Change of season

Every branch of the NYPL

 

I love the New York Public Library for connecting me to worlds of books! The research division allowed me to read the Indian-published work of Nandalal Bose, discussed in Sumana Roy's How I Became a Tree.

But NYPL affords access to more than academic titles. Delivered conveniently to my nearest neighborhood branch I can check out books no university library would stock, from children's books like Sylvaine 

 

Jaoui and Anne Crahay's I'm like a tree and a tree's like me (with clever holes in its pages) to comic books like Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester's rather darker Family Tree, where some humans become trees.

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom

Checked out the twin exhibitions on the Tarot at the Morgan Library today, Renaissance Symbols and Modern Visions. I'm planning to take the "DIY Religion" class there. Tarot is not really my thing but, judging from last year's cohort, it's likely to be of more than casual interest to at least a few of the students. I'm not sure the part about the original 15th century Italian tarocchi cards will wow them, but the modern adaptations have something for everyone. For me, it was the Six of Trees (they're flying!) from Rachel Pollack's Shining Tribe Tarot of 1994.

Snap!

Tree damage in Riverside Park, perhaps from Thursday night's squall.

If you can make it out, imagine that opening of sky was once filled with a tree canopy, and look down to where the trunk of that tree was and, in part, still is. Then look left, to see where the snapped-off tree fell, and up and down to see the damage done to the tree on which it fell.

Plowshares

I'm very moved to learn of "Rooted," a monument going up soon in Charlottesville, VA. It will be in the form of a banyan tree, open so that people can move and sit within it, open to the sky and the surrounding park, an invitation to gather, reflect and celebrate.

But this isn't just any monument. It will be made with the bronze used in an earlier statue, which used to organize this space in a completely different way - the monument to Robert E. Lee, erected in 1924, whose proposed removal provoked the deadly "Unite the Right" march in 2017. The statue was finally removed by the city five years ago, who partnered with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center to reimagine the space and its history in a program called Swords into Plowshares. 

JSAAHC in turn paired Boston-based non-profit MASS (Model of Architecture Serving Society) with Oakland sculptor Dana King, who "envision ROOTED not as another heroic statue but as an open civic landscape organized around welcome, gathering, beauty, and participation. Rather than asking visitors to look up at history, the project invites them to inhabit it." ROOTED was one of three compelling proposals developed (another of which involved a symbolic tree, too) and the one chosen by the community. MASS chose the baobab "for its life-giving fruit and the symbolism of resilience, interconnection and shared knowledge" - and for its "pan-African symbolism."

“The opportunities like this are extraordinarily rare,” said Jha D Amazi, principal of MASS’s Public Memory and Memorials Lab. “To transform the very material of a monument is to acknowledge that history cannot be erased, but it can be reimagined."

This will be one of a new generation of public monuments which are interactive and participatory rather than static, their meaning formed over time by communities on the ground rather than fixed once for all from above. Explains an article in Architect Magazine, "Rather than designing objects that proclaim a single historical truth, they are increasingly being asked to create places that accommodate multiple histories, invite dialogue, and evolve alongside the communities they serve. The goal is no longer to conclude historical debates but to provide civic spaces where those conversations can continue."

The form of a tree seems especially apposite here, monumental yet alive and changing, and particularly the baobab, known to be a place of gathering. On top of that ROOTED has found a way to make the opened-up tree feel like a community of people, its branches like human arms in a dance of gesture and signification. Its form is fixed, of course - at least the bronze component - but part of its empowering joy will be the awareness that its bronze has been reclaimed from hatred for love.

Babbling

What to say about the Giant Sequoias we encountered at Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park? They're so big! And tall! Really old! And strange! 

Jared Farmer somewhere observes that people claim profound spiritual experiences around them, sensing our smallness in the face of deep time and physical massiveness, but really our thinking just stops.  

We can try analogies. I was quite taken by this pretty display of superlatives at the Giant Forest Museum, a hulking Giant Sequioa and dark towering Coast Redwood surrounded by (from left) the Tule Cypress in Oaxaca, the museum itself, a Space Shuttle launch, a stack of elephants, a Blue Whale, the Titanic, a wispy Bristlecone Pine, a tall Sugar Pine, the Statue of Liberty and an adorably diminutive dinosaur.

Each of these comparisons would permit some babbling, but in the end just deepen the sense of incommensurability between our thoughts and these remarkable existences. What could we have to say to each other?

The point when I came closest to some sense of the enormity of these trees was when my nephew climbed atop the massive rootplate of a fallen giant, which looked like a portal out of science fiction movie. To get up there he had to walk along the fallen tree to find a way to climb up, disappearing from earshot for such a long time we started to worry.

Down but not defeated

Adirondack apparition

Bicenquinquagenary

What to call the upcoming 250th celebrations? 

The current regime (Robert Reich argues we shouldn't defile words like "administration," "president" or even "government" to describe these lawless brigands, but "regime" is OK) has found ways to make even "1776" and "250" toxic (taxpayer-funded slush fund for paramilitary thugs? monstrous arch of vanity?), confirming their unworthiness of the history they claim to embody. What can we say worthy of that history?

Although decades of reconstruction await, I think the rest of us will muddle through. I'm heartened by Jill Lepore's wry perspective on the 1976 bicentennial ("by almost any measure, 2026 is a goat rodeo") and Heather Cox Richardson's just-unveiled "250 to 250" project, among other interventions. This history, as Richardson reminds us, is ours. 

But what to call the whole thing? The official moniker "semiquincentennial" - half of five hundred - gives me thousand year Reich vibes. A long view of history suggests that two hundred fifty years is a pretty impressive achievement. Most empires don't last that long, let alone longer. Invoking five hundred years sounds grandiose and presumptuous. (Most trees don't live nearly that long, for instance.) 

I'll settle for bicenquinquagenary (a term I encountered first at Princeton's 250th in 1996). If that sounds a little wobbly and weird, so much the better. At its best, the United States of America has always been a little loopy and piety-challenging.

Fully formed

The only thing more astonishing than the explosion our unseasonably warm days provoked in the hickory planted in front of our building last year is that these two pictures were taken only thirty hours apart, ten o'clock yesterday morning and four this afternoon! And the new stems and leaves aren't weightless and gauzy like most new leaves but substantial, meaty and heavy. An amazement.

Despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty

How could I not share this 2017 poem from Ada Límon, shared today by some algorithm and poets.org (on whose site you can also hear it read by the poet)? As current events make for a permanent knot in my stomach, the trees are busy doing what trees do this time of year.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Out lines

More and less evanescent lines on the Kazimiroff Nature Trail

Sunset ice

The Hudson is full of ice. These are views from our window Monday and yesterday, at sunset. Today we watched the sunset from the river!

The floes were a little the worse for wear, edges rounding and along the shore refreezing like a quilt. The river flowed upstream at a brisk clip. 

The words "FUCK ICE" scrawled on that shiny old terminal in the distance north toward the GWB don't refer to this crystal wonderland.

 

Birds of a feather

The New York Public Library at Bryant Park has a Christmas tree with a difference. Its branches are full of birds of all kinds, many in nests (and loads of pinecones)! The snowy white owls apparently flew in last year.

Snowed

First real snowfall of the winter. So beautif--- It's hard to delight in it as my friends and colleagues anguish over the impossible decision, due tomorrow, whether to pursue "voluntary" departure from the school.

Autumnal apparitions

Native and interloper, at Blauvelt State Park, each a little otherworldly

Sudden shower

There's a gorgeous arboreal cover on the newest New Yorker, Sergio Garcia Sánchez's Hiroshige-inspired "Sudden Shower." 

I love how the tree keeps growing upward and out of the frame on the right, too venerable to be concerned with symmetry. It must have been drawn from life!

Trunk line call

4 eyes: better than 2! Look at that tree in the river, I said as we crossed a stream on a visit to friends in central Pennsylvania, wondering how its carcass had been moved into the middle. But my companion thought I meant the other tree, which I had entirely missed, the new one!

Old growth

A giant has fallen - well, half of a giant. A northern red oak in nearby Riverside Park, which at over 350 years may be among the city's oldest trees, split in two in a heavy storm in early July. I don't know what effect this will have on the remaining tree, not being an arborist. But the open wound surely makes it vulnerable to further loss. 

Looking through my old photos (with the help of Photos automatically tagging places), I find I never took a picture of kin! Too big, I guess - I know from trying that it's nigh impossible to convey the size of a tall tree, not to mention the highest canopy beyond the canopy. But here it was, in early November 2020 (in fact it was the day after the election), forming the dark background on the left as I was trying to capture the sense of a portal into the light. (It's taken from the other side of the Forever Wild walk which went beneath those branches.) 

Village tale

Just another city tree with stories to tell (West 10th Street)

Overstory

But the really good news is that Rümeysa Öztürk has been released! Now for all the others unjustly detained by a wannabe gangster state.