(silence)
The space that contains us.
They say that trees talk to one another, that their words pass through fine filaments underground. Such molecular communications can exchange information and resources. Like a wilting leaf signaling drought, these words are part of their treeness, their tree bodies. To become fluent in such a language, one would have to have such a body—one would have to become a tree.
I’m wondering how to hear these words of trees. How to find them. Or even just how to start looking for them with my human body. The definition of language that goes like this: “Language is the rule-based use of abstract signs”, has been used to distinguish human language from animal communication. Applying it to plants would distance them even further from humans than it does animals, but it is still a formula for thinking about language. Instead of presuming any ideas of plant communications, I want to use that very human standard to approach the idea of understanding plants in a different way. I see the plant body itself as a sign—not as a way to compare or contrast, but simply as a place to start.
If tree words are part of their bodies, then parts of a tree body might be like letters of the alphabet—an awkward human comparison. But I can look at the parts. The microscopic scale of tree-to-tree communication through mycelium networks is out of my direct sight. But with my eyes and my pencil, I can look at tree shapes and try to listen to what they tell me.
I sit in the shade of a large boulder to rest the ankle that is complaining about the wobbly talus traverse to get to this ancient Grove of Limber Pines on the east side of the Mosquito Range in central Colorado. The road up to this trail ends in peaks formed from faulted anticlines, places where the deep strata of the earth are pushed up in folds. Remnants of mines and oil exploration litter the slopes of this range which is rich in minerals and oils. The area where the ancient Limber pines survive was not mined. It is now in National Forest, but it is part of the historic hunting grounds of the Ute people.
Despite the road going almost nowhere else, the area is busy. Hikers pass by without seeing me tucked alongside the boulder and I eavesdrop. The trees are what they came for. They express their admiration and wonder. They stand beside them and gaze. They touch them. They pose with the trees. Photograph after photograph of the tree bodies alone and juxtaposed with the human.
I try to draw a tree.
As I try to capture the lines of my selected tree, I wonder about my motivations. It feels similar to the selfies of the other visitors: a souvenir, a tree tale. Although less invasive than a vandalizing mark, it still feels like a selfish desire. “Look at me.” “I was here.” I feel a nagging sense of voyeurism, of privileging not only my ability to get here but my choice of a fantastic form to document.
My drawings cannot capture this tree.
From scientific illustrations for medicine to elaborate systems of metaphor, western art has found uses for plants as objects. To break out of these forms seems impossible. But again, I need a place to start, and so I emphasize the process, not the product—the process of looking and recording, even if it is suspect and flawed.
How can I begin to record the information encoded in just one piece of the skin of this being? The hundreds of years of living add up to 730,000 days of weather that have stripped off bark, polished exposed surfaces, forced curves, and spirals, and left long gashes along the small portion on which I focus my attention.
I’m ignoring the tissue underneath, the cells that make it up, the organelles within the cells, and the molecules that flow throughout. At every scale, there is more to see and understand. We cannot translate what we don’t understand. But we can transliterate. In an embodied approach to cognition and language, modes of thought arise from how bodies experience and process the external environment. The shapes made by trees are a record of their environmental experience. It is my loose idea that the shapes of trees record their lives and that they can be conceived of as letters in a language we can’t perceive. The tree body makes a shape. We can see what might be a letter of one “alphabet” and change it into a corresponding letter of another. I draw the shapes of the tree to “transliterate” them into something that could hold meaning for a human body and a human mind.
I struggle to comprehend the angled planes of exposed wood. I sketch the lines again and again, and there is too much information to fit in. It’s as if my mind cannot let my eyes see the true shape of this tree being. It doesn’t look right—like a creature splayed open, sitting with curled legs on the ground, holding up massive arms to the sky.
Back in the studio, I rework the drawings again and again. I begin to see. And to feel some resonance in my own body. Rips and swirls and exposed ridges of interior wood encode a history. I cannot read the words or the story, but I begin to see the shapes of the letters.
The twist in the hips, I can transfer that letter in tree body language to my body, a different body, a different language, transliterated, the shape is similar. I cannot know what it means to the tree, but in my body I can ask what wind or push of rock would force a twist of a hundred years.
I compare my desire to acquire this image to the tree’s will to live. 730,000 hours versus the one hour I can sit here. The artists here are the tree, the wind, the hail, and the stones of the mountainside.
I dream about the limber pines living on the fringes. They’re outsiders with a culture so strange that they are seen as objects of curiosity rather than fellow beings.
I see them as if on a vast dark plane beyond the edge of our day-to-day world.
These twisted ones bear the gaze of the sightseers silently. If they ever talked to outsiders, they don’t anymore. Do the visitors even care? Or do they just want to see the freak show—the gnarled limbs and twisted ropey roots.
If one of the people who came to look stayed long enough, maybe they could learn the language of the old ones.
But the biting winds and shifting sliding rocks of the edge are cruel to soft, world-warm bodies. The rocks tilt and slide. The whole mountain can seem to come down on you. The wind screams and tears. Sunlight parches and burns.
Here at the wild end of the world, simple things like water and air can be as dangerous as bombs or knives and twist the bodies living on the edge every which way.
Do they chew rocks and drink ice? How do they all stay together in the Grove when the land shifts so?
The old ones cling to the rocks, even taking stones up inside themselves, like the story I heard in school that still makes me shudder about a Spartan soldier who let a fox eat his stomach rather than show his pain.
Below the crush of rock, on the solid edge of the soil where the wind is softer, younger ones and others of different shapes and habits mix happily with the ancient ones.
But the inhabitants of the Grove have figured something out. There’s a rumor that they have old-style links running underground—old handshakes—ancient protocols. Maybe those underground linkages can also find food down below out of sight.
On the far slope above the path we visitors have made, a broken torso and neck stick up as if made of rock. Did the Grove’s links fail this one? Did the land lurch so violently that its hold was cut? Or did the hard living out here wear away its desire to endure?
I saw an old one leaning over so far that their limbs pressed out at all angles for balance. Shoulders, chest, and arms were thrust so farin one direction that any average person would need a solid cane to hold them up. Below the long-sloping shelf running from one hip to the armpit, the front of their torso was ripped open. Layers inside were sealed hard and smooth, as if that Spartan survived the fox and grew armor from his scars.
On another continent, I walk past church, chickens, cows, leaving behind the mowed Chateau vistas and village charm, to enter what feels like a tunnel into a Beech forest. Rough roads thread through the trees and firewood is stacked at their ends. Communal use of the forest is traditional here. This is Haute-Marne in northern France, a department created in 1790 from parts of several pre-Revolutionary provinces including Champagne and Burgundy. This forest is just south of a karst region from which the river Manoise flows. Marl and limestone underlay the forest floor where massive battles have been fought and wild boar now gouge the mud with their tusks.
The path pushes into the trees along a muddy tributary stream. On the hillside above the cow pastures I've just left, the sun dances through an open wood of mature beech and maple and sycamore and the understory is open and lush. But here, last night’s rain drips through the canopy. Slugs, some spotted, some orange, stretch across the wet dirt path. Other than the sound of the birds and the gouges left by wild boar in the mud, there is nothing but trees and shadow. The scene captured by my phone camera is bright and green, but what I see with my eyes is darker, less saturated, even oppressive and bleak.
I have entered the wood.
No single tree calls to me here to sketch. No one trunk with striking features claims my eye or appeals to my hand to copy. Larger trees stretch into the sky but most are shorter, slanted and broken, dark with lichen and moss. Unlike the rocky slopes in Colorado, the struggIe here is not for water and carbon but for light. The slim lines of trunks and limbs seem clear enough until I try to bring them into order on my page.
I get lost in the drawing, I can’t keep what I’m looking at straight. If the story of a drawing of the limber pine is that of too much information in the shape and line of one body—too much to record—here the information overload comes from too many bodies crowding into the vision.
The symbolism of forests is varied and vast. Sitting on a stool in this damp shadowy space, I feel a loss of control, perhaps similar to Giovanni Aloi’s claim in Why Look At Plants, that the forest as a symbol is “designed to remind us (or convince us) that we no longer belong in nature; that we left a long time ago; and that the forest essentially is, for us, a place of loss; losing one’s way, losing one’s sanity, losing one’s life (1).”
To be in the woods is to be in the place of fairytales—but these tales revolve around people being inside of, or outside of, the woods. On entering the forest they find that different rules apply. Danger is different there than in the busy human spaces, but the story is still a human drama. The forest is a real place, not a symbol. What are the stories of the forest itself?
When I’m on the landscaped grounds, lovingly planned and maintained for human aesthetic appreciation, I am always aware of the forest on the edges and how I am not in it. Now I am very much in the forest and I seek the warmth and the light and the shade like a tree but also unlike a tree. I can leave the forest to find the comforts of sun and lawn, but how can a tree conceive of leaving the forest—it is itself the forest. What do trees know of in and of out?
I let go of the struggle to organize the too many lines of trees and focus on the only thing that’s clear—the light.
The way the light falls and strikes surfaces through the trees defines the shape of the scene, but not in large easy blocks. It hits the limb of one tree, then the trunk of another. I cannot easily find a larger pattern. Random shafts illuminate a mossy twist here, then a stretch of bark there.
If these tree bodies talk to one another, they must also speak of light and space and air as much as any underground thoughts. My body starts to want the warmth of sunlight as I sit here. I want to follow the light.
Out of the dark wood and back on the landscaped grounds of the Chateau is a little fairy grove with a path through the lilac understory of maple, sycamore and spruce trees. The branches arch over the path making a tunnel down to the light and the lake below.
I want to sketch the shaded fairy path and the light beyond, but when I open wide the sheets of my notebook pages, I am startled by the sudden burst of movement on the white surface. The shadows of the stems and leaves above me twitch and flicker. As in the first moving pictures, uncertain jerky shapes jump in and out of focus.
This is what the tree bodies are—a structure to stretch a trembling skein of light harvesters in the way of the sun’s rays to catch its energy—not the fixed lines of a drawing.
I try to catch them with my vine charcoal—itself a charred stem. It seems simple until it isn’t. I can’t keep up. My clever hominid fingers were not evolved to be leaves. I can hold the charcoal and turn it into patterns on a page. They grasp light and turn it into life. This singing/vibrating in the light is the story of the forest itself. I’m trying to fix the song into hard black and white shapes. The impossibility of doing this puts me back into my body. The separation complete. Maybe being human is wanting to talk to a tree, even if one can’t, to want to bridge the difference.
From ancient tales of Daphne and Narcissus to the prominent foliate head on the recent Coronation invitation of King Charles III of Britain, the blurring of plant and human bodies is a widespread and persistent motif (2). The Green Man is one iteration of such a plant person. Although his antiquity and consistent character are much in dispute, there is a growing interest in this archetype. Whatever his origins, the Green Man speaks to our interest and our need to re-animate our understanding of the vegetative world and to connect to it.
If language is linked to body, blurring the bodies, tree and human, human and tree, seems like a good metaphor for trying to cross the gap of understanding. The Green Man could be a symbol of a desire to approach the vegetal world on more equal terms. If body difference makes exact understanding impossible, then the fantasy character of a merged body can be an emblem of the desire to cross that gap. A desire to acknowledge tree communication without assuming we understand or don’t understand it; to find ways to see/hear tree words even when they are in a language we don’t understand.
I don’t know if we are creatures that came out of the forest, off the savanna, or from a lost garden, but this practice of being with the vegetal, of drawing a tree in order to open myself to learning something of its world, feels like a necessary act of solidarity in this time.
When I started thinking about trees and language, I wanted to observe directly with as few preconceptions as possible. But what could I really see? The bodies of the trees.
I can’t escape thinking like a human, but when I stripped down the idea of “sign” in the context of vegetal life, I came to the plant itself. Plants in the garden show us what they need with how they grow. The only language of the trees I felt I could see was the record of their lived experience manifest in their physical growth.
Initially I thought of this drawing exercise as one of translation, but human preconception quickly got in the way. I worked to imagine possible meanings and that effort took me away from the plant itself. So I decided to sit and draw. The experience of two dissimilar kinds of being in dialogue with only their bodies as a possible basis for that exchange brought me to the idea of transliteration.
Transliteration substitutes one written letter for another in a word or phrase so that the same vocalization can be made from reading different alphabets. It is still a human process of writing and reading, but it is based on what the body does in speech. Through the voice, transliteration gives the reader a corporeal link to a message without conveying abstract meaning, recognizing that the visual shapes are, or at least could be, a message (3).
I sit. I look. I draw. I hope to cross a little of the distance between us. If I can slow my human brain in its rush to analyze and classify, perhaps I can entangle myself in the presence, the message, of a tree.