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. 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.