Lost in the idea of woods

The landscape architect husband of a friend told me that all students of landscape architecture read a book called Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, so I'm having a look. Literary critic Robert Pogue Harrison argues that western culture has always constructed the forest as that from which civilization, or law, or enlightenment frees us. Building out ideas of Giambattista Vico with more than a few Heideggerian ideas, Harrison imagines that humans used to live like animals in the eternal twilight of dense forests, until one day stumbling on a forest clearing during a storm. There they discovered the sky, and the vertical, Jove!, and abstraction - and the seeds for civilization were planted. From now on, the one sheltering canopies of forests block access to the sky.

As human settlements in clearings pushed the forest away, civilization at the center became ever more "utopian," ever more abstract. After a certain point that's not a good thing, as the reminder of the shadow - furnished especially by poets who travel from the metropole to the forest's edge province and report back what they have seen - keeps civilization tethered to the earth. In our deforested present, even the idea of what forest meant and should mean is nearly lost.

It's an odd sort of argument for keeping forests - we need their limitation. But that humans might have been civilized in and with forests is never considered. Instead, forests are places of disorientation and enchantment, places humans get lost. Representative is his eloquent description of the great Mother Goddess of the 30,000 years of human history before we finding a clearing, one of whose final forms was Artemis. (Next in line comes Dionysus.)

[Artemis] is the noumenal spirit of the forests which gives birth to a multiplicity of species (forms) that preserve their originary kinship within the forests’ network of material interdependence. In her wild woodlands there are no irreducible distinctions—no noise that does not sound like a response to some other noise, no tree that does not fuse into the arboreal confusion. The diversity of species in the forest belongs to the same phylogeny, so much so that in heightened moments of perception they appear as mere versions of each other—the fern a version of the dragonfly, the robin a version of its supporting branch, the reptile’s rustle a version of the rivulet’s trickle, the wildflower a version of the ray of light that reaches it through the canopy. ([Chicago: 1993], 29-30)

This is certainly very poetic. It sounds like a formular for getting lost in the woods, for heightening our disorientation, luxuriating in its supposed dissolution of distinctions. It doesn't sound like the way forests are known by those who dwell there, who need to know what's safe and who's kin - and do. They know that the "network of material interdependence" is not an abstraction. Noises do respond to other noises- not echoes but conversations. We get lost in the woods when we blur and conflate the way Harrison's "heightened moments of perception" do; luckily, the people of the forest - not just human people - have taught us ways not to get lost. 

The image of forests Harrison synthesizes is indeed a deep part of western culture - a part of what's allowed it in recent centuries to uproot so much of the natural world. But what a distorted image it is! At this point it feels like a landlubber's account of the sea. 

Unter den Linden

Step under a blooming linden tree and there's a vault full of stars!

Parentage of beauty

Back in my office again for the first time in a spell, I reread Buddhist poet W. S. Merwin's enchanting Unchopping a Tree, appreciating anew the lovely illustrations of Liz Ward. The poem, which isn't perhaps really about trees at all, offers instructions on undoing the destruction of a felled tree, starting with refastening leaves which fell off, then slowy hoisting the trunk back into place. This is where the chips which the chainsaw sent flying are restored to their original places...

Global heating

Could it be the same story? 

Lights, camera

Went back to The New School for the first time in almost two months to find the courtyard transformed! The lush new planting regime is getting lusher and lusher, rich greens coming from above and below. The transformation is almost cinematic! Then came a delicious 

surprise. A string of people dressed like folks from the glory days of The New School in the 1940 started to flow across the courtyard. Turns out someone was shooting a movie scene in the big auditorium, and the extras had to cross the courtyard to pick up their lunches. Past and present blurred for a moment.

Inside the trees

How do we picture trees? This question scaffolded the "Religion of Trees" class through the practice of drawing. It's important to the claim of my book, too. (I haven't decided against including drawing exercises in it!) Since most trees are in forests, you can never see them whole, and what you would see, if you could isolate one, would make little sense on its own.

Leaf peeper's nausée II

A year and a half ago, as we bathed in spectacular fall colors in our little corner of the Central Adirondacks, I had a nausée moment. 

we were thrilling to leaves and colors just as the trees to whom they belonged were letting them go. Although we were constantly applauding, nobody was putting on a show for us. The pigments that gave us colors we deliriously grasped for names for (claret? pink grapefruit? rhubarb? blood?) had served some other purpose once. At that chlorophyl-filled time, the leaves were green because they absorbed reds and yellows. Titillating the likes of us by bouncing the golds and scarlets back at us was never the point! By the time the trees elicit gasps from tree peepers like us, the leaves' work is done - except decomposing on the forest floor. It was like showing up for the curtain call of a theatrical performance, or indeed at the stage door, unaware of and incurious about the play that had just concluded. 

That's part of why I felt the need to witness spring unfold in a deciduous forest, something accomplished so joyfully during our Appalachian sojourn last month. I learned the truth of lands for which, in Joan Maloof's words, 

Forest is our land’s natural calling, and if you leave just about any spot here alone for long enough it will become forest 

The virtuosity of all those seeds, twigs, saplings, trees! This was the show, surely, whose curtain call alone I knew. But by the end of our stay I'd also started to experience the harsher side of spring. Many a leaf was munched by animals or blemished by parasites or throttled by twining vines, but, more fatally, some of the spry young tree shoots were already wasting away as the canopy closed off their access to sunlight. There was no way all these little treelets would be able to mature anyway; a select few might make it for a few years. Reaching the canopy would require one of the mature trees' falling and opening a space, and would involve a competition to the death among adolescent trees seizing their chance.

In the Dacks this time, attending more to forest than to individual tree, I was struck by the glittering waves of broadleaf leaves, most still radiant with spring thinness. This was all to the good: the cast members assembling for the show! What gave me pause, somehow, were other familiars: red maples, many of whose crowns were so full of samaras they already anticipated fall colors - golds, oranges, browns. Some seemed festooned with bunches of reddest cherries (every bit as red as those I marveled at in North Carolina).

What would become of all these seeds? Twirling in the wind when the time was ripe, they'd skitter about. A few might land and put down roots. The roadsides were already mobbed with crowds of young maples from last year. But the canopy here, too, was already full. There were no vacancies. What would become of all the seeds? Nothing. Somehow this seemed appalling. My fall vertigo was nothing compared to this. The leaves of fall were all meeting the same fate, having each had the chance to contribute to their tree. I found myself thinking of the final verse of the hymn "Come, labor on": 

Come, labor on! 

 

No time for rest, till glows the western sky,

 

till the long shadows o'er our pathway lie, 

 

and a glad sound comes with the setting sun: 

 

"Servants, well done." 

But the spring seeds? Most never get a chance to labor. Their story is over almost as soon as it begins. Thinking forest-scale here, I was overwhelmed by what seemed an incredible wantonness, a waste. I recalled Annie Dillard's discussion of "Fecundity," which notes the prodigious scale of reproduction in most kingdoms of life, a prodigality required since the odds were so very much against success. 

I haven't tired you with my views on the well-meaning children's book Big Tree by Brian Selznick. It's the story of two sycamore seedling siblings, Merwin and Louise. They're among the hundreds of seeds jammed into one seedball among hundreds on their mama.

After many beautifully drawn adventures (they're living at the very end of the age of the dinosaurs), they are reunited. Louise's a grown tree by now (she will - spoiler - clairvoyantly coordinate the response when the meteorite approaches). Merwin, who'd been stuck in a crack in a rock for a long time, finds a spot near her to grow. At the end, Merwin grows freely to Louise's size in the convenient clearing next to her, and their branches reach out to touch each other. 

Sycamore seeds can't see or talk or move but I found I could make my peace with the anthropomorphism. It is is a (human) children's book, after all, if quite American - the protagonists save the world! - and it teaches rather delightfully about the interconnections of nature, offering us a place in an ongoing story that reaches back far far beyond our arrival. But what I couldn't accept: of the other tens of thousands of sycamore siblings (just from mother tree), not a word. This seemed fundamentally dishonest to me. Every oak was once an acorn but most acorns... 

Selznick's challenge was waiting for this trip to put down roots. Can we think about trees without anthropomorphizing them? Trees - the ones that make it - seem to us to have lives and personalities in meaningful ways like our own, resonant with our deepest aspirations. Yet...

In the Dacks this time, aware in a new way of the vast number of seeds (and pollen...!) put out by each of these millions of trees, and of the certainty that very near none of them would ever even come close to becoming trees, or even shoots, I found myself thinking anew of the incommensurability of tree lives and human lives. And human religion? Jesus tells his disciples that, just as every hair on their heads is counted, nothing in creation happens unwitnessed by God.

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. (Matthew 10:29)

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? (Luke 12:6)

Does not one maple key fall on the ground unmourned? 

ADK

Another fun stay in the Adirondacks. This is as close as we've come to the high season - summer officially starts Memorial day, so every-thing's set to open on Friday - but we prefer the lower-key times. High temperatures - 90˚s! - made it feel like summer enough already.

Within the forests we walked in, the spring ephemerals have mostly passed. Understory leaves are stretching out to catch sunlight while they can. The other action is in the tree canopy, far from view unless flowers, catkins - or whole branches - fell. We'll be back in autumn!

Surface tension

Do water striders see trees?

Dusting

The Adirondacks are full of glorious conifers. In this season that means conifer pollen everywhere - including windshields and lake beaches!

Active reflection

Elders

Really tall trees, as I learned at Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest last month, are hard to make out from the ground. The biggest eastern white pines in the little grove called Cathedral Pines, near where we're staying in the 'Dacks, are well over three hundred years old. Like Joyce Kilmer's contemporaneous tulip trees, their patch of woods wasn't exceptional when they were young, touching the hems of 

giants centuries their senior, like countless kin in all directions. They only became exceptional when all around them was razed by rapacious European settlers. It's not clear how this stand of pines survived the loggers who leveled most of the Adirondacks; they may have been saved by something as prosaic as a disputed property line! Eastern white pines don't generally live past 400 years so some of the Dacks' oldest and tallest have fallen already, with more to come.

Regreen

Back to to 'Dacks for some more spring forest bathing! If the drive down to North Carolina last month felt like fast-forwarding to spring, the drive 4 hours' north and 2500 feet in elevation to the Adirondacks turns the clock back again, the deciduous green getting lighter and paler...

Hard to believe it's just four years qgo that we started coming up here. While always in the off season we've seen all seasons but summer (unless this counts): fall in 2020, in 2021, in 2022 and of course in 2023; end of winter fun in 2020, also in 2021, spectacularly in 2023 and 2024; and spring both in 2022 and last year, 2023.

Riversides

Hard to tell from my camera's focusing (more or less) on the raindrops on windows, but these are complementary views - from our corner of Manhattan to Edgewater, NJ across the Hudson, and vice versa.

Dead bug

I've been neglecting this blog! The sciatic flareup I mentioned last week is holding on longer than my last (and first) episode in 2021. I've gotten a boost from visits to a friend's chiropractor who, among other things, has me doing the dead bug stretch.

New neighbor!

Last week I noticed that a new tree planted in front of our building seemed to be a hickory - it had the same leaf explosions from a big 

bud I'd been taught to see in North Carolina, if five rather than seven leaflets and a more common color. Perhaps a shagbark hickory? (Yes!)

Remember this one?

Kastanie!

Not the Northern Lights but welcome color on a rainy day.

Religious opera!

Haven't been to the opera in a while, happy to have got tickets for the Metropolitan Opera's new production of John Adams' "El Niño" last night. The opera/oratorio, loosely inspired by Handel's "Messiah" and the medieval miracle plays in which western theater begins, and interleaved with Latin American poetry (and a little Hildegard of Bingen and Martin Luther!), is a retelling of the cosmic miracle of the Nativity of Christ featuring not just one, not just two but five Marys. Two - a soprano and a mezzo-soprano - are in the opera/oratorio as written, but this lush production adds three more, dancers: Indigenous Mary, Tropical Mary and Golden Mary. In a production as visually multi-layered and shimmering as Adams' music, it works - as Mary does in the life of those who revere her - human, local, embodied, immediate but also divine, universal, plural, transcendent.

In search of cognizance

My Kailash adventures seem like a long time ago, but a memoir just published by one of our young Nepali team members is taking me back to the summer 2016 circumambulation. I posed a selfie of myself reading it (with curious spider plant in the background), and he beamed it back, a FaceBook yatra! I've been going back to my pictures from the epic journey in renewed astonishment. 

(It's been diverting reading about our demanding trek, too, because I've been housebound for a few days with a sciatic flare-up.)

May flowers

Spring in New York didn't wait for us... not that I'm complaining.

NYPD @ TNS

While I've been communing with trees, my university has been, like many others, convulsed by student protests at the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza and our complicity in it as Americans. When Columbia students set up a tent encampment to demand their university divest from companies involved in Israel's war on Hamas, some of our students joined them, and others set up an encampment on our campus too, demanding similar divestment from our far smaller endowment. Columbia's was stormed by the NYPD, as were similar protests at other New York schools - leading quickly to the appearance of larger encampments - but our campus seemed to be an exception, the interim president having assured all that she didn't want to call the police. The exception proved the rule yesterday morning, as police arrested students who were sleeping in tents in the lobbies of three schoolm buildings. In short order, faculty bodies across the school put out statements and passed resolutions condemning the president's calling the police, demanding all charges against the protesters be dropped, voting no confidence in the university leadership and endorsing the protesters' call for the university to divest. I followed all this on my phone as we drove back from North Carolina (when I wasn't driving), amazed at how quickly it all unspooled. Who saw this coming? And what happens now, in the last week of the academic year, New School's innocence (again) lost?

Green hills

We spent almost twelve hours on the road driving the nearly 600 miles back to New York. For much of the way we were accompanied by the Applachian hills, now flush with green. Not just because outside temps were for a time in the high 80s, it felt like summer! The redbuds had given way to the cooler purple of paulownias.

Especially on the northern part of our trip, whose hills had still been wintry brownish grey though blushing maroon with maple buds, the transformation was striking. But it struck me also that every square foot of these forests had been through the same transformations I'd been witnessing on my remarkably unremarkable North Carolina walk.

Three wondrous weeks!

Mission accomplished! I wanted to see spring arrive, and did!