Extinct branches

The ceiling of a central gallery in the Natural History Museum in London has since 2009 offered visitors "TREE," a work by Tania Kovats commissioned for Charles Darwin's 200th and the Origin of Species 150th birthdays. This is a "wafer-thin" slice of an actual tree - a two hundred year old oak - inspired by the famous drawing in Darwin's notebooks of 1837 which seems to capture the moment 

he discovered the theory of evolution. The museum's video about the making of "TREE" ends with the superposition of Kovacs' work, the source tree while still standing, and Darwin's sketch. I can't find images of what it looks like from right underneath it but the one below at least offers a tree's eye view. It must be most impressive and a little sinister, the museum's largest botanical specimen!

Kovats' work is simply called "TREE" but, despite her requests, is described by visitors and ultimately the museum too the way Darwin's doodle is, as a "tree of life." And yet it's not even clear that Darwin's drawing represented a tree. One scholar has argued that Darwin's model was coral. It seems more likely that the image of a tree of life was a preexisting one which Darwin made use of, as is suggested by the way he uses the image in Origin of Species 22 years later. 

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. . . . As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

The twiggy drawing wasn't in fact the first in that notebook in which Darwin was feeling his way toward the theory of evolution. Two others appear a few pages before, each of the three corresponding to a central element of the emerging theory. Adaptation, gaps in the fossil record, and - for this third one - extinctions. When more than just the evocative "I think" is included in your image, we see ongoing thought.

The original image seems designed to make sense of the "immense gap of relation" between A (bottom right) and B (top), relative to the smaller but also different gaps between B and C, and between B and D. Beside the image come two later thought bubbles which lead to the epiphany that the process described "requires extinction." (text) Maybe he made the later connection between his theory and representations of species affinities as a tree with the inescapability of extinctions in mind - a way to recognize kinship with the defunct.

There have been many problems identified in thinking of all of life as a tree, not least because of the implications of lateral gene transfer. But I'm intrigued that part of the value Darwin saw in the tree simile was the fact that trees lose branches: "the great Tree of Life ... fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications." As a botanist Darwin appreciated that trees grow through loss. 

My main inspiration in these reflections is an article I stumbled on by Nils Petter Hellström, “The tree as evolutionary icon: TREE in the Natural History Museum, London,” Archives of natural history 38.1 (2011): 1–17, and rabbit holes it led me to.

Leave karma

At a faculty retreat today, a colleague came up to say hi, and when I told him "I'm on leave" said "You shouldn't be here!" Apparently, when he was on his first leave years ago, he came to a faculty meeting and I collared him and said the same thing - and without that permission "I would never have finished my book." I'm glad I went today - we haven't gathered as a faculty since before the pandemic and the event was full of joy and camaraderie - but now I'm taking my old advice, returned with interest. Maybe the karma will help my book, too!

Scarred sacred

In a fun book by rainforest canopy botanist Nalini Nadkarni I finally found an articulation of something I'm becoming increasingly convinced is missing from tree lore. 

The form of a tree is a frozen expression of its past environment and traumas. 

I wouldn't use the word "trauma" but the growth of trees is a process of trial and error and chance and loss, of endless branchings only a few of which endure. This isn't the main point of Nadkarni's book, Between Earth and Sky: Our Intimate Connections to Trees, but I'll take it. 

Leafing through [Hallé, Oldeman and Tomlinson's] book on tropical tree architecture is like flipping through an automobile showcase catalogue, with each individual tree species presented in its ideal Platonic form. However, individual trees in the wild — even those of the same species — almost never end up looking like their potential self. They encounter wind, climbing primates, and shade from nearby trees, all of which cause certain branches to fall and some buds to shrivel. So finding model trees with perfect architecture in a rainforest is somewhat like locating a perfect automobile in a used-car lot — possible in theory, but probably not in fact. 

(University of California Press, 2008), 30, 39

Why does the ramshackle reality of actual trees matter, and matter to me? I'm trying to find language for it, but I think it's going to be important to the argument of my book. Idealized views of trees, aesthetic and spiritual, rarely tarry with this reality. Trees to many symbolize unity, coherence, completeness. But people who live with trees rather than just musing about them (or letting gardeners and city parks departments tend to them) know that even thriving trees are dropping twigs and branches all the time, evn without wind and climbing primates. What you see when you look at even an apparently symmetrical tree isn't every branch it might have grown. And all those "eyes" (as on the courtyard maples above)? Abandoned branches, every one of them.

This seems important because of the way some folks I've been reading see trees as somehow representing the unity of all things - life, the universe and everything. That's why, they say, people in all cultures have at some point represented the universe as a tree. That's the work evolutionary "trees of life" seem to do today. But every existing tree is haunted by lost and aborted branches, as would be the tree of life if we didn't offer a victors' history. (Can't trace the source of this image:

What's that got to do with my argument? There's no question that images of world trees and the like appear in many religions. But they knew the world differently than we do. What people saw in these idealized tree was more tragic, perhaps more subjunctive than what moderns detached from the reality of arboreal living imagine. In a nutshell: trees can be profound parts of human religious lives, but best if we can learn again to see and relate to them the way folks outside of modern capitalist society do. These folks didn't know what we now know about the sentience and sociability of trees, but they might have been less surprised than we moderns are.

No, trees as much scarred as sacred weren't part of the project when I started, but there were hints, as in my joy over this spread from Bruno Munari's Drawing a Tree. But this seems to be a direction worth going. In any case, it's what I'm seeing as I spend more time with trees.

Bodhi image issues

The current Buddha, Gotama, isn't the first, even in this kalpa (age), nor is he the last. Theravada tradition tells of twenty-seven Buddhas before him, including three in this age. Gotama's the fourth of this age, and the final one will be Metteyya/Maitreya. These enlightened ones all happen on the same unchanging truth (why Donald Lopez thinks the Buddhist tradition inherently conservative), and all do so under a tree. But it's not always the same kind of tree! 

As I'm learning from Asha Das' The Tree-Thrones of the Buddhas (Kolkata, 2003), Gotama chose a pipal (ficus religiosa), perhaps also the choice of the Buddha twenty-four before him, Dipamkara. Koṇāgamana, you might recall, sat beneath an Indian fig. But Maitreya will break through under a different kind of tree, the only one to have sheltered four past Buddhas, a Ceylon ironwood (messua ferrea). Hmph! How significant, then, is the pipal?

怎么过生日?

Beautiful light this morning!

Each graceful limb a sacred hymn

Remember absurdist Aussice poet-cartoonist Leunig? He gets trees!

浮世

Lily ponds in winter

Widening gyre

Winter lights

Cold slaw

Patience

After 701 days, New York City saw snow today! Not just flurries in the air but actual accumulation on the ground, trees, vehicles and lions.

100 days

Israel's war against Hamas has reached its hundredth day. No words. One in one hundred Gazans are dead, most are displaced, their homes destroyed. And my country is complicit. The October 7th attacks were horrifying, but are succeeding in creating a state of perpetual war.

Dreams of winter

Wintry colors even with no snow: bleached reeds jagged as ice

Global heating

Each of these diagrams from the BBC is more horrifying than the last.

But last year's record are sure to be superseded

Top shelf

My shelf's at the top, and I've started filling it with tree books.

Fiat lux

My sabbatical has begun in earnest! Past sabbaticals have taken me to other countries but this one will be based in New York City... and yet, away. I might sneak down to my university of a Friday (when nobody's around) but I have a new home base: a space in the main study room of the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities at the New York Public Library. My orientation was yesterday afternoon, when there were three other scholars spread across the four long tables. (Each of us gets a dedicated shelf for books from the library.) I was the first to arrive this morning, and found this atmospheric scene. I switched on another table lamp lights and settled into the warm semi-darkness until another researcher came in and told me the main lights in the room are motion activated. As he walked up and down, lights of all kinds went on! Let's hope I have that experience too!

Ghost of Christmases past

On my way to pay a visit to the Lang courtyard trees (my official line "I'm on leave but my relationship to the trees continues") I noticed a lot of other trees along the road. As I was trying to capture the Andersenian pathos of the piles of discarded Christmas trees through a gif of the billowing of the bags abandoned along with these stunned specimens along East 13th Street, I was photo-bombed by a fire engine, its lights flashing; once gif-ified it looks as evanescent as the splashy colors of the Christmas season.

In the air

No accumulation but we've had credible snow flurries for two days!

Pink

 Second sunset of the new year, already a bit jittery

Happy new year

Two images from our recent trip to Joshua Tree National Park express my apprehensions and my hopes for 2024. (You've seen images of both of these plants already.) The jumping cholla above looks like a pretty tree but at its feet is an arsenal of spiky balls waiting to hitch a ride on anyone who gets too close. Danger spreading!! The yucca below, putting forth its blossom, is a little unseasonable but also reassuring. Its buds are clustered in such a way that they look almost like a calendar! 2024 will be a year with new shocks and spikes but may it be contained still in the underlying continuity of shared life.