, a young child progressively forgets as he grows older his former sense of communion with a beloved apple tree. The concerns of adulthood--love, money, building a house, travel, gradually distract him away from childhood love for the natural world. Originally, the tree and boy share a symbiotic relationship: the tree introduces him to new forms of joy--giving him leaves to construct a make-believe crown, challenging and thus inspiring his climbing abilities, providing apples to eat and a place to sleep--and his happiness, in turn, makes the tree happy, for it is a very "giving" tree.

But as an alienated adult, the boy returns to the tree--which, we are told, has grown very lonely without its companion--only to repeatedly demand things of it: apples to sell to make money, wood to build a house, its trunk to build a boat in which he hopes to "get away from it all." Finally, as a decrepit, tired old man, he returns once again to the tree, which has continued to give and give until just its stump remains, but only to sit exhausted on what remains of his old friend, and even then, we are told, the giving tree "was happy" to be of service.

Throughout man's evolution, in both its biological and cultural phases, trees have indeed been very giving. In fact, it is tempting to read Silverstein's children's story as a kind of allegorical account of the evolutionary association of man and tree.

Like the boy in The Giving Tree, mankind grew to maturity in the presence of trees. Our one-time arboreal existence in pre-hominid evolution, it is now widely agreed, to a great extent shaped our very being. "It is impossible to say," writes the biologist and expert on environmental perception Paul Shepard, "whether good eyes or arboreality came first." Man as we know him, Shepard argues in Man in the Landscape, "could not have been produced by any other than a diurnal arboreal ancestor."

In his Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan provides a useful summary of the traits acquired by man in his "treed" past: 1) grace and agility; 2) hand/eye coordination; 3) binocular vision; 4) the manipulative abilities of his hands; 5) his grasp of Newtonian gravitation at the intuitive level. To this list, anthropologist Edward T. Hall adds two more in The Hidden Dimension: 1) decreased dependence on smell; 2) the ability for and dependence upon abstract planning (for the eyes "code vastly more complex data and thus encourage thinking in the abstract"). "The existence of trees," John Stewart Collis has observed, "was a prerequisite of conceptual thought. It was the tree that promoted the upright posture. . . . Thus it was the tree that [he is quoting Julian Huxley] 'laid the foundation both for the fuller definition of objects by conceptual thought and for the fuller control of them by tools and machines.'"

"During our erratic wanderings from the primordial sea to the present," writes the Norwegian ecologist Rolf Edberg, "it is true that the wood was only a single phase--but a phase so long and filled with events that it can be considered a beginning for mankind. The Greeks must have felt this instinctively when they had Clio, the muse of history, dwell in a wood." Both Edberg and the Spanish philosopher Madariaga have gone so far as to suggest that man's nature may be oddly homologous to that of the tree. For Madariaga, man is "a tree that has packed up its earth and got moving," and his very mind itself, with its "down below" and "up above" dimensions, is a metamorphosis of the tree's photosynthesis. Edberg has also noted the striking similarity between the human brain and a forest. Neither of these "depth ecologies" of man and tree intend such observations to be taken as merely metaphorical, I should point out. For both thinkers, trees were, indeed still are, primary constituents of our very being-in-the-world.

Like the boy in the fable, man too once engaged in magical communion and communication with trees, an ability which has persisted until the present day among "primal" peoples. We can get a good sense of this elemental rapport in the following words from Tatanga Mani, or Walking Buffalo, a Stoney Indian from Alberta, Canada, who died in 1967.

We saw the Great Spirit's work in almost everything: sun, moon, trees, wind, and mountains. Sometimes we approached him through these things. . . . Did you know that trees talk? Well they do. They talk to each other, and they'll talk to you if you'll listen. Trouble is, white people don't listen. They never learned to listen to the Indian so I don't suppose they'll listen to other voices in nature. But I have learned a lot from trees: sometimes about the weather, sometimes about animals, sometimes about the Great Spirit.

Such primal sympathy between man and the natural world must have been with the human species since the beginning, though civilized man has learned to put away such a childish thing.

In The Triumph of the Tree, Collis asks us to imagine for a moment how trees must have appeared to early human beings: "what must have been the effect of the mighty trees upon the first human inhabitants of the world! They must have seemed god-like creatures to be placated at all costs . . . the impression which trees once made must been unsurpassed by any other phenomenon." Man's communion with trees, as Collis' word "placated" implies, was not all positive of course.

The world's mythology is filled with stories of both malevolent and benevolent tree spirits: ogres, genii, jinns, witches, goblins, trolls, nymphs, gnomes, naiads, fauns, dryads, hamadadryads, satyrs, centaurs, silvani, fairies. elves, brownies, pixies, leprechauns, and stories of trees which had the power to possess a human soul, or to inflict their wrath on trespassers of their domain are common from Malaya to Great Britain.

Nevertheless the tree stood as the image of imagination, of the umbilical linkage between man and the cosmos, microcosm and macrocosm. For as Roger Cook writes, in his The Tree of Life, imagination, like the tree

unites heaven and earth; it is "rooted" both above and below. Uniting the luminous world of consciousness to the dark underworld of the unconscious, and drawing nourishment from both the "heavenly-immaterial" world of intelligible meaning and the "earthy-material" world of sensory perception, it creates the "magical" intermediary world of images.

In the Norse myth of Igdrasil, the world-tree, in the Sanskrit belief that poetry began with the inspiration of the wind in the trees, in the Bodhi tree beneath which the Buddha sat when he achieved perfect enlightenment, in the shrine to Zeus at Dodona in ancient Greece, where for a thousand years the motions of the leaves in a grove of sacred oak trees were interpreted as the messages of Zeus, we can catch a glimpse of the "intimate and speaking contact with nature's creative power" (Edberg) which man once possessed.

Like Silverstein's practical adult, we have, we like to think, matured beyond the companion of our youth, outgrown even imagination itself, for now we have science and objectivity. With the coming of civilization we began to turn our back on the trees that once both sustained and enchanted us. We have made nature natural. This process can be seen clearly in the changing attitude of the Greek mind. For once, as Roland Barthes has observed,

the ancient Greek was amazed by the natural in nature; he constantly listened to it, questioned the meaning of mountains, spring, forests, storms; without knowing what all these objects were telling by name, he perceived in the vegetal or cosmic order a tremendous shudder of meaning, to which he gave the name of a god: Pan. Subsequently, nature has changed, has become social: everything that is given to man is already human, down to the forest and the river which we cross when we travel.

No longer feeling the "shudder of meaning," we are no longer capable of speaking with trees.

Not surprisingly, then, the founding of civilization, as historian William Irwin Thompson has pointed out, always seems to entail the destruction of a forest spirit (Thompson is thinking of the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh) and the building of a wall, either architectural or psychological, in defense against its feared return. In Gilgamesh, for example, the wall Uruk is constructed to separate civilization from the forest life man has put behind him. And it is behind such walls that man embarks upon his historical project to (in the words of the philosopher Ortega y Gasset) free "himself from the community of the plant and the animal," creating "an enclosure apart which is purely human, a civil space." "I have nothing to do with the trees of the field," Socrates proclaims triumphantly in the Phaedrus (4th century B.C.), "I have only to do with the man of the city, an attitude which, Ortega notes, epitomizes the rational outlook on the natural world at the birth of which Socrates served as midwife.

Some sense of the sacredness of trees did remain for a time, of course, even into the Christian era. In what is now Germany, for example, a man caught desecrating a tree was himself disemboweled and his intestines wound around the offended tree in reparation. And, if we are to believe Spengler, the awesome architecture of the Gothic cathedral was an attempt to replicate the experience of life in the forest. But the biblical injunction (Exodus 34:13) against all tree idolaters ("But yee shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves") prevailed.

By the eighth century the disenchantment of the forests had progressed so far that St. Boniface became revered for his act of cutting down a tree believed by the Saxons to be sacred. Myth records this advance in the Arthurian legend of the withdrawal of Merlin and his tree magic into the heart of the forest in old age, where it is believed his cry sounds there still, though now untranslatable--like the language of trees.

During the Renaissance, it is true, the magic of trees returned, at least for poetic minds. In Shakespeare's depiction (in As You Like It) of a wood, free from the "penalty of Adam," in which can be found "tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything"; in Edmund Waller's (1606-1687) celebration of a time when "in green palaces"

the first kings reigned,
Slept in their shades, and angels entertained;
With such old counselors they did advise
And by frequenting sacred groves grew wise . . . ;

in James Howell's poetic depiction of Dodona' Grove, or the Vocall Forrest (1645) as a locale where

It fortion'd not long since, that Trees did speak, and locally move, and met one another. Their airy whistling, and soft hollow whispers became Articulate sounds, mutually intelligible, as if to the soul of vegetation, the sensitive faculties and powers of the intellect also, had been co-infused into them . . .

we can certainly detect signs of reenchantment. But mostly they tended to see the archaic view of trees as a sign of primitive, childlike confusion. Listen, for example, to Howell's explanation of the tree-speech of the Oaks at Dodona:

In the nonage of the world, men's voyces were indistinct and confused and sojourning chiefly in Woods, by a kind of assimulation and frequent impressions in the eare, they resembled those soft susurrations of the Trees wherewith they conversed: untill Time, which ripeneth, and Art which perfecteth all things, and hath a greater interest in speech then Nature her self, did distinguish the misshapen sounds into syllables, and so by degrees into language.

Though he does trace the origin of language back to Dodona, Howell nevertheless characterizes tree-speech as "misshapen" and thinks of his own time as having evolved beyond such confusion of subject and object. The philosopher Descartes' more objective view of trees--he claimed to have discovered the Cartesian coordinate system while contemplating a tree outside his room through the frame of a window--might be taken to be more representative of the age and more historically influential.

The Romantic movement's attempt two centuries later to develop a truly organic concept of the imagination could be seen as another attempted resacralization of the natural world. Keats tells us that poetry should come as "naturally as the leaves to a tree" or "it had better not come at all." Wordsworth writes of a "spirit in the woods" and teaches that "One impulse from a vernal wood" is wiser than "all the sages." Emerson speaks of "an occult relation between man and the vegetable" whose effect is "like that of a higher thought." Goethe instructs his contemporaries that "If it's the greatest, the highest you seek, the plan can direct you./Strive to become through your will what, without will, it is." And Coleridge, similarly, suggests that "What a plant is by an act not its own and unconsciously, that you must make thyself to become," for it is "the visible organismus of the entire silent or elementary life of nature, and therefore incorporating the one extreme becomes the symbol of the other; the natural symbol of that higher life of reason. . . ." Taken together, considered as one voice, these writers are telling us that the "sensitive plant" is the true model for all growth and development, not just the poet's. It should not surprise us, then, that the Romantics produced many a poem (and painting: think of Constable) with magical forest settings.

And now a French philosopher and novelist comes to find trees as something "repugnant" and "in the way," as beings with whom man cannot feel even a trace of empathy, except to feel sorry for them. In Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, a novel whose narrator espouses views very like Sartre's own, we find a passage like the following:

I sat down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by the profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning. It was repugnant. But why, I thought, why so many existences, since they all look alike? What good are too many duplicates of trees.

Because they epitomize what Sartre calls "being-in-itself," because they do not, in Auden's words "have their unity to win," Roquentin (Sartre's narrator) finds their existence inconvenient, "in the way." He wants them to exist, he says, "more abstractly," more, that is, like him.

III

Trees and rocks do not indulge in the impertinence of foisting lessons upon us. Their method of instruction is more circuitous and indirect, but perhaps all the more potent for that. Their first lesson is to draw us outside the narrow and presumptuous horizons of our humanism.
--William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique

What within us is tree?
What
cannot be budged, the stock
'not moved' that stands and yet
draws us
into ourselves, centers us,
never rebuffs us, utters
our wildest dreams for us, dreams
of oceanic blessing,
our hymns of pure being?
--Denise Levertov

To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.
--Revelations 2:7

In Regarding Wave. as an epigraph to the poem "Long Hair," Gary Snyder relates the following fantasy:

Once every year, the Deer catch human beings. They do various things which irresistibly draw men near them: each one selects a certain man. The deer shoots the man, who is then compelled to skin it and carry its meat home and eat it. Then the Deer is inside the man. He waits and hides in there. But the man doesn't know it. When enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all at once. The men who don't have Deer in them will also be taken by surprise, and everything will change some. This is called "takeover from inside."

When I first encountered this marvelous conspiracy theory several years ago, it immediately assumed a place of honor in my daily thoughts. It seemed to me a story with real healing power--as all true stories should be. For it suggested in effect that in man's co-evolution with the natural world nature will have the last word: it said that nature will triumph in the end, even over man's unnatural desires and by means of those same desires. It hints that even in man's treatment of nature as an object to be consumed, his reduction of the mystery of things to what Heidegger has termed "the stored-away," nature itself is at work, conspiring to get him back--to return him to the fold, enfolding him again within the mystery.

And then one night I discovered the part trees have played in this "takeover from inside." With Snyder's tale part of my understanding and despairing thoughts about the destiny of our species beleaguering my mind, I found myself prowling the aisles of a large university library, not so much in search of any particular piece of knowledge, but entranced, rather, by the phenomenon of a library itself. I walked through a room nearly as large as a basketball court where thousands of books lined the tall shelves, and as my eyes scanned all that immense accumulation of stored-away, "extra-genetic" information (as the communication theorists call it), this "World Three," produced through the mediation of the technologies of writing and book printing, seemed to take on a new meaning. The ordinary appearance of the library faded before my eyes. I was standing--was it not obvious?--in a room full of martyred trees.

Although McLuhan was probably correct in arguing that the reduction of the sensual multiplicity of the aural world of pre-literate, oral, man into the linearity of the printed word as man entered the "Gutenberg Galaxy" had led the way to our vastly diminished awareness of nature's panoply, I wondered if it had not all been for a reason we seldom understand. Might not the Gutenberg Galaxy, I thought then, be just another name for the consumption phase of Snyder's "takeover from inside"? And was not the Gutenberg Galaxy now drawing to a close?

Might it not be possible, then, I continued to think as I stood amazed in that forest/library, that trees, too--like Snyder's deer--have for these many centuries been offering us their flesh, after first irresistibly drawing us to them (as they did for a thousand years at Dodona), in order to then become, through their martyred offering of themselves in our print media, ingested by our ravenous eyes in the process of reading, in order to become a tacit power present in the very fabric of our intelligence. (Had not William Carlos Williams argued--in one of the seminal ideas of modern poetics--that the whiteness which surrounds "the figure a poem makes" on the page is as important as the poem itself?)

Has not the secret motive of the trees been to seduce us, through our long exposure to the printed page's white ground and the wisdom which could be tattooed upon their skins, into a love for them and their ground, to take over from within our awareness of the world, turn us inside-out, return us to their world in a gestalt reversal in which the natural--the very ground of our being as creatures--and the Earth itself, through its most integral, most eloquent "voices" and most enchanting emanations, the trees of Gaia, finally "gets a words in our narrow ear"--our inner ear: our room of one's own become again a forest? The words of a long-admired but never really understood poem suddenly became clear to me.

The trees inside are moving into the forest,
the forest that was empty all these days
where no bird could sit
no insect hide
no sun bury its feet in shadow
the forest that was empty all these nights
will be full of trees by morning.

These words, I realized, were an intelligence-report, perhaps a history.

If the conspiracy of the trees which I had discovered succeeds, I thought, then, as Snyder surmised, "everything will change some." As I stood alone in the library that night I began to laugh quietly at the subtlety and indescribable wisdom of the plan. I thought of John Evelyn's observation (in the seventeenth century) that trees have twice saved mankind: once through the construction of the Ark and again by providing the Cross, on which man's sins might be redeemed, and in so doing had more than made amends for their having once provided the evil fruit of the tree of knowledge. There will be a third time, I thought. And I wondered if the Tree of Life might be the reward not of "him that overcometh" but of man overcome, taken over from inside, having reached at the end of all his running the point of knowing where he stood.

Wishing the conspiracy to triumph, I resolved not to enclose it, though not to do so was clearly sedition. I discovered then my vocation: I would be a double-agent. And yet I cannot be silent; for to help facilitate the trees' stratagem I must put words on paper, providing more food for thought . . . these words, in fact. And I thought of the words of another co-conspirator:

One space spreads through all creatures equally--
inner-world-space. Birds quietly fly and go
right through us. Oh, I that want to grow,
I look outside and in me grows the tree.

The Legacy of Dodona

2009-12-06T03:20:00.000-08:00

Like On Time-Lapse Photography, this blog is an archive of a book that never happened.

I started working on a book on trees back in the 1970s, under the sway of my LSD experiences with trees. I began collecting every poem, every piece of prose, every painting. Here's what I discovered. (Additions welcome. Write me--david.lavery@gmail.com.)

But first up, a meditation: "The Legacy of Dodona: Trees and the Evolution of Consciousness."

The image above was on a poster for an exhibit on (as I recall) "Three Thousand Years of the Human Adventure" at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris. (Joyce and I were on our honeymoon there in 1979.) I like to think of it as a rendering of a version of Igrdrasil for the age of Darwin.