Tree.

 

Tree: Letters to the living.

As a child I used to draw and paint from Karel Plicka’s images of dead trees in the Boubin Virgin Forest in his book Vltava. I once visited a friend whilst she was staying at her childhood home. In her old bedroom was a ghostly painting of dead trees in a forest. There was something uncanny about this image. Entranced by it, I asked her who painted it. She gave me a strange look, then said, “you did?” The paintings uncanny qualities were not simply due to it being both familiar and unfamiliar, like an unrecognised childhood friend, but the way the trees in the foreground had been painted first and the background painted in later. It possessed a strange negativity without the reversal of tones. I am still haunted by this image, painted from Plicka’s image “Mist in the Boubin Virgin Forest” from the book Vltava. An image unrecognised and not remembered, as though painted by someone else.

Shortly after my Grandma passed away I again started to draw translations from the photographic images of dead trees in Karel Plicka’s book Vltava. The drawings were fragmentary and I seemed unable to complete them. The book had been given to my Mum by my Grandfather. I still do not know why he gave her this book, but I have always been haunted by Plicka’s photographs taken along the banks of the Vltava river from its source down into Prague.

I could not understand why I started drawing translations from this book again. For some reason it made me feel close to the departed. The dead trees photographed by Plicka in the Boubín Virgin Forest reminded me of my grandmother’s hands, gnarled with arthritis, that I often sat holding before she passed away. The unrecognised painting in my friend’s old bedroom had been painted after my grandpa passed away. I read the line from T. S. Elliot’s Gerontion, ‘I that was near your heart was removed therefrom…’ from another book that belonged to my grandfather, a 1937 copy of T. S. Elliot Poems 1909 – 1925.

T. S. Elliot, Poems 1909 – 1925 (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), 52.

That night I had the following dream:

I am in a forest and look down. I notice that I am wearing a short camel coat, with one blue panel on the front. I have no idea why I am wearing this coat and I decide to look for a classic camel coat. I find a market on the edge of the forest and enter a stall selling handbags and purses. I look around and realise that they are all pink and blue shiny plastic. Then I notice a beautifully crafted black leather doctors’ bag with brass fittings, covered with dust. A woman comes up behind me and says, “I wouldn’t pay five pounds for that dusty old thing.” I think it is worth far more and ask another stall holder where I can find the seller. She points me towards a row of tall town houses lining the other side of the street. The houses are Baroque in style and look South American. I walk along the row of houses, and each has tables and chairs outside. They are all cafés serving different types of food. I then come to a plot of land at the end of the row, surrounded by a white picket fence. The plot is full of low mounds made from ancient stone blocks, covered in grass and moss. They look like graves but also resemble low Maya monuments. The handbag seller walks up to the fence and leans on it. I ask him what the mounds are for. He tells me, “They are where the dead come during the day to write letters to the living. But they rarely ever manage it.” I notice a few letters scratched into an exposed stone. I feel sad that the dead make so much effort to communicate to the living, yet only manage a few letters.

The dream occurs at the edge of the forest, on the fringes of civilisation. Like the Boubin Virgin forest that Plicka photographed, forests have always suggested the unknown, that which is untamed and untouched by civilisation. There is part of something in each of us that comes from similar territory. It operates with a feral and untamed logic that works with uncanny accuracy. It is almost incomprehensible to the rational mind, and it is better to never question its workings. Its workings are archaic, as old as the hills, and it communicates in or through a language of images.

The dream could have been telling me that this book carried a form of medicine like the dusty old doctor’s bag. Perhaps it was saying that images are a form of communication from the dead to the living. They certainly survive or live on long after the subject of the image has changed beyond recognition or no longer exists. They also outlive their creators.

It was not unusual, as with the ancient Maya and their descendants, for stones to talk or be the,

‘… seats of supernaturals.’

David Freidel, Joy Parker and Linda Schele, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1995), 178 – 179.

Stone shrines were also perceived to be the “sleeping house” for the dead soul.

David Freidel, Joy Parker and Linda Schele, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc, 1995), 188.

The stones or sleeping houses in my dream are only occupied by the dead during the day for the sole purpose of communicating with the living.

Marcel Proust in his reflections on involuntary memory, on the past being hidden somewhere out of reach of the intellect in some material object and the sensation it evokes wrote that,

‘I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.’

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 1 Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage Books, 2005), 50-51.

Perhaps in Plika’s images of dead trees, some aspect of the past is recognised and returns to share my life.

Tree: World Tree.

The first house that I remember living in had a row of conifers at the end of the back garden that I liked to disappear into. I recently dreamt that I was trying to climb one of these conifers but was unable to reach the top. An elderly man was climbing the tree next to mine and disappeared up into the sky. I woke feeling frustrated and disappointed at my failure to reach the heavens.

As a child I was good at climbing trees. The next house we lived in was close to the woods. My sister, friends and I spent much of our time in the woods where we built dens out of sticks, bracken and moss. We always knew when other children had used our den or lit a fire and jeopardised our territory. Climbing trees was a good way to survey the area for signs of disruption, but also a way of figuring out who had the most courage. Later we realised that courage and stupidity go hand in hand as being able to get up a tree did not necessarily mean being able to get down again. Now I can only dream about climbing trees.

I rarely have this sort of dream. Usually, I accompany the dead in the underworld rather than trying to reach the heavens. The elderly man was no doubt a Shaman, skilled in the art of climbing the World Tree which spans the three worlds, the underworld, our world and the sky world.  

Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Arcana: London), 259-287.

This tripart division could almost be described as a cosmological constant in archaic cultures, including the ancient Maya. For the Celts the underworld was the source of life. Life has its roots in the underworld, the world of the dead.

Our time in the woods taught me that each tree has its own personality, texture and atmosphere. Some trees seemed foreboding, as though they had witnessed some atrocity. Those we did not climb or even stand under their canopy. Others seemed welcoming, possessing great strength in their trunks and branches and those trees we climbed. There were young trees which we left alone and old, decaying trees that were fascinating due to the ecosystems that had developed in their rotting bark. Each tree had its own unique species of birds and insects living, feeding and sheltering in it.