Trees in Literatures and the Arts: HumanArboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) 9781793622792, 9781793622808, 1793622795

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Trees in Literatures and the Arts

Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI Advisory Board: Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists.

Recent Titles Lupenga Mphande: Eco-critical Poet and Political Activist by Dike Okoro Environmental Postcolonialism: A Literary Response edited by Shubhanku Kochar and M. Anjum Khan Reading Aridity in Western American Literature edited by Jada Ach and Gary Reger Reading Cats and Dogs: Companion Animals in World Literature edited by Françoise Besson, Zelia M. Bora, Marianne Marroum, and Scott Slovic Turkish Ecocriticism: From Neolithic to Contemporary Timescapes edited by Sinan Akilli and Serpil Oppermann Avenging Nature: The Role of Nature in Modern and Contemporary Art and Literature edited by Eduardo Valls Oyarzun, Rebeca Gualberto Valverde, Noelia Malla Garcia, María Colom Jiménez, and Rebeca Cordero Sánchez Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers by Zhou Xiaojing Climate Consciousness and Environmental Activism in Composition: Writing to Save the World edited by Joseph R. Lease Rethinking Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nature: Ecocriticism and the Tangled Landscape of American Romance by Steven Petersheim The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times edited by Naomi Milthorpe The Human–Animal Boundary: Exploring the Line in Philosophy and Fiction edited by Mario Wenning and Nandita Batra

Trees in Literatures and the Arts HumanArboreal Perspectives in the Anthropocene

Edited by Carmen Concilio and Daniela Fargione

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Cover image Artist: Silvia Beccaria Title: Metamorfosi Year: 2009 Photo credit: Mariano Dallago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-2279-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-7936-2280-8 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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02-04-2021 12:12:32

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Forewordxi Santiago Zabala Introduction1 PART I: HUMAN–TREE KINSHIP19 1 On Becoming Tree: An Alter-native, Arbo-real Line of Flight in World Literatures in English Carmen Concilio

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2 Pacific Perspectives of the Anthropocene: Trees and Human Relationships Emanuela Borgnino and Gaia Cottino

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3 Becoming-botanic: Vegetal Affect and Ecological Grief in Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian  51 Shannon Lambert 4 Russian Bodies, Russian Trees: Examples of Interconnections between the Tree of the Motherland and the Soviet People Igor Piumetti

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PART II: SPIRITUAL TREES85 5 Trees as the Masters of Monks: Some Observations on the Role of Trees in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers87 Bernard Łukasz Sawicki v

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6 The Ash Tree as “unwobbling pivot” in Pound’s Early and Late Poetry Stefano Maria Casella 7 Seamus Heaney’s Arboreal Poetry Irene De Angelis

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8 Between Ecology and Ritual: Images of New Zealand Trees in Grace, Finlayson, Hilliard, and Sargeson Paola Della Valle

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9 The Tree that Therefore I Am: Humans, Trees, and Gods in Cosimo Terlizzi’s Cinema Alberto Baracco

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PART III: TREES IN/AND LITERATURES149 10 Flora J. Cooke’s Tree Stories: Progressive Education and Nature in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States Bahar Gürsel 11 Talking Trees in Amazonian “Novels of the Jungle” Patrícia Vieira

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12 Gardens of Hell, Trees of Death: For a Poetics of Urban Nature in the Lyrics of George Bacovia Roberto Merlo

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13 The Poetization of the Exotic in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: Nikolaj Gumilëv’s Palm Tree Giulia Baselica

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PART IV: TREES IN THE ARTS201 14 Mother Sequoia: Waiting for an Imperceptible Enlightenment among Millennial Trees Tiziano Fratus

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15 Performing with Spruce Stumps and Old Tjikko: On the Individuality of Trees Annette Arlander

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16 Tuning and Being Tuned by a Patch of Boreal Forest: Works from the Boreal Poetry Garden, Newfoundland, Canada Marlene Creates

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PART V: TREES AND TIME243 17 Tree Photography, Arboreal Timescapes, and the Archive in Richard Powers’ The Overstory245 Daniela Fargione 18 Family Trees: Mnemonics, Genealogy, Identity, and Cultural Memory Eva-Sabine Zehelein

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Index281 About the Editors

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About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

This book owes its existence to multiple inspiring conversations, provocative criticism, encouraging interest, and joint efforts of friends and colleagues that we would like to thank. At the University of Turin, we are grateful to former Rector, Prof. Gianmaria Ajani, and to the Directors of our Departments, Prof. Matteo Milani (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures) and Prof. Donato Pirovano (Department of Humanities), for their trust and support to an international and interdisciplinary conference that took place in May 2019: “Trees in/and/around Literature in the Anthropocene.” Twenty participants—academics, environmentalists, poets, and artists—of eight different nationalities met to discuss their works on trees and forests from different perspectives. Trees were ethically and aesthetically called into question with the aim to identify, describe, or allegorize their singularities and specificities, or to pay homage to their material, literal, cultural, ethnic, and symbolic meaning through a variety of textualities. Consequently, we decided to collect some of those essays that could reflect this lively and extended debate that kept growing over the months. Thanks to all our contributors for their patience and collaborations: to work on such a crucial project while in lockdown and isolation due to COVID-19 restrictions, with libraries closed and sources hard to consult has been a real challenge and we have highly appreciated their resilience. Our special gratitude to Michael Gibson who worked for the environmental studies program at Lexington Books until October 2020: we appreciated his constant support and contagious enthusiasm that we also found in Kasey Beduhn, who took over the management of the eco-studies program with the same passionate and caring attitude.

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We are grateful to the outside reviewers whose perceptive questions and helpful advice contributed to the final shape of this volume. Daniela Fargione wishes to express her gratitude the Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh for the Visiting Fellowship that allowed her to collect useful material for the writing of her article. Carmen Concilio is grateful to Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), a Contemporary Art Gallery-cum-garden in Turin, where she attended interesting conferences on the vegetal world and met international environmental artists. Finally, we would also like to acknowledge our mutual support as editors, friends, and neighbors living in an inspiring place surrounded by trees that talk to us every day.

Foreword Santiago Zabala

Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain is a movie about the relation of two lovers (played by Hugh Jackman and Rachel Welch) with the tree of life in three different eras: 1500, 2000, and 2500. In the first, a conquistador travels to find the Fountain of Youth to empower his queen, Isabel, a monarch menaced by the cruel intolerance of the Spanish Inquisition. In the second, a research scientist obsessively tries to develop a life-extending treatment for brain tumors (using a compound extracted from an ancient tree in Guatemala) that threatens the life of his wife, Izzi. And in the third, Tom Creo is floating in space with the Tree of Life convinced that Izzy is part of the tree. In each era, the lovers are overwhelmed by the power of the tree and die. Some argue that The Fountain is about one man’s eternal struggle to save the woman he loves; others believe it narrates the quest for eternal life or the tension between science and art. I believe it’s an attempt to rescue us into recognition of the greatest emergencies—much like this exceptional collection of essays edited by Carmen Concilio and Daniela Fargione. The greatest emergency is the absence of emergency. Those emergencies we have suffered through already in the twenty-first century—terrorist attacks, the financial crisis, refugee crises, and the COVID-19 pandemic—could have been avoided. This does not mean that the coronavirus pandemic is not an alarming emergency that we should have been more forcefully confronted at all levels. It simply suggests that the greatest emergencies are the ones that we do not confront, that are hidden even in their obviousness, such as deforestation or climate change. Despite the warnings of scientists and activists since the 1970s, climate change is responsible for the death of seven million human beings every year because of air pollution. We can only hope climate change might also become an “emergency,” fought with the same unified purpose as COVID-19 was in 2020. What is dramatic about COVID-19 is that it was an xi

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“absent emergency” for many years. In 2019, the WHO director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned us that the “threat of pandemic influenza is ever-present”; the evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace predicted in 2016 an escalation in global pandemics such as those caused by swine flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and Middle East respiratory syndrome; and David Quammen in 2012 explained how dangerous pathogens, such as coronaviruses, could leap from animal species to humans.1 But why haven’t we listened? How can we prevent the emergencies we ignore from becoming emergencies we have to confront abruptly? The problem with great, absent emergencies such as deforestation, as well as environmental degradation in general, is that we were not convinced by science. The internet and, in particular, social media have been used by those who profit for short-sighted extractive capitalism to trick us into believing that traditional vectors of authority and legitimation are not needed anymore to know facts. This has allowed conspiracy theories to manipulate and condition the findings of science. But warnings alone, like facts or data, do not stand up all by themselves. These need government agencies, media outlets, and credentialed academics to convince the public of their meaning.2 This is why the greatest challenge faced by climate scientists today is not just to demonstrate the speed at which glaciers and ice caps are melting but also convincing everyone to take action against global warming and its alarming consequences. The fact that Greta Thunberg, a teenaged activist, for example, manages to mobilize more people than the respected philosophizer of science Bruno Latour is an indication that taking action is not only a matter of knowledge but also involves senses and feelings. But isn’t this the realm of literature and the arts? If art often works better than scientific announcements as a way to reveal emergencies, it is not because of artists’ ability to create beauty but rather because of the intensity and depth of their works. Documentary photographs of the ongoing destruction of the Amazon forest and the volcanic islands of the Pacific, for example, can be truthful but are rarely as powerful as the novels and short stories that address this emergency and that are discussed in Patrícia Vieira’s and Paola Della Valle’s contributions to this volume. This is why “when a work of art truly takes hold of us,” as Hans-Georg Gadamer said, “it is not an object that stands opposite us which we look at in the hope of seeing through it to an intended conceptual meaning. Just the reverse. The work is an ‘Ereignis’—an event that ‘appropriates us’ into itself. It shocks us, it overturns us, and sets up a world of its own, into which we are drawn.”3 Scientists can also overturn our world, but their works preserve a distance that is constitutive of their findings and renders their effects less immediate.

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A work of art seeks to reduce this distance not only to draw our attention but also to involve us in an experience the artist considers significant. Although the human–tree relations are not always evident in the works of art interpreted throughout this book, they always invite us to experience one of the greatest emergencies of the twenty-first century: deforestation. But in order for this experience to work it must also be dangerous because the “closer we come to the danger,” as Martin Heidegger once said, “the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.”4 These questions, contrary to the realm of science, are not meant to find a response. The goal is to recall a danger that too often is overlooked—like our greatest emergencies. In sum, while science seeks to rescue us from emergencies by improving and preserving knowledge, the arts rescue us into emergencies, calling for our intervention, as this book does. If this call offers any opportunity to save ourselves, it does so because the danger it foregrounds is more radical than the one confronted by those concerned about the environment—it ventures into the foundations of activism. Concilio and Fargione have provided questions and experiences throughout this book that “truly take hold of us.” These experiences might actually prevent the great silent emergencies such as deforestation from becoming emergencies that we are forced to confront abruptly when it is already too late.5 NOTES 1. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Global Influenza Strategy, 2019–2030, World Health Organization, https​:/​/ap​​ps​.wh​​o​.int​​/iris​​/hand​​le​/10​​66​5​/3​​11184​; Bob Wallace, Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on Infectious Disease, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (New York: Norton, 2012). Recent plant studies among environmentalist theorists are also meant to remind us of these dangers. See Emanuelle Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (New York: Polity, 2019); and The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, ed. Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 2. On hermeneutics and the problem of alternative facts, see Santiago Zabala, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020); and in relation to the environment see the various contributions in Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen, David Utsler, eds, Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

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3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation, ed. R.E. Palmer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 71. 4. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 303. 5. On art salvation in relation to deforestation, see Santiago Zabala, Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 79–85.

Introduction

In the year dedicated to Plant Health, Richard Powers’ dense novel echoes and reverberates in our minds. It is Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize for Literature with his encyclopedic and epic novel The Overstory, who reminds us of the multiple relations of humans and trees: When the world was ending the first time, Noah took all the animals, two by two, and loaded them aboard his escape craft for evacuation. But it’s a funny thing: He left the plants to die. He failed to take the one thing he needed to rebuild life on land, and concentrated on saving the freeloaders! . . . The problem was that Noah and his kind didn’t believe that plants were really alive. No intentions, no vital sparks. Just like rocks that happened to get bigger . . . Now we know that plants communicate and remember. They taste, smell, touch, and even hear and see. We, the species that figured this out, have learned so much about who we share the world with. We’ve begun to understand the profound ties between trees and people. But our separation has grown faster than our connection. (Powers 2018, 451)

Evoked in Powers’ story by the invasive whirs of saw chains, forest shrinking has become a veritable curse. Forests are under assault by the hands of primarily Western capitalistic societies that keep considering trees as mere objects for human use: whether for building houses and bridges, making paper, furniture or tools, or simply used as fuel, wood has been more and more included in our urbanized spaces. Over the years, our timber hunger has gradually become pathologically bulimic so that in many countries, especially in Latin America, reckless businesses and illegal logging have already had irreversible economic, social, and environmental impacts. Deforestation has been recognized as a real catastrophe for global warming, but occasional 1

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news of local activism gives proof of new distinctive forms of political and environmental consciousness. For example, not long ago around five thousand people were protesting on the site of a would-be-Gold mine in Turkey, where trees had been felled.1 Paradoxically, however, the more we value the natural resources harvested in a forest, the more we feel mentally and spiritually separated from trees that have become invisible. This condition of plant blindness is the result of a pernicious distortion: we either idealize nature (with a capital letter), or we obliterate it. We now know so much more about trees and their hidden life. The extensive new published material—fiction, memoirs, poetry, personal experiences, guides—testify a renewed interest in trees, plants, and the vegetal life in general. Science has given support to the intuition that trees communicate with each other through a symbiotic fungi system and a complex root network, sharing information and warning each other about external attacks or other perils. We know that they function more as communities rather than individuals, they join roots and share storage, they cooperate with human and nonhuman animals, they are able to see and watch and imitate close mates, they can learn and memorize. But we have also learned that trees suffer from overheat and lack of water, from spreading diseases or toxic substances. As Peter Wohlleben writes: “Acids, toxic hydrocarbons, and nitrogen compounds accumulate in the trees like fat in the filter of an exhaust fan above a kitchen stove” (Wohlleben 2016, 222). Trees grieve like us, and heal like us. Or we like them. Humans and plants, in their coevolutionary relation, have shared history for millions of years and it is to respond to this drive to mutuality that we intend to interrogate ourselves about our common ground. And yet, Trees in Literatures and the Arts is not a matter of “entanglement” (Barad 2007) between man and nature, nor is it a matter of humans and nonhumans, as with Fichte I versus not-I. In talking of, about, and around trees, we would like to pay homage to Eduard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation: “Each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (Glissant 1997, 11). Trees and us are related, are thinkable within a kinship, and the present collection of academic essays on trees stays on the side of poetry in its attempt to look for meaning and reciprocity. Again, what is at stake here is—in terms of a poetic epistemology—a knowledge that is reached through environmental humanities studies: ecocriticism, literary studies, the performative arts, poetry, photography, film, and media studies. This is our way to create and promote an intertwined multiple dialogue among a variety of disciplines to acknowledge the presence of trees all around us, with us, the role of trees in our lives or in the existence of the protagonists of the stories we read, study, teach, and love best, trees in their real and symbolic functions on our Planet Earth.

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We hug a tree—realistically or metaphorically—and we respond to a call of relationality. We hug a tree and we also hug the tree’s relations with the sun that heats it, the wind that blows through its foliage, the ice in winter that freezes the soil around its base, the colony of insects and bacteria that find refuge in it. We hug a whole community of other creatures, a new kinship of humanarboreal connections. If the common aims of all disciplines in the face of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) and invisible and non-imminent danger are the mitigation of climate change, the avoidance of a global collapse of civilization, and the improvement of human condition and environments, then scholars should first proceed with a reconceptualization of the human. Recent international works have questioned long-standing notions of human nature and conservative practices that have repeatedly led to human control and domination of nature and natural resources. Human and zoo-anthropology, ethnography, and animal studies, for example, have contributed to analyze interspecies relationships. “Species interdependence is a well-known fact, except when it comes to humans,” claims Anna Tsing (2012): this supposed exceptionalism has sprung from the assumption that humans are “autonomously self-maintaining.” This is a conservative idea that has favored preservation rather than innovation, perpetuating a false dichotomy of nature and culture with devastating consequences. We are convinced that an appreciation of the multiple interlacing of the human and nonhuman can inaugurate innovative and creative research paths, which will need to take into account discipline and cultural specificities, various temporalities, regional and local factors within transnational fluctuating landscapes. Therefore, we are calling for an expansion of traditional comparative literary canons toward a wider conception of world literature, which includes previously marginalized minority literatures and global systems, cultures, and networks: in a word, a new biodiversity of both ecosystems and cultures. As a consequence, a fruitful strain of transnational environmental humanities for our study proves the merging of postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives. At stake here is the conviction that different forms of global networks can enhance global alliances, thus emphasizing a call for ecological activism. The practical effect of this method consists in the influence that ecological creative thinking has on social transformations and protection of the human and nonhuman; in our specific case, of the arboreal. It is in the first section of this volume dedicated to human–tree kinship that we explore some forms of human and arboreal intermingling. In the first chapter, “On Becoming-Tree. An Alter-native, Arbo-real Line of Flight in World Literatures in English,” Carmen Concilio draws from Cathy Caruth’s metaphor of Dantesque-like figures speaking through the wounds of broken branches and trees, thus voicing their trauma. These speaking wounds are invitations to listen to the arboreal as a practice of love for humans/trees.

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According to Concilio, this paradigm represents a new challenge to our crystallized anthropocentrism in favor of the “infrahuman, or the post-human,” or as a new form of meditation, a “dendrosophy” to use Tiziano Fratus’s neologism. Literary transformations of human beings into trees abound in World literature: Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Ariosto are the most well-known classical cases, but also contemporary South African literature offers multiple examples of humans turned into plants, such as Mandela’s Xhosa fable that echoes Ovid’s Metamorphosis, André Brink’s Imaginings of Sand (1996) and Achmat Dangor’s Kafka’s Curse (1997). Women-trees are benign ancestor-spirits in the novel by Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (2006), where myth and the Aboriginal Law take on a magic realist note to depict a world of mutual relationships between the living and the dead. Finally, a natural acceptance of the becoming-vegetal is to be found in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2015), where the woman protagonist decides to turn into a tree. To her, this alternative and arboreal essence means to be able to deconstruct and refuse the patriarchal, western-like bourgeois way of life and frame of mind, thus hinting at new forms of decolonization and green democracy (Mancuso 2018; Marder 2013). The second chapter, “Pacific Perspectives of the Anthropocene: Trees and Human Relationships,” is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Emanuela Borgnino and Gaia Cottino. Starting from the assumption that plants, human and nonhuman animals are endowed with the same agency, the two anthropology scholars analyze two cases of Oceanian trees, the Hawaiian ohia lehua (metrosideros polymorpha) and the Tongan fa (pandanus tectorius), with the purpose to illustrate the nature–culture relationship from a non-anthropocentric perspective. In the context of the Hawaii ecosystem, their barks, fruits, and leaves make both trees multifunctional in their interactions with the human community. From house building to weaponry, from transportation to adornments in traditional dances and ceremonies, these trees are part of a domestic “normality.” But the material world also acquires symbolic and cultural meanings, eventually eliciting a shared sense of responsibility: trees partake of a common story and history by way of this codependent interaction with other collectivities. This very intermingling and the attempt at decentering the human experience is also the main concern of Shannon Lambert’s chapter, “Becoming-botanic: Vegetal Affect and Ecological Grief in Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.” Not far from Concilio’s position, Lambert explores human grief and trauma. Indeed, Freud looms heavily in Levy’s novel that narrates a tangled story of mental health, the natural world, and cultural inheritance; very similarly, Han’s novel investigates a troubled psyche: becoming-plant is an act of subversion, a process that allows the protagonist to protect herself from the violent impositions of her family and society. Yet,

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Lambert does not concentrate on human experience exclusively; rather, by siding with Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman, the author stretches the idea of memory and awareness beyond the human, eventually proving how plants can be considered as part of interspecies communities of mourning, “communities where they offer avenues for making-productive affects such as grief.” The following chapter by Igor Piumetti, “Russian Bodies, Russian Trees: Examples of Interconnections between the Tree of the Motherland and the Soviet People,” concentrates on the tree of the motherland that Andrej Platonov (1942) describes as solitary, unique, and magical for its striking ability to provide a shelter to the birds and to resist even the worst weather conditions in a critical phase of Russian history: Second World War. In 1987, the tree itself becomes the protagonist of a short animated visionary movie by Vladimir Petkevič when the country was deeply affected by the dramatic transformations that resulted in the end of the Soviet Union. Yet, if in the first version the humanized tree stands for the country itself and glimmers in life and hope while protecting its inhabitants from the destructive power of the war, in Petkevič’s film—a sort of existential parable—its gloomy and daunting overtones evoke a sense of threat mainly conveyed by the image composition and the dark music. The ur-story of the tree becomes relevant in connection with citizenship, as the protagonist of the story keeps a leaf of that tree hidden under his clothes. This keepsake, too, becomes a symbol of resilience and regeneration, for the young man, like the leaf, feels to be the son of the land, and this strong sense of belonging awakens a new will to fight for the freedom and regeneration of the self and of the motherland. The leaf is the real essence of a tree. It is the first reaction to the tree’s adaptation to the landing and rooting of trees and their vocation to an aerial life. On the leaves is based not only the life of the individual tree itself, but also the life of the whole biosphere. From the leaves depend both the vegetal and the animal life. Leaves imposed on the majority of leaving creatures one unique ambience: the atmosphere. Neither the flower nor the trunk is as important as leaves are (Coccia 2018, 38). The leaf is the plant: the trunk is only a support to the leaf; it is from the leaf that the plant regenerates itself, for the flower is formed by leaves, sepals are leaves, petals are leaves, stamens and pistils are leaves, and also fruits are born of leaves (Tonzig 1975, 27–31). Leaves have to do with breathing, with the breath of our world, with life itself. Thus, Andrej Platonov in his tale, Vladimir Petkevič in his animated film and Zachar Jaščin in his graphic novel, all pay homage to the leaf as unique source of regeneration, of pure life itself, eventually as a sort of gigantic communal flux or hug. But when we embrace a tree, within our gaze and cognition, we also embrace its long-standing knowledge: despite human tendency to cultural constructions, anthropomorphic projections, objectifications, stereotyping,

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oversimplifications, trees are here recognized as wisdom keepers. Trees are held in reverence, like old and venerable sages, saint-like people, like sanctuaries they can become the site of pilgrimage. Not so long ago, Amitav Ghosh reminded us how the Buddha’s illumination was reached by sitting and meditating under a tree (Ficus religiosa) (Ghosh, 2019). Since time immemorial, trees are connected to spirituality and philosophy, and spiritual trees are cherished in the heart of this volume. The second section of the volume, dedicated to spiritual trees, begins with the wise words of a monk scholar, Bernard Łukasz Sawicki, who devotes his research to the role of trees as “masters of monks.” The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, the text here analyzed, is not only a compendium of proverbs and aphorisms of ancient saints, but it also collects visions, parables, and legends of Christian ascetics and monks in their efforts to gain a closer relation with God. Sawicki recognizes that trees play different roles in their spiritual struggle and unveils the human personal weaknesses and occasional discomfort that solitary monks may overcome by emulating trees: when facing a storm, for instance, they are invaluable teachers offering lessons on how to be patient and persevering. But they can also become active mediators between the human and the divine: in this case, a tree acts as embodiment of the Holy Spirit, an inspiration to abandon the mundane and elevate to a more powerful spiritual dimension. As Sawicki states in his conclusion: “a master should be like a tree: noble, helpful and always indicating something beyond (or above).” Similarly, Stefano Maria Casella’s chapter on Ezra Pound’s poetry evokes Christian mysticism by referring to the French monk Bernard de Clairvaux and his praise of nature’s teachings. Although the French monk and the American poet lived and wrote eight hundred years apart from each other, they both celebrate the Book of Nature and the vegetable kingdom. The focus of Casella’s exploration is the primacy of the ash-tree that appears in much of Pound’s poetry: from A lume spento (1908), his poetic debut (Venice, 1908)—which opens with “La Fraisne (The Ash Tree)”—to Thrones de los Cantares (1959), Pound draws inspiration from religion, mythology, mysticism, and anthropology to explore the arboreal world. If in his poetic “green” years, Pound seemed fascinated by the psychic and physical phenomenon of “dendro-morphosis” (“The Tree” and “A Girl,” for instance), his later years were devoted to the mythological metamorphosis of the ash-tree into Yggdrasil, the axis mundi of Norse cosmogony, eventually suggesting similarity between the Norse god Oðinn and the old poet himself. Arboreal poetry and tree veneration are intertwined also in Irene De Angelis’s chapter analyzing Irish tree worship and Celtic tradition. “Tree. One of the most potent monosyllables in our tongue”—argues Seamus Heaney, whose poems attribute natural, mythical, historical, and linguistic

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meaning to tree—is also “A word that roots far into the ground of our human being . . . one of those fundamental nouns . . . which ramifies into a whole tree of language in itself.” De Angelis showcases a whole catalog of trees in Heaney’s poems—from Yggdrasil or the tree of life, to the tree of knowledge, the world tree and the tree of the Cross—that evolve from the personal sphere to a more abstract and universal symbology. With the fourth chapter, we move from the old Celtic world to contemporary New Zealand, a lush and green country originally named Aoteaora, with Paola Della Valle’s chapter “Between Ecology and Ritual: Images of New Zealand Trees in Grace, Finlayson, Hilliard and Sargeson.” With incisive examples taken from the Māori animistic culture—such as planting a tree when a child is born (as explained in the novel Mutuwhenua by Māori writer Patricia Grace), or considering the tree as tapu (sacred) because it embodies one’s ancestors—the author evokes the sacredness and mystery of forests that have increasingly been felled in fulfillment of a capitalistic logic (urbanization and the spreading of the so-called cash crops). The impact on the flora and fauna of the country by the introduction of the Europeans and their interests has been at the core of some recent literature. Della Valle explores the narratives of some Pākehā writers, that is, New Zealanders of European origin: Roderick Finlayson, Noel Hilliard and, especially, Frank Sargeson, the so-called “father” of New Zealand literature. Finally, the chapter entitled “The Tree that Therefore I Am. Humans, Trees and Gods in Cosimo Terlizzi’s Cinema” by Alberto Baracco concludes this second section of the volume by reminding us of the key function of trees as mediators between the earth and the sky, as connectors between materiality and spirituality. In his analysis of Cosimo Terlizzi’s cinema, the author draws his critical stand from Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy. In his inquiry on the I-Thou relationship with nature, Buber stresses the role of trees as our direct interlocutors, where the mutuality and reciprocity of this relationship guarantee an authentic bond with the environment. The tree, Baracco claims, is a “You” in relation to which it is possible to say the “I,” in a dialogue that allows human beings to rediscover their most authentic nature. As with Buber: “It is as if the tree waits to turn green for me, and I say, ‘So, it is you.’ I am affected by the ‘Though-ness of this particular tree’” (Buber 2004). Focusing on Cosimo Terlizzi’s latest film Dei (2018), the author analyzes the protagonist Martino’s intimate dialogue with the secular olive tree standing in the middle of his courtyard from the theoretical framework of ecophilosophy, which regards cinema as “a particularly effective medium for the expression of a viable environmental philosophy.” If Martino can communicate with his olive tree, it is because trees have their own language that he seems to understand. The Ogham alphabet and the Runic alphabet were born from trees; a leaf is both the smallest component

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of what we call foliage in a tree, but also a page in a notebook and a page, at least in Italian, is both a sheet of paper and one of two sides of a leaf. Thus, trees are naturally connected with literature; they partake of the same substance, the same matter. Trees are even connected with the art of teaching as Bahar Gürsel demonstrates in her chapter on Flora J. Cooke (1864–1953) and her tree stories that inaugurates the third section of this volume on trees in/and literatures. A disciple of the progressive educator Colonel Francis Wayland Parker (1837–1902), Cooke herself achieved an eminent position in the educational community of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, not only for her inclusive vision of the school and the actors involved, but especially for her reformist methods inspired by nature. This is particularly evident in Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children that she published in 1894, a collection of myths and fables that she mainly used to enhance her pupils’ inclination to observe and, of course, their reading skills. In Gürsel’s chapter “Flora J. Cooke’s Tree Stories: Progressive Education and Nature in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States,” readers can appreciate the role of trees here studied in their “thisness,” that is, in their individuality within an ecosystem. As a consequence, young children can learn the valuable contribution of each element within a community and emulate their behaviors as virtuous human citizens. The perception of virtuous citizenship, however, is not that easy to grasp in certain regions of the world if stereotypical portrayals of environment linger and are spread through misleading written and oral representations such as in the Amazon river basin. One of the richest and most diversified natural places in the world, it was inhabited by indigenous peoples in the pre-Columbian period and yet it was considered as an inhospitable “green hell” by the first explorers and colonial settlers. As Patrícia Vieira explains in her chapter, “Talking Trees in Amazonian ‘Novels of the Jungle,’” this sense of hostility was also reflected in the first writings and in the so-called novel of the jungle, a literary genre that emerged when economic growth was rapidly expanding because of the abundant sales of latex extracted from the rubber tree. Some novels of the jungle, however, such as José Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex (La vorágine, 1924), Ferreira de Castro’s The Jungle (A Selva, 1930), and Rómulo Gallego’s Canaima (1935), not only stand as a critique of rampant capitalistic modernization while exposing its nonofficial history and relative costs, but they also offer a homage to the luxuriant Amazonian nature, giving voice to the uniqueness of its flora. Another “green hell” is depicted by Roberto Merlo in his chapter “Gardens of Hell, Trees of Death: For a Poetics of Urban Nature in the Lyrics of George Bacovia.” The Romanian Modernist poet, George Bacovia, conveys his ideas on nature in modern times and urban life through iconic images of

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trees embedded in city parks, public gardens, and boulevards as ghostly and gloomy presences. They are tokens of a nature that amidst urban modernity is turned into a new version of anthropic artificiality. Thus, trees are transfixed in their wintry status, leafless and almost lifeless, black and scorched by frost, like stumps in a landscape either lashed by rain or whitened by snow. In this context, mankind and trees end up mirroring each other’s status of homelessness and displacement in the upsurging modernity, in a sort of coevolutionary sharing of grief, for the poet feels like weeping while leaning against the tree as against a brother’s shoulder, or calling the willow tree “sister.” What is lost, however, is a retrieval of the Romantic and Traditionalist vision of a more harmonic continuum between urban and rural landscapes. Thus, Bacovia, with his “phytocriticism,” might be considered the initiator or precursor of a view of nature that characterizes postmodern urban writers, who cannot but observe how nature in our contemporary cities is subject to almost “obscene” forced adaptation. An example of this type of discourse is to be found in South African author Ivan Vladislavić who depicts the welltrimmed city trees with a certain sad irony: Periodically, the municipality savages the oaks on Kitchener Avenue, cuts them down to size to remind them that they are in Africa. They line the streets, showing us their stumps, and we feel sorry for them, although there is nothing we can do. In spring, they grow a fuzz of leaves, and become big-headed and tender. Then every stump shoots out a clutch of long straight water shoots. They are never themselves again. With their limbs standing on end, they look permanently startled, deranged. The aloes in between lean out towards the street like old people waiting for a funeral procession. (Vladislavić 2009, 167)

Or, more ironically, he even speaks of shackled and enslaved oak trees: The oaks in Roberts Avenue have shackles around their ankles. These iron hoops, which were used to edge the holes when the saplings were planted, look like the rims of wagon-wheels. With the thickening of their trunks and spreading of their roots, the growing trees have often dislodged the hoops from the paving, breaking them loose into the air. Sometimes bark has grown over part of the hoop, sealing it, healing it into the woody flesh. I imagine that here and there a tree must have engulfed its shackle entirely. My friend Liz says the shackles are there to stop the trees from wandering off, the poor things are no better than slaves. My brother Branko says she’s read too much Tolkien, it’s the other way round: the trees are there to keep the shackles from being stolen. (Vladislavić 2009, 173)

From the dark and gloomy environment of the Romanian urban gardens depicted by Bacovia, we move to the “exotic” atmospheres evoked by the

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image of the palm tree so cherished by many Russian poets at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the last chapter of this section, “The Poetization of the Exotic in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Literature: Nikolaj Gumilëv’s Palm Tree,” Giulia Baselica showcases several examples offered by Nikolaj Gumilëv (1886–1921), one of the most significant representatives of Acmeism, whose frequent travels through North and East Africa shaped his personal exoticism. In many lyrics written between 1907 and 1918, in the journals he kept during his trips to Africa and in his personal letters and theatrical works, his palm tree echoes a primeval world, free from the war cruelties that injured the body of Russia. Gumilëv’s trees acquire plural meanings, but while they represent beauty and harmony to the eyes of the Russian, they stand for fertility to local indigenous people, due to the rich variety of foods and beverages that can be obtained from them. This is a teaching to be gained by reading also contemporary Canadian novelist and poet Anne Michaels. She writes about an inventory of Nubian fruit trees as if they were a family: The date trees fell into the following categories: fruit-bearing female trees including young females of five years, non-bearing trees (males and older trees), independent shoots (three to four years old), small shoots still attached to the mother’s root. (Michaels 2009, 109)

Indeed, the palm trees of the Wadi Halfa district were ancient groves growing around a single mother, reproducing for generations. At pollination time, the Nubians climbed the tall trees, cut the male flower in the bud, ground the buds into powder, and preserved the powder into wrapping paper. As each female flower opened, the climber went up again to empty the content of the satchel over the open flower. At harvest time, dates would rain down to earth and women and children participated in the gathering of the ripe fruits to be shared among the villagers. All this shows the mutual cooperation of man and plants in an environment, the desert, where the two are mutually dependent on each other. All parts of the tree are used, the core of fallen trunks was eaten, the fruit turned into spirit and jam and cakes. Leaves were woven into ropes, and baskets; stems were shaped into brooms. The branches were used for roofs and pieces of furniture (Michaels 2009, 21). Gumilëv must have noticed all this, the inseparable generosity of both trees and men. With their flexible trunks and fan-like foliage, palms stand out in the exotic gardens of Africa, but also become silent witness of colonial violence. The palm tree then acquires a symbolic meaning when it is the protagonist of the fairy tale “Princess Zara” and witnesses a human sacrifice. In a play for children, the palm ends up symbolizing metempsychosis: the setting is India and what is at stake is the good and evil residing in human beings

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and becoming visible, thanks to a metamorphosis. The palm punctuates the Russian poet’s production as ever present, admired element, not differently from Picasso’s Africa or the Impressionists’ exotic landscapes, yet realistically connected to the African landscape he had visited and known. Trees are not only, or better, no longer mere objects of representation in artworks. More and more, they are protagonists in live performances and in exhibitions all around the world. Yet, they are art’s masterpieces themselves. They are natures’ exhibits. We only need to look at them. There are other ways in which the destiny of trees is linked to art. Not long ago, on April 15, 2019, Notre Dame in Paris caught fire. Parisians held their breath and prayed, while claiming: “the Forest is burning.” That was the popular name for the intricate, massive, wooden structure of the Cathedral’s roof. Strikingly enough, artist Berlinde De Bruyckere describes blown-up trees as collapsed cathedrals: On an open spot in the fields, we found the remains of an enormous tree, struck by a tremendous force and split into two, its gigantic crown smashed to the ground. The image came to mind of a collapsed cathedral, the roof vault thrown to the floor. (De Bruyckere 2013, 30)

Trees possess an aura of sacredness, they are nature’s cathedrals. More recently, Alessandra Viola, an Italian journalist, documentarist, and communication expert, reminded us that a call was made for tree donations to reconstruct Notre Dame exactly as it was. Possibly, secular oaks, like the original ones. Possibly, at least two thousand, three hundred years old oak trees. But trees are not simply resources, they are not just logs and splinters: they are living beings. The cathedral might be rebuilt using resins or other more modern materials in imitation of wood, without depriving France of its forests and secular green life (Viola 2020, 4). To save forests, the next move and frontier for jurisprudence will be to acknowledge rights to trees and plants, too, as it happened for rivers. Indeed, trees can perform and be artworks not only in their natural ecosystems, but also in urban and anthropic areas. A precursor and convinced ecologist, artist, and architect Hundertwasser, envisioned trees as tenants and neighbors already in 1973. The best way to reforest a city is to plant tree tenants in apartment blocks, around windows, between stores, and across facades. Tree Tenant. The best way to reforest a city is to plant tree tenants into windows. There is nothing more conspicuous and positive than seeing a tree tenant from far away growing out of a window in the fourth or tenth floor. It has the effect of a symbol striking the feelings of people more that 100 trees in a park. A tree

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tenant pays rent in real value in much more valuable currency than a human tenant pays in paper money. (Hundertwasser 2011, 75)

Hundertwasser’s architecture is an example of naturecultural art, while trees are neither mere decorations, nor objects in artworks; they are embedded in the planning and growing of the edifice, in a cooperative symbiosis with it. In the present volume, artists provide their views on trees as being part of the forest heritage of the Planet, but also as single individuals in their own “ecceitas” and uniqueness, as individual beings. The fourth section of the volume begins with poet Tiziano Fratus’ chapter “Mother Sequoia. Waiting for an Imperceptible Enlightenment among Millennial Trees,” where he remembers his epiphanic experience, when visiting one of the Californian sanctuaries of millennial Sequoias and listening to their “song of silence.” There, he found his rootedness—as Homo Radix, or Rootman—in poetry. His verses, laid out as shape poems, or concrete poems, or even tree poems, are the result of a practice of “dendrosophy,” a Zen-like meditation in nature, in the company of trees, most of the times while walking. After all, he writes, “every poet is destined to become a tree.” Not differently, Michael Marder claims “The human who thinks like a plant, literally becomes a plant” (Marder 2013, 165). Yet, Fratus adds an original note, for he claims generativity for himself: “I am a rootman and these notes are my acorns, my racemes, my cones, my woodgrain.” Moreover, a whole new language defines his discipline: dendrosophy is a practice of “silvobuddhism” or “woodbuddhism,” or “eco-buddhism.” It is a spiritual path, a new poetic ecosophy. It also implies a new type of activism, consisting in being alert in front of nature’s silence, listening to nature, sylvan and sylvatic meditation that translates itself into a life-writing, extending between paper and bark, well-conscious that the present ecological crises are inextricably related to social justice. This new personal engagement is best expressed by Fratus’ poetry, as well as by his new and daring philosophical assumption: Radico ergo sum. Another example of performativity in nature is discussed in Annette Arlander’s chapter “Performing with Spruce Stumps and Old Tjikko: On the Individuality of Trees,” her chronicle of—and commentary on—her own artistic performance with individual spruce trees and stumps, in both Finland and Sweden. The question that triggers her research projects and performative experiments is “How is it possible to establish a performative relationality with trees?” Her personal answer and artistic gesture consist in posing with trees in front of a camera placed on a tripod, periodically, on equal basis, to share the same space and time experienced by trees and plants. Her plant performance inaugurates new thinking practices, for instance one that imagines “the planthroposcene,” a post-humanist perspective capable to

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see an environment consisting of interrelated living beings. With the aims of decolonizing our ways of looking at nature, and of dismantling our hierarchical prejudices, the artist references both Hall’s ideas of “heterarchy” (as opposed to hierarchy), and philosophy of care for plants. Similarly, she adopts Marder’s anti-metaphysical and anti-essentialist approach, thus recognizing the subject-less, vegetal “it-thinks” of the plant world. Only allowing ourselves to see trees as having their own agency, intelligence, and thinking capacity, might we create a dialogic experience of co-performing with plants where they grow. Her artwork therefore results into an art performance as an embodied action, media or video art as valuing repetition, and environmental art as an ethical commitment also in terms of its educational potentiality. To the call of a recent plant turn in science, a plant turn in the arts now responds, where plants are co-performers, not mere background settings or decorations. In her chapter “Tuning and Being Tuned by a Patch of Boreal Forest: Works from The Boreal Poetry Garden, Newfoundland, Canada,” poet, photographer, and land artist Marlene Creates also illustrates her own way to perform with, for, and in front of trees. Not dissimilarly from Arlander, Creates’ artistic gesture is site specific and her nature-inspired poems are recited in situ, in the presence of an audience. Her spoken, performance poetry, however, is also to be experienced digitally, on the web as a “Virtual Walk of the Boreal Poetry Garden,” in a complex multimedia and multimodal artwork of eco-digital humanities. Dematerialization of artworks and zero carbon emissions become feasible through the digital new media. Thus, Marlene Creates manages to conjugate an aesthetic visual, vocal, and sensorial video-poetry with an ethical stance as an artist and environmental advocate. Moreover, her attention for the Newfoundland vernacular results in the salvaging of a landscape and a language, including a treasury of words for very unique ice and snow formations, that might dissolve under climate change threats. Trees and stumps, too, known singularly, individually, mourned when blown out by strong winds, visited repeatedly, and “sung” in poetry are part of Creates’ artistic immersion into her patch of forest, and also of her physical immersion—in tune with and tuned by—her surrounding, self-regenerating ecosystem. Trees have their own narratives: inscribed in the rings of their trunks there is time immemorial; data about the humidity and water storage of past years, centuries, even millennia. The three artists here presented, all point at trees as time witnesses. Fratus conjures up towering millennial Sequoias, dwarfing humans and their relatively recent colonial enterprises. Arlander poses her gaze on “Old Tjikko, a relatively small spruce tree, which grows on Fulufjället mountain in a national park in western Sweden, not far from the Norwegian border. A large part of the spruce grows as a shrub along the ground, and it is this part that is 9,950 years old according to carbon dating.” (See also Richard Powers 2018:

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221–222). Finally, Marlene Creates demonstrates, in one of her exhibits of cross-sections of blown down trees, that even very thin tree trunks might reveal an age much older than thicker and larger trees, with a bigger diameter. In a sense, all this shows that trees are time, and time is inscribed, embedded, if not entrapped in trees. To release and free time from trees, not differently from what Prospero did when he freed Ariel from a pine, photography and literature might cooperate poetically as they do in Richard Powers’ The Overstory, a novel that Daniela Fargione defines as a monumental narrative on human plant blindness that requires that we “put ourselves entirely in the plants’ shoes, or rather roots” (Marder 2013, 10). Fargione thus inaugurates the fifth section of the volume on trees and time: “Tree Photography, Arboreal Timescapes, and the Archive in Richard Powers’ The Overstory.” She points out how—by resuming many themes already explored in his first novel Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance (1985) and in August Sander’s famous shot bearing the same title— Richard Powers gives shape to a colossal photo-book, very similar to the Austrian photographer’s project, aiming at storing images (and sounds as “trees hum”) of a world that will be visualized and heard in the post-Anthropocene, when archives will not contemplate the human presence any longer. Sander’s archive of human archetypes—each of which was labeled with a specific name and identity—was meant to elude stigmatization of the deviant on the ground of physiognomic assumptions; similarly, Powers’ archive collects arboreal characters with specific personalities recorded by phytobiography. Single tree types are connected to the nine human protagonists and environmental activists, and one in particular, Nick Hoel, is identified as the last photographer of this multigenerational saga. He keeps alive the family male tradition of taking pictures—every year at the same time—of a chestnut tree, the only survivor of the blight that killed most American chestnuts, finally acquiring an appreciation for tree permanence as opposed to the transience of human life. The “sentinel tree,” which also plays the crucial role of time keeper in the whole story, eventually proves to be the only truthful and trustworthy photographer: roles are finally inverted. Fargione thus demonstrates how humans and trees operate on different timescales, so that also the concept of memory entails a re-configuration: trees, plants, and the soil remember; human beings do not. As a consequence, their blindness and amnesia together call for new technological devices to beat the constant threat of extinction. Writing, photography, and cinema are human inventions to record time and challenge death, but Fargione sides with Joanna Zylinska and invites to unburden these media from their crystallized role of anthropocentric memory aid (as in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida) and to consider photography as “a practice of life for as long as it keeps life as duration in deep time, an act that transcends human control.”

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Trees have been improperly used to figure out hierarchies, as happens with family trees and business companies’ diagrams, representing the staff distribution into various competences, positions, and responsibilities. Yet, this is a mistake, for the idea of a head on which a whole series of subordinated branches should be dependent is at least questionable. Trees are characterized by organs that are distributed all over the body of the plant and therefore no hierarchies can be detected. There is no head or heart to talk about. Even the shape of the crown, be it umbrella-like, or cone-like, allows the rays of the sun to reach each single leaf in a democratic distribution (Mancuso 2018, 72). The case of family trees showing a bottom-up direction is different, for they see the head of the family as a root from which branches develop upward. This structure is hardly ever to be found in firms and companies’ graphic representations of their staff, for a strongly hierarchical and downward structure is favored. Therefore, the graphic appropriation of trees for such figurative representations might be considered improper. In the closing chapter of the volume, “Family Trees: Mnemonics, Genealogy, Identity, and Cultural Memory,” Eva Zehelein interestingly challenges and questions family trees not only as remarkable structures, functional to memory of past lineages but also as graphic paradigms to define identity in terms of genetic inheritance through the passing of time. When the now debatable and debated institution of marriage fails to represent the trait-d’union between individuals in the family, the family tree becomes an obsolete, fragmented, fractured, and discontinuous pattern. Yet, family trees are evidence for exercising the power of belonging, of inherited ownership, and even of ethnic claims. (Parenthetically, the case of Moodrooro Narogin is emblematic, for after having spent a whole life as an Aborigine and as a black person, he was expelled from his community for his family showed a white ascendancy.) Quite rightly, the author asks “What happens if genetic kinship loses capital in favor of social belonging (adoption, sperm and egg donation, surrogacy)”? Eva Zehelein’s chapter turns then to analyzing the case of the rising interest in family trees as natural and organic constructs of identity, ethnicity, race, and class in American life. Similarly, the increasing number of websites and services helping to retrieve family ancestry and DNA testing will contribute according to the author to provide new models, patterns, and diverse forms of family trees in American culture. When the UN General Assembly declared 2020 as the International Year of Plant Health to raise global awareness on how to protect our vegetal patrimony, we realized that a volume on trees and/in the arts and world literatures might be a propitious occasion to shine a light, through images and storytelling, on their pivotal roles in our existence. We are convinced that we need the crucial data and information that only science can provide, but we also believe in the urgency to translate those very data and information

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into emotions to forge our collective imaginary and prompt us to healthier behaviors and lifestyles. Plants are the primary source of the air we breathe and they make up about 80 percent of the food we eat. A threat to plant health consequently becomes a threat to safe and stable food systems and distribution, jeopardizing the work of various worldwide programs that are fighting to reduce poverty and hunger. What a joy, then, to see that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 was awarded to the World Food Program for its efforts “to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas, and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.” This motivation alone would suffice to make us aware, once again, that food is never only food, and plants are not just colorful ornaments in our manicured gardens. In theory, we all knew that old and new invaders endanger biodiversity and strike vulnerable communities, devastating entire patrimonies of cultures and traditions. But then COVID-19 arrived, and when it was declared as pandemic at the beginning of this tragic year, lockdowns and movement restrictions were enforced in many global communities. Suddenly—and maybe for the first time in the Western capitalistic world—we understood the full meaning of the word “breathing.” The authors included in this collection of articles have laboriously worked holding their breath while coming to grips with the dramatic circumstances that the planet was (and still is) facing. We do hope that the narratives and discourses that this book provides will contribute to facilitate more conscious humanarboreal relations.

NOTE 1. https​:/​/ww​​w​.reu​​ters.​​com​/a​​rticl​​e​/tur​​key​-e​​nviro​​nment​​-alam​​os​-ce​​o​/aft​​er​-pr​​otest​​ s​-ala​​mos​-c​​eo​-de​​fends​​-turk​​ish​-m​​ine​-p​​rojec​​t​-aga​​ins​t-​​misin​​forma​​tion-​​idUSL​​8N253​​ 2O0, last accessed September 19, 2019.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ghosh, Amitav 2019. “La voce degli alberi.” Minimamoralia. June 30, 2019. Accessed October 20, 2020. http:​/​/www​​.mini​​maetm​​orali​​a​.it/​​wp​/am​​itav-​​ghosh​​-la​ -v​​oce​-d​​​egli-​​alber​​i/. Ghosh, Amitav. 2019. “Life Stories: Books About. A Planet in Peril.” The Guardian. October 4, 2019. Accessed October 20, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/bo​​oks​ /2​​019​/o​​ct​/04​​/book​​s​-mak​​e​-sen​​se​-wo​​unded​​-p​lan​​et​-am​​itav-​​ghosh​.

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Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Buber, Martin. 2004 [1937]. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: Continuum. Coccia, Emanuele. 2016. La vie des plantes. Une Métaphysique du mélange. Paris: Bibliothèque Rivages, 2016. Italian translation by Silvia Prearo, La vita delle piante. Metafisica della mescolanza. Bologna: Il Mulino. De Bruyckere, Berlinde and J. M. Coetzee. 2013. Crippelwood. Kreupelhout. Brussels: Mercatorfonds. Glissant, Édouard. 1997 (1990). Poetics of Relation. Translated from French by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Hundertwasser, Friedrich. 2011. Regentag-Waterglasses For Life. Vienna: The Hundertwasser Foundation. Ivan, Vladislavić 2009. Portrait with Keys. The City of Johannesburg Unlocked. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Mancuso, Stefano. 2018. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants. Translated by Vanessa Di Stefano. New York: Astria. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Michaels, Anne. 2009. The Winter Vault. Toronto: Mc Clelland & Stuart. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Peter Wohlleben. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World (Translated by Jane Billinghurst). Vancouver: Greystone Books. Powers, Richard. 2018. The Overstory. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co. Tonzig, Sergio Stefano. 1975. Letture di biologia vegetale. Milano: Mondadori. Tsing, Anna. 2012. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.” Environmental Humanities, 1:141–154. Viola, Alessandra 2020. Flower Power. Le piante e i loro diritti. Torino: Einaudi.

Part I

HUMAN–TREE KINSHIP

Chapter 1

On Becoming Tree An Alter-native, Arbo-real Line of Flight in World Literatures in English Carmen Concilio

Writing of, and, around trees does not mean to forget people, ethics, history, at all: “In myths, people turn into all kinds of things. Birds, animals, trees, flowers, rivers” (Powers 2018, 30). On the contrary, Cathy Caruth’s essay in trauma studies, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), places special emphasis on the literary transformations of human beings into trees. This paradigm—becoming arbo-real—interestingly enough challenges Anthropocentrism in favor of the “infrahuman, or the posthuman,” of the becoming-vegetal1 of men and women, while positing a new, post-metaphysical condition, and perhaps a new form of “dendrosophy,”2 both love for trees and a form of meditation, as well as of “plant-thinking”: “The human who thinks like a plant, literally becomes a plant, since the destruction of classical logos annihilates the thing that distinguishes us from other living beings” (Marder 2013, 165; author’s emphasis). Although criticized for privileging a Eurocentric modernist paradigm,3 Cathy Caruth quotes Sigmund Freud to remind us of how he found “the most moving poetic picture” of the compulsion to reenact a traumatic accident “in the story told by Tasso in his romantic epic Gerusalemme Liberata”: Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armor of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again.4

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This particular episode proves how the experience of trauma repeats itself through the unknowing act of the survivor, against his will (Caruth 1996, 2). Leaving aside the repetition compulsion and unwilling reenactment, typical of “traumatic neurosis,” Caruth stresses the literary quality of “the moving and sorrowful voice that cries out, a voice that is paradoxically released through the wound” (Caruth 1996, 2; author’s emphasis). Caruth goes on claiming: “Tancred’s story thus represents traumatic experience not only as the enigma of a human agent’s repeated and unknowing acts but also as the enigma of the otherness of a human voice that cries out from the wound” (Caruth 1996, 3). Literature and psychoanalysis converge and meet, according to the author, right in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing that they both are able to establish. As a consequence of all this, Caruth provides the following definitions of trauma: Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on. Trauma seems to be much more than a pathology, or the simple illness of a wounded psyche: it is always the story of a wound that cries out. (Caruth 1996, 4)

Finally, trauma has two more relevant features: it bears witness to history, within a double telling, both as “encounter with death” and as “ongoing experience of having survived it” (Caruth 1996, 7); and it speaks with the voice of the other, “the other within the self” (Caruth 1996, 8). In the example mentioned, the wound that speaks is not precisely Tancred’s own but the wound, the trauma, of another. That other voice is “the other within the self that retains the memory of the ‘unwitting’ traumatic events of one’s past” (Caruth 1996, 8). Thus, one’s trauma is tied up with the trauma of another,5 it leads to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound. This act of listening is exactly what characterizes psychoanalysis: “Such a listening to the voice and to speech delivered by the other’s wound is what takes place, indeed, in Freud’s own terms, whose theory of trauma is written not only about but in the midst of trauma” (Caruth 1996, 8). Tancred’s case is therefore different from all other classical cases of lamenting trees, in Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Ariosto, because of the repetitive pattern of trauma. While Virgil presents the wellknown case of Polydorus (Aeneid 1992, 66–67), killed by arrows that later flourish into a myrtle bush, and to whom Aeneas gives a proper burial, in his Metamorphoses Ovid left a corpus of about fifteen episodes of transformation of women and men into plants.

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Ovid’s legends might be understood as etiological tales to explain the origin and color of certain vegetal species. Yet the metamorphosis is a radical becoming-other, for plants depend on various external elements. “Its Heteronomy (literally ‘the law of the other,’ indicative of the plant’s dependence on something other than itself) turns into a crucial component of vegetal anti-metaphysics” (Marder 2013, 67). They invariably present recurrent elements accompanying the metamorphoses, such as the presence of the sun and water, both granting the well-being of the vegetal. The cause of the transformation is often love—violent, forbidden, or eternal. The most famous episode is undoubtedly that of Daphne, who is transformed into a laurel tree, to avoid being raped by Phoebus (Metamorphoses. I. 545). In Ovid, acts of violence against the gods of nature are punished, too: the picking of a flower, for instance, produces Dryope’s metamorphosis into a jujube tree (Metamorphoses. IX. 391). All the mythical characters transformed into plants, both men and women, start experiencing the immobility and rootedness of their feet, then their hair is turned into leaves, while their wooden fibers grow upward around their bodies and end up closing their mouths and eyes. If a part of the plant is broken, it does both bleed and speak in laments through the wound. This means that becoming-vegetal is a clear metaphor for a sort of permanence of life in death, it is a new hybrid status, that might last for ever. This latter natural fact is also allegorized in Christian symbolism. For instance, in the Gospels it is often claimed that a seed must die, well-buried in the soil, before it can be born again. Or, in the words of the philosopher Michael Marder: Similarly, in a peculiar mediation between the living and the dead, caressing the dead with its roots and obtaining nourishment from them, the plant makes them live again. Vegetal afterlife, facilitated by the passage, the procession of the dead (including the decomposing parts of the plants themselves), through the roots to the stem and on to the flower, is a non-mystified and material “resurrection,” an opportunity for mortal remains to break free from the darkness of the earth. (Marder 2013, 67)

Different from the classics is Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1623), where Prospero listens to the pain and suffering of Ariel, a gentle spirit, whose cries and laments come from inside a tree, as Aeneas listened to Polydorus: Prospero: Dost thou forget From what a torment I did free thee? . . .

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she [Sycorax] did confine thee, By help of her more potent minister, And in her most unmitigable rage, Into a cloven pine, within which rift Imprisoned thou didst painfully remain A dozen years, . . . , where thou didst vent thy groans As fast as millwheels strike. . . . If thou more murmr’st, I will rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails till Thou hast howled away twelve winters. (I.ii. 274 ff)6

This case is relevant, not only because Prospero acts as a sort of psychoanalyst who listens to the sufferings of Ariel and manages to heal him, but also because the tree is cracked (“cloven”; “rift”). Ariel’s voice cries out (“groans”) through that crack in the bark, lamenting his traumatic imprisonment, immobility, loneliness, and abandonment. Interestingly, Prospero threatens to punish Ariel by imprisoning him again into an oak tree, a much harder and robust tree, in case he disobeys or forgets gratefulness. The repetition principle in the trauma is here the real threat. With Edmund Spenser—who follows Dante, Ariosto, and others— Fradubbio, in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene (1590), reveals himself to be a bleeding and speaking tree. He warns the Knight about the Sorceress/Charmer Duessa, who in her doubleness represents Catholicism and distracts him from Una, the only and unique Truth, that is to say Anglicanism. The knight is not able to understand the warning. In this case not magic, but Providence—represented by Prince Arthur—in a Protestant world, must intervene to save the hero.7 In all these cases, the metamorphosis or imprisonment is a traumatic experience that speaks through a wound. The supernatural powers of the divinities in ancient times, God’s will in Dante’s Inferno, the magic powers of sorcerers (Shakespeare, Ariosto, Tasso), or Providence in Spenser are needed to transform, hide or imprison human beings into or under trees and plants. On the contrary, here, a listener is needed in order for the wound to speak, for grief to emerge, and for a narrative to circulate as an exemplary didactic or moral tale. These and many other examples are the background for contemporary literary cases of metamorphoses of humans into trees. A becoming-other, or becoming-vegetal that expresses another form of infra-humanity or posthumanity that is fairly common although less frequent than the transformation into animal. Richard Powers, Pulitzer Prize winner in 2018 with his novel The Overstory, has one of his characters claiming that “[Ovid’s] fables

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seem to be less about people turning into other living things than about other living things somehow reabsorbing, at the moment of greatest danger, the wildness inside people that never really went away” (Powers 2018, 117). In particular, Ovid’s fables of male violence against women echo in Andre Brink’s magical realist novel Imaginings of Sand (1996), where an old and dying grandmother, Ouma Cristina, constructs a whole genealogy, a family “tree,” of nine generations of women. The first in the lineage is Kamma Maria, a Khoikhoi woman, who proves that South Africa is a country where ethnicities met very early in the history of colonial encounter, thus defying the notion of the purity of a white-dominated Boers’ land. Kamma lives all her life in a borderland between the Boer farm of Adam Oosthuizen and the little karoo tribes, often absenting herself from home for months and living a double life, under different names and wearing different clothes. After a long and extenuating search for her, Adam is ready to launch himself against her, cavalcading his ox, sjambok ready in hand: And then, all of a sudden, she changed into a tree, a small thorn tree, with ample space for birds in her branches, and shadow below for her two mahems. Adam raced towards her as fast as he could. Beside himself, and most likely without realizing what he was doing, he started flagellating the tree with his sjambok. The tree began to cry, its tears running down the trunk like gum. Then all the birds in the widespread branches started flapping their wings, and in front of Adam’s eyes they flew off with the tree, past the horizon, gone. (Brink 1996, 192)

Kamma means water, and a river is the place where the white man first saw her. She is the daughter of a local headman and an incredible singer, able to sing all the birds’ songs. Languages are her blessing and her damnation, for she can act as interpreter. Yet, because of her supposed betrayals, her tongue is cut, as happened to mythical Philomele (Metamorphoses, VI. 578), but she has magical powers: she can talk to animals, turn sheep into stones, and change herself into anything. However, her turning into a tree, after a life of bartering between the white man’s farm and the Khoikhoi villages, her story of love and betrayal, resembles “Kamiyo of the River,” one of the fairy tales Nelson Mandela chose for his collection (Mandela 2002, 75–76).8 The story narrates of an old shepherd, who wanted a wife, and decided to carve a beautiful woman out of a tree trunk. He created a most beautiful statue, blew breath into her nostrils, and touched her eyes to give her life. Then he brought her to his own home and gave her clothes: an apron, beads, and a head-ring. But she was so beautiful that when some young men passed by, they abducted her and took her to their village, on the other side of the hills. The old man then called two pigeons and instructed them on how to fly

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to her and sing a special song and bring back her apron. The next day it was her head-ring he asked back, and so he did day after day, till he asked for her life. Finally, the two birds pecked at her eyes and she was turned back into a statue. Then, her limbs fell to pieces and rolled down the hills and then her head and her body rolled down close to the water, where they became again a tree with beautiful green leaves, “and that is where Kamiyo has been ever since, to this day” (Mandela 2002, 76). This very short, yet very complex, fairy tale generates various considerations. First of all, it reminds us of the legend of Pygmalion (Metamorphoses, X. 261), who for love of his own beautiful statue, turns her into a real woman. The old Shepherd, however, is also a God-like figure, who is able to breathe the breath of life into the body of a woman. Thus, the fairy tale also echoes the Biblical creation myth. Only the woman is not created from a rib of Adam, but from a log. The fairy tale also shares various elements with the story narrated by Ouma Cristina to her grandchild Cristien, who has just come back to South Africa from her self-exile in London, to vote in the first democratic elections, in 1994. Kamiyo, like Kamma, whose name has a similar root, is a young woman who lives with an elder man, she is contended between two groups of men and torn between two lives, in two different places. When her husband wants to regain her, she is turned into a tree. Two birds magically obey the man’s order, while Kamma is always followed and guarded by her two birds (mahems). Their transformations seem to allow them to regain their arboressence, that is to say their otherness: The vegetal self proceeds in the absence of self reflection or fully developed self-feeling, in and as a unidirectional, infinite movement towards its other, namely light . . . the infinite relation to the other without return to oneself is the touchstone of Levinasian ethics and of . . . ethical approaches that advocate the substitution of the appropriative model of subjectivity with the receptive orientation to the other. The plant embodies, mutatis mutandis, this approach to alterity, in that it tends, with every fiber of its vegetal being, toward an exteriority it does not dominate. . . . Vegetal heteronomy, therefore, holds the blueprint for the formation of subjectivity at the current stage of post-metaphysical thinking, with its emphasis on the constitutive role of the relation to the other. (Marder 2013, 71–72)

Where Kamiyo dies a generous and beautiful tree is born, for life was given to her nostrils and to her eyes, while in Ovid’s tales life is taken away when the bark covers mouth and eyes. This creates an inevitable proximity between women and nature, or better between women and Mother Earth or the Mother Goddess of ancient times. What makes women one with nature

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is their capacity to pro-create, but also aesthetic beauty. Trees are there to be admired and to be venerated for ever after the metamorphosis in almost all of Ovid’s tales. What is also at stake in these examples is that turning into a tree for women is a way to escape patriarchal control, violence against their body and person, and to reunite with nature, as happened to Daphne, while the tree is a protector (De Bruyckere 2013, 45). After mentioning Bernini’s Daphne, J.M. Coetzee thus interprets this same myth: My feeling is that Greek fables like the one about Apollo and Daphne are a later, and in a way more rational, overlay over a deep feeling in primitive religion that all of life is one, i.e., that the life-force is mutable and expresses itself almost at will, unpredictably. The body of a girl (or of a youth) and the trunk of a tree are just different manifestations (metamorphoses) of the same deep force. (Coetzee 2013, 47)

This means, warping Shakespeare’s famous line, that “we are such stuff as trees are made on.” One more South African novel includes two overlapping patterns dealing with the metamorphosis of a man into a tree. In Achmat Dangor’s novel Kafka’s Curse (1997), Omar Khan undergoes various metamorphoses. Being a colored Muslim in the years of Apartheid, he decides to pass for a Jew, to acquire the privileges of white people. He changes his name into Oscar Kahn, moves to the suburbs of Johannesburg, and marries Anna, a white woman. He loves telling her a fairy tale that has its roots in Persia and Arabia, but has undergone a transformation in each of the several countries where it travelled, from Middle to Far East. The version narrated by Omar of the romantic love story between Leila, a Princess, and a gardener, Majnoen, sees the gardener turned into a tree while eternally waiting for Leila’s arrival in the forest where they promised to meet. She was forbidden to leave by her father, who had discovered her plan to flee. The gardener’s name is also synonymous with “madness”: “When at last Leila managed to escape and hurried to where she was to meet Majnoen, she found that he had become part of a tree . . . no . . . he had become a tree! Not an ugly old oak, but a beautiful and sensitive willow” (Dangor 1997, 23). The same scene is offered to Anna, when she goes back home after her separation. Oscar had not survived to see Nelson Mandela’s presidency: “I too would have been able to go out and vote, openly for the first time, as a black man, a half-baked one anyway, a bushy. To join in this festival they call freedom” (Dangor 1997, 61). He died in the year of the free elections, when his life-long lie, his Kafkaesque metamorphosis, could be finally dismissed: “In what had been the main bedroom, a tree had thrust up through the floor. Flowers sprouted in a profusion of colours from the dark, disinterred earth,

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green moss covered the walls. The air had a sweet, damp smell, like the air in a forest” (Dangor 1997, 28). The fairy tale of Leila is known for its variations and endless rewritings (“In Arabia, I think—where else would he set his beginnings?”), for after all “Oscar was a mixture, Javanese and Dutch and Indian and God knows what else, they would later discover” (Dangor 1997, 14). Imagine a man turning into a tree as he waits for a lover who will never arrive. A well-deserved fate, if you ask me, for a lowly gardener waiting for a princess. In any case, there are no forests in all of Arabia. So, what are the real origins of the legend? A trivial incident, sentimentalized and exaggerated to heroic proportions by slaves from India or Java or Malaysia to sustain themselves? A coping mechanism—that’s what you call it, no? It might have been African? This continent is fecund—yes, fecund—with the kind of foliage which gives birth to the secret lives that are the very substance of magical parable. (Dangor 1997, 30)

In fact, Oscar is indigenizing the tale, making it African. Yet, the term “coping” seems to hint at a psychic problem: “An insanity that strikes those who dare to stray from their ‘life’s station’” (Dangor 1997, 31). If the becoming-vegetal is the answer to a psychosis, Stef Craps is right in identifying a more complex variety of traumas: Drawing on such notions as “insidious trauma,” “oppression-based trauma,” “postcolonial syndrome,” I elaborate a supplementary model of trauma which— unlike the traditional individual and event-based model—can account for and respond to collective, ongoing, everyday forms of traumatizing violence. (Craps 2012, 4)

Oscar was sick, he had problems with his lungs, he could no longer breathe properly (“Oscar had developed the perfect breathing technique: breathe in through the nose, breathe out through the mouth” (Dangor 1997, 3). “Then Oscar was struck by an illness that reversed the whole natural order of his being” (Dangor 1997, 4); plants had been brought in his room, to increase the “natural oxygen level.” His brother-in-law suggests that “there was perhaps some psychological basis for Oscar’s illness. Kafka’s Curse” (Dangor 1997, 9). His becoming-vegetal is a much more radical transformation than the becoming-animal of Kafka’s story, although both conditions cause the death of the individual. In a sense, Oscar’s arbor-essence has something to do with Deleuze and Guattari’s highlighting the paradigm, or drive, of the straightened head (rebellion) as opposed to the lower head (submission) in Kafka’s stories. After all the tree breaks free from—and also breathes

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freely in—the light and air, while Oscar spends his life in attempting to hide his secret (Muslim and oriental) self in a darkened house: “That is my triumph. I have robbed Malik of something to bury, and Martin of something to despise. I have broken the cycle of remembrance” (Dangor 1996, 62). Although a rewriting of the Leila and Majonen tale, Kafka’s Curse is also an Ovidian-like fable of eternal love that is only possible when a human being becomes a tree, as in the case of Philemon and Baucis (Metamorphoses, VIII. 808). As in the already mentioned fairy tale of Kamiyo, a bird is associated also with this metamorphosis. It flies from Oscar’s lawn into the house of his brother, as a bad omen, or a warning, or simply as a magical presence. A magical presence are also the women-trees in Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria (2006). Half sea-monsters, half-fish, and half-trees, these womanly figures are ancestral spirits, who have come to rescue Norm Phantom, the protagonist of the novel. Norm is a respected seaman and fisherman, a man who treasures the Law, the most ancient narratives of the Aborigines. When he finds himself in the middle of a cyclone that provokes a tidal surge in the mangrove lagoon of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where his grandson, just a child, is also risking his life, he finds himself surrounded by these reassuring presences, the ancestral spirits: A fish-faced old woman with eucalyptus leaves strewn through her wildly flowing, wet white hair, sat in the boat. . . . Instead, still scowling, she wiggled her fingers at him to look ahead if he did not want to fall over. . . . When she wiggles her fingers, he believed he saw fresh green eucalypt leaves spring from their tips. The leaves immediately flew through the wind and several hit him in the face. He smelt her astringent aroma, and when he was stung in the eye, he instantly turned his head back to the direction he, they, she, the wind, the rain were heading. (Wright 2006, 300–301)

This image of the old woman-tree is astonishing and unforgettable. She is the personification of nature and a tempest. Her fingertips launch leaves that have the function of pointing to the right direction. Her presence is described through a figure that involves the sight, the smell, and the touch. Norm looks at her face, he smells her eucalyptus aroma, and is touched by her leaves on the face and in the eye. She is a creature that belongs to the river, the sea, and the mangroves lagoon and stands for the interconnectedness of all things, beings, and creatures, as shows the closing collective portrait “he, they, she, the wind, the rain.” To Aborigines, nature is not a separate entity, there is no need for a metamorphosis of the woman-spirit into a tree. She is a guiding force, the strength itself that Norm derives from being part of nature, according to ancient beliefs. Norm is never alone when he is immersed in nature:

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Now the boat was crowded with old fish women who bared their open mouths at him. He guessed that there had to be at least twenty crammed together like sardines, hissing him on. To his disbelief and incomprehension, for he knew that together, they could not have weighted a kilo, because it cost him nothing to carry them. These women were also dressed in muddy clothes scattered with leaves and foliage fallen from trees, as though they had just risen from the wet ground where they had been sleeping. (Wright 2006, 301)

Here, it is evident how the women are half water creatures and half land creatures, awoken from the muddy rising waters. Norm is actually towing his boat to higher ground, he is running inland to escape the tidal surge that is invading the lagoon, while the trees are shaken by heavy winds and lashing rainfall. The women are there to render the boat lighter and give it speed; they are both visible and inconsistent, humans and spirits, fish and plants and earth. He saw that there were about thirty or forty of these phantom people huddling and shuffling together, while the rain fell over them, like it does over leaves in the bush. . . . They literally dragged the old women from the boat and Norm watched in stunned silence as he saw that they were dressed in what looked like sodden, inflorescent compost heaps where the rain ran through the crumpled leaves, bush blossoms, tangled strands of grasses and twigs before splashing down onto the muddy ground. (Wright 2006, 303)

This kinfolk that expresses itself with fusillades of leaves is helpful to Norm to the point of creating a human chain to keep the rope of his boat while it travels downriver toward the point where Bala, the child-grandson, needs to be rescued. The rescue is spectacular and proves to be an example of the welldeserved labeling of the novel as magic realist. Although the definition is not correct, for Aborigines do not see the ancestors and the non-living as separate from reality, they do not see them as magic presences, but simply as part of a live cosmos. The women-trees are the voice and the fingers of the tempest, are its personification, are part of the human nature and part of natureculture, in a continuum of life forms that comprise the world of matter, the world of spirits, and all beings both material and immaterial. The last of the literary examples here examined is even more dramatic. Kang Han, a South Korean novelist, in her novel The Vegetarian (2007, Engl. trans. 2015),9 winner of the Man International Booker Prize 2016, narrates of a young wife, who all of a sudden, after having a nightmare, takes the decision to throw away all the meat she has in the freezer and become a strict vegan. Her husband does not appreciate her sudden change and connects her strange behavior with her refusal to wear a bra, something western feminists had targeted as a first move toward women’s liberation.

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Her refusal to cook and to eat meat exposes her to family derision and even violence, for her father forces meat into her mouth during a meal, causing her to attempt suicide as a consequence. All this brings her marriage to an end. Once alone, and under sedatives, she lives a sexual experience with her brother-in-law, which can be easily interpreted as a rape. Then, she turns to an even more rigid diet, resorting to water only. Clearly, her choice is too radical and she is slowly killing herself. In her delirious or extreme “plantthinking” or “weak thought” (Vattimo and Zabala 2013, xiii), she believes she is a tree and she often stands with her bare bosom turned toward the sun, as if to activate chlorophyll photosynthesis, in her new “phototropism: this is movement towards sunlight” (Marzec 2008, 8). When she has the chance to flee from the mental clinic, where she is confined, she takes refuge in a wood, “standing there stock-still and soaked with rain as if she herself were one of the glistening trees” (Han 2015, 125). When her sister goes to visit her at the clinic, she finds: A female patient doing a handstand at the far end of the western corridor, it never even crossed her mind that it might be Yeong-hye. Only when the nurse, with whom she’d just spoken on the telephone, guided her in that direction had she been able to recognize Yeong-hye’s long, thick hair. Her sister was upside down and balancing on her hands, her face flushed almost puce. (Han 2015, 146)

In this performance, the protagonist seems to enact what the philosopher Michael Marder ascribes to “plant-thinking”: “this inversion of Platonism” (2013, 60); “post-metaphysical philosophy, in keeping with this ongoing transvaluation, performs a symbolic decapitation or castration of the old metaphysical values” (2013, 62). Moreover, Marder claims that “Francis Ponge puts the flowers and vegetal life in general at the forefront of this effort, when he asserts that they have no head, pas de tête” (Ponge 1992, 106; Marder 2013, 62). The philosopher explains how the expression in French might mean “no head” or “walking on the head,” and this is exactly what Yeong-hye does. From the physicians’ point of view, she is really in bad conditions, she refuses to eat, and the doctors are forcing injection after injection to nourish her and prevent her from dying. But Yeong-hye has an epiphanic revelation to share with her sister: “Sister. You don’t have to bring that stuff now.” She smiled. “I don’t need to eat anymore.” . . . Yeong-hye met her question with another. “Sister, did you know?” “Know what?”

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“I didn’t, you see. I thought trees stood up straight . . . I only found out just now. They actually stand with both arms in the earth, all of them. Look, look over there, aren’t you surprised?” Yeong-hye sprang up and pointed to the window. “All of them, they’re all standing on their heads.” . . . “I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.” (Han 2015, 147–148)

Yeong-hye just wants sunlight and water, like Daphne before her, she has renounced her animal status and now feels she belongs to the vegetal world. Her idea that to become-tree the human body must be conceived upside down is a variation (an inversion) on the metaphysical idea of the arbor inversa: A different and indeed more secular tradition of symbolism appears in Ancient Greece, in which the human conquers the tree form and politically turns it upside down. In Timaeus Plato defined the man as a “heavenly plant” with its branches on earth and roots in heaven. If the plant absorbs nutrients from the soil, on the opposite the human protrudes its roots in the heaven of Ideas. “Man is an inverted tree, and a tree is an inverted man,” echoed Aristotle in On the Parts of Animals and after him repeated many Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars in the Middle Ages. Traditionally the image of the inverted tree, or arbor inversa, signifies that the human is projected towards the spiritual in opposition to the instinct of beasts. The growing roots of the human mind are a vivid metaphor of the ever-growing knowledge of humankind. It is clear that this image represents a political re-appropriation of the tree-form and almost a statement of independence of the citizen in the age of the Athenian democracy, if compared with the oppressive symbolism of the ancient tree of power. (Pasquinelli 2018, 5)

Yeong-hye reverses this idea, and wants to be rooted exactly as trees are, with her head downward. She wants to be or become truly a tree: Look, sister, I’m doing a handstand; leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands . . . they delve down into the earth. Endlessly, endlessly . . . yes, I spread my legs because I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch; I spread them wide. (Han 2015, 127, 148)

If not literally alluding to the arbor inversa, this is at least an attempt at deconstructing and subverting the primacy of the head (caput), human rationality per se, traditionally attributed to patriarchal and hierarchical ordering. “Plant-thinking” refers to—Michael Marder writes—“non-cognitive, non ideational, and non imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants” (what I later call “thinking without the head” (Marder 2013, 10). The hands respond to the

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principal downward movement: “Geotropism. It is the constant growth of the root downwards in response to the force of gravity” (Marzec 2008, 8). Thus, she refuses the traditional hypothesis that Darwin had also accepted: “The plant’s root functions like the brain in animals.”10 Moreover, when claiming that she wants flowers to bloom in the midst of her legs she is responding to another principle of post-metaphysical philosophy, “germination commences in the middle, in the space of in-between . . . the plant is an elaboration on and from the midsection devoid of a clear origin. In this sense, all growth is rhizomatic . . . both extremities of plants are ‘eheaded.’ Plants grow from the middle. . . . The middle is often de-centred. . . . It is the middle place . . . the plant interferes with the metaphysical fixation on the One” (Marder 2013, 63–65). Yeong-hye has understood two more important principles that govern trees: the different distributions of vital organs and their collective existence. To her sister she reveals, with scientific accuracy: “Sister . . . all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters” (Han 2015, 144). Scientists have proven this is true: “It seems difficult to define a plant as ‘an individual’—and in particular trees—could be considered real colonies, consisting of reiterated architectural units” (Mancuso 2017, 177). And philosophers, too, admit that: “in such an organism—which is, after all, a society rather than an individual—something ages” (Marder 2013, 112). The biologist Stefano Mancuso, among others, further elaborates on that: A plant is not an animal. . . . Plants do not have a face, limbs, or, in general any recognizable structure that is similar to those of animals . . . they do not have single or double organs that are responsible for the main functions of the organism. . . . Organs are points of weakness. . . . plants distribute over their entire body the functions that animals concentrate in specific organs. Decentralisation is the key. . . . Plants breathe with their whole body, see with their whole body, feel with their whole body, and evaluate with their whole body. Spreading each function over the entire organism as much as possible is the only way to survive predation, and plants can do it so well that they can even withstand removal of much of their body without losing functionality. Just as a plant does not have organs on which it depends, it does not have a brain that acts as a central control. (Mancuso 2018, 71–73)

In Richard Power’ The Overstory, a scientist discovers that trees create a symbiosis as that of Philemon and Baucis sustaining each other as a couple: When the lateral roots of two Douglas-firs run into each other underground, they fuse. Through those self-grafted knots, the two trees join their vascular systems together and become one. Networked together underground by countless

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thousands of miles of living fungal threads, her trees feed and heal each other, keep their young and sick alive, pool their resources and metabolites into community chests . . . Her trees are far more social than even Patricia suspected. There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest . . . trees share their storehouses. (Powers 2018, 142)

To conclude, Yeong-hye is teaching a final lesson to her sister, in spite of the fact that she is dying. She has survived a violent father, the passivity of her own mother and sister, her middle class, her uneventful life, even a rape, but now she has acquired total control of her own body and will. She has now chosen a more trustworthy family, more supportive, as has scientifically been proven for trees to be. Her metamorphosis into a tree is not the result of magic, it is more literally, a way of dying, a choice of reuniting herself with her inner arbor-essence: “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?” (Han 2015, 157), she asks, innocently. Thus, turning into trees is a radical form of metamorphosis in nature, a way to cry out one’s trauma: the trauma of early colonial times in South Africa, or the trauma of the Apartheid years denying ethnic difference and diversity, or the trauma of a male-dominated, carnivore society. Pointing at the vegetal model offered by trees is a way to practice plant-thinking, weak thought and, even, decolonial thinking.11 Scholars, such as Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano aim at dismantling Eurocentric, capitalist, military, Christian, patriarchal, white heterosexual, male cultural models that have been imposed by colonialism. In contrast, they propose the acceptance of new and diverse democratic models, what they call a “radical de-colonial anti-capitalist diversality,” and “pluriversality.” They also speak of the need for a “socialization of power” (Grosfoguel 2011, 17). A similar conclusion is reached by Stefano Mancuso, through the observation of successful vegetal collective models: The future I imagine will be ever richer models that renounce a vertical control of decision-making processes and in which all functions, even entrepreneurial ones, as well as any proprietary rights, will be ever more distributed. In fact, at least in Europe, similar structures—organized according to the plant model, distributed and rooted in the territory—have long existed; they are called cooperatives. . . . Their failures are often due to having stopped acting like plant structures and instead turned into animal hierarchical organizations, thus losing flexibility and renouncing their knowledge of the territory. So, in addition to imitating the decentralized structure of plants . . . we must imagine new forms of diffused ownership. (Mancuso 2018, 93)

Similarly, decolonial thinking proposes that:

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Democracy needs to be reconceptualised in a transmodern form in order to be decolonized from liberal democracy, that is, the western racialized and capitalist-centred form of democracy. (Grosfoguel 2011, 17)

In the chapter “Athenians, bees, democracy, and plant modules,” Stefano Mancuso looks for similar alter-native democratic structures in our future: “green democracies.” Michael Marden, too, speaks of “vegetal democracy.”12 In nature, large, distributed organizations without control centers are always the most efficient. This shows that talking of/and/around trees does not mean to forget people, at all. On the contrary, plants show us the way.

NOTES 1. With this expression, I mean to transfer Deleuze and Guattari’s coinage “becoming-animal” to the vegetal world. 2. https​:/​/st​​udioh​​omora​​dix​.c​​om​/20​​16​/06​​/28​/d​​endr​o​​sofia​​-2/, accessed January 10, 2020. 3. “[She] tend[s] to show little interest in traumatic experiences of members of non-western cultural traditions.” (3) “A troubling aspect of Caruth’s analysis is that in its drive to identify Tancred as a trauma survivor, it tends to obscure the wound inflicted on Clorinda . . . Given that this episode concerns the killing of an Ethiopian woman by a European crusader, an orientalist dimension which Caruth does not acknowledge, her reading of this tale can be seen to illustrate the difficulty of trauma theory to recognize the experience of the non-Western other” (Craps 2012, 15). 4. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), vol. 18, ch. 3. Quoted in Caruth 1996, 2(1), 113. 5. “She has to interpret Clorinda’s voice as not exactly her own but as (also) that of the Traumatized Tancred’s dissociated second self” (Leys 2000, 295–296). 6. William Shakespeare. The Tempest. In The Arden Shakespeare, ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury, 1999, 191–192. 7. I owe these hints to a conversation with my colleague Lucia Folena, professor of English and Renaissance Studies at the University of Turin. 8. “In this story from the Transkey, recorded and retold by Hugh Tracey, a theme is depicted that also appears in various guises in the folklore of other indigenous language groups: a statue or other inanimate object changes into a living being. Or vice versa. The illustration is by Diek Grobler” (Mandela 2002, 48). 9. I am grateful to a group of students of mine (University of Torino Reading Group), who invited me to read this novel and discuss it with them in its English translation.

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10. “The tip of the radicle thus endowed, and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements” (Pasquinelli 2018, 13). “The root system is, without any doubt, the most important part of the plant. It is a physical network whose apexes form a continuously advancing front. . . . Thus the entire root system guides the plant like a sort of collective brain or, better, a distributed intelligence” (Mancuso 2017, 77). 11. I am indebted to the debate opened at the Aiscli Conference on “Postcolonial/ Decolonial: Unpacking the Prefix. Literatures and Cultures in English and Beyond,” University of Bari, February 21–22, 2019. 12. Cfr. Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, “Foreword,” in Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013, xi–xv: xv.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brink, André. 1999 [1996]. Imaginings of Sand. Orlando: Harvest. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Craps, Stef. 2012. Postcolonial Witnessing. Trauma Out of Bounds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Dangor, Achmat. 2000 [1997]. Kafka’s Curse. New York: Vintage. De Bruyckere, Berlinde & Coetzee, J.M. 2013. Cripplewood. Kreupelhout. 55th International Art Exhibition The Venice Biennale. New Haven: Yale University Press. Freud, Sigmund [1920]. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953–74, vol. 18. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of PoliticalEconomy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality.” TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the LusoHispanic World. 1(1), 2011. https​:/​/es​​chola​​rship​​.org/​​uc​/it​​em​/21​​​k6t3f​​q, accessed May 15, 2019. Han, Kang. 2015 [2007]. The Vegetarian, transl. by Deborah Smith. New York: Hogarth. Ley, Ruth. 2000. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mancuso, Stefano. 2018. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants. Translated by Vanessa Di Stefano. New York: Astria. Mandela, Nelson. 2002. Favourite African Folktales. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Marzec, Andrzej. Vegetal Philosophy (Or Vegetal Thinking). Translated by Malgorzata Olsza. CzasKultury/English 5/2008, 4-17. http:​/​/cza​​skult​​ury​.p​​l​/en/​​wp​-co​​ntent​​/uplo​​ ads​/2​​017​/0​​2​/AMA​​rzec_​​Veget​​alPhi​​losop​​hy​_Cz​​as​Kul​​tury_​​5​_200​​8​.pdf​, accessed January 10, 2020. Nims, John Frederick (ed.). 2000. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Arthur Golding Translation 1567. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books Edition. Pasquinelli, Matteo. 2018. “The Arborescent Mind. The Intelligence of an Inverted Tree.” In Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (ed.) Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium, 1–18. Berlin: Stenberg Press. Powers, Richard. 2018. The Overstory. London: Heinemann. Shakespeare, William [1610] 1999. The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare, ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury. Vattimo, Giovanni and Santiago Zabala. 2013. “Foreword.” In Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, xi–xv. Virgil. 1992. The Aeneid, trans. by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Knopf. Wright, Alexis. 2006. Carpentaria. Sydney: Giramondo Publishing.

Chapter 2

Pacific Perspectives of the Anthropocene Trees and Human Relationships Emanuela Borgnino and Gaia Cottino

It is because of trees, or better a tree, if today we talk about the Anthropocene: the piceasitchensis of Motu Ihupuku (Campbell Island), 600 Km south of Aotearoa-New Zealand. This tree is the only survivor of a massive plantation project for wood extraction, driven by the British colonial forces in the early twentieth century under the direction of Lord Ranfurly (Mancuso 2018). Given the extreme climate of the island, whose average temperature is 7ºC and winds often blow up to 100 Km/h, the project of making it a wood reservoir never worked and the hundreds of planted trees were wiped out, frozen, or dried by winds. The only survivor was a specimen of picea thanks to its position, protected from bad weather, together with its robustness. Since its estimated birth in 1902, the tree “continued to grow in one of the most isolated places of the world . . . given this isolated growth, indeed, the tree of Campbell island marks a unicum also for scientific research. Thanks to the results of the scientific analysis the year 1965 was set as a benchmark for a new geological era: the Anthropocene”1 (Mancuso 2018, 107). Defined by the Anthropocene Working Group as the age in which the human species became the primary cause of a permanent change in time, the Anthropocene has also triggered a paradigm turn in socio-anthropological sciences: the ontological turn (Strathern 1987; Wagner 1981; Viveiros de Castro 2009) which, in essence, challenged the categories of nature and culture.2 These categories are the result of negotiations between people and their worlds and change in space and time. The resulting “heterogeneous geographies” argues Sarah Whatmore “imply a radically different understanding of ‘who’ (what) constitutes the worlds ‘we’ inhabit. Such an understanding decouples social agency from the logocentric assumptions that restrict the 39

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capacity to act or to have effects to human beings, admitting other players to the networks of social life” (Clocke 2002, 47). As Bruno Latour stated, “The great philosophical contribution of the Anthropocene is that narrativity, what I call geo-story, is not a layer added to the brutal physical reality but what the world itself is made of. When they say the planet is alive it does not mean there is one big organism that is to be called Earth, but that its many ingredients are all building their own world. ‘Connected’ does not mean ‘holistic’” (Latour 2014, 10). As also Tim Ingold argued a few years earlier: people, artifacts, animals, trees, plants, topography, climate, culture, economy, and history are knotted together “to form an unfolding timespace of particular landscapes and places” (Clocke 2002, 9). Indeed, his ANT theory rejected the nonhuman/human distinction by championing the nonhuman agency, therefore also “trees are associated with forms of agency . . . which are traditionally associated with the human realm” (Clocke 2002, 54): they carry out routine actions, transformative actions and creative actions (ibid.). Namely, “they have a bewildering range of capacities, and engage in myriad relational processes with both humans and non-humans” (Clocke 2002, 58). Indigenous communities acknowledge the nonhuman worlds and their connection to humans since they “do not separate the universe of culture, which would be an exclusive prerogative of human beings, from the universe of nature, which includes all the remaining entities of the world” (Cottino 2018, 46). In the Pacific Island cultures, for example, there are no terms for nature (Cottino, 2018), thus marking a non-separation between nature and culture, humans, and other living beings. All beings are indeed related by principles of equation and affinity (TamaseseTa’isiEfi, 2009) through kingship ties: a specific tree can therefore be cousin to specific humans, creating kin groups that include all beings. To say it with Cécile Gaspar and Tamatoa Bambridge, “indigenous cosmogonies, unlike western myths, integrate non-human entities (corals, fish) in their ideologies, blurring nature and culture” (Bambridge 2008, 223). This explains how the Huli people of the central highlands of Papua New Guinea reacted to the sight of Europeans who cut down the hoop pines surrounding their sacred sites and used the wood as building material: “They concluded that white people must be related to their own ancestors who had originally planted the trees and that European ownership of chainsaws and sawmills was itself a sign that European owned the trees themselves” (Bell, West and Filer 2015, 6). By providing two cases from the Pacific, our contribution attempts to deconstruct an anthropocentric view of trees and to present different perspectives on nature–culture relationship and codependency. To do so, we will analyze the human–arboreal relationships with two trees: the Tongan fa (pandanus tectorius) and the Hawaiianʻōhiʻa lehua (metrosiderospolymorpha).

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What role can different models of humanity play in permanently decolonizing the thought? (Viveiros De Castro, 1998) By transposing oral knowledge and storytelling (talanoa) into a written form, acknowledging the efforts of contemporary indigenous scholars in decolonizing methodologies (Smith 1999), we aim at drawing new perspectives on the human-arboreal interaction and interdependence. THE FA TREE OF TONGA According to the Tongan cosmology before humankind, while a female goddess was intent in weaving a fine mat of pandanus leaves (fa) she cut her finger with the sharp fiber. The finger bled profusely and, as the blood coagulated, two eggs formed, male and female, these two eggs where the progenitors of humanity. This myth reveals some aspects worth analyzing. In the first place, it acknowledges the ecological history of the islands of the Tongan archipelago: the pandanus tree, just like the coconut palm, was there before the humankind. Indeed, this cosmogonic version of creation depicts humans as born on a pandanus tree weaved mat, which was clearly already there before humans. Our anthropocentric vision is so strong that we tend to take for granted that trees and plants moved and settled only when transported by human beings. Instead, not only do a vast amount of seed carriers play a crucial role in spreading the seeds—such as winds, insects, birds, and currents—but trees also enact a number of actions to reproduce and spread. In other words, they have an agency and interact with other species, among which humans. As Stefano Mancuso argues, “trees aren’t motionless. They move a lot, but in longer time periods. What trees cannot do it isn’t move, but rather adjourn, at least throughout life” (Mancuso 2018, 9). The pandanus has spread in the past 250 million years through the Polynesian islands by moving via water since it belongs to those “uncommon great navigator” (Mancuso 2018, 67) trees, whose seeds can resist in salt water; as they are transported by currents and washed on the beaches, they colonize and settle islands right where the sand and the earth join, the myth reveals that humans are just one component of a complex ecological setting. Second, humans are born on a weaved pandanus mat and therefore they are both materially and symbolically tied into networks of relationships. On the one side, human beings are tied (weaved) to the pandanus trees on which they depend for eating, and once for roof-building and canoe-making: fruits are edible and leaves serve as wrapping paper for underground oven cooking, guaranteeing sustenance and continuity of the community. On the other side, humans are tied (weaved) to the pandanus trees since their leaves and

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bark are central to the production of valuables (koloa) for ceremonies and dance performances. Weaved to make fine mats, the pandanus trees fibers are symbolically representing the genealogical ties of the community as well as their “relatedness” (Poltorak 2007, 13) to the nonhuman beings populating the environment. The circulation of these fine mats in ceremonies intangibly represents and creates the community ties. As Heather Young–Leslie states “there is a Tongan proverb that says, ‘society is like a mat being woven.’ The proverb uses the interlacing of pandanus fibers to reflect on the mingling of blood and gender, rank and status, family histories and individual deeds that, over time, produce Tongan society” (Young–Leslie 2007, 115). Therefore, the myth captures this double symbolic and material value between animate and inanimate worlds and flips the perspective on the relationship between the two, quite similarly to Ingold’s theoretical framework when he states that “instead of thinking about plants or animals as part of the natural environment for human beings, we have to think of humans and their activities as part of the environment for plants and animals” (Ingold 1997, 244). Farmers, for example, “[in] the work they do, in such activities as field clearance, fencing, planting, weeding and so on, or in tending their livestock, do not literally make plants and animals but rather establish the environmental conditions for their growth and development” (Ingold 1997). Such reversed perspective on the human–arboreal interaction, which despite being universal is locally rooted into the eco-cultural setting and therefore diverse according to the context, explains the bewilderment of Captain James Cook when he landed for the first time in the Kingdom of Tonga, in 1777. He writes on his diaries: “The edge of this island is cultivated with plantations, the more inner parts instead are way less cultivated, even if very suitable for farming. Along the coast we could see small woods of coconut trees and other trees, beautiful grasslands and, here and there, plantations and trails leading everywhere on the island, in a very fascinating chaos which makes even more picturesque the islands’ panorama” (Beaglehole 1994, 223). Such “fascinating chaos” was a “natureculturescape,” the result of the local twist of this universal relationship, indecipherable by Cook’s western eye. The Captain lacks the grammar to read and interpret the destination of the spaces, which he can only divide into the categories of cultivated and uncultivated, cultural, or natural. The absence of an idea of humans as part of the environment for plants and animals reveals the strong anthropocentric philosophical matrix of the western thought where humans rule nature and, by domesticating it, they mark a threshold between nature and culture. Furthermore, the Tongan fa tree is also related and relates to other living beings, such as crabs and octopuses who feed themselves on its blossoms. According to some oral tales these trees’ leaves, resembling octopuses

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because of their long shape, are confused with partners by octopuses looking up at the land from the sea and push them out of the water and up on the trees. Therefore, it is common to see these sea creatures crawled on trees. Interestingly enough, in Japan the term for addressing the pandanus tree is “octopus tree,” proving the connection between these creatures. Humans are part of a complex ecosystem where each inhabitant has roles and responsibilities. These last, in the Tongan human realm, are set by the key value of tahuifonua where tahui stands for caring/nurturing/taking responsibility for, and fonua for land, people and placenta (O Ki'ili 2005). This last word, fonua, stresses the strong connection between people and their land, where they are born and return to in a cycle of continuity, and where their ancestors are still ghostly and agentive presences. Tahuifonua is a multicreature, multi-spatial, trans-temporal concept including land, terrestrial, and marine beings together with people and their ancestors. Therefore, to tahuifonua means nurturing and taking responsibility for this complex relatedness. KULEANA: RESPONSIBILITY, PRIVILEGE, AND DUTY Although there is no univocal concept of indigenous epistemology, many notions from different cultural settings resonate and appeal to one another, quite homogeneously debunking the centrality of humankind. As stated by the authors of Making Kin with the Machines3: “Man is neither height nor center of creation. This belief is core to many Indigenous epistemologies. It underpins ways of knowing and speaking that acknowledge kinship networks that extend to animals and plants, wind and rocks, mountains and oceans. Indigenous communities worldwide have retained the languages and protocols that enable us to engage in dialogue with our non-human kin, creating mutually intelligible discourses across differences in material, vibrancy, and genealogy” (Lewis, Arista, Pechawis, Kite, 2018). Even scientific arguments have belittled the role of human beings: starting from Charles Darwin who rewrote the role of the human species in the living kingdom. Today, as a matter of fact, we are aware that all living beings on the planet are related to each other, from mammals to algae, from bacteria to plants, due to the universality of the genetic code and many other aspects including the dynamics of the nervous system. Recent works (Narby 2010; Kohn 2013, Mancuso 2017) are re-evaluating what are called/the so-called “intelligences in nature,” such as the communication between trees and the dynamics of the nervous system of plants. The key to access Oceanian eco-cosmologies lays in the recognition of the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds through which

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human beings shape their reality. These relationships with the nonhuman collective are conveyed and governed by a “sense of responsibility.” An analysis of the etymology of the term “responsibility” reveals that it derives from the Latin respònsus, past participle of the verb respòndere, “to answer.” Consequently, from an etymological point of view, responsibility is embedded in a relational dynamic: having responsibility means responding to someone (Borgnino 2019). The epistemological frame of Pacific Islanders eco-cosmologies is deeply rooted in a world populated by a plurality of collectives with which humans must constantly negotiate a position and a relation. Indeed, landscapes are made up of many “scapes,” views, which are intertwined in a multidimensional panorama where time, space and matter negotiate models of coexistence between a plurality of collectives. Responsibility is a vehicle of connection, a common task that allows communication and relationships between organisms. Katrina-Ann Kapā’anaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira and indigenous scholars translate this participation with the environment with the term “sense ability” (Oliveira 2014, 49), that is both the ability to receive and perceive stimuli from the terrestrial, marine and meta-physical world and the response to these sensory stimuli. Vine Deloria Jr. explains how this “sense of responsibility” underlies two attitudes “one attitude is the acceptance of self-discipline by humans and their communities to act responsibly toward other forms of life. The other attitude is to seek to establish communications and covenants with other forms of life on a mutually agreeable basis” (Deloria Jr. 1999, 50–51). In this perspective, the environment can be seen as a map of responsibilities that intertwine, meet, and collide; a map of numerous individual responsibilities that, by uniting, cover the whole territory like a blanket, in a shared collective responsibility. We could go further by affirming that the responsibility is a state of intimacy with the environment: myriad responsibilities enacted by all beings, even by non-humans. In this intimate scheme, two key factors come at play: positionality and relationality. Namely, responsibilities are not static and monotonous, but change and modulate depending on one’s position and status. According to the Kanaka Maoli, the native population of the Hawaiian Islands, responsibility (kuleana) is indeed mutual: “Both the Mauna (mountain) and Kanaka are instilled, at birth, with particular kuleana to each other. This relationship is reciprocal, and its sanctity requires continual maintenance in order to remain pono, or balanced” (Peralto 2014, 234). In this sense, responsibility is a place-based relationship that requires time and interaction with the landscape. For this reason, we propose to study the human–arboreal relationship to understand how these relations shape the Pacific Islanders way of giving sense to the world.

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THE ‘ŌHIA LEHUA TREE OF HAWAI’I When speaking of plants in Hawaiian sometimes the term po’e (people, persons, personnel, population) is used to refer to a group of trees, translating banana trees in “banana people,” or taro patch as “taro people.” A collective subjectivity is indeed recognized to trees and plants, indicated as people. However, on an ontological dimension, there are several implications in the recognition of vital essence to stones, plants, animals, and atmospheric events. Hawai’i is one of the many cases in which the concept of person is attributed to the animal, vegetable, and mineral world. The ʻōhi’a lehua tree (metrosideros polymorpha) makes no exception. Its mythological origin tells us the story of an attractive man named ʻŌhi’a, who has eyes only for a beautiful girl named Lehua. One day, while on the mountain, ʻŌhi’a meets Pele, goddess of fire and creation, who falls for him and invites him to enjoy life together as husband and wife. ʻŌhi’a having already given his heart and love to Lehua refuses Peles’ offer. Furious Pele chases him with lava flows blocking him and transforming him into a twisted tree. Lehua who was looking for her lover on the mountains saw everything and begs the other gods to intervene. Moved by her deep feelings and lament, the gods decide that the lovers should be forever united, and transforms Lehua into the beautiful blossom of the ʻōhi’a tree.4 In Hawai’i, today, it is believed that if you pick or break the blossom of a ʻōhi’a lehua tree it will start raining, symbolizing the tears of the two lovers being separated; this symbolism is clearly still embedded in the contemporary history of the tree. Nevertheless, the ʻōhi’a lehua had many other uses for early Hawaiians: the wood was used for house constructions, to create weapons, kapa cloth (fine mats) beaters, boards for pounding poi (a taro purée), and statues; its leaves were and still are used as a medicinal tea and its flowers and blossoms are important adornments in hula dance and lei making (flower necklaces). Indeed, there is a strong connection between theʻōhi’a lehua and hula dance, the tree is considered to be the physical manifestation of the goddess Pele and her relatives like Laka, the goddess of hula dance. The ʻōhi’a lehua is an ecological foundational tree, the first one to colonize newly formed land blanketed in lava and to filter water and nutrients; indeed, in the Hawaiian language ʻōhi’a means to gather. It is not by accident that in the legend ʻōhi’a is transformed by Pele into a tree surrounded by a sea of lava. In other words, the local indigenous culture recognizes the tree responsibility: to filter and gather water. The local culture acknowledges that it is thanks to the ʻōhi’a lehua tree, which fulfills its daily responsibilities, or we could say function, of gathering and filtering water, that the forest grows lush on lava fields. In Hawai’i, as well as in the whole Pacific, landscapes are shaped by a relationship of codependency: the ʻōhi’a lehua is a foundational tree in the

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Hawaiian ecosystem because it is indispensable to produce local cultural knowledge, it shapes the ways Kanaka Maoli see and are in the world. If the ʻōhi’a lehua forest, covering nearly one million acres of the Hawaiian archipelago, disappeared not only the ecosystem would suffer but also the cultural landscape because of this reciprocal relationship. According to the Kanaka Maoli ecology, all the incarnations or expressions of nature—including rocks, trees, and water bodies—are animated, therefore aware and capable of interacting with each other and with the human collective. “The genealogy teaches us the land is the elder sibling and the people are the younger sibling meant to care for each other in a reciprocal, interdependent relationship. Humanity is reminded of its place within the order of genealogical descent” (Kanehe 2014, 345). Humans participate in a common genealogy with land, animals, trees, rocks, and all the expressions of nature. Living becomes an act of participation, a formal recognition of the co-essence of human beings and the environment. This participation makes well-being dependent on the practice of the mālama (taking care) of everything that participates in the construction of the landscape. As a matter of fact, the native ecological approach does not recognize a supposed equality to living species but postulates a particular ontological status for humans. Humans are perceived as interconnected in a network of relationships with nature, with whom they share the same genealogy, but toward which they have intrinsic responsibilities, kuleana. CONCLUSION What does it mean, for anthropologists today, to approach the study of human–environment relationship from two trees perspective? It means that the ecological story of trees and the history of their interactions with other collectivities, including the human one, shed a light on the codependency processes in which trees are indispensable to produce local cultural meanings and crucial in triggering a sense of ecological responsibility. Native voices, as much as local folk cultures, can contribute to take on contemporary environmental urgent matters. Indeed, these societies force us to look at natureculturescapes as a whole, a unity, where humans are only one of the many collectivities, as well as to acknowledge the co-construction of these natureculturescapes, where a culture of human-arboreal and human-animal interaction is practiced. These societies are advocating that the time to take our responsibility is upon us. Leon No’eau Peralto writes: “If we continue to poison the‘āina (land) in which our genealogical trees are deeply rooted, our children and grandchildren will surely be confronted with a harsh reality . . . In neglecting our kuleana (responsibility) to mālama this ‘āina (take care

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of this land), we ultimately neglect our kuleana (responsibility) to the future generation of our Lāhui (Nation). Our time of reconnection and renewal is upon us” (Peralto 2014, 241). Indigenous voices, and more recently western youth, call upon a wider global responsibility for those relationships that a part of humanity has tried to deny by creating ecological regimes in which human beings fell under the illusion of control, exploitation, and management of nature at will. However, today we know that the human beings are only one of the interconnected components of the world in which they live and are not in a position to exercise any control. Yet the damage has been done and no financial compensation or carbon credit can respond to the ecosystem damages, soil poisoning, and hydrological pollution. Responding to the Anthropocene therefore requires a change of paradigm, to change the way in which human beings, in industrialized societies, see themselves in relation to the environment and to express a new ecological regime that takes into account interconnection and participation (Borgnino 2019); a regime in which the concept of responsibility could play an important role. To say it with Arianne Conty’s words: “To resolve the Anthropocene . . . we must also revise the ecological soundness of our political and economic practices and ideologies, establish a new understanding of the collective codetermination of human and other forms of life, and educate our species about its newfound responsibilities for both the human world and the nonhuman earth” (2016,19). Societies in Oceania established a relationship of continuity with places, lagoons, mountains, and trees, social life in the Pacific is a matter of relationships of frequent visits and gift exchanges. Visiting a forest is a biosocio-cultural practice that requires time to establish and confirm a bond that could perish if the visits become rarer or access is denied. According to Bruno Latour: “What is at stake in the Anthropocene is this order of understanding. The human mind should be suddenly teleported into a global sphere that, in any case, would be much too vast for its small scale. We need to know more about it, so, gradually, step by step, knowledge of the place in which we live be experienced as urgent” (Latour 2017, 139). In this contribution, we have attempted to de-construct an anthropocentric view and to present different perspectives on the nature–culture relationship and codependency. Nevertheless, one question remains open: if what all Cook could see was a fascinating chaos and what we can see today is a less anthropocentric and dichotomic version of these natureculturescapes, how much are we still not seeing, and therefore missing, of the interactions between different animated collectives? Even today we experience Cooks’ bewilderment in front of the great multiplicity of codes, voices, and agencies. An exemplary case that summarizes these clashes of codes is the Valley of Mākua on the leeward cost of the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i. Mākua (meaning “parent” in the native Hawaiian language) is a sacred place for the Hawaiian

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indigenous culture and a Military Reserve for the Us Military who is currently leasing the valley from the State of Hawai’i and using it as a training field. An elder of the association called Mālama Mākua whose purpose is the preservation and the return to the community of the Valley of Mākua said: “Even when we are admiring the beauty of Mākua Valley after the rains, it’s still somebody else’s green.”5 The phrase “it’s still somebody else’s green” is significant, because we often forget that nature is an anthropized space affected by the ecological regime that societies choose. The same “green” in control of the native population would turn into a multitude of voices and agencies producing a different landscape; the same fascinating chaos that Cook could not de-codify. The narrative or the logic of the responsibility is based on the answer that we give to the questions: What relationship do we have with a tree, or a crab, or a cloud? What creates a sense of belonging to an island is a land-based philosophy: humans are part of a complex and dependent ecosystem that defines the role and the responsibilities of its members, giving meaning to the world. Ontologies are more and more concrete and to give voice to trees is one of the possible paths to decolonize our thoughts.

NOTES 1. The year 1965 as the starting date of the Anthropocene is a hypothesis presented by the author (Mancuso) on which the scientific world is still debating. 2. For further inquiry on the subject, see Holbraad, Martin, and Pedersen Morten Axel. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge University Press and Heywood, Paolo. 2017. “The Ontological Turn.” In Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. 3. Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite, Making Kin with the Machines, 2018, Resisting Reduction Competition Winners. https​ :/​/jo​​ds​.mi​​tpres​​s​.mit​​.edu/​​pub​/l​​ewis-​​arist​​a​-pec​​​hawis​​-kite​. Accessed November 20, 2019. 4. There are many versions of the popular myth about the origin of the ‘ōhia lehua tree, the one presented in this article is just one of those. 5. Interview from the field, Makua Valley, April 2018.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aluli-Meyer, Manulani. 2014. “Indigenous Epistemology: Spirit Revealed.” In New Zealand Qualifications Authority, Enhancing Mātauranga Māori and Global Indigenous Knowledge, Wellington: NZQA.151–164. Beaglehole, John Cawte. 1994. James Cook: giornali di bordo. Trad. by Franco Marenco. Milano: Tea.

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Bell, Joshua, West Page, and Filer Colin, eds 2015. Tropical Forests of Oceania. Anthropological perspectives. ANU Press. Borgnino, Emanuela. 2019. Ecology, Sovereignty and Indigenous Knowledge. The role of kuleana in shaping historical, environmental and political responsibility in the time of the Anthropocene in the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i.” PhD Dissertation. Università Milano Bicocca, Dipartimento di Scienze Umane per la Formazione “Riccardo Massa”: Milano. Cajete, Gregory. 2000. Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence. Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers. Conty, Arianne. 2016. “Who is to Interpret the Anthropocene?” La Deleuziana, 4, 19–44. Cottino, Gaia. 2008. “‘Men are interested only in rootcrops.’ Food security gendered policies in the Kingdom of Tonga.” Antropologia 5 (1): 41–58. Deloria, Vine Jr. 1999. Spirit & Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader. Golden: Fulcrum Publishing. Fornander, Abraham. 1918. Hawaiian Antiquities and folk-lore. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press. Fujikane, Candice. 2016. “Mapping Wonder in the Māui Mo’olelo on the Mo’o’āina: Growing Aloha ‘Āina Through Indigenous Settler Affinity Activism.” In Marvels & Tales, 30(1), 45–69. Gaspar, Cécile, and BambridgeTamatoa. 2008. “Territorialités et aires marine protegées à Moorea (Polynésie française).” Le journal de la Société des Océanistes, 126/127, 231–245. Hau’ofa, Epeli. 2008. We are the Ocean. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Jones, Owen and Paul Clocke. 2002. Tree cultures. The place of trees and the trees in their place. Oxford: Oxford International Publishers. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood Dwelling and Skill. London & New York: Routledge. Ingold, Tim. 2016. Ecologia della cultura. Edited by Grasseni, Ronzon. Roma: Meltemi. Kanehe, L. M. 2014. “Kū’ē Mana Māhele: The Hawaiian Movement to Resist ‘Biocolonialism.’” In A Nation Rising. Edited by Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Hussey, Kahunawaika’ala Wright. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 331–353. Kapā’anaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira, K.R. 2014. Ancestral Places understanding Kanaka Geographies. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think. Berkeley: University of California Press. Latour, Bruno. 2014. “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene: A Personal View of What Is to Be Studied.” In The Anthropology of Sustainability, edited by Lewis Brightman, 35–51. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mancuso, Stefano. 2018. L’incredibile viaggio delle piante. Bari: Laterza. Mawyer, Alexander and Richard Feinberg. 2014. “Senses of Space: Multiplying Models of Spatial Cognition in Oceania.” ETHOS, 42(3), 243–252. Narby, Jeremy. 2010. Intelligenza in natura. Milano: Jaca Book.

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O Ki’ili, Tevita. 2005. “Tahuiva: nurturing Tongan sociospatial ties in Maui and beyond,” The Contemporary Pacific, 17(I), 83–114. Peralto, Leon No’eau. 2014. “‘O Koholālele, He ‘Āina, He Kanaka, He I’a Nui Noona ka Lā: Re-membering Knowledge of Place in Koholālele, Hāmākua, Hawai’i.” In I ulu I ka ‘āina land, edited by Osorio Jonathan, 76–98. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Poltorak, Mike. 2007. “Nemesis, speaking, and tahuivaha’a: interdisciplinarity and the truth of ‘mental illness.’” In Vava’u, Tonga, The Contemporary Pacific, 19(I), 1–36. Smith, Linda Tuhivai. 2013. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd. Strathern, Marilyn. 1987. “Out of context: The persuasive fictions of anthropology.” Current Anthropology, 28(3), 251–281. TamaseseTa'isiEfi, TuiAtuaTupua. 2009. Bioethics and the Samoan indigenous reference, UNESCO Regional Pacific ethics of knowledge production workshop. Blackwell Publishing. Tsing, Anna. 2014. “Strathern beyond the Human: Testimony of a Spore.” in Theory, Culture & Society, 31(2/3), 221–241. Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2009. Métaphysiquescannibales. Paris: P.U.F. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2017. Metafisiche cannibali. Elementi di antropologia post-strutturale. Traduzione di Galzigna, Liberale. Verona: Ombre Corte. Young-Leslie, Heather. 2007. “. . . Like a mat being woven . . .” Pacific Arts (3–5), 115–118.

Chapter 3

Becoming-botanic Vegetal Affect and Ecological Grief in Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian Shannon Lambert

INTRODUCTION Writing from a world newly introduced to the ideas of Darwin and Freud, painter Edvard Munch penned his movingly melancholic (and now-famous) lines, “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity” (Potter 2011, 573). Where Darwin’s evolutionary theory retrospectively explains biological continuity, Munch’s lines proleptically ponder relationality between the human and vegetal.1 By gesturing to material cycles that sit at odds with the quasi-(Christian) religious binary of creation/destruction, Munch describes a process that operates across human and botanic forms, one where transformation replaces termination. Materially, the change articulated here is decomposition. As John MacNeill Miller observes, decomposition is tightly tied to ecology: the rotting body is one “whose distinction from its material environment wanes with each passing day” and its decomposition draws attention to the “broader biotic community of which we are a part” (Miller 2017, 383–84 in Oak Taylor 2019, 51). Decomposition is, to take up Deleuzian parlance, a “becoming-imperceptible” of the human where bodies-as-organisms disappear and instead merge with the earth in processes that draw attention to the “forces [which] run through humans and plants, to incipient brains, to milieus and atmospheres, to geographical and historical events” (Grosz in Roffe and Stark 2015, 18–19; cf. Caracciolo and Lambert 2019). As attested to by the many examples in classical literature, Munch’s gesture to vegetal transformation has a long history. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 51

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tales of the Heliades, Apollo and Daphne, Cyparissus, Baucis and Philemon, Dryope, Attis, and Myrrha, describe how humans are transformed into trees for “relief from actual or anticipated grief,” “restitution of lost virility,” “refuge for threatened or violated femininity,” and “atonement for (and protection from) forbidden seductions” (Tutter 2011, 432). Here, grief, the first causal category, shares close company with transformation. In their recent collection Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Grief and Loss (2017), editors Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman argue, via Judith Butler, that “mourning is about transformation: ‘one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly forever’” (Butler, n.d., 21 in Cunsolo and Landman 2017, 12). Mourning and grief2 occupy center stage in Cunsolo and Landman’s book and, along with chapters in other edited collections (Bladow and Ladino 2018), monographs by scholars such as Sianne Ngai (2005), Lauren Berlant (2011), and Nicole Seymour (2018), and themed special issues (American Imago 77 (1), 2020, ed. Stef Craps) the focus on “negative” effects like grief emerges as part of a push to transform the landscape of ecocriticism and interrogate the unproductive optimism of contemporary, liberal, environmental activism.3 Where human grief is generally understood, following Freud, as an affectively repetitive process that works toward an “end” or “resolution,” “ecological grief” resists the closure afforded by substituting or forgetting the “love object”—instead, the “object” of ecological grief is hard to pin down because it is, to use Paul Saint-Amour’s words, “unpunctual, diffuse, intangible, and collective in every sense” (Cunsolo and Landman 12; Saint-Amour 2020, 138). In other words, while both mourning, and even its pathological counterpart, melancholia, are “terminable processes that occur in human, calendrical time, moving ‘forward’ from loss,” ecological grief “plays havoc, in both scalar and directional terms, with these temporalities” (Ibid., 139). Ecological grief, then, problematizes linear and teleological approaches to time, as well as fantasies of human individuality and exclusivity. If ecological grief, sits above, beyond, and resistant to the capacities of human experience, one can argue that it requires new frames of reference and navigation. In this chapter, I consider how contemporary literature such as Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (2011) and Kang Han’s The Vegetarian (Han 2007; Engl. Smith 2015) both turn to vegetal forms to engage with experiences of grief that are depicted as multi-generational and dispersed. While this paper takes up the interest in human-vegetal continuity, “form” and “affect”—rather than decomposition proper—are the methodological tools I use to explore “forces”—like grief—that “run through humans and plants” (Grosz in Roffe and Stark, 2015, 18–19). Form, here, is understood in the vein of “new formalist” work by scholars like Caroline Levine (2015). For Levine, forms are abstract patterns or shapes, which are transferrable, or

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“portable,” and can be “picked up and moved to new contexts” (2015, 7). Levine’s new formalism, which explores how the forms of “whole,” “hierarchy,” “rhythm,” and “network” work across narrative and social domains, offers a starting point for this chapter, allowing me to consider forms’ transferability across perceived species boundaries. The sections which follow take up two of these forms to argue that the specific rhythmic and networked forms of vegetal life, operative in Deborah Levy’s and Kang Han’s novels, offer literary explorations of how exposure to patterns that challenge human conceptions of temporal linearity and spatial singularity might help to navigate complex affective constellations like ecological grief. Most directly, I ask, what are the affordances of vegetal forms? And, how might these be relevant for the Anthropocene?4 As Nicole Merola contends, the Anthropocene is “among other things a period in which linear time and progressive narratives are undercut by effects of the material persistence of things we thought would disappear (carbon emissions, plastics)” and “a period when individual and collective human actions exceed the boundaries of the body” (Merola 2018, 26, emphasis mine). The Anthropocene thus requires a “decentering” of human subjectivity and renewed attention to “living connectivity and interdependency” (Cunsolo and Landman 2017, 3). Here, I argue that an effectively tuned formalism rooted in the vegetal performs the work of a material environment, which gradually “decomposes” or “decenters” the teleological and individualized notions of human subjectivity that preclude us from forming meaningful and enduring ecological relationships. In the first section “Etc: Rhythm and Repetition,” I consider how vegetal time, which Marder describes as, “hetero-temporal”—that is, involving the simultaneous existence of multiple temporalities—“cyclical,” and “materially embedded,” in Levy’s and Han’s novels problematizes the temporality or rhythms of human grief-work (Marder 2013, 95). According to Marder, whenever “humans beings encounter plants, two or more worlds (and temporalities) intersect” (2013, 8). In Munch’s quotation, for example, plants have access to a (material) “eternity” seemingly denied to the human. Trees are, as we see in both religion and mythology, conceived of as temporally expansive: in the opening to his attentive and nuanced reading of Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), Saint-Amour offers the following passage from Job 14:7–12: While “there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof may not cease,” for humans death is final: “So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, nor be raised out of their sleep” (Saint-Amour 2020, 137). Similarly, in order for Cyparissus—the famous figure of Ovid’s Metamorphoses who accidentally kills his beloved pet stag—to “mourn forever,” he must be turned into a tree: the cypress tree (Tutter 428; Saint-Amour 2020, 144). In both of these examples, trees are linked with regeneration and

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longevity—however, while in the former “hope” is consequential, in the latter grief is both the cause and consequence of the transformation: The god [Apollo], grief-stricken, told him, “You will be mourned by myself, and others you will mourn, and by your presence, you will signal grief.” (Ovid 10.195–97 in Tutter 429)

In this passage, not only does grief transform Cyparissus, but his transformation creates a network of grief. For Cunsolo and Landman, ecological grief is a communal affair, which—through “decentering [human] subjectivities”— opens up space for thinking and “living connectivity and interdependency” (2017, 3). It is possible to identify the shared quality of grief-work in Long Litt Woon’s autobiographical The Way Through the Woods: Of Mushrooms and Mourning (2019). In the opening pages, she describes the memoir as one which “tells of two parallel journeys: an outer one, into the realm of mushrooms, and an inner one, through the landscape of mourning” (2019, 1–2). After the unexpected death of her husband, and reeling in her grief, Long takes a beginner’s course in mushrooming. Finding surprising joy in the thrill of discovery and the sense of community, Long works to obtain her certification as a Mushroom Inspector. Central to her memoir is the belief that “seemingly unrelated subjects such as mushrooms and mourning can, in fact, be connected.” While Long refers to her grief as hers alone to bear, in a move that replaces individuality with multiplicity, she, to use Sarah Lyall’s words, “put[s] mushrooms rather than herself at the center of her story” (Lyall 2019, n.p.). In addition, the various references to shared grief through communal structures such as mushrooming communities and bereavement support groups contextualizes her feelings within a larger network of grief. For example, she writes how deforestation creates an effective response that ripples through the mushrooming community: At the start of each mushroom season pictures are posted on social medial of trees cut down and lying scattered all over the place. Another prime hunting ground gone. It can be therapeutic to share one’s disappointment with likeminded souls who understand what a loss this is. You can almost hear the whole community heave a great collective sigh. (Long 2019, 56)

Grief draws out these kinds of “relational ties” (Butler 2004, 22 in Brinkema 2014, 71). In the second section of this chapter, “Oikos: Symplasm and Society,” I couple the novels’ thematic interest in trees with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) concept of the rhizome and Marder’s observation that “each single plant is a community” to explore how grief both creates and

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coordinates collectives (Marder 2013, 183). Both novels allude to and engage with traumas (and their residual grief) too big to be processed on an individual level: in Levy, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, and in Han, patriarchal and anthropocentric violence. In their polyvocality and frequent references to families and forests, both texts can be read as experiments in collective grief-work. In Swimming Home, the affective refrain of nostalgia links characters in the nine separate focalizations. Bordered by a wall of cypress trees, the characters in the French villa can be read as rhizomatic assemblage that exchanges affect in a kind of storied “symplasm”—that is, the “continuous cellular connection that extends through a plant” (Myers 2015, 37). Yet, as we reach the events of the novel’s ending, we discover this rhizomatic connectivity is a surface effect only visible extra-textually: the characters’ inability to share their individual grief means that the “relational ties” Butler describes are never formed within the bounds of the text. Thus, we see no “collective practices of change” which might allow for the “collective transformation of negative relations” (Braidotti 2018, 222). And, in The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s botanical metamorphosis draws our attention to her body as a meeting-place for collective and interspecies grief, and in so doing, reminds us of our “vital interconnection with a multitude of (human and nonhuman)” (Braidotti 2018, 222). ETC: RHYTHM AND REPETITION In this first section, I consider how the thematic and formal features of Levy’s Swimming Home and Han’s The Vegetarian engage with three aspects of botanic temporality to create a sense of ecologically productive “plant” or “vegetal affect”: the “vegetal hetero-temporality of seasonal changes,” the “spatio-temporality” of plant growth, “the cyclical temporality of iteration, repetition, and reproduction” (Marder 2013, 95, 12). By looking at repetitions in both texts, I will consider how the novels’ “interwoven rhythms perform a . . . lively temporal alternative to the unified progress we still long to obey” (Tsing 2015, 34). Here, vegetal temporality is a way of organizing the affective experience of an ecological grief which is multi-scalar, temporally confusing, and unending. Tom McCarthy has described Levy’s Swimming Home as a “kaleidoscopic narrative,” which borrows its setting from the “English-middle-class-onholiday novel” (McCarthy 2011, 160). However, rather than focusing on exterior events, Levy’s Freudian novel unfolds in an interior, psychologic landscape as a tangled story of mental health, the natural world, and cultural inheritance (McCarthy 2011, 160). Set largely in a tourist villa in AlpesMaritimes, France, the novel plays out over the course of a week with

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sections chronologically separated into consecutive days. Yet, despite this seeming adherence to clock time, the novel’s repetition of events creates an impression of cyclic temporality, which McCarthy has described spatially as “entering the whirlpool” (2011, 159). Most simply, the plot follows the meeting of poet Joe Jacobs and self-styled botanist, Kitty Finch. Joe and his family are vacationing in the tourist villa when they see Kitty floating in their pool. Apparently, the villa has been double booked; however, for reasons unbeknownst to friends and family, Joe’s wife, Isabel, invites Kitty to stay in the spare room of the rented villa. We quickly learn that Kitty is an unreliable character: while she says she is in France to look for mountain plants, we soon learn that Joe is the reason why she is at the villa. Kitty is an avid reader of Joe’s poetry and she asks him to look at one of her own poems, “Swimming Home.” According to Kitty, her and Joe are in “nerve contact,” suffering, respectively, from traumas of assault and the Holocaust (Levy 2011, 48). As Joe reads Kitty’s poem, he notes the proliferation of “etcs,” which conceal things “that could not be said” (Levy 2011, 83). Joe’s sense that Kitty “is not a poet. She is a poem” (Levy 2011, 88) alerts us to the ways that Kitty’s poem microcosmically enacts the characters’ continual inability to express their personal grief. From Kitty’s stutter, to Joe’s repression of the traumatic loss of his family, to Isabel’s journalistic mediation of her exposure to large-scale suffering as a foreign correspondent in conflict regions, the novel is filled with repetitions of similarly unsaid utterances of loss and displacement. As the novel progresses, Joe and Kitty are increasingly drawn to one another, and his attraction to her is described as part of a predictable cycle of unfaithful behavior. However, this time it is repetition with difference: after having sex with Kitty, Joe is brought “to the edge of something truthful and dangerous” (Levy 2011, 145)—unable to endure the etcs, he commits suicide. His body floating in the pool loops us back to the beginning of the novel where we encountered Kitty’s body “floating near the deep end” (Levy 2011, 5). Careful to link this cycle with grief, Levy plays with the homonym “bear”: she opens the novel with a description of the strange body in the pool as a “bear,” and closes with a description of Mitchell (Joe and Isabel’s friend) dragging Joe’s body from the water: “It was so heavy. It was as heavy as a bear” (Levy 2011, 154). According to Eugenie Brinkema, the words “grief” and “gravity” share an “etymological intimacy” in that they both derive from the word “gravis (weighty)”—an etymological connection that reminds us of grief’s corporeality (2014, 73). Like grief, so often described with reference to this physicality, vegetal time, scholars in critical plant studies contend, is materially embedded; it expresses duration in growth, in its expansion into space. For Paul Valéry, the vegetal “allow[s] one to see and sense true time.” “For a plant, a form is equivalent to an age—form is linked to size. Time is inextricable and

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correlatively tied to its life. A year is a node, a layer, a body separated from its surroundings and annexed, added onto, raised, directed, appointed, placed, built upon” (Ryan 2012, 101). Levy’s novel experiments twice with this kind of material growth and atrophy. From pages 111 to 113, a poem is accumulatively compiled in the interstices of human action. Just as Nina seems to observe Claude and Jurgen’s interaction from an “outside” (“He laughed and Claude laughed with him”), the poem appears as three lines offset from the action of the storyworld, bearing no relation to the text that surrounds it: “snowburst/drifting away/to the dark” (Levy 2011, 111). Two pages later, after Nina, Claude, and Jurgen drink beer and discuss European geography, Nirvana, and Kitty’s poem, the “snowburst” poem appears again, but this time repeating only the last two lines (“drifting away/to the dark”) before adding a third: “forest.” As Claude and Nina move closer and begin to kiss, a version of the poem, which builds on the previous lines (“to the dark/forest”), “bleeds” into the action of the story: where the trees bleed snowburst. (Levy 2011, 113)

In each iteration, lines of the previous instance are taken up and developed. The poem, like the forest it references, is something that grows (both in sense and space). We also see an example of this on a larger scale within the novel where we find three separate repetitions of the scene “A Mountain Road, Midnight” (Levy 2011, 3–4, 26, 146). In this scene, Kitty and Joe are driving; Joe asks her to keep her eyes on the road as he contemplates how “early humans had once lived in a forest that was now a road” (Levy 2011, 4). “They knew,” Joe thinks, “the past lived in rocks and trees and they knew desire made them awkward, mysterious, messed up” (Levy 2011, 4). Drawing him out of the distant past, Kitty tells Joe (in one of the repetitions) “Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely” (Levy 2011, 4). Yet, where the “snowburst” poem “grows,” the repetitions (with variation) of this scene diminish in size, in a literary wilting where decreased textual space maps onto a sense of ever-diminishing time, or an impending end: “you tried and you did not get home safely. You did not get home at all” (Levy 2011, 146). As well as suggesting the materiality of time, these plot-level repetitions create a cycling of experience that formally “collides,” to use Levine’s words, with the novel’s organization into clock time (2015, 51). As noted in the introduction, personal grief is generally managed by “assigning it periods, stages, or calendars”; however, the cyclic repetitions of this scene, which

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contains the grief of early societies, forests, and personal loss, challenges an ability to understand grief as “stadial or terminable” (Saint-Amour 2020, 141). Along with the accumulative phrasal repetition, and the scenic repetition with variation, the novel’s plot structure forces us to read in a cyclic manner: Swimming Home begins with its conclusion—something we only realize once we reach the end of the text, and which encourages us to go back and consider the beginning afresh. Similarly, the substitution of Kitty’s body with Joe’s in the pool cautions against a utopian understanding of cyclic regeneration of the type we see in the quotation from Job. Rather, against a simplistic faith in “natures cycles,” the repetitions with variation caution against cyclic consistency and the idea of endless regeneration and growth (Barr 2017, 192).5 While “trees will grow back,” they will not be “the same trees” (Miller 2019, 94). Even in a cycle, a repetition, something is irrevocably lost through change, or transformation. Repetition is, to paraphrase Deleuze, always an experience of difference (1968; Engl. 1994). The regrowth of trees also evokes their temporal heterogeneity: time not only cycles in the novel, but also cuts through delineations of past and present creating what David Herman calls a “fuzzy temporality” (Herman 2002, 12, passim). Joe’s daughter, Nina, who—according to McCarthy—emerges as the inheritor of the novel’s trauma, confesses: I have never got a grip on when the past begins or where it ends, but if cities map the past with statues made from bronze forever frozen in one dignified position, as much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day. (2011, 157)

Despite the parsing of time into years and calendar days, grief and—in particular ecological grief—share with the vegetal a resistance to the linear objectification of time. In a manner evocative of Nina’s “murmuring” past, Jesse Oak Taylor draws together work by scholars such as Eduardo Kohn (2013) and Tsing et al. (2017) to consider how material presences “haunt” the bodies of plants. Like histories gleaned through dendrochronology, “all life . . . houses by virtue of those constitutive absences, the traces of all that has come before it—the traces of that which it is not” (Kohn 2013, 212 in Oak Taylor 2019, 46). Similarly, describing the spectral presence of bodies there-and-not-there, Tsing et al. write: “Trees that grow back when cut down, such as oaks, may have evolved that ability in times when elephants trampled them. The ghosts of lost animals haunt these plants, even as the plants live on as our companions in the present” (2017, G4-5 in Oak Taylor 2019, 46). The vegetal holds within it multiple temporalities in a way that suggests an approach to time required in this Anthropocene moment: “Rooted in the losses that can begin in the deep past and extend into the deep future,

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it exceeds the span of human seasons, lifetimes, epochs, and even speciesbeing” (Saint-Amour 2020, 139). In addition, time in all of these examples is not something which sits still, but is instead, a multispecies murmuring, a Bergsonian “flow.” “Flow” also plays an important role in Han’s The Vegetarian. Like Swimming Home, Han’s novel portrays a troubled psyche enmeshed in human and nonhuman communities. Partially based on her short story “Fruit of My Woman” (1997), the novel follows the development of a woman who, after a vivid and disturbing dream, becomes a vegetarian (indeed, vegan). Her dietary decision also catalyzes her “becoming-plant”—a process through which, Magdalena Zolkos observes, she seeks an escape from the violence of human life (2019, 105). The novel culminates with her being rushed to critical care at a dangerously (if not fatally) low body weight—clinically diagnosed with schizophrenia and anorexia nervosa, Yeong-hye is adamant that she no longer needs food; she photosynthesizes. The opening section of The Vegetarian is told in first person by Yeong-hye’s husband, Mr Cheong, who is unsympathetic and aggressive. He describes Yeong-hye as more and more silent, cold, and passive, and complains about how her increasing “stubbornness” is a constant source of embarrassment and frustration for him.6 The climax of this section is a family dinner where Yeong-hye’s father forces a piece of meat into her mouth. “Growl[ing]” and with “an animal cry of distress,” she takes a knife from the kitchen and cuts into her wrists (Han 2015, 40). This section ends with Yeong-hye in hospital, sunning herself naked outside, a small bird crushed in her hand (Han 2015, 40). The second part of the novel shifts to third-person narration and is focalized through Yeong-hye’s brotherin-law. A struggling artist, he becomes fixated on Yeong-hye’s birth mark (described in the text as a “Mongolian mark”)—a mark he says “called to mind something ancient, something pre-evolutionary, or else perhaps a mark of photosynthesis” (Han 2015, 83). Inspired by the mark, he asks Yeong-hye to model for him, painting flowers over her body while filming. While he claims the mark is more “vegetal than sexual” (Han 2015, 83), his artistic experiments result in his long-fantasized coupling of their botanically painted bodies—bodies which are, at the section’s end, discovered by his wife and Yeong-hye’s sister, In-hye. The novel’s final section, “Flaming Trees,” continues the third-person narration, but the focalization shifts to In-hye. This section details In-hye’s regular (and final) visits with Yeong-hye, and shifts to present-tense narration in a move that foregrounds the section’s preoccupation with time. The novel ends ambiguously: In-hye is rushed to hospital with her dying sister, past “blazing” trees, which are like “green fire undulating like the rippling flanks of a massive animal” (Han 2015, 183). Focusing her attention completely on the forest, In-hye “stares fiercely at the trees” with a “look in her eyes that is dark and insistent” (Han 2015, 183).

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Like Swimming Home, the novel involves both micro (phrasal) and macro (event) repetitions. On a larger scale, the shocking events of the dinner party are repeated, in varying forms, over the three different sections of the novel (Han 2015, 40–41, 66, 136). What is particularly noticeable, however, is the phrasal repetition that occurs in the final section of the novel, “Flaming Trees”: Time passes. These words are repeated five times in the section before the variation “Now there’s no more time left” (Han 2015, 154, 155, 160, 166, 170, and 171). Each time the Woolfian phrase is repeated, it is isolated above the rest of the text, detached from the human events that follow. With each repetition, we are reminded of temporal phenomena that sit apart from, and are indifferent to, human life. Yet, as noted in Marder’s work, and as we saw in Levy’s novel, botanical time is materially embedded. “Time passes” is not an abstract phrase; it denotes a continual flow of materiality. Like the nonhuman interlude of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), where dampness and the “little airs” “flow over and erase all the intricate structures of human community,” it is possible to argue—repurposing Louise Westling’s work— that the focus on nonhuman bodies and the relentless phrasal repetition in the final section of The Vegetarian “plunges [the narrative] into the very energies flowing through the sea of being . . . in which people are no more consequential than brief flashes of light” (Westling 1999, 860, 862). The nonhuman forces which “disassemble” human time in this section of the novel are an assemblage of the affective and elemental. The forest in this final section, even in its fiery “blazing” takes on a liquid, wave-like quality— a “green fire undulating”—connecting it with cycles of affective repetition (Han 2015, 183). Here, rhythm takes the shape of a grief that exceeds the bounds of the human, one which is, like the waves’ continual march to and retreat from the shore, “long, hard, laborious work that [is] never truly concluded”: “Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life which she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart” (Cunsolo and Landman 2017, 8; Han 2015, 139). In-hye’s grief is tightly bound with the vegetal form her sister is imperceptibly becoming. She thinks about the “innumerable trees she’s seen over the course of her life, the undulating forests which blanket the continents like a heartless sea”; they “envelop her exhausted body and lift her up” (Han 2015, 169). Like Woolf’s “airs,” the grief-tree-ocean assemblage is a flow which destabilizes human structures: “Only fragments of cities, small towns and roads are visible, floating on the roof of the forest like islands or bridges, slowly being swept away somewhere, borne on those warm waves” (Han 2015, 169). While being cautious to neither glorify nor ignore Yeong-hye’s mental illness, it is possible to read her fixation on the botanic alongside Val Plumwood’s ecological approach to mortality.7 According to Plumwood, modernism has instilled in, what she describes as, the “contemporary western identity” an aversion to death that we seek to counter through a transcendentalism where the spirit

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ascends from the decaying body (2008, 327). Materially, people often choose to cordon off bodies from the earth in coffins and lay slabs of concrete to deter digging fauna (2008, 326). Plumwood’s essay “Tasteless: A Food-Based Approach to Death” (2008), was conceived after two brushes with mortality: a crocodile attack and the burying of her son. After being in the jaws of the crocodile, Plumwood realizes that she had existed in a philosophical system that designates humans as eaters but never eaten—a system that promotes notions of human exceptionalism. In her shift to vegetarianism, Yeong-hye seeks to unsettle a structure reinforced through a lifetime of eating animal bodies. In the botanic, she finds a form closer to earth, the soil, and the reality that she will be consumed in a “decay that benefits other forms of life” (Plumwood 2008, 327): “Look, sister, I’m doing a handstand; leaves are growing out of my body, roots are sprouting out of my hands . . . they delve down into the earth. Endlessly, endlessly . . . yes, I spread my legs because I wanted flowers to bloom from my crotch; I spread them wide” (Han 2015, 127, italics in original). “Why, is it such a bad thing to die?” Yeong-hye asks her sister (Han 2015, 157). Plumwood notes that while “at the individual level death confirms transience” on “the level of the ecological community, it can affirm an enduring, resilient cycle or process” (2008, 328). An ecological approach to death like the one articulated by Plumwood “reveal[s] a route to healing grief through the joyful vision it offer[s] of death as flowing into . . . a tranquil and beautiful landscape” (2008, 328). While landscapes may not be, or always stay, tranquil, “bodily decay,” she argues, is “the ground of entry to a sacred ecological community” (2008, 329). Just as In-hye’s imagines her body being swept away, we can reconceptualize mortality and subsequent decay as an ecological process that allows us to “honour the dissolution of the human into the more-than-human flux” (Plumwood 2008, 330, emphasis mine). OIKOS: SYMPLASM AND SOCIETY In Forms, Caroline Levine argues that literary texts function as sites “where multiple forms cross and collide, inviting us to think in new ways about power” (2015, 122). Both Swimming Home and The Vegetarian are preoccupied with networks and (to different degrees) both constellate around the collectives of family and forest. As well as denoting a group existing in a single household, the term “family” has botanical roots being used, from as early as the 1640s, to describe a group of related plants (“family,” n. 2a and 8a, OED). Both Han and Levy use figurative language to draw together these two senses of the word. In The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye turns to In-hye saying, “Sister . . . all the trees of the world are like brothers and sisters” (148). And, in Swimming Home, Kitty asserts that “Plants are always from some sort of family” (19). While perhaps scientifically referring to genera, poet Joe engages with her statement figuratively: “He was impressed by the tender way she held the plants in her fingers

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and spoke about them with easy intimacy, as if indeed they were a family with various problems and unusual qualities” (Levy 2011, 18–19). Yet, beyond simile, both texts appear to explore how grief motivates the “cross and collision” of human and nonhuman networks. I will first consider (and problematize) the rhizomatic quality of Swimming Home. Here, rhizome is understood, following Deleuze and Guattari, as “a-centered, nonhierarchical, and nonsignifying” connections created “solely by a circulation of states” (1980, 5). I then turn to The Vegetarian and the concentration and creation of networks of grief through Yeong-hye’s vegetal transformation. The nine different character focalizations of Levy’s Swimming Home are linked through the recurring motif of (loss of) “home”: Table 3.1  Character Focalizations in Levy’s Swimming Home Character

Reference

Page(s)

Kitty

• We hope . . . we’ll all get home safely. • “Swimming Home by Kitty Finch.” • I live with my mother at the moment, but it’s not my home. • You did not get home at all. • He asked her again to please, please, please drive him home safely home to his wife and daughter. • Did it [the bear] ever get home? • None of them [the words] had swum home. They were all caught on the way. • Perhaps he should beg the staff to drive him home? • He knew he must leave no trace or trail of his existence because he must never find his way home. That is what his father had told him. You cannot come home. • She was not ready to go home and start imitating someone she used to be. • It would seem that Kitty Finch could make herself at home anywhere. • The house in London Kitty referred to wasn’t exactly cozy. • She and Mitchell could no longer make ends meet. They could barely pay their mortgage. When they returned to London they would have to sell their house. • [To Kitty] Haven’t you got a home to go to? • Homesick Aliens section. • [ET] finds a way of getting home to his own planet. • Come on, Kitty Ket, I’ll take you home. • Even after fifteen years living in France, wretched as she was from her country of birth and her first language. • She had telephoned Kitty’s mother, who would be arriving early on Sunday morning to collect her daughter and take her home. • Why did you [Isabel] invite a stranger into your home? • Homesick Aliens section. • Perhaps he [Joe] is homesick. He wants to go home to his planet.

4 47 58 146 4

Joe

Isabel

Nina Laura

Mitchell Jurgen

Madeleine Sheridan

Claude

6 132

30 62 70 98

58 51–53 52 125 16–17 134

135 51–53 53

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In a work on Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), a novel primarily interested in relationships between humans and trees, I have argued that it is possible to trace textual patterns across character sections in a way that maps analogically onto the chemical signaling of plants (Lambert, in print). Plants have been shown to participate in complex biosemiotic exchanges across species, with material signals in the form of chemicals and hormones, for instance, being sent in patterned packages—via a mycelial or fungal webs made of mycorrhizal fungi—to neighboring trees equipped with “pattern recognition receptors” (Witzany 2006, 172). In some ways, it is possible to read the nostalgic effect of Swimming Home’s refrain of “home” in a similar methodological vein—that is, as a process of “making kin” beyond the “biological family,” a process, Donna Haraway argues is about the “giving and receiving of patterns” (Haraway 2016, 10). However, while it is tempting to interpret these circulations as a kind of storied “symplasm” where a “continuous cellular connection . . . extends through [the] plant” (Myers 2015, 37), the fact that all characters (besides Kitty Finch) fail to “receive” the grief signals of others problematizes this kind of analogical mapping. Kitty alone, whom Joe describes as “as receptive as it was possible to be,” is able to transmit and receive patterns across bodily boundaries (Levy 2011, 88). Walking into an orchard Kitty begins to point out to Joe all of the trees which “were not doing too well” (Levy 2011, 18). Joe asks, “Do you only notice the trees that suffer?” “Yes, I suppose I do” (Levy 2011, 18). Drawing on the work of Judith Butler (2004), Cunsolo and Landman note how suffering has the capacity to draw attention to “our relations to and connections with others” (2017, 12). Yet, despite glimmers of connectivity, a more sustained sense of effectively motivated relationality— either intra-species or interspecies—does not emerge within the text. Rather, what seems to be the case, especially in light of the novel’s ending, is that the rhizomatic assemblage of characters is a surface, stylistic effect created through thematic repetition across character focalizations. Lost in the etcs of their individuality, the characters of Swimming Home are unable to create a community that has the capacity to “depersonalize affect” and “collective[ly] transform . . . negative relations” (Braidotti 2018, 222). In contrast to Swimming Home, the networks we find in The Vegetarian are far less visible. As scholars have observed, Yeong-hye’s decision to turn vegetarian cannot be easily categorized as “personal” (Stobie 2017; Kim 2019). Rather, in refusing to eat meat, she rebels against a carnophallogocentric society that oppresses both women and animals (Stobie 2017; Won-Chung 2019). According to Thom van Dooren, “mourning is intrinsic to cultivating response-ability” (van Dooren in Haraway 2016, 38), and in The Vegetarian, Yeong-hye’s own suffering within a patriarchal system, encourages her to form empathetic ties with bodies exploited in similarly oppressive structural systems (Stobie 2017, 96–97). At the end of the novel’s first section,

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Yeong-hye describes her sense of the collective animal lives lodged in her breastbone: Something is stuck in my solar plexus . . . Yells and howls, threaded layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides. (Han 2015, 46, italics in original)

Yeong-hye’s body, we discover, “contain[s] multitudes” (Whitman 1892). In this sense, it can be argued that her body becomes a site for collective and transspecies mourning in a quasi-funeral rite that gathers and remembers lost bodies and lives. In The Vegetarian, “multiplicity” replaces individual subjectivity and collective grief and suffering are rendered visible in Yeong-hye’s atrophying body. In her attempt to become tree, itself a highly networked and largely symbiotic form, Yeong-hye seeks an escape from the systematic violence of patriarchal and anthropocentric networks (Zolkos 2019). In turning to trees, which appear as vegetal but also as animal (Han 2015, 124, 183), Yeong-hye attempts to create an “enlarged sense of a vital interconnection with a multitude of (human and non-human) others by removing the obstacle of selfcentred individualism and anthropocentrism” (Braidotti 2018, 222). As Marder reminds us, each single plant “is a community, too” (Marder 2013, 183). Quoting Joseph Amato, Won-Chung Kim argues that Yeong-hye’s “skeletal anorexic body exerts ‘a powerful moral claim upon us’” (Amato 1990, xx; Won-Chung 2019, 8). In the final section of the novel, our experience is channeled through In-hye’s guilt-ridden present-tense focalization and we are prompted to see ourselves—as In-hye does—reflected in Yeong-hye’s “empty black pupils” (Han 2015, 167). In other words, her botanic transformation lays claim upon the reader, rendering visible the networks that (s)he (may) unknowingly perpetuate and in which (s)he may be complicit. In this sense, and in a manner distinctly evocative of Cyparissus, grief and suffering cause Yeong-hye’s transformation into a tree, and create a network of grief. Situating Yeong-hye’s body within the networks of grief it makes visible, her botanic transformation can be read as an, if extreme, indication of “how we must ourselves change” (van Dooren and Bird Rose 2017, 376). CONCLUSION “Never forget,” Natasha Myer says, quoting Haraway, that “your body does not end at the skin” (Haraway 1987, 36 in Myers 2014, n.p.). In a text which

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experiments with the idea of “cultivating your inner plant,” Myers offers a set of instructions to become botanic: after finding a place in the sun, sinking your feet into the ground, reaching your arms outward, you are ready to follow the imaginative cues she gives to cultivate your practice of becomingplant. “Feel the rush,” she instructs, as you redistribute your awareness through this thin, filigreed tangle of roots that branch and branch . . . Feel your whole root system humming with an electric charge. You have become one giant nerve cell merging with soil. Now hook yourself into a thickening mycelial network of fungi, microbes, and other roots around you. Feel the energetic thrill of connection. How far can you extend your awareness? Run with it, in every direction. (n.p.)8

Myers’s instructions guide a spiritual practice that, through imaginative leaps and affective alignments, draws attention to a “multispecies ecology” (2014, n.p.). In “Environmental Mourning and the Religious Imagination” (2017), Nancy Menning makes a case for looking to spiritual and religious practices and models of mourning for insight into navigating ecological grief. She is interested in how mourning “rituals” structure our grief experiences around a particular event or loss, while practices (which she sees as existing on a continuum with rituals) might help us to cultivate resilience to loss by “creat[ing], nurtur[ing], and draw[ing] attention to connections” (2017, 59). Through their attention to vegetal rhythms and networks, it is possible to argue that texts like Levy’s and Han’s serve as fictional sites that might allow readers to practice loss and grief-work in ways that are more sensitive to nonhuman temporalities and bodies. In Matters of Care (2017), Maria Puig de la Bellacasa argues that “time,” for example, “is not a given; it is not that we have or not have time but that we make it through practices” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 175, emphasis in original). Along with Myers’s and Yeong-hye’s practices of becoming botanic, and the vegetalized approaches to heterogenous and dispersed grief in Swimming Home and The Vegetarian, green burial practices and memorial tree urns problematize the idea that burial is a “definitive human practice [that] produces human time, creating layers of past, present and future” (Heath-Kelly 2018, 70). Instead, the attention afforded to interspecies communities by practices like these, suggest a “more fluid and embodied concept of self and its boundaries can be employed here to suggest a complex narrative of continuities, in which the story goes on, although no longer mainly a story about human subjects” (Plumwood 2008, 328). What the Anthropocene “reminds the human” is, to cite Pieter Vermeulen, that “it can never simply coincide with a particular form of life” (2015, 140). Instead, as Munch’s vegetal quotation reminds

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us, humans are, to use Darwin’s words, continually cycling through “endless forms most beautiful” (Darwin 1859, 427; Merola 2018, 34; figure 1).

NOTES 1. Darwin was, of course fascinated by plants. In his Power of Movement in Plants (1880), Darwin “carefully describes plant growth movements and draws attention to the remarkable similarities between the movements of plants and animals” (Hall 2011, 139). See Matthew Hall, 2011. 2. In “Environmental Mourning and the Religious Imagination” (2017), Nancy Menning describes grief as emotions which are “largely passive,” while mourning is the structured “action we embark on to heal what has been harmed within us by the severing of relationships that matter deeply to us” (58–59). 3. Groups such as The Extinction Rebellion, a movement explicitly motivated by grief rather than optimism, are also challenging this idea. 4. See Caroline Levine (2015) for more on formal “affordances.” 5. In “Auguries of Elegy: The Art and Ethics of Ecological Grieving” (2017), Jessica Marion Barr notes how “prior to the World Wars, elegies (Western European and British in particular) were premised on resolving mourning and finding consolidation and comfort in nature’s cycles, in the flourishing of the nation-state, and in the visions of eternal life in heaven” (192). 6. Unlike her husband, we are given six fleeting moments of insight into Yeonghye’s far-from-passive world. Scattered within the husband’s first-person narration, we find italicized passages which, written in the first-person voice of Yeong-hye, give us an insight into her internal world, her dreams and thoughts of blood, gore, violence, and guilt (12, 19, 28, 32–33, 41–42, 49). 7. For more on mental health in The Vegetarian, see Marchalik and Jurecic 2017. 8. Myers asks, “at what point do you lose track of ‘you’? When does ‘I’ dissipate? Plants are not autonomous individuals with clear-cut boundaries. Plants are porous to the very atmospheres they make, and they ingather a multispecies ecology around them, catching all kinds in their whorl” (2014, n.p.).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Amato, Joseph A. 1990. Victims and Values: A History and a Theory of Suffering. New York: Praeger. Barr, Jessica Marion. 2017. “Auguries of Elegy: The Art and Ethics of Ecological Grieving.” In Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, edited by Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman, 190–226. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press. Berlant, Lauren Gail. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Bladow, Kyle A., and Jennifer K. Ladino, eds 2018. Affective Ecocriticsm: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2018. “Joy, Ethics of.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 221–24. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Brinkema, Eugenie. 2014. The Forms of the Affects. Durham: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 2004. Precious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Caracciolo, Marco, and Shannon Lambert. 2019. “Narrative Bodies and Nonhuman Transformations.” SubStance 48 (3, 150): 45–63. Cunsolo, Ashlee, and Karen Landman. 2017. “Introduction: To Mourn beyond the Human.” In Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, edited by Ashlee Cunsolo and Karen Landman, 3–26. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species. New York: Penguin. Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. “Family.” n, 2a and 8a. OED Online. Third Edition, 2013. Hall, Matthew. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. SUNY Series on Religion and the Environment. Albany: State University of New York Press. Han, Kang. 2007. The Vegetarian: A Novel. Translated by Deborah Smith. London: Portobello Books, 2015. Haraway, Donna. 1987. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Australian Feminist Studies 2 (4): 1–42. ———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices. Durham: Duke University Press. Heath-Kelly, Charlotte. 2018. “Survivor Trees and Memorial Groves: Vegetal Commemoration of Victims of Terrorism in Europe and the United States.” Political Geography 64: 63–72, Accessed October 22, 2020. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​ 016​/j​​.polg​​eo​.20​​​18​.03​​.003. Herman, David. 2002. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lambert, Shannon. “‘Mycorrhizal Multiplicities’: Mapping Collective Agency in Richard Powers’ The Overstory.” In Nonhuman Agency in the 21st Century Novel, edited by Bettina Burger, Yvonne Liebermann, and Judith Rahn. Palgrave Macmillan. In print. Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press. Levy, Deborah. 2011. Swimming Home. High Wycombe, England: And Other Stories.

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Long, Litt Woon. 2019. The Way through the Woods: On Mushrooms and Mourning. First U.S. edition. New York: Spiegel & Grau. Lyall, Sarah. 2019. “A Unique and Affecting Memoir Combines Grief and Mushrooms.” The New York Times, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​019​/0​​8​ /14/​​books​​/revi​​ew​-wa​​y​-thr​​ough-​​woods​​-mush​​rooms​​-mour​​ning-​​​long-​​litt-​​woon.​​html. Accessed November 20, 2019. Marchalik, Daniel, and Ann Jurecic. 2017. “Mental Illness in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.” The Lancet 389 (10065): 147. https://doi​.org​/10​.1016​/S0140​ -6736(17)30010-7. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. McCarthy, Tom. 2011. “Afterword.” In Swimming Home, 159–60. Sheffield: And Other Stories. Merola, Nicole M. 2018. “‘what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this/ minute atmosphere’: Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety.” In Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment, edited by Kyle A. Bladow and Jennifer K. Ladino, 25–50. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. 2019. “Fixed Capiral and the Flow: Water Power, Steam Power, and The Mill on the Floss.” In Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, 85–100. New York: Fordham University Press. Miller, John MacNeill. 2017. “Composing Decomposition: ‘In Memoriam’ and the Ecocritical Undertaking.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 39 (5): 383–98. https​:/​/do​​i​ .org​​/10​.1​​080​/0​​89054​​95​.20​​17​​.13​​71826​. Myers, Natasha. 2014. “Sensing Botanical Sensoria: A Kriya for Cultivating Your Inner Plant.” Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, n.p. https://imaginative-ethnography.com/imaginings/affect/sensing-botanical-sensoria/. Accessed November 20, 2019. ———. 2015. “Conversations on Plant Sensing: Notes from the Field.” NatureCulture, 3: 35–66. https://www.natcult.net/journal/issue-3/. Accessed November 20, 2019. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Oak Taylor, Jesse. 2019. “Mourning Species: ‘In Memoriam’ in an Age of Extinction.” In Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire, edited by Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, 42–62. New York: Fordham University Press. Plumwood, Val. 2008. “Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death.” Environmental Values 17 (3): 323–30. Potter, Polyxeni. 2011. “From My Rotting Body, Flowers Shall Grow, and I Am in Them, and That Is Eternity.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 17 (3): 573–74. https:// doi​.org​/10​.3201​/eid1703​.AC1703. Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Posthumanities 41. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Roffe, Jon, and Hannah Stark. 2015. “Deleuze and the Nonhuman Turn: An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz.” In Deleuze and the Non/Human, edited by Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark, 17–24. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Ryan, John. 2012. “Passive Flora? Reconsidering Nature’s Agency through HumanPlant Studies (HPS).” Societies, 2: 101–21. https://doi​.org​/10​.3390. Saint-Amour, Paul K. 2020. “There Is Grief of a Tree.” American Imago 77 (1): 137–55. Seymour, Nicole. 2018. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stobie, Caitlin E. 2017. “The Good Wife? Sibling Species in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24 (4): 787–802. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/isle​/isx073. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tutter, Adele. 2011. “Metamorphosis and the Aesthetics of Loss: I. Mourning Daphne –The ‘Apollo and Daphne’ Paintings of Nicolas Poussin.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92 (2): 427–49. https​:/​/do​​i​.org​​/10​.1​​111​/j​​.1745​​-8315​​ .2011​​​.0039​​6​.x. Vermeulen, Pieter. 2015. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Westling, Louise. 1999. “Virginia Woolf and the Flesh of the World.” New Literary History 30 (4): 855–75. Witzany, Günther. 2006. “Plant Communication from a Biosemiotic Perspective: Differences in Abiotic and Biotic Signal Perception Determinate Conent Arrangement of Response Behavior. Context Determines Meaning of Meta-, Interand Intra- Organismic Plant Signaling.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 1 (4). https​:/​/ ww​​w​.ncb​​i​.nlm​​.nih.​​gov​/p​​mc​/ar​​ticle​​s​/P​MC​​26340​​23/. Won-Chung, Kim. 2019. “Eating and Suffering in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 21 (5). https://doi​.org​/10​.7771​ /1481​-4374​.3390. Zolkos, Magdalena. 2019. “Bereft of Interiority: Motifs of Vegetal Transformation, Escape and Fecundity in Luce Irigaray’s Plant Philosophy and Han Kang’s The Vegetarian.” SubStance 48 (2): 102–18.

Chapter 4

Russian Bodies, Russian Trees Examples of Interconnections between the Tree of the Motherland and the Soviet People Igor Piumetti

INTRODUCTION 200 meters. In the moment I am writing this article, the world economy is collapsing under the pressure of coronavirus. What once was impossible to imagine seems now to have become a reality: stopping the capitalist system. 200 meters. This is the distance we, living in Piedmont, are allowed to reach far from home. What I am missing most is not only my beloved parents or my dearest friends: in most cases that distance gave me the possibility to get in touch with most of them, even more frequently than before. I am not missing dinners in restaurants, resting at bars. I am missing especially nature. My 200 meters allow me to reach the river Po, and I am happy to reach, whenever I have the chance to do that, the big trees along this river. They keep on growing. Even in this lost spring. A spring that, actually, seems to be lost only for us, not for the rest of nature. This distance from what I love is nothing else but the palest representation of what might mean losing everything in a war, but it really helped me understand how much value a person, like Stepan Trofimov, the hero of the tale I am going to analyze, can give to a leaf. DEREVO RODINY: ANDREJ PLATONOV’S TREE OF THE MOTHERLAND In this essay, I intend to discuss the representation of the “tree of the motherland” as described by Andrej Platonov in his tale and by Vladimir Petkevič in his short, animated movie. These two artists, belonging to different artistic 71

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fields, entitled their work Derevo rodiny (The tree of the motherland). The creation of the tale and of the movie is not coeval, but many elements suggest a strong relationship between the two artworks. First of all, the presence of the tree and its relationship with people around it. In the past years, the role of forests and trees in Russian literature attracted several scholars (Costlow, 2013), but the motif of Derevo rodiny itself seems to appear for the first time in Platonov’s work. The theme of the tree of the motherland, even from different artistic perspectives, emerged in the representation of two critical phases of Russian history. Andrej Platonov’s tale was published during the Second World War. This war represented a historical event that strongly affected the collective consciousness since its beginning. What is commonly called Second World War is actually called in Russian “Vtoraja Otečestvennaja vojna,” the Second Patriotic war. It is called “second” since the first one was fought against the French troops led by Napoleon. Invaded for the second time by a European enemy, Soviet Russia had to face this terrible situation despite its technical failures. Nevertheless, the propaganda machine strongly worked to keep up the spirit of the troops and of the people. The second tree of the motherland, the short, animated movie by Petkevič, appeared in the critical moment of the late 1980s, during the deep transformation that led to the end of the Soviet Union. In this period the attempts by Gorbačëv to transform the Soviet Union (we all remember keywords like glasnost’ or perestrojka) were not able to prevent the collapse of the Soviet system. In both cases, Platonov and Petkevič were living in moments that were critical for their country and both recurred to the image of a tree to describe the situation of their motherland. Although the animated film by Petkevič is not the adaptation of the tale written by Andrej Platonov, some similarities allow us to underline the presence of common elements in both works: as I will demonstrate in the present essay, these elements somehow allow us to see the animated movie as a sequel of the tale. I would also like to mention that Derevo rodiny is the title of a graphic novel created by Zachar Jaščin, based on the tale written by Andrej Platonov in 1942, and published in 2015 (Jaščin 2015, 81–94). This graphic novel appears in the collection of graphic versions of Andrej Platonov’s tales entitled Cvety na zemle (Flowers on earth). Jaščin’s Derevo rodiny is the graphic adaptation of Andrej Platonov’s tale, a stimulating intersemiotic translation offering interesting food for thought. For this adaptation, Jaščin used the common title Derevo rodiny, and not the “original” title Bož’e derevo. Andrej Platonov during the Second Patriotic war worked as a correspondent for the newspaper Krasnaja Zvezda. In this period, he was allowed to publish four books, mainly collections of tales dedicated to the war. This happened after a long period in which Platonov’s activity as a writer was not encouraged by the Soviet Regime. In the early months of 1930, Platonov

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started working on the first draft of the short story Vprok (For future use), “a largely satirical portrayal of efforts to collectivize the Russian countryside” (Seifrid 1992, 11), but was then published in 1931 by the magazine Krasnaja nov and soon arrived on Stalin’s desk. The dictator labelled the author with the epithet “swine.” From that moment the critics started attacking Platonov, accusing him of slandering the new man, the socialist transformations and the mainline of the party. Platonov sent letters to the editors of the main newspapers, in which he admitted his mistakes. But neither the Pravda nor the Literaturnaja Gazeta dared to publish the letter of the writer, who would be cut off from any publication for many years. The war represented a great new opportunity for Platonov: in 1942 he started working as war correspondent for the newspaper Krasnaja Zvezda. In that period his articles and tales allowed him to gain new popularity and to be able to serve his country, giving his own contribution to the war as an artist and a writer. DEREVO RODINY OR BOŽ’E DEREVO In 1942, Andrej Platonov published the short tale as part of the collection Pod nebesami rodiny (Under the skies of our motherland). The tale was published with the title of Derevo rodiny, although the original title was Bož’e Derevo (The divine tree). Traces of the core theme of the tale can be found in Platonov’s notebooks (Platonov 2000, 226). Here, in the twentieth notebook, he talked about “Божье древо”—листик в карцере, в каземате заключенного, листик, вынутый из штанов, из “заначки.” Он думал, что лист тот с божьего древа (Translation: “The divine tree”: a leaf in the punishment cell, in the prisoner's casemate, a leaf taken out of his pants, where it was hidden. He thought that leaf from the divine tree. All translations are mine). In this note, we can identify the core theme of the second part of the tale, where the Nazi enemy imprisons the main character. The difference with the last version of the tale is subtle, since in the published tale the prisoner is naked and does not wear pants. The most interesting element here is related to the title. Indeed, as we can see, Platonov refers to the tale as Bož’e Derevo (The divine tree) not as Derevo rodiny (The tree of the motherland). The tendency of Platonov to recur to double titles is not rare and has been already studied in the past. In particular, Kornienko in 2000 focused on the problem of double titles in Platonov’s tales written between the 1930s and the 1940s (Kornienko 2000, 22). Although in that study the choice of a second title for the tales seems related to creative reasons, in the case of Bož’e derevo–Derevo rodiny, this explanation might not be so satisfying. As a matter of fact, we cannot state whether he decided to change the title or he

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was forced to change it for the publication, in any case in the complete collected works published in 2012 it appears, as in the original version from his archives, with the name Bož’e derevo (The divine tree). The reason why I suggest that the change of this specific title might not depend on the author’s will is related to the presence of the word “divine,” which might not have been appreciated by censorship. The project of a tale called The divine tree dates back to 1941, and is attested in a letter sent by Andrej Platonov to Natal’ja Vladimorovna I’ičnaja, a member of the editorial board of the journal Pioner. In this letter, the author proposes the publication of two “antifascist and contemporary” tales, one of which is The divine tree. Unfortunately, the tale was published by the journal Novyj Mir only in 1943, a year after the publication within the collection Pod nebesami rodiny in 1942 (Varlamov 2010, 48). Platonov’s proposal to the journal Pioner points out another important element that we must take into consideration: the tale addresses children and is part of the work that the author dedicated to children’s literature. In particular, Platonov worked on short tales, plays for children, and fairy tales (e.g., the collection of Russian fairy tales Volšebnoe kol’co, The magic ring, published in 1950). Derevo rodiny can be divided into two sections, which differ in many respects. This duality is expressed by a different setting for the narrated action, by a different representation of nature and by the different language used. The first setting can be identified as “the motherland”: a generic portion of typical Russian countryside where the hero of the tale, Stepan Trofimov (probably a peasant), lives with his mother. He abandons his house to go and fight for his motherland, but before leaving, he stops under the tree that the people of his village call the “divine tree” and takes one of its leaves. He hides the leave under his shirt and walks away. Here, we have a short passage introducing the reader to the second setting, represented by the war front, the land occupied by the enemy. After a short military training, he reaches the front and starts fighting with his battalion, till one night during a military operation he is shot, caught by the enemy, and imprisoned. Trofimov finds himself in a room, probably inside a hut: he is still in Russia, since he can see a portrait of the famous Russian poet Puškin on the wall. Here, he is questioned, since the enemies think that he cannot be just a simple soldier. At the end of the tale, he wakes up naked in a sort of dark prison-pit illuminated by the grey-light of a lamp. He then discovers that the leaf of the divine tree, covered in dry blood, is still stuck to his body. He then sticks the leaf to the wall right above his head. In that moment this leaf, the symbol of his motherland, is also his only possession. In that moment, he decides to protect this leaf, his only belonging, and to kill any enemy who will enter the cell.

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I now would like to focus on some interesting elements that occur in the description of the tree and the place where Trofimov comes from. What I call “the motherland” is described right at the beginning of the tale. Moreover, of course this description contains a precise sketch of the tree: Мать с ним попрощалась на околице; дальше Степан Трофимов пошел один. Там, при выходе из деревни, у края проселочной дороги, которая . . . уходила отсюда на весь свет—там росло одинокое старое дерево, покрытое синими листьями, влажными и блестящими от молодой своей силы. Старые люди на деревне давно прозвали это дерево “божьим,” потому что оно было не похоже на другие деревья, растущие в русской равнине, потому что его не однажды на его стариковском веку убивала молния с неба, но дерево, занемогши немного, потом опять оживало и еще гуще прежнего одевалось листьями и потому еще, что это дерево любили птицы. Они пели там и жили, и дерево это в летнюю сушь не сбрасывало на землю своих детей—лишние увядшие листья, а замирало все целиком, ничем не жертвуя, ни с кем не расставаясь, что выросло на нем и было живым. (Platonov 2012, 11) [At the end of the village, at the edge of a country road, which . . . led to the whole world, grew a lonely old tree, covered in blue leaves, wet and shining in its young strength. The old people in the village long ago called this tree “divine,” because it was not similar to any other tree growing on the Russian land, because the lightning from the sky struck it many times in its old life: but the tree, after falling ill, came to life again and it dressed itself with even more leaves than before, and also because the birds loved this tree, they sang and lived there, and this tree during the summer dryness did not dump to the ground its children, the unnecessary dry leaves, but everything was still all around it, with no sacrifice, with no abandonments, and whatever grew on this tree was alive.] (All translations are mine)

The description offered by Andrej Platonov is quite peculiar and reveals how the language used by Platonov is evocative, particularly in the first part, where he describes the setting of the motherland. In these few lines, we can perceive Platonov’s narrative techniques, which somehow remind one of old Russian legends and mythology. In particular, it is necessary to focus on some elements emerging from this description and regarding the tree. First of all, the tree is described as old, alone, and unique. Its uniqueness is revealed by the color of its leaves. Of course, there are some blue trees in nature, especially if we consider the presence of flowers, but the presence of plants or even trees with blue leaves is

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quite unusual in the Russian vegetation. More likely, we have to see a symbol in the choice of the blue color. Blue is the color of the sky, the place where God resides in the Christian tradition; but blue is also the color of the cloak of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. This element could be the reason why this tree is called “divine.” This tree seems to be extraordinary also for its ability to provide a shelter to the birds that hide among its branches and because even the worst weather conditions have never affected its life. On the contrary, it seems to have grown even stronger. In particular, we can read that this tree was “struck by lightning,” but it was able to survive. This expression from the perspective of a “divine tree” can refer to its ability of being “eternal,” even stronger than nature. However, from the perspective of the description of its own motherland, Platonov uses these words to refer to the many times when Russia was attacked by the enemies and was still able to survive. Examples may go from the invasion of the French troops in the so-called First Patriotic war we mentioned above, or even from the long Mongol occupation of Kievan Rus’ (thirteen–fifteen century). One more significant aspect of the description consists in the uniqueness of the “divine tree”: indeed, it is different from any tree growing in Russia, and this fact raises doubts as far as its real existence is concerned. After all, considering that this tale was written for children and that the tone of the description evokes a magic world, we might probably say that this “divine tree,” at least in this first part, shows magical features. A mix of magic and spirituality is deeply present in the old Russian epic songs (byliny). Therefore, it is very likely that in this description Platonov tries to evoke the traditionally epic atmospheres that surround the hero of the epic songs. In this respect, it can be interesting to look at the visual translation created by Zachar Jaščin in 2015. In this case, the artist represented an oak tree. His drawing is in black and white, so we cannot see whether the leaves are actually blue. The process by which an object described through words is made visually perceivable always implies a loss of its evocative strength: even in this case, the tree, once drawn and fixed on paper, loses some of its mysterious aura. The choice of an oak tree might be in contrast with the indication given by Platonov of “a tree not similar to any other tree growing on the Russian land.” However, this choice is not in total contrast with other symbols and characteristics attributed by Platonov to his tree. The oak is actually a very common tree in Russia. Furthermore, oak trees are usually very strong and resistant and oak forests are full of life: their height allows the light to reach the soil and their leaves facilitate the growth of other plants. Their branches offer a shelter to animals: indeed, cicadas in an ancient Greek Epigram by Anyte of Tegea were called drykóitai, “the ones that live in the oaks” (Pontani 1979, 196; Cattabiani 1998, 52). Moreover, in the ancient Russian tradition,

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oak was the sacred tree of Perun. He was the god of thunder and the creator of lightning (Cattabiani 1998, 56). Therefore, from this perspective, Jaščin chooses a tree, which, unlike the one described by Andrej Platonov, is common in Russia. Conversely, the artist preserves both the ancient symbology of the tree related to the god of thunder and the role of the oak as strong shelter for animals and plants, as they are described also by Platonov. A final example worth mentioning might be the poet Aleksej Merzljakov (1778–1830) who also portrayed a lonely oak in his famous song Sredi doliny rovnyja (Among the Spreading Vale): here the oak seems to be humanized, and sings its sadness and its solitude, longing for its motherland (Cosltow 2013, 99–100). In this description, Andrej Platonov opts for some lexical choices that reflect a relationship between human beings and trees. Indeed, this tree seems somehow anthropomorphized: Platonov says that it “falls ill” and describes its leaves calling them “its children.” This last choice is particularly relevant, since it brings us to focus on a sort of isomorphism between trees and human beings already pointed out by Marija Dmitrovskaja (Dmitrovskaja 2000, 25–40). It is interesting to note that Platonov claims that the tree’s children are not its fruits, but its leaves: indeed, a tree needs its leaves to be alive, as well as the motherland needs its citizens to survive. From this perspective, as a symbol for the motherland, this tree takes care of its inhabitants, protecting them, never abandoning them. The Russian word rodina, motherland, shares the same origins of the verb rodit, “to give birth.” In this vision the role of the tree, of the mother and of the motherland seem interconnected. This interrelation of symbols is again reinforced by the presence of the mother of Trofimov, who, as we will see, is again connected to the world of plants through Platonov’s lexical choices. The role of the divine tree as a symbol of rodina in the meaning of “the one that gives life” is in opposition with the land devastated by soldiers, as we can see in the second part of the tale. If in the first part we can see a sort of harmony between humans and nature, in this case we see the land and nature reflecting the destruction of war. War means death not only for people but also for the land itself: И красноармеец глядел в свое поле, далекое от его дома, но знакомое, как родное, и похожее на всю землю, где живут и пашут хлеб крестьяне. А теперь эта земля была пуста и безродна—что жило на ней, то умерло под железом и солдатским сапогом и более не поднялось расти. (Platonov 2012, 10) [And the Red Army soldier looked at his field, far from his home, but familiar as his own, and similar to any land where peasants live and grow wheat. And now this land was empty and rootless: what once lived on it, died under the iron and the soldier’s boot and did not rise anymore.]

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Platonov describes the land occupied by the enemy as a familiar sight to the eyes of Trofimov, yet, at the same time deprived of life, or as he says pusta i bezrodna, “empty and rootless,” where the adjective bezrodna contains again the same root of the words rodina, the motherland, and the abovementioned verb rodit, to give birth. The interconnection between nature and humans specifically becomes an interconnection between trees and humans. This strong relationship occurs in many parts of the short tale, and is expressed through both visual evocation and specific lexical choices, such as in this case: Степан сорвал один лист с этого божьего дерева, положил его за пазуху и пошел на войну. Лист был мал и влажен, но на теле человека он отогрелся, прижился и стал неощутимым, и Степан Трофимов вскоре забыл про него. (Platonov 2012, 9) [Stepan tore one sheet from this divine tree, put it on his bosom and went to war. The leaf was small and wet, but on that human body it warmed up, became flat and imperceptible, and Stepan Trofimov soon forgot about it.]

And later: Лист с божьего дерева родины присох к телу на груди вместе с кровью и так жил с ним заодно. // Трофимов осторожно, не повреждая, отделил тот лист от своего тела, обмочил его слюною и прилепил к тесовой стене как можно выше, чтобы фашист не заметил здесь его единственного имущества и утешения. Он стал глядеть на этот лист, и ему было теперь легче жить, и он начал немного согреваться. (Platonov 2012, 17) [The leaf from the divine tree of the motherland had crouched to his chest along with blood and so had lived with it. // Carefully, without damaging it, Trofimov separated the leaf from his body, wetted it with saliva and stuck it to the wall as high as possible so that a fascist would not notice his only property and consolation. He began to look at this leaf, and now living was easier for him, and he began to warm up a little.]

In this description, we see that Stepan brings with himself a part of his motherland represented by the leaf. We can see the leaf in two moments. First, when Stepan tears the leaf from the tree; and second, when he eventually finds the leaf caked with his own blood, which at that point has become part of his own body. Only at the end of the tale, Stepan finds out the leaf, and as the divine tree (here called “divine tree of the motherland”) helps its children, also the leaf (defined as his only property and consolation) helps

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Stepan to feel better, and gives him a reason to fight even if he is alone, naked and imprisoned. In these excerpts, we can see how Platonov visually recreates a relationship between the human beings (Trofimov) and the trees (the leaf). Again, in a divine/Christian perspective, the leaf on the chest could also symbolize a cross (Spiridonova 2000, 105). The second way in which Platonov creates a relationship between human beings and trees is more subtle and is related to further specific lexical choices. We have already seen in the initial description that the tree seems to have human features, which are defined through figurative lexical choices: the tree “falls ill,” but especially “has children.” Also, human beings seem to possess features that belong to the vegetal world: Trofimov’s old mother is described as usochščaja, dried up. In this case, Platonov employs a term that is commonly used to describe plants. The same term is also used to describe Trofimov’s body after the shooting. When Trofimov wakes up, he feels that a lot of blood had fled out of his body, which now is usochščee, dried up. Furthermore, at the end of the tale Trofimov finds himself in a pit, naked, under the surface of the earth: Он встал и снова загляделся на лист с божьего дерева. Мать этого листика была жива и росла на краю деревни, у начала ржаного поля. Пусть то дерево родины растет вечно и сохранно, а Трофимов и здесь, в плену у врага, будет думать и заботиться о нем . . . Трофимов не хотел зря жить и томиться; он любил, чтоб от его жизни был смысл, равно как от доброй земли бывает урожай. Он сел на холодный пол и затих против дубовой двери в ожидании врага. (Platonov 2012, 15–16) [He stood up and looked at the leaf of the divine tree again. The mother of this leaf was alive and grew up on the edge of his village, at the beginning of the rye field. May the tree of the motherland grow forever and safe, and may Trofimov here, captured by the enemy, in a stone pit, think about it and take care of it . . . Trofimov did not want to live and suffer in vain; he wanted to give a meaning to his life, as well as the good earth provides a harvest. He sat on the cold floor and fell silent against the iron door, waiting for the enemy.]

Once again, from a lexical point of view, we can notice an interconnection between the vegetal and the human world, in particular when Platonov claims “the mother of this leaf was alive.” The author creates a perfect parallelism with the maternal element (Trofimov’s mother and the tree-mother) on one side, and on the other side the children (Trofimov and the leaf, which actually have become the same thing). Under the earth, Trofimov acts exactly like the seed of a plant1: he is ready to sprout, to give a meaning to his life by being prepared to kill any enemy who will enter his cell.

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Moreover, if Trofimov offered his life, it would not be in vain. Thus, even naked and imprisoned, as a dried leave on the motherland tree, Trofimov will still be essential to his country and his life will be like the harvest provided by the earth. DEREVO RODINY: AN ANIMATED MOVIE Platonov wrote the short tale around 1942 in a phase of the Second World War still critical for the Soviet Union. For the Union, the situation was as critical as it was in the period in which Petkevič was working on his vision of the tree of the motherland. Created in 1987, Derevo rodiny by Vladimir Petkevič represents a sort of allegory, a series of oneiric dreadful visions. Although Petkevič did not openly create an adaptation of Andrej Platonov’s work, for sure he was inspired by the Soviet writer in his previous creations: in 1984 he released a short, animated film (Noč’, The night) which was based on Andrej Platonov’s tale Železnaja starucha, The old Iron Lady. On this basis, we can presume that he might also have drawn inspiration from Platonov’s Derevo rodiny for this movie. If the tree of the motherland in Platonov’s vision represents life and eternity, in Petkevič’s film it is loaded by a dark and threatening atmosphere. The dualism of the setting created by Andrej Platonov, who considers the landscape as a living creature (Murphy 1998, 226) opposes the land where Trofimov lives, full of colors and life, to the land devastated by the war: at the end of the tale, however, the tree is still safe and protected. On the contrary, Petkevič’s short movie gives space to a continuum where the oneiric dimension of destruction involves also the tree, which becomes part of the devastation imagined in a fearful dream. Somehow, both of the authors’ visions seem prophetic: the Soviet Union did not collapse under the attack of the fascist regime, but the wave of destruction would overwhelm it some years after the publication of Petkevič’s movie. The “sand animation” technique and the music chosen by Petkevič contribute to create a constant state of tension through the whole movie. The “sand animation” technique consists of drawing images over a glass illuminated from below and covered in sand; the artist creates images using the sand while a camera shoots each frame from above once the image is ready. As a result, the images of Derevo rodiny play on tones of grey, providing a “melting” effect more than a cross-fade effect between the single frames. The tree of the motherland created by Petkevič has no dialogues or voice over. As we said, the only audible comment is the music. Visually, we can attend to a series of oneiric images. In the beginning, we can see the branches from above, as if we were on the tree or even the tree itself. Apparently, they seem to cover the whole land around it. The image is similar to the one

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described by Andrej Platonov: again, a big solitary tree, in the countryside, surrounded only by land and a few houses. In the next frames, we see an old man approaching the tree and sitting down to sleep. The man reminds one of the old women described by Andrej Platonov (the old mother of Stepan Trofimov) but what is particularly interesting here, something that will occur also further on in the movie, is that the man gradually fades into the bark of the tree, as the leaf of Platonov’s tree was stuck to Stepan’s body. Suddenly, we understand that what we will see is probably the dream of this old man. In this visionary or dreamy dimension, on the tree there starts to appear a series of oneiric images that follow one another. One of the most interesting elements is the bell, a common symbol of Russian identity widely used in particular in nineteenth-century classical music, which apparently hangs from the tree as if it were its fruit and which becomes the crib of a baby, cradled by his mother. The baby quickly grows up and steps through the branches of the tree as if he were in a forest, leaving his mother, flying higher and higher until the tree apparently burns. This passage offers a similar image to the one we have already encountered in Platonov’s tale, where Stepan Trofimov leaves his mother and goes to the front. The grown-up kid wakes up in the same position of the old man, suggesting perhaps that the old man is dreaming of his own childhood. We see that it is spring and the tree is covered in leaves and fruits, until a sudden wind reveals that its fruits, as before, are nothing else but bells. In Petkevič’s vision, too, the tree appears to have supernatural features that make it unique: these features are not explicit, like in Platonov’s tale, as the peculiar color of the leaves, but they are instead represented by its ability of growing bells instead of fruits. At this point, we see dark and threatening clouds coming toward the tree: a strange mountain grows from the soil, so the kid starts ringing the bells as in alarm. A huge man wakes up holding in his hands the tree and the child and tries to walk away from this threatening mountain, but he starts walking on a dark land, surrounded only by what seems burning cities and general destruction. This image might strongly evoke threats and the destruction caused by war, somehow recalling the land that surrounds Trofimov at the front. The man reaches the burning mountain, faces the fire, and enters in a cave under the mountain. Suddenly the fire stops, the rocks of the mountain fall down and we see a huge tree coming out of the falling stone: the tree is being reborn thanks to sacrifice and despite the destruction and is now safe again. The nightmare seems to come to an end and we see again, like in a circular perspective, the land from above the tree, with the shadow of the branches covering the soil all around it.

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TWO TREES OF THE MOTHERLAND By comparing the two works, we can identify a series of similarities and differences regarding the tree, the humans and the interconnection of the human and vegetal worlds. As far as the tree is concerned, in both cases we have a lonely tree in the countryside. In addition, in both cases the tree is hardly identifiable (only in the case of Jaščin’s comic we clearly see the leaves of an oak tree). While in Platonov’s vision, the tree does not produce any fruits (its children are its leaves), in Petkevič’s movie the tree produces leaves and fruits, which become bells. As for the humans, in both cases we see the presence of an old person: in the first, Trofimov’s mother; in the second, the old man dreaming (probably) of his own childhood. In addition, we have on one side Trofimov standing like the main hero fighting against fascists, while in Petkevič’s movie we see a kid appearing in the dream and a giant who saves both the tree and the kid. Finally, as far as the interconnection of human and vegetal world is concerned: this is a key point that we have already described while mentioning Platonov’s lexical choices that seem to create a relation between humans and plants. This interconnection is firstly expressed as a physical fusion: as the leaf in Platonov’s tale becomes part of Trofimov’s body, the old man seems to become part of the tree and his deep wrinkles fade into the bark of the tree. The interconnection is related also to the mother/son couple: in Platonov, we have a parallel presence of two mothers and two sons, since we have Trofimov’s mother and the tree itself and on the other side Stepan and the leaf (in Platonov’s vision the leaves are the children of the tree). Also, in Petkevič we can see the mother and the child, in this case on the tree. The third type of interconnection brings the idea of protection: Stepan Trofimov wants to protect the tree of his motherland as the giant in Petkevič finally struggles to save the tree. CONCLUSION Platonov describes the tree of the motherland as a solitary, unique, and divine tree: a symbol of hope and life. His tree is extraordinary also for its ability to provide a shelter to the birds and because even the worst weather conditions have never affected its life, making it grow even stronger. In the tale, the peasant Stepan Trofimov goes to fight against the Nazis to protect his country and takes with him a leaf of this “magical” tree. Thanks to this leaf even when the Nazis capture and imprison him, Trofimov will be able to feel strong enough to keep on fighting to protect his own land. In Petkevič’s visionary movie, the tree might embody again a country in danger: in this case, an unidentified gigantic

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man will try to save his country by saving the tree from an unspecified danger (generally symbolized by fire and destruction, possible reminiscences of war). If the tree of the motherland in Platonov’s vision represents a symbol of hope, life, and eternity, even if in danger, in Petkevič’s film a dark and fearful atmosphere threatens the tree, which at the end triumphs again in its immortality. The interconnection between the Russian people (represented by Trofimov/gigantic man) and the motherland (represented by the tree in both cases) emerges through a relationship of mutual protection: in Platonov’s tale we can point out the humanization of the tree, whose “kids” are not its fruits, but its leaves. Trofimov Protects his tree and the tree reciprocates with its leaf that indeed becomes part of his body. The role of the divine tree as a symbol of rodina (which in Russian means motherland, and literarily indicates “the one that gives life”) is in direct opposition with the land devastated by the soldiers, which appears to be without life. Last, the interconnection between people and trees is evident also on a lexical level: as the tree seems to have human features (since that it “falls ill” and “has children”), also humans seem to have vegetal features: Trofimov’s old mother is described as usochščaja, “dried up,” using a term commonly applied to plants. In the light of the analysis of these two works, we can somehow trace a direct connection between the tale and the film. In the tale, Platonov tells us the story of what happened until Stepan went to war, while the film represents its conclusion. The old man sleeping under the tree could be Stepan: he grew up in the countryside, near an old “magic/divine/supernatural” tree (symbol of his motherland); he went to fight the enemy (the fascist regime, represented by the mountain that appears in the nightmare of the man). While in the tale we see him still fighting, in the film we know that he came back from war (after the Soviet Union won the war against the Nazi regime), and like the giant in the film, he was able to save his own life, the life of his motherland and of his tree. Under this perspective, the leaf stuck to Stepan’s body and the old man “melting” into the tree show both the interconnection between the Russian people and their earth and their responsibility to protect it. NOTE 1. The symbolic importance of earth as mother and fertile element has been illustrated by Sinjavskij, 1991, 181–191.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cattabiani, Alfredo. 1998. Florario. Miti, leggende e simboli di fiori e piante. Milano: Oscar Mondadori.

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Costlow, Jane T. 2013. Heart-pine Russia, Walking and writing the nineteenthcentury forest. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Dmitrovskaja, Marija A. 2000. “Obraznaja parallel’ “čelovek-derevo” u A. Platonova.” In Tvorčestvo Andreja Platonova: Issledovanija i materialy. Kn. 2, edited by V’jugin V. Ju., 25–40. Sankt Peterburg: Nauka. Jaščin, Zachar. 2015. “Derevo rodiny.” In Cvety na zemle. Grafičeskie adaptacii rasskazov Andreja Platonova, edited by Artëm Lachin and Dmitrij Nesterach, 81–94. Voronež: Grotesk. Kornienko, Natal’ia Vasil’evna. 2000. “Dobrye ljudi’v rasskazach A. Platonova konca 30-40-x godov. Predvaritel’nye tekstologičeskie zametki.” In Tvorčestvo Andreja Platonova: Issledovanija i materialy. Kn. 2, edited by V’jugin V. Ju., 3–24. Sankt Peterburg: Nauka. Murphy, Patrick D. (ed.). 1998. Literature of Nature, An International Sourcebook. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Platonov, Andrej. 2000. Zapinsye knižki. Materialy k biografii. Moskva: IMLI-RAN. Platonov, Andrej. 2012. Smerti net! Rasskazy i publicistika 1941–1945 godov. Moskva: Vremja. Pontani, Filippo Maria (ed.). 1979. Antologia Palatina, vol. II. Torino: Einaudi. Seifrid, Thomas. 1992. Andrei Platonov. Uncertainties of spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinjavskij, Andrej. 1991. Ivan-Durak. Paris: Syntaksis. Spiridonova, I. A. 2000. “O nekotorych chudožestvennych osobennostjach voennych rasskazov A. P. Platonova.” In Tvorčestvo Andreja Platonova: Issledovanija i materialy. Kn. 2, edited by V’jugin V. Ju., 89–105. Sankt Peterburg: Nauka. Varlamov, Andrey. 2010. “Andrej Platonov: svet gibeli” in Moskva, IX: 9–76.

Part II

SPIRITUAL TREES

Chapter 5

Trees as the Masters of Monks Some Observations on the Role of Trees in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers Bernard Łukasz Sawicki

In the most ancient collections of The Sayings of the Desert Fathers,1 there are some texts dedicated to trees. Analyzing these texts one can discover that, first of all, they deal with the role of trees in the lives and the spirituality of the monks from the desert. Sensibility and closeness to nature is one of the basic aspects of monasticism in the desert, where any form of life, any plant is very important. Especially trees. They were not just a mere part of the landscape or the environment. Whoever has traveled through Ethiopia and admired the peaks of the mountains, there must have seen in some of them a typical element of the landscape: great clumps of trees surrounding the monastic buildings and settlements like a fence of shrines. In the Ethiopian language, “debr” means both “mountain” and “monastery.” An Ethiopian proverb says “a monastery without trees is like a doctor without a beard.” That is why some regions in Ethiopia owe their characteristic landscape to the trees growing on the mountain peaks to support the existence of monasteries (Cerulli 1958, 259). Therefore, the perception of trees in early monasticism is very interesting: they are described, and also taken as symbol or parable, expressing the monks’ admiration for nature and its wisdom. In all this, one can find an echo of the Bible and also a certain mystic and poetic quality hidden in the diversity and in the originality of rapports between trees and monks. TREES AS TEACHERS The first and most important role the trees played for the monks in the desert was that of teachers. They were admired as very useful but, simultaneously, 87

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they were observed, meditated upon, contemplated, so that, as a result, they could serve as a parable, a symbol, or a metaphor. The nature and life of trees turned out to be a good illustration of essential truths and life values. In one of the Sayings, the tree symbolizes good life: Someone asked Abba Agathon, “Which is better, bodily asceticism or interior vigilance?” The old man replied, “Man is like a tree, bodily asceticism is the foliage, interior vigilance the fruit. According to that which is written, “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire” (Matt. 3.10) it is clear that all our care should be directed towards the fruit, that is to say, guard of the spirit; but it needs the protection and the embellishment of the foliage, which is bodily asceticism. (The Sayings 1983, 21. Agathon 8)

This comparison derives from the Gospel, but this saying developed it vividly and concretely. In this rather allegorical description, the tree taken as a model helps to understand the rules of spiritual life: as the leaves are necessary for the generation of the fruit, so ascetism is needed to shape the right spiritual life. Another image, foreign to our culture due to the quality of the interaction, is offered by the watering of trees. According to this text, for a beginner of monastic life the insults he may receive from other people are like the watering of trees: “Abba Isaiah said, ‘Nothing is so useful to the beginner as insults. The beginner who bears insults is like a tree that is watered every day’” (The Sayings 1983, 69. Isaiah 1). Here, the organic connection between nature and the human spiritual experience is very striking. The image used in this text is powerful, suggestive, and also unequivocal: the way toward spiritual perfection and humility may seem so . . . inhuman but finally it results very effective. Thanks to such images we can understand the monastic lifestyle, as in the case of perseverance, where the resistance of the trees against the storm is used as an example: the resistance to the perseverance of temptations brings salvation, as a very famous Desert Mother, Amma Theodora, said: “Let us strive to enter by the narrow gate. Just as the trees, if they have not stood before the winter’s storms cannot bear fruit, so it is with us; this present age is a storm and it is only through many trials and temptations that we can obtain an inheritance in the kingdom of heaven” (The Sayings 1983, 83. Amma Theodora, 8). However, perseverance is not the only means to bring spiritual fruits. Trees can also teach us other strategies for bringing forth good fruits. Here, as well, the teaching results from a good observation of and a sort of love for trees: [Abba Agathon] answered “A person is like a tree; physical labor is the leaves, interior vigilance the fruit. Given that which is written, ‘Every tree not bearing

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good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire’ [Matt 7:19], it is clear that our entire concern is with the fruits meaning the vigilance of the mind; but there is also need of the protection and ornamentation the leaves provide: these are physical labor.” (The Book of the Elders 2012, 146)

The metaphors express clear and suggestive allegorical meaning, while human qualities pertain to a new, wider, organic dimension, resulting from harmony with nature. The wider context of the vegetation offers other stimuli for theological considerations. Trees, indeed, can symbolize the activity of the Holy Spirit: They [the disciples] said to him [Abba John Colobos], “We thank God it rained heavily this year, and the palm trees drank. They are putting shoots, and the brothers are finding [materials for] handwork.” Abba John said to them, “So it is with the Holy Spirit when he descends into the hearts of the ones: they are renewed and put out shoots in the fear of God.” (The Book of the Elders 2012, 195)

It is very meaningful that Abba John Colobos, another famous monk living in the Egyptian desert, pronounces his theological sentence as a spontaneous reaction to a normal information concerning the rain that was offered him by his disciples. Such a situation shows the organic relationship between the spiritual imagination of the Abba and his reception of the surrounding world. These two realms penetrate and stimulate each other: spirituality is expressed through images of nature, while nature is interpreted in spiritual keys. The same happens with less theological concepts such as goodness as symbolized by trees. Again, this is a classical image used in the Bible (in Psalm 1, for instance), but in the monastic context of the desert, the tree is seen with great fondness and even tenderness: An old man used to say, “It is written, ‘The righteous man will blossom like the palm tree’ (Psalm xcii, 12). Now these words make known that the soul acquires height, and straightness of stature, and sweetness from beautiful deeds. But there is another quality which is found in the palm, that is, a single, white heart, which is wholly suitable for work (or useful for being worked). And this must be found in the righteous man, for his heart must be single and simple, and it must be accustomed to look towards God only. Now the heart of the palm tree is also white by reason of that fire which it possesses naturally, and all the service of the righteous man is in his heart; and the hollowness and the evenness of the tops of the leaves [typify] the setting up of sharpness of the soul of the righteous man against the Calumniator.” (Palladius 2016, mobi pos. 3319)

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Also, in this text, the accuracy of the observation corresponds to a deep sensibility of the Desert Fathers for spiritual things. Everything has a poetic character as well. Such expression involves, motivates, and gives peace. The symbolical meaning attached to the trees does not necessarily require theological sophistication. Sometimes the simple reciprocity between man and trees appears in moving associations, and trees are witness to monks’ interior dilemmas and experiences. Some other times, a tree can simply turn out to be a shelter: Abba John said, “I am like a man sitting under a great tree, who sees wild beasts and snakes coming against him in great numbers. When he cannot withstand them any longer, he runs to climb the tree and is saved. It is just the same with me; I sit in my cell and I am aware of evil thoughts coming against me, and when I have no more strength against them, I take refuge in God by prayer and I am saved from the enemy.” (The Sayings 1983, 87)

In this moving and personal confession, the tree appears as a convenient help, almost a friend, that always offers protection. There are other examples of such friendly collaboration with trees. They can be not only metaphorical but also a real shelter, protecting the monk from an importunate curiosity, as in the story of Abba Simon, another desert monk: A magistrate came to see Abba Simon one day. When he heard of it, he put on his apron and went out to attend to a palm-tree. When the visitors arrived, they called out to him, “Old man, where is the anchorite?” He replied, “There is no anchorite here.” Hearing these words, they went away again. (The Sayings 1983, 224–225)

The simple diversity of trees can also be a good lesson. In this case, a seemingly obvious observation leads to a theological conclusion: “Abba Poemen said that Abba John said that the saints are like a group of trees, each bearing different fruits, but watered from the same source. The practices of one saint differ from those of another, but it is the same Spirit that works in all of them” (The Sayings 1983, 95). We can find the same reasoning in another observation concerning the natural stability of trees. An elder said: “In the same way that a frequently transplanted tree is incapable of bearing fruit, so neither will a monk who moves from place to place bear fruit’” (The Book of the Elders 2012, 114). In this image, the teaching nature of trees is very evident, even if it is both implicit and discrete: to bring fruits the monk must acquire the stability of trees. So, in this context, the tree is a master of monks.

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TREES AS PARTICIPANTS The monks’ contact with trees is not limited to passive observation or inspiring reflections. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers bring examples of active, sometimes miraculous, participation of trees in the lives of monks. Of course, on such occurrences the trees are anthropomorphized, which makes them, at least in the narration, closer to monks. Quite often, the trees participate in human situations and seem to express an intervention of God. Such participation does not have to be necessarily spectacular. Sometimes the trees simply behave according to their nature, but the particular circumstances provide an unusual meaning, as in the famous story with “the tree of obedience”: It was said of Abba John the Dwarf that he withdrew and lived in the desert at Scetis with an old man of Thebes. His Abba, taking a piece of dry wood, planted it and said to him, “Water it every day with a bottle of water, until it bears fruit.” Now the water was so far away that he had to leave in the evening and return the following morning. At the end of three years the wood came to life and bore fruit. Then the old man took some of the fruit and carried it to the church saying to the brethren, “Take and eat the fruit of obedience.” (The Sayings 1983, 85–86)

In this story, the tree becomes central in the relationship between the Abba and his disciple, it becomes a material means to test obedience, while the tree assists them by simply accomplishing its natural functions. There are also situations where the presence of trees becomes a visible sign of God’s will and blessing: They said to [the brother], “Look: your angel! Get up and follow him.” He got up. Bid the brothers farewell and followed it. He came to where the eagle was standing. Soon it rose flew one furlong away and alighted again, and the brother followed it likewise. Again, it flew and alighted not far off—and this went on for three hours. But then, as he was following it, the eagle went off to the right of the monk who was following it and did not reappear. Nevertheless, the brother followed it and as he looked, he observed three palm trees, a spring of water, and a small cave. He said, “Here is the place the Lord has provided in advance for me.” In he went and started to live there eating dates for food and drinking water from the spring. He spent years there all alone seeing nobody. (The Book of the Elders 2012, 108)

Also, here the trees remain what they are: they grow, give shadow, and bring fruits. However, the context of their presence, related to the concerns and research of a monk, makes them the real protagonists of the situation, even

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without being anthropomorphized. Here the trees are simply very close to the monk’s life. They promise the fulfillment of his desires and offer security and protection from the sun. Trees may also stimulate strong and original reactions in the monks. In these cases, the trees seem to be present in their thoughts both as real things and as symbols. They become a pretext for and a spur to involvement, as, for instance, with an elder monk: “They said that there were seven persons living on the mountain of Abba Anthony and that, when the figs were ripe one of them would keep watch to drive off birds. There was an elder there who, when he was keeping watch on his day, used to cry out, ‘Away with evil logismoi inside-and birds outside!’” (The Book of the Elders 2012, 210). This story suggests that the zeal and determination of a monk are equally strong both toward material and to spiritual elements. The first makes the second more tangible and concrete, and even easier to express. Finally, there are also situations in which trees participate as real and decisive protagonists. Their anthropomorphism becomes a powerful metaphor for spiritual life and its connection with reality. This happens when an old man visits a monk in Egypt: They used to speak about an old man, who was from Syria, and who used to dwell on the road of the desert of Egypt, and whose work was as follows: At whatever time a monk came to him he would welcome him. And it came to pass that on one occasion a man came from the desert and asked him to allow him to rest, but he would not permit him to do so, and said to him, “I am fasting.” Then the blessed man was grieved and said to him, “Is this your labor, that you will not perform your brother’s desire? I beseech you to come, and let us pray, and let us follow after him with whom this tree, which is here with us, will bow.” Then the man from the desert knelt down, and nothing happened, but when he who received strangers knelt down, that tree inclined its head at the same time, and seeing this he profited, and they glorified God. (Palladius 2016, mobi pos. 1527)

In a discrete but clear way, trees express the will of God, becoming a sign, or even a sort of sacrament of his words. Their extraordinary participation in human affairs could be qualified as miraculous. And such qualification could be just, since we are dealing with people living and consciously integrating spiritual and existential realities. ONE MORE FUNCTION OF TREES The examples given above reveal one important truth about trees: in the lives of monks they are mediators, always symbolizing and indicating the powerful and merciful presence of God.

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Thus, trees are neither assimilated to human beings, nor are they part of any monastic activities. Rather, they are there to symbolize the connection between earth and heaven, and the elevation from a wordly reality to a spiritual dimension in life. The tree might therefore become an object of contemplation and an inspiration for meditation. But this is not necessarily true for everyone: One day while Abba Silvanus was living on the mountain of Sinai his disciple Zacharias went away on an errand and said to the old man, “Open the well and water the garden.” The old man went out with his face hidden in his cowl, looking down at his feet. Now at that moment a brother came along and seeing him from a distance he observed what he was doing. So, he went up to him and said, “Tell me, abba, why were you hiding your face in your cowl while you watered the garden?” The old man said to him, “So that my eyes should not see the trees, my son, in case my attention should be distracted by them.” (The Sayings 1983, 223)

The final goal in a monk’s life is to concentrate on the most essential things. At a certain stage of his spiritual growth, any other thing may only distract. This can be the case with trees: if they do not lead toward this essential concentration, they may become a distraction. Both trees and monks share the same destiny: they are created by God and exist for Him, with one small difference: the monks, as human beings, have free will, so that they may not choose God. In this sense, sometimes it is recommended that monks follow the example of trees, explicitly imitating them: “A monk who is on the earth without desires is like a greening tree. A monk who took angelic life is a tree of life in heaven. A monk living permanently in one place, who is not wandering, is a tree of eternal life” (Starowieyski 2011, 171). In this case, trees reflect the different stages of the spiritual life that a monk has achieved. In the same way, one can speak about one of the key virtues of monastic life: humility. Its beauty and efficacy are presented through the metaphor of the tree: “Humility is the tree of life ascending to the heights. A monk who could achieve it gathers good fruit” (Apoftegmaty Ojców Pustyn 2011, 162). So, the tree is a model of this important virtue; however, since the text is not a parable but just the identification of humility with trees (“humility is the tree”), they intertwine, helping one another to be expressed and experienced better. Images and metaphors become part of a monk’s spiritual life, involving not only his emotions, but also his intellect and will. This short overview of the trees as they appear in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers has revealed their dual role. On the one hand, trees are very present in the lives of monks, who are full of admiration for them. Trees are a constant part of their geographical and spiritual landscapes. They are present in

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their minds and hearts. They inspire their imagination, reflection, and prayer. There is a certain intimacy between monks and trees, although one that is full of respect and distance. On the other hand, trees have a functional role: they embody other values, which are far more beautiful and fruitful. Since these values are transcendent and spiritual, they are not visible but need to be made present. Here is when trees achieve their most prestigious function: the natural tension between their intimacy to humans and their role of mediators with God pushes them to put their beauty, strength, and all their qualities at the metaphorical service of these values. In this way, the values may become more visible and tangible, whereas the trees become more meaningful and fascinating. In this context, one can learn another lesson from trees: a master should be like a tree: noble, helpful, and always indicating something beyond (or above).

NOTE 1. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, also known as Apophthegmata Patrum, is a collection of pronouncements of the famous desert personalities and anecdotes about them, compiled toward the end of the fifth century but using much older material. It consists of texts in Greek, but it probably derives from an oral tradition in Coptic. See John N. D. Kelly. “Patristic literature.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed June 1, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.bri​​tanni​​ca​.co​​m​/top​​ic​/pa​​trist​​ic​-​li​​terat​​ure.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cerulli, Enrico. 1958. “Il monachesimo in Etiopia.” In Il monachesimo orientale, Atti del Convegno di Studi Orientali, Roma: Edizioni Orientalia Christiana. Palladius. 2016. The Sayings of the Holy Desert Fathers. Transl. by Wallis Budge, Kindle Edition. Starowieyski Marek (a cura di). 2011. Apoftegmaty Ojców Pustyni.. Zbiory etiopskie (wybór), mniejsze zbiory greckie, zbiory łacińskie, Kraków: Tyniec Wydawnictwo Benedyktynów. The Book of the Elders. Sayings of the Desert Fathers. 2012. Transl. by John Wortley. Collegeville, MI: Liturgical Press. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. 1983. Transl. by Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications.

Chapter 6

The Ash Tree as “unwobbling pivot” in Pound’s Early and Late Poetry Stefano Maria Casella

INTRODUCTION Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry, Pull down thy vanity, (LXXXI/535)1

Thus Ezra Pound, in one of his typical invectives scattered throughout his epic poem, The Cantos, and particularly in its most famous section, The Pisan Cantos (1948). The first imperative, “learn,” is in the affirmative, while the second, “pull down,” likewise affirmative in its grammatical form, implies also a kind of negation and a prohibition, the denial and blame of “the vanity of human wishes,” thus echoing the classical theme of “vanitas vanitarum / havel havalim,” which represents one of the ethical cores of Canto LXXXI. Pound’s admonishment, in a sense, revisits the words of a great Christian mystic of the eleventh century, Bernard de Clairvaux, who extols the teachings imparted by Nature and by the vegetable kingdom: “Experto crede: aliquid amplius invenies in silvis, quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt te, quod a magistris audire non possis” (Bernard de Clairvaux 1889, 353).2 Some eight hundred years divide the French monk and the American poet, but both of them recognize the primacy of the earliest and universal book given to mankind, the Book of Nature (Liber Naturae) and of its immutable teachings; among such teachings one of the earliest and most important is the deep connection between man and Nature, man and all living beings.3 By combining and juxtaposing the meaning of these two statements about the world of Nature in general, and the vegetable kingdom in particular, this essay will focus on images, symbols, and myths connected with one of its 95

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most traditional and typical embodiments and emblems, the Tree, and more precisely on the ash tree, as it appears and is portrayed in Ezra Pound’s poetry. And, since “ends and beginnings” (LXXVI/476) are often very close—if not almost exactly coincident—this exploration “sub specie arboris” shall start from the very beginning of Pound’s poetry, A lume spento (his debut book of poetry, published in Venice in 1908), and conclude half a century later with two Cantos from the penultimate section of his “forty years epic,” Thrones de los Cantares (1959), in particular Cantos LXXXV and XC. To begin with A lume spento, what is remarkable and significant is that this book had been originally entitled “La Fraisne (The Ash Tree).” On its frontispiece the poet had both titles, and two dedications, printed. To begin with, the earliest title: “This Book was / LA FRAISNE/(THE ASH TREE)” (CEP 5), then followed by the earliest dedication: “to such as love this same / beauty that I love, somewhat / after mine own fashion” (Ibid.). This first “version” is connected to the second through a kind of adversative sentence which explains the reason of the change: “But sith one of them has gone out very quickly from / Amongst us it given” (Ibid.) and, in its turn, is followed by the “definitive” title: “A LUME SPENTO/ (WITH TAPERS QUENCHED)” (Ibid.). To conclude with, the poet adds a typical “in memoriam,” obviously followed by the name of the dedicatee and by a further specification about it: “in memoriam eius mihi caritate primus / William Brooke Smith / Painter, Dreamer of dreams” (Ibid.). Apart from the elaborate typographical layout (different types and different bodies) and the typically modernist copresence of various languages (English modern and archaic, and Latin), what is most noteworthy is the coexistence (never changed) of the double title and double dedication. The earliest version may be defined as a general one, “to such as love the same / beauty as I love . . .”; in it the young poet addresses to his fellow artists and aesthetes, that very same small circle of chosen ones which will be recalled in the incipit of “In Durance” (Personae 1909): “I am homesick after mine own kind, Oh I know that there are folk about me, friendly faces, / But I am homesick after mine own kind” (CEP 86). But a tragic event occurred in 1908, the year of publication of A lume spento: the untimely death of one of Pound’s earliest friends, a fellow freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, William Brooke Smith. This latter was a young painter, representative of fin de siècle aestheticism à la Wilde, and had introduced Pound to the doctrine of l’art pour l’art (Carpenter 1988, 38–39). Thus, the debutant poet changed both the dedicatory formula (having it more solemn in classic Latin) and the dedicatee, defined as “Dreamer of dreams.” The very concept and atmosphere of “dream” permeates also the poem “Song”: “Love thou thy dream / All base love scorning . . . dreams alone can truly be, / For ‘tis in dream that I come to thee” (CEP 46)

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and the epigraph of Personae (1909): “Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart” (CEP 77) (Witemeyer 1969, 44, 51, 64). In any case, this double title was not chosen by chance; on the one hand it is evidence of Pound’s typical aesthetic gusto as witnessed by the refined archaism “la Fraisne”—instead of modern French “la frêne.” On the other hand, its second formulation/phrasing (which was to become the official one) A lume spento is a Dantescan4 quotation from Purgatorio III, 132, and refers to the disinterment of the body of Manfred of Swabia, as an excommunicated by the church (the parallel, which however ends here, is with the death of Pound’s young friend, the painter William Brooke Smith). It goes without saying that with this title the debutant poet begins his career in the wake of Dante, the master who will remain his guide until the very end of his modern epic poem, The Cantos, as the very last fragments on the theme of “Paradiso terrestre / Paradise” prove (Casella 2018, 203–4). To return to the ash tree, it is worth stressing that this is quite an uncommon species from a poetic point of view, whereas it is much more relevant from the mythological and folkloric one, through its ancestral and archetypal specimen, Yggdrasill, the “axis mundi,” the pillar of the Cosmos, the tree from whose trunk the first human couple was born, the man called Ask (close to “Ash” [tree], and the woman called Embla (echoing the elm tree, “elmla”). Like this earliest couple of progenitors, also the “second” original couple, Lìf and Lìfthrasir, came out of Yggdrasill’s trunk after the cosmic catastrophe of Ragnarök and the return of a new world of gods and men (Brosse 2004, 9–16; Cattabiani 1996, 43–49; Graves 2013, 52, 167). The tree of Poetry par excellence is the Apollonian laurel, sacred to Phoebus, the god of Poetry, and therefore symbol of poetic effort and poetic glory; of course, Pound does not ignore it: two of his early poems, “The Tree” (ALS) and above all “A Girl” (R), deal with the traditional connection laurelDaphne-Apollo. Nonetheless, A lume spento does not begin with the laurel, but with the ash tree.5 Furthermore, these three early poems of Pound’s, “La Fraisne,” “The Tree,” and “A Girl” share a common denominator: they all deal with unique and extraordinary physical and psychic phenomena and with experiences undergone by human beings, that is their partial or complete identification with, and/or metamorphosis into, trees. The very kind of experience Pound tries to explain and clarify in “Psychology and Troubadours” (the fifth chapter of The Spirit of Romance, Pound’s first critical oeuvre, 1910): Greek myth arose when someone, having passed through delightful psychic experience tried to communicate it to others . . . Speaking aesthetically, the myths are explications of mood . . . I know . . . one man who understands Persephone and Demeter, and one who understands the Laurel, and another who has, I should say, met Artemis . . . Our kinship with the ox we have constantly

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thrust upon us; but beneath this is our kinship to the vital universe, to the tree and the living rock, and, because this is less obvious—and possibly more interesting—we forget it. (SR 92, emphasis added)6

The first part of this statement is well known and has been widely analyzed by literary critics from the mythological and psychological perspective; but it is the reference to “the tree and the living rock” (see Bernard de Clairvaux’s sentence “Ligna et lapides . . .”) which is particularly relevant to our reading. No less important are the poet-critic’s following reflections about what Pound defines as the “germinal” consciousness of man: “with certain others their consciousness is ‘germinal.’ Their thoughts are in them as the thought of the tree is in the seed, or in the grass, or the grain, or the blossom. And these minds are the more poetic, and they affect mind about them, and transmute it as the seed the earth. And this latter sort of mind is close on the vital universe” (SR 92–93). Before and beyond the Greek myth of metamorphosis (Apollo and Daphne), here a more ancestral kind of phenomenon and experience is alluded to, shamanism, which is precisely accomplished through the psychic-spiritual identification of the shaman with another living being, either an animal or, in this specific case, a tree.7 Moreover, also a meta-poetic theory is alluded to in this passage, conveyed through the metaphor of the “tree in the seed” (not unlike the philosophical Aristotelian concept of act and potency): it has to do with the capacity of these “poetic minds” to “affect mind about them”; a kind of “creative contagion” which enables other individuals to see the world in a different way, and to become “poetic minds” themselves. Almost half a century after the publication of A lume spento and Ripostes (with their three poems dedicated to trees and humans), the ash tree reappears in Cantos LXXXV and XC (Section Rock-Drill de los Cantares, 1956). It is not by chance that this tree is placed in that particular phase of Pound’s poetry: the plant of Pound’s earliest poem has now undergone a mythical metamorphosis into Yggdrasill, the “axis mundi” of Norse cosmogony, cosmology, and myth, the witness of the beginning and end of Miðhgardh and of Walholl—the “unwobbling pivot” of the “green world”—and of the World/ Cosmos in general (Bacigalupo 1980, 234–37; Brosse 2004, 9–33; Cattabiani 1996, 43–49; Eliade 2020, 71 n., 270 n., 269–74, 380, 383; Guenon 1997, 279–85;). As this is the one and only reference to Norse mythology and lore in Pound’s Cantos (together with the tirade against “Fafnir the worm” in “Addendum for C”: Addendum for C/812–813), it proves how meaningful and important this myth is within the whole design of his poem.

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JUVENILE TREES: “LA FRAISNE,” “THE TREE,” AND “A GIRL” These three poems deal with the close coexistence between human beings and trees, and/or with the metamorphosis of humans into trees. The most evanescent, vague, and enigmatic of this lyric triad is undoubtedly “La Fraisne.” Apart from the influences from Yeats’s poetry (“The Madness of King Goll,” “The Wind among the Reeds,” and The Celtic Twilight; cfr. Bacigalupo 1980, 264 n. 3; Ruthven 1969, 158–60; Witemeyer 1969, 48, 52, 63), this poem is particularly remarkable for the following reasons: first, the still incomplete (not yet realized) metamorphosis of man into tree of the speaker-protagonist, a man who lives among trees in the forest, but still is and remains a human being and second, the theme of the mystic marriage between men and trees, in this case between man and woman-as-tree (Frazer 109–39). Miraut de Garzelas, the protagonist of this monologue who defines himself as “gaunt, grave councilor” (CPP 9), has escaped from a tumultuous life and taken refuge and rest “curled mid the boles of the ash wood . . . mid the ash trees” (Ibid.). There, “[b]y the still pool of Mar-nan-otha” he has found “a bride / That was a dog-wood tree” (Ibid.)—a beneficent, merciful being in comparison to the woman (Riels of Calidorn) who belongs to his past life and whose negative memories still haunt him: “Once when I was among the young men . . . there was a woman . . . I hope she will not come again . . . she hurt me once” (Ibid, 10). Though not yet metamorphosed into a tree, this old man has discovered and experienced a different and above all more “natural” (i.e., in full harmony with Nature) way of living, feeling, and thinking immersed in the “green world”: his psychological metamorphosis—more precisely “metà-noia” (change of mind) has been almost fully realized.8 Worth stressing is the detail about the arboreal species of his new partner: “I found me a bride / That was a dog-wood tree” (Ibid. 9). Very tellingly, exactly this species of tree reappears almost half a century later (late Fifties) in a letter from Pound to H.D.: Ezra begins the letter by addressing to his sweetheart of their early Philadelphian years with the words: “dog-wood flower.”9 Over seventy, the poet seems to identify himself (“a posteriori”) with the “gaunt, grave councilor” of his early poetry and life, having he himself lived almost similar experiences of disillusionment, separation, and isolation in a mental, psychological, and spiritual “sphere” of his own, during the so-called tempus tacendi when he was imprisoned in St. Elizabeths hospital for thirteen years since November 1945, as well as after his release in April 1958. In a sense, the old poet associates the beloved young woman of his adolescence, Hilda, with Miraut de Garzelas’s new bride, the woman-tree called “dog-wood,” a creature who “hath toward me a great love / That is sweeter than the love of women / That plague and burn and drive one away” (Ibid. 10). Furthermore,

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from an anthropological point of view, this “new bride” who belongs to the natural realm and not to the human one recalls and almost looks like the character of the “celestial bride” of the shamanic tradition and lore (Eliade 2020, 76–81, 168, 381 n., 421; Frazer 1987, 109–39; Zolla 1986, passim). In comparison to “La Fraisne,” “The Tree” and “A Girl” are less ambiguous and obscure poems: in both of them the dendro-morphosis has been completed, and the human-arboreal conscience (“germinal consciousness”: Pound’s definition in “Psychology and Troubadours” quoted above), a consciousness which is un-sexed in “A Tree,” and female in the first half of “A Girl,” meditates on the transformation undergone and on its effects. The speaker of “A Girl,” a modern Daphne after the metamorphosis: “one who understands the Laurel” (“Psychology and Troubadours” again) and her change, recorded almost in the Imagist style in the first stanza leaves no doubts about this phenomenon: The tree has entered my hands, The sap has ascended my arms, The tree has grown in my breast— (CEP 186)

characterized by a kind of “appropriation” and replacement of the parts of the human (female) body from the living tree, and followed by a visual simile: “Downward, / The branches grow out of me, like arms” (CEP 186). The second stanza, uttered by a different voice, probably the poet’s, addresses the girl-laurel/laurel-girl and widens the mythological spectrum of the “tree” (connection laurel—Apollo) and of “violets,” perhaps an allusion to the myth of Attis’ death (Brosse 2004, 120–26, 147–49; Cattabiani 1996, 164; Frazer 1987, 347–52). The voice of the being/spirit speaking in/from “The Tree,” that “stood still and was a tree among the wood” (CEP 35 / EPP 3) represents—or rather briefly synthesizes—the completion of the still unaccomplished metamorphosis of Miraut de Garzelas in “La Fraisne.” In its new embodiment—or more precisely “en-trunk-ment”—it “know[s]” not only the laurel” (Daphne) and the “elm-oak” (Baucis and Philemon).10 It has also known “the truth of things unseen before” (CEP 35; EPP 3)11 and understood “many a new thing”: this being has therefore reached the mystic degree of knowledge / intelligence as stated in Bernard de Clairvaux’s phrase (“Ligna et lapides docebunt te. . .”), and the shamanic one, like the ancestral archetype of the poet (including the Norse god Oðinn, connected to Yggdrasill, as in Cantos LXXXV and XC).12 It is not by chance that Pound positioned this poem at the very beginning of his 1926 collection Personæ, thus stressing the crucial meaning, within the whole poetry collection, of this lyric and the experience it conveys: the first

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“persona” to appear, to open the book, to speak to the reader is in fact that of a being “who was a tree amid the wood” and which has undergone and lived a different kind of experience (“delightful psychic experience,” as already stressed) and acquired a “new”—or, rather, the most ancestral one—kind of knowledge. Another common denominator of these three poems, also emphasized in the words of their speakers, or by the voice of the poet, is that their characters are considered “fools” or “mads” according to the earthly standards: Miraut de Garzelas “ran mad in the forest” (“Note Precedent to ‘La Fraisne,’” CEP 8, emphasis added); the speaker of “The Tree” admits that her whole new experience and all that she has known “was rank folly to my head before” (CEP 35; EPP 3, emphasis added); finally the short lyric “A Girl” closes with the observation “And all this is folly to the world” (CEP 186, emphasis added). As a matter of fact, it is proved by history of mankind that all different, eccentric, or unorthodox psychic and spiritual experiences have always been stigmatized by the establishment, and that individuals who undergo “delightful psychic experiences” or unconventional ones have always been mistrusted and labeled as heretics, as per- or dis-turbed personalities, as subversive and seditious individuals (Pound 1954: 431; Witemeyer 1969, 62–63). Partial evidence of this censure may be found also in the (auto) biographical episode recalled by H.D. in her booklet End to Torment (1958) where an astonished and icy professor Doolittle (Hilda’s father) asks the young suitor of his daughter, catching him in flagrante with his daughter: “Mr. Pound, with your magic, your ‘strange spells of old deity,’ why didn’t you complete the metamorphosis?” (ET 17, emphasis added). About that moment of juvenile ecstasy (“ek-stasis” in the etymological sense), it is worth noticing that in the same memoir, a few lines before the episode just quoted, H.D. remembers: “we were curled up together in an armchair” (Ibid.); “curled,” like the speaker of “La Fraisne” who was “curled mid the boles of the ash wood.” Speaking of trees, in End to Torment there is an episode which sees the two adolescents climbing a maple tree in Hilda’s garden and remaining there among its branches on a kind of platform built by Hilda’s brother: “We had climbed up into the big maple tree in our garden, outside Philadelphia . . . There was a crow’s nest that my younger brother had built”; there, she remembers, “We sway with the wind. There is no wind. We sway with the stars. They are not far . . . Why had I ever come down out of that tree?” (ET 12). Apart from the “literal” meaning of the episode (a typical open air play and pastime of children), on a different level of interpretation that “ascent of the tree” cannot but recall, even though vaguely, the earliest stages of a shamanic initiation when the shaman climbs the tree to take flight toward the aerial regions of the spirits (Eliade 2020, 123–27, 137, 169), and the

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sensations recalled by H.D.: “We sway with the wind . . . Sway with the stars” are more than telling. Thus, in End to Torment, one of the two young lovers (H.D.) of a time gone recalls in her old age memories of their shared past through images of their juvenile life in complete communion with trees and the green world, as Dryad and Faun (the nicknames given by the young Pound to Hilda and to himself), both in their biographical fiction and in their mythical imaginary projection. THE MYTHICAL “YGGDRASAIL” If the Pisan Cantos (1945) were mainly written in the turbulent and painful atmosphere of “the enormous tragedy” (as in the incipit of Canto LXXIV), the following section, Rock-Drill de los Cantares (1955) may be said to have been written après le deluge or, to borrow the precise definition from Norse mythology, after the Ragnarök, when the old world of gods and men has been destroyed in the final deadly strife between the powers of Good and Evil, and the ensuing conflagration. In Pound’s case, a new and different “Götterdämmerung” took metaphorically place: the poet’s “earthly gods” were “put down . . . from their seats,” as in the line: “Muss, wrecked for an error” (CXVI/809). Nonetheless, not only had the ash tree of his early poetry resisted almost unshaken, but it had also undergone a mythical metamorphosis, becoming the sturdy “Yggdrasail” of Norse mythology, the “axis mundi” and the “unwobbling pivot” of his poetry and, in a sense, also of his life. And the poet himself, not unlike Oðinn (even though in a different way) had much suffered, both during the six months in the cage at the DTC of the American Army near Pisa, and later during the thirteen years of captivity spent at St. Elizabeths hospital in Washington, D.C. Though a human and mortal being, Pound himself, almost like Oðinn, had acquired new spiritual sight and higher knowledge through the very pains he had endured (Brosse 2004, 12–13). Another reference to End to Torment is here unavoidable: in two letters respectively dated May 7 and 8, 1958, an old H.D., musing on Pound’s photograph of less than three weeks earlier, on April 19 (the day of the poet’s release from St. Elizabeths) which had been published in the New York Times, recalls a dramatically evocative comparison with ancient Norse and Greek myths: “Ezra looked like Wotan . . . Here is the legend, the myth: actually, the basic myth can not be localized. Wotan, Odysseus, or Herakles, born in Hailey Idaho or wherever it is” (ET 43). All these characters—a god: Wotan, a deified hero: Herakles, and a mythical hero: Odysseus—together with a mortal man “born in Hailey Idaho” (i.e., Ezra Pound himself) suffered greatly, and underwent a painful process of initiation, as their respective myths, tales, and life clearly demonstrate.

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But back to the ash tree, which now reappears in its mythical “hypostasis” as Yggdrasill, in Cantos LXXXV and XC. It has been remarked by two of the most important critics of Pound’s, Ronald Bush and Massimo Bacigalupo, that in Rock-Drill the poet “speaks . . . as a member in a community of initiates” (Bacigalupo 1980, 234) and that this section is “a sequence designed to articulate the divinings of a magus” (Bush 1999, 120). It follows that the similitude established by H.D. between the poet and the Norse god (Wotan/Oðinn) whose life, ritual initiatory death, and (real) final death is correct, and that both god and poet are inextricably connected with the cosmic Ash Tree: Cantos LXXXV and XC furnish further evidence and confirm this. Canto LXXXV opens with the Chinese ideogram “LING”; the Italian critic Massimo Bacigalupo thus explains: “ling contains at the top the sky radical, below which are three ‘mouths,’ and at the bottom a character meaning, ‘A wizard or witch; a medium. Magical arts, spirits . . . [We gather that] the sky speaks, [that] nature brings forth shadows, signs, and [that] these are interpreted by magic. Sensibility, [we conclude,] consists in reverent attention to the words and traces of nature” (Bacigalupo 1980, 235). But the “words of nature” necessarily include “the language of trees”; a further note of the same critic on “THE FOUR TUAN,” that is, “love, duty, propriety, and wisdom” (Ibid.) and on the dialectics between “ling” and “ching” in connection to Yggdrasill buttresses the hypothesis: “Yggdrasill is the process as tree, as the forces of vegetation. Ling, reverence for the words of the sky, implies ching, reverence for the green world” (Ibid. 237). And since Yggdrasill is the “axis mundi” and the direct connection between Heaven and Earth (and vice versa), the two dimensions evoked by the ideograms “ling” and “ching” (and their meaning) are connected via the cosmic Ash-Tree. But all this, once more, from a semantic, ethical, and spiritual perspective fully dovetails with Bernard de Clairvaux’s advice: “Ligna . . . docebunt te.” It may be said that now, as in the poet’s almost final confession, “it coheres all right” (CXVI/811). Therefore, in Canto LXXXV the lines “That you lean ‘gainst the tree of heaven, / and know Ygdrasail” (LXXXV/559) emblematize once more the theme of the mythical Ash-Tree as “axis mundi,” as Tree of Knowledge, as bridge between Heaven and Earth (Brosse 2004, 9–30, Guenon 1997, 279–89). “That you . . . know Ygdrasail” also implies and means “That you know through Ygdrasail,” like the God Oðinn, through a process of shamanic initiation: the shaman does climb the white birch, the Tree of Light/Enlightenment; in his turn Oðinn climbs Yggdrasill and remains hanging from its branches for nine days, in a ritual of self-sacrifice which will give him higher knowledge and wisdom (Brosse 2004, 12–13). The main theme, therefore, is that of knowledge acquired through initiation, through sensibility as in the ideogram “Ling” at the beginning of the

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Canto: “LING [ideogram] Our dynasty came in because of a great sensibility” (LXXXV/557), later repeated twice in the same Canto: “Our Dynasty came in because of a great sensibility / Les mœurs furent réformées, la verty fleurit” (LXXXV/565) and “Our Dynasty came in because of great Ling [ideogram] sensibility” (LXXXV/569) and through “THE FOUR TUAN [ideogram] or foundations” (LXXXV/559). The theme of knowledge is, in fact, repeatedly and variously modulated throughout this Canto, being articulated through, and dealt with from different perspectives all interconnected among them: (a) as mystical initiatory knowledge: “Our science is from the watching of shadows” (LXXXV/557); (b) as knowledge acquired through the constructive dialectics of the process, and through wise examples: “not a lot of signs, but the one sign / etcetera / plus always Tεκνη / and from Tεκνη back to σεαυτον / neither by chinks, nor by sophists . . . Dante, out of St Victor (Richardus), Erigena with greek tags in his verses” (LXXXV/560) and by following the inner spirit “ch’e’ ditta dentro” (LXXXV/566); (c) as spiritual knowledge: “CONTEMPLATIO . . . Diuturna cogites” (LXXXV/560, 571); (d) as general culture: “Perspicax qui excolit se ipsum, Their writings wither because they have no curiosity” (LXXXV/559); “Keep ‘em off the market four years / and leave ‘em without understanding, / No classics, No American history, / no centre, no general root, / No prezzo giusto as core / UBI JUS VAGUM” (LXXXV/563);13 “study with the mind of a grandson / and watch the time like a hawk” (LXXXV/564) (plus the “recipe” mixing in equal parts “research . . . observation . . . training and Tεκνη,” Ibid.); therefore “You will go a long way without slipping / without slopping over” (LXXV/564–565); (e) as linguistic knowledge and appropriateness: “‘Get the mot juste before action’” (LXXXV/572). All these teachings and positive examples (or, when negative, to better have the positive ones stand out) lead to the Latin explicit of this Canto: “aperiens tibi animum” (LXXXV/573), a “luminous detail” and a spiritual “viaticum,” which needs no explanation. From a metaphoric and mythological point of view, these are the “new” Runes that Yggdrasill gives the poetas-new-Oðinn: it is in fact well known that, after his initiation, the Norse god is characterized also as god of Poetry (Brosse 2004, 13). Of course, one cannot forget or omit the almost numberless Chinese ideograms which appear in this Canto: their importance and meaning cannot be downsized, but the focus is on the mythical ash tree Yggdrasill, and on its symbolical and metaphorical significance in Cantos LXXXV and XC. In this latter one, Yggdrasill appears at the very beginning, epitomizing the metaphor and doctrine of Nature and Signatures,14 and combining it with another mythical episode, that of Philemon and Baucis (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book VIII): “Beatific [and beatified] spirits welding together / as in one ashtree in Ygdrasail. / Baucis, Philemon” (XC/619). Here, the image of the

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devout old couple echoes “that god-feasting couple old / that grew elm-oak amid the world” of the juvenile poem “The Tree” and, as in that poem, also in this Canto the Apollonian laurel is evoked through the image of the Delphic sacred fount Castalia. Furthermore, as in a new re-birth of Nature (after Ragnarök / Götterdämmerung), under the solemn, protective and benevolent shadow of Yggdrasill other trees begin to sprout: “elms,” “stone under elm” (once more the couple “Ligna et lapides” of Bernard de Clairvaux), “woodland . . . the trees rise . . . boughs . . . umbrella pines . . . pineta . . . a new forest” (XC/621, 622). There is also a difference, a shift from the Norse myth through a change that is extremely telling and meaningful: in the original version of the myth, after Ragnarök/Götterdämmerung and the final destruction of Miðhgardh and of Walholl, life begins miraculously again through the new original couple, Lìf a& Lìfthrasir, born out of Yggdrasill’s trunk (Brosse 2004, 14). Also in Canto XC do appear a couple shadowed by the beneficent “Ygdrasail,” but they are not young people, rather elderly ones: Baucis and Philemon. This mythical couple brings back once more to the short lyric “The Tree” which, before being published in Ripostes (1912) and reprinted at the beginning of Personæ (1926), had appeared for the very first time in Hilda’s Book (1905–1907), a collection of twenty-five poems (two handwritten, the rest typed) “hand sewn, bound in vellum” which Pound dedicated to and gave his young sweetheart (Pound 1979: 67–68; Dennison 2005, 146–47). It has already been recalled that the two teenagers, Ezra and Hilda, “climbed up into the maple tree in our garden” as H.D. remembers in End to Torment (ET 12). Still more telling, meaningful, and evocative is the name Ezra gave his beloved: “Dryad” (mythologically, a nymph of the oak tree and, in their romance, also a kind of reversal of the identification Philemon = Oak/Baucis = Elm or Linden).15 In End to Torment, Hilda mentions that epithet Ezra gave her: “No, Dryad, he says” (ET 12); “You must come away with me, Dryad” (Ibid. 15). And in another flash of memory she reconstructs her father’s words (or, more precisely, her recollection of those words) at catching the two adolescents smooching: “Mr. Pound, you turn into a Satyr, a Lynx, and the girl in your arms (Dryad, you called her) . . . is Maenad, bassarid” (ibid. 17, Italics of the Author). In the first poem of Hilda’s Book, Ezra addresses Hilda as “Child of the grass,”16 wishing that “All the old lore / Of the forests & woodways / Shall aid us” (“Child of the grass,” ET 68–69). He also declares that “My lady is tall and fair to see / She swayeth as a poplar tree . . . Her hair is brown as the leaves that fall” (“Domina,” Ibid., 73, 74) and stresses that “She has some tree-born spirit of the wood” (“Rendez-vous,” Ibid., 84). It is also remarkable that the setting of several lyrics is “wood-woodland” (“To One That Joureyeth with Me,” 73, “Era Venuta,” Ibid., 81; “The Tree,” Ibid.; “Rendez-vous,”

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Ibid. 84), and that it is characterized by “maple bough” and “King oak tree” (“The Banners,” Ibid., 77). It is evident that the identifications woman-tree are multiple, and that the young poet is not so much interested in a precise mythological (or botanical) correspondence, rather in stressing the fundamental “arboreal” nature of his beloved, a “tree-born spirit.” Such a mystical communion with the world of trees recalls once more the concept of “germinal conscience” formulated in “Psychology and Troubadours”: Ezra and Hilda, the Faun17 and the Dryad, did possess such a “germinal conscience.” Thus, the quotation from “Psychology and Troubadours” could be slightly changed, to adapt it to the two young lovers: “Their thoughts were in them as the thought of the tree . . . And their minds were the more poetic, and they did affect mind about them, and transmuted it as the seed the earth. And this latter sort of mind was close on the vital universe” (SR 92–93, changes in Italics). A similar psychic phenomenon and condition is described and explained in the revelatory “Note Precedent to ‘La Fraisne’”: When the soul is exhausted of fire, then doth the spirit return unto its primal nature and there is upon it a peace great and of the woodland “magna pax et silvestris.” Then becometh it kin to the faun and the dryad, a woodland-dweller amid the rocks and streams “consociis faunis dryadisque inter saxa sylvarum.” (CEP 8, Italics for Latin in the text, otherwise added)

E.P.’s and H.D.’s souls were “exhausted of fire”—the fire of their juvenile love and ecstasy, as remembered by Hilda herself several times in End to Torment: “kisses . . . Electric, magnetic” (ET 4); “The perfection of the fiery moment can not be sustained . . . the memory of the ‘fiery moment’” (Ibid., 11, 24,); “fiery kisses” (Ibid. 15, 54). Therefore (as in the “Note” just quoted), also their “spirit[s]” did take refuge in their “primal nature,” becoming “kin to the faun and the dryad”—their very mythological doubles—under the shadows of real and imaginary, symbolical and mythical trees, first of all the ash tree as Yggdrasill. That special and most rare “germinal conscience” had awakened for the first time in the two young lovers, it had grown, developed, become self-conscious in their adulthood, and had finally re-surfaced again—now in the elegiac mode—in the “old couple” aware that, as in Canto XC “Trees die & the dream remains” (XC/623). NOTES 1. The abbreviation is that in use among Pound’s scholars: Roman number of the Canto/page number. The reference edition is The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1989. For the other abbreviations of Pound’s and other

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poets’ works in the text of this essay, see Bibliography, where they are individually explained. 2. “Believe one who has tried: you shall find a fuller satisfaction in the woods than in books. The trees and the rocks will teach you that which you cannot hear from masters.” The point here is not so much whether Pound may have known Bernard de Clairvaux (if so, probably via Dante) and been influenced by the Medieval mystic— and certainly St. Bernard does not introduce the modernist poet to the extreme vision (Notes for CXVII et. Seq./815–17) as he does with Dante in Paradiso XXXIII—rather the similarity of the two statements as regard the immutable and unalterable and irrefutable teachings of Nature. 3. See also Pound’s sincere interest and deep admiration for St. Francis of Assisi, and his translation (1910) of “Il Cantico del Sole” (SR 102–03). 4. The adjective “Dantescan” was used by Pound himself both in poetry: “By no means an orderly Dantescan rising” (LXXIV/457) and in his obituary (Feb. 4, 1965) for T.S. Eliot: “His was the true Dantescan voice.” Therefore, following his “auctoritas,” it will be used also in this essay. 5. Considering Pound’s classical culture and his interest in myth, the reader might expect that, following the tradition, the poet would have addressed himself to, or dedicated his work to, or asked the assistance of, Apollo, the god patron of poetry or, at least, of his cortege of Muses. 6. On this theme, see also Ezra Pound, “Arnold Dolmetsch” (1918): “The first myths arose when a man walked sheer into ‘nonsense,’ that is to say, when some very vivid and undeniable adventure befell him, and he told someone who called him a liar” (Pound 1954, 431). 7. During his/her initiation process, the shaman climbs a tree (a birch tree, the “Tree of Light”) as anthropologists have repeatedly stressed and demonstrated. See Eliade 2020, 125–27: “Ritual Tree Climbing.” On the extraordinary characteristic of the phenomena recorded in the poem “The Tree,” see Witemeyer 1969, 12 (footnote); however, Witemeyer does not directly associate this kind of experience with shamanism, but limits himself to the psychic level of “displacement of the poet’s self into another mode of existence.” 8. On the psychological condition of the protagonist, also in comparison to the other two “dendro-morphic” poems “The Tree” and “A Girl,” see Witemeyer 1969, 24–25, 53, 57, 64, 71. 9. In Bacigalupo’s Italian translation of End to Torment (Bacigalupo 2013, 127), one finds the name of the corresponding tree in Italian, when Pound addresses H.D. as “fiore di sanguinello,” that is, “dog-wood flower” (I wish to thank Massimo Bacigalupo for his kind replies to my questions about this particular letter and its translation into Italian). 10. Even though, according to Mythology, Baucis was transformed in a Linden, not an Elm. 11. A lexical-semantic remark is here necessary: in classic Greek the aorist tense “οιδα” of the verb “to see” “οραω” almost changes its meaning, and signifies “to know” (not “I saw”); thus the speaker of “A Tree” now “knows” because he/she “has seen” (“knowing the truth of things un-seen before”).

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12. As far as the archetype of the poet as shaman and initiate is concerned, the connection is to the mythical Orpheus and his extraordinary life and experience. On Orpheus and modern poetry see, for example: Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice. Poetry and Natural History. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960; Robert McGahey, The Orphic Moment. Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarmé New York: State University of New York Press, 1994; Åke Strandberg, The Orphic Voice. T.S. Eliot and the Mallarmean Quest for Meaning. Uppsala: Uppsala University Library, 2002. 13. It is worth considering also the evocative meaning of the word “root” in connection to Yggdrasill and its three roots (Brosse 2004, 10–11). From a different hermeneutic approach and perspective which goes beyond traditional mythology, by projecting the image and its interpretation on a cosmic/astral plan and its interpretation, see de Santillana-von Dechend 1968, 268, 282 (in part. 498). 14. On this doctrine, it is interesting to note that, according to the Italian scholar Elemire Zolla, God taught Nature the play-game of signatures, which in the Norse lore and culture were called Runes: “God [is] the creator of Nature in his own image: He teaches her the play of signatures, which in the Norse world will be called runes” (Zolla 1986, 94, our translation into English). Therefore, in this Canto, the connection and consequentiality Nature-Doctrine of Signatures-Yggdrasill-Runes is quite clear, even though not explicitly declared as is typical of Pound’s allusive and obscure poetry. 15. See also p. 97 of this essay as regard another mythological identification human being-tree, that is, the first woman, Embla and the Elm tree, not unlike that of Baucis with the elm tree in Greek myth and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 16. Perhaps an anticipation of the concept of “germinal consciousness” and of “the thought of the tree” which is already “in the grass,” as formulated in the passage from “Psychology and Troubadours” quoted on page 106 of this essay. 17. Worth mentioning here also Claude Debussy’s magic and quasi-mystic musical composition Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune (1894) and its source, the poem L’après-midi d’un faune by Stéphane Mallarmé (1876) whose protagonists are the very sylvan creature, the Faun, and the Nymphs.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bacigalupo, Massimo. 1980. The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: Columbia University Press. Bernard de Clairvaux. 1889. Life and Works of Saint Bernard, Abbot of Clairvaux, edited by Dom. John Mabillon, translated and edited with Additional Notes by Samuel J. Eales, London: Burns & Oates (2nd ed.). Brosse, Jacques. 2004. Mitologia degli Alberi. Dal giardino dell’Eden al legno della Croce. Milano, Rizzoli. Italian translation by G. Angiolillo Zannino (orig. title Mythologie des Arbres. Paris: Plon, 1989). Bush, Ronald. 1999. “Late Cantos LXXII-CXVII.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound, edited by Ira B. Nadel, 109–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Carpenter, Humphrey. 1988. A Serious Character. The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber. Casella, Stefano Maria. 2018. “‘By no means an orderly Dantescan rising’: Ezra Pounds Anmerkungen zu Dante Alighieri.” In Dante-Rezeption nach 1800, edited by Franziska Meier, 185–204. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Cattabiani, Alfredo. 1996. Florario. Miti, leggende e simboli di fiori e piante. Milano: Mondadori. Dennison, Julie. 2005. “Hilda’s Book.” In The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia, edited by Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Stephen J. Adams, 146–47. Westport/CT and London: The Greenwood Press. De Santillana, Giorgio, von Dechend, Hertha. 1998. Il Mulino di Amleto. Saggio sul mito e sulla struttura del tempo. Milano: Adelphi. Italian translation by Alessandro Passi (orig. title Hamlet’s Mill. An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1969. Eliade, Mircea. 2020. Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press (orig. title Le Chamanisme et les Techniques Archaiques de l’Extase. Payot: Paris, 1951) Frazer, Sir James George. 1987. The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. London: MacMillan. Graves, Robert. 2013. The White Goddess. A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, edited with an introduction by Grevel Lindop. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Guenon, René. 1997. Simboli della Scienza Sacra. Milano: Adelphi. Italian translation by Francesco Zambon (orig. title Symboles fondamentaux de la Science sacrée. Paris: Gallimard, 1962). H.D. 1979. End to Torment. A memoir of Ezra Pound by H.D. With the poems from “Hilda’s Book” by Ezra Pound, edited by Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King. New York: New Directions (abbreviated in the essay with the acronym ET). H.D. 2013. Fine al tormento. Ricordando Ezra Pound, edited and translated by Massimo Bacigalupo. Milano: Archinto. Pound, Ezra. 1953. The Spirit of Romance (1910). New York: New Directions (abbreviated in the essay with the acronym SR). Pound, Ezra. 1954. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, edited and with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber (abbreviated in the essay with the acronym LE). Pound, Ezra. 1976 A. A Lume Spento (1908). In Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, edited by Michael John King, introduction by Louis L. Martz. New York: New Directions (abbreviated in the essay with the acronym CEP). Pound, Ezra. 1979. “Hilda’s Book” (1905–1907). In End to Torment. A memoir of Ezra Pound by H.D. With the poems from “Hilda’s Book” by Ezra Pound, edited by Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King. New York: New Directions (abbreviated in the essay with the acronym HB). Pound, Ezra. 1989. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions. Pound, Ezra. 1990. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1919–1920). In Personae. The Shorter Poems (1926), a revised edition prepared by Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York: New Directions (abbreviated in the essay with the acronym EPP).

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Ruthven, Kenneth Knowles. 1969. A Guide to Ezra Pound’s Personae (1926). Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Witemeyer, Hugh. 1969. The Poetry of Ezra Pound. Forms and Renewal 1908–1920. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Zolla, Elemire. 1986. L’amante invisibile. L’erotica sciamanica nelle religioni, nella letteratura e nella legittimazione politica. Venezia: Marsilio.

Chapter 7

Seamus Heaney’s Arboreal Poetry Irene De Angelis

Since ancient times, people have attached a spiritual quality to trees. Trees are around us, in the noisy, polluted cities we live in, in our own gardens, in public parks, or along the streets. They are outside the cities, too, foris, in the woods and the forests which according to many literary and folklore traditions were once inhabited by hermits, mystics, and visionaries, searching for a natural temple to worship, without doors and open to all. In Ireland, the origins of tree worship are rooted into pagan Celtic tradition. The country is sometimes known as “The Emerald Isle,” in memory of a time when it was covered in woodlands. There is a long tradition of veneration of certain trees, which are still considered sacred today. This explains why, about twenty years ago, when plans were made for a new motorway in County Clare, the Irish folklorist, storyteller, and fairy expert Eddie Lenihan famously made the news, warning against the felling in that area of a tree, which was said to be sacred to the fairies (Deegan 1999). Lenihan strongly believed that misfortune would befall anyone who cut it down, threatening any motorists driving over the spot. So, in the end, the motorway was built around the sacred tree, preserving an element of the landscape, which was traditionally considered an object of worship. Starting with a brief introduction on the deforestation of Ireland, which provides the historical background for my research, this essay takes into consideration a selection of poems concerning trees written by the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney. My analysis will show how arboreal images are pervasive in Heaney’s oeuvre, taking on different meanings across time, and moving from the personal level to an increasingly abstract mode of representation.

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THE DEFORESTATION OF IRELAND The “Emerald Isle,” once celebrated for the green forests that extensively covered its terrain, “became almost entirely denuded of tree cover by the end of the nineteenth century and continues to be among the least forested regions in Europe” (Shokoui 2019, 17). In ancient Celtic cultures, every tree was believed to “possess its own spirit or numen” (Green 1992, 1–2). The Irish Celts celebrated trees as a source of spiritual power and associated them with protection against evil spirits and bad luck. Already in the so-called Brehon laws, the ancient legal code of Ireland written in archaic Gaelic during the seventh and eighth centuries, “trees were considered communal property and cutting or mutilating them was a serious offence” (Shokoui 2019, 18). After the Norman Conquest, with the rise of feudalism and the development of farming, Ireland witnessed the first period of deforestation during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The change of land use and the felling of the forests continued at increasingly high levels when Ireland became a British colony in the sixteenth century. In Tudor England, Ireland became a strategic and economic target for invasion for “the fuel-hungry British Isle,” partly also due to “the growing demand for cheap timber used for ship-building purposes” (Shokoui 2019, 19). The deforestation for agricultural purposes continued during the Stuart and Commonwealth periods, causing damages to biodiversity and “gradually alienating the Irish, who had earlier relied on the woods as shelter, dwelling, and source of livelihood” (Shokoui 2019, 19). British colonizers not only deprived the Irish “of their shelter and source of income, but also gradually alienated them from their own dwellings” near the woods (Shokoui 2019, 19). After the Act of Union (1800), reforestation schemes were started by the gentry, but this had a negative impact on the local population, which became more hostile toward the landowners. In the mid-1840s, an Gorta Mor, or the Great Irish Famine, caused the death of over one million people and the emigration of another million until 1852. Millions of poor Irish farmers who relied on the land for survival were suddenly confronted with the apparent indifference of nature toward their suffering. Last but not least, when, after the Land Act of 1881, land ownership was transferred to farmers, who exploited the woods for tillage and grazing, “landlords cleared great areas of forests to compensate for the loss of their previously owned lands” (Shokouhi 2019, 20). When in the first decade of the twentieth century the state started to replant trees, only 1.5 percent of the earlier ancient forests were left. In the period that led to Irish independence, reforestation schemes were temporarily abandoned. The need for fuel and timber during the two world wars further reduced the size of Irish forests, until the Forestry Act of 1946, “which accelerated the process of planting trees by up to 10,000 acres per

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annum” (Shokouhi 2019, 20). In more recent times, when in 1973 Ireland entered the EEC (now the EU), afforestation became associated with the privatization of Irish forests. The reforestation scheme had an excellent outcome in the late 1970s, and this positive result lasted for about two decades, until tourism, particularly during the Celtic Tiger years, had a double effect on the landscape: on the one hand, cultural treasures such as Coole Park in Co. Galway were preserved, but on the other hand, the natural environment was inevitably damaged. Today, “less than 11% of Ireland’s total land area is under forest cover” (Shokoui 2019, 21), a very limited surface in comparison with the European average of 35.5 percent. The creation of new forests to tackle climate change is among the priorities of the Irish government’s environmental agenda, with a planting target of 440 million trees by 2040. Of these, 70 percent are to be conifers, while 30 percent will be broad leaves, a balance regulated by the need to protect biodiversity and to prevent the extinction of certain animal species. MAD SWEENEY AND IRELAND’S FORESTS If the various waves of foreign colonization throughout Irish history, alongside climate change and natural disasters, caused a transformation of the Irish landscape with its deforestation, the advent of Christianity “disrupted the so-called ‘natural’ order of the pagan world” (Shokoui 2019, 26), leading to the desacralization of the groves, “bereaving the landscape from its protecting deity (genius loci) and disconnecting the native population from the surrounding environment” (Shokoui 2019, 27). By devaluating the landscape, which the Irish considered a place of worship, the Christian missionaries deprived the land of its original status. The sacred dwelling, namely the woods, is the setting of Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray (1983), his English translation of the Gaelic masterpiece Buile Suibhne. This anonymous medieval text is believed to date back to the twelfth–thirteenth centuries or even earlier. It tells the story of a legendary King of Ulster, Sweeney, who is the embodiment of the pagan Celtic tradition. Sweeney’s antagonist, Ronan Finn, is a cleric and an ascetic, who curses him and turns him into a bird doomed to fly from tree to tree all over Ireland. Heaney’s translation from the Gaelic original had a ten-year literary gestation, which culminated in this outstanding representation of an outlaw and a penitent figure, part hermit, part tree worshipper, who ultimately is an alter ego of the poet himself. His role as an outsider and a marginalized, mentally unstable figure can be explained in the following terms: “The forests were foris, ‘outside.’ In them lived the outcasts, the mad, the lovers, brigands, hermits, saints, lepers, the maquis, fugitives, misfits, the persecuted, the wild men” (R.P. Harrison 1992, 5).

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The beauty of nature is sung by Heaney/Sweeney in lines which are reminiscent of the songs of praise by ancient Irish hermits. The bird-King Sweeney embodies the figure of the artist, a deraciné who takes comfort in art and struggles for freedom and creativity. The central part of his song is a paean to the trees. In the marginal space of the forest, a place of transformation and redemption, Sweeney finds comfort and shelter, a mental sanctuary that offers him space for contemplation and renewal. Exiled King Sweeney is presented as a hybrid figure, part human, part avian, who sings poems of lamentation and praise. The metamorphosis he is doomed to after Ronan’s curse turns him into a liminal figure, who experiences the harshness and the pleasure of the woods, associated with danger and excitement, beyond the limits of society and yet in close contact with it. Beyond the threshold of the forest something marvelous happens, namely Sweeney’s becoming enchanted, something which can only take place after he becomes an interspecies and is therefore able to appreciate the wonders of life. Sweeney is fully part of the natural world that surrounds him, with its trees and animals. His inbetweenness enables him to overcome the binary terms of Ronan’s curse (civility vs. wilderness): he “encounters difference with a surprised ‘feeling of being charmed by the novel and yet unprocessed encounter’ with his new environment and other species” (Bennett 2001, 17). Therefore, Ronan’s curse is not only a punishment, because it introduces Sweeney to the dimension of wonder expressed in his poetry. The enchantment associated with the woods is in line with the idea of sacredness of the early Irish landscape. Commenting on early Irish nature poetry in his essay “The God in the Tree,” Heaney identifies a tension around which this poetry was built, between pagus, “the pagan wilderness . . . unrestrained” and disciplina, “a religious calling that transcends the almost carnal lushness of nature itself” (Heaney 1980, 183). Sweeney’s story reflects this tension: Ronan’s curse and Sweeney’s penitential existence are linked to disciplina, while in Sweeney’s praise of nature we find an expression of pagus (Herron and Pilz 2019, 89). The woods are not mere wilderness, but rather an interstitial space where paganism and Christianity coexist, a place that is apparently desolate, where beauty and surprise can nonetheless be found. If on the one hand the woods are a purgatorial space associated with punishment, on the other hand they offer consolation, a natural shelter, food, and companionship. Sweeney’s “ark and his Eden” (Heaney 1983, 21), Glen Bolcain forest, is also his “winter harbor,” his “haven,” his “refuge,” his “royal fort” (Heaney 1983, 65). Taking etymology into consideration, Herron and Pilz interestingly point out how in Old English the noun “madness” contains the same root as “woodness,” while there is a connection between the adjective “wood,” meaning insane, and the Old Gaelic for poet, fáith, meaning “wild” or “mad” (Herron

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and Pilz 2019, 92). Sweeney’s mental state is as ambivalent as the place he finds himself in, as his mood oscillates between anger and acceptance, hallucination, and self-awareness. His liminal state corresponds to the symbolic nature of the woods, suspended between “prison and sanctuary, wasteland and Eden, poison and cure” (Herron and Pilz 2019, 93). They are an appropriate sort of punishment, being the natural shelter of the outlaws and the outcasts, a place of “exile, escape, prophecy, penance, vision and temptation” (Herron and Pilz 2019, 93). Like the Biblical wilderness, they may lead to a higher form of spirituality, their “discomforts allowing for a proof of faith” (Saunders 1993, 18–19). Following the medieval conventions, the woods are unregulated in opposition to civilization, yet they are the ideal scenario for enchantment. Another fundamental aspect of Sweeney Astray is that its protagonist chooses to roost in particular trees. In the paean to trees, the oak, the alder, and the birch trees are mentioned. Beside them, the yew trees play a special role in the poem, the “lords of the wood” (Kelly 1999, 41), usually to be found close to holy wells or next to churches. In medieval Irish culture they were associated with kingship, but they were also symbols of death and afterlife. In ancient Celtic mythology, the yew was the tree of the druids and it was an emblem of sacred wisdom. Although trees offer Sweeney solace with their beauty, they are also part of an inhospitable and rough environment. Their thorns cut and wound Sweeney’s avian body, increasing the suffering inflicted upon him by the elements, especially in the winter season with its biting frost. It is not by chance that the yew tree was believed to be the tree upon which Christ was crucified (MacCoitir 2018, 3): scholars such as Stephen Regan find several evangelical allusions in the story of mad Sweeney, in his Christ-like suffering and his association with the crown of thorns. Through his repentant solitary pilgrimage, Sweeney’s penance is enacted in the trees. Suspended in a purgatorial state between life and death, he finds himself amid the tree-tops, neither grounded on earth nor reaching heaven. The Irish woods allow for Sweeney’s “threshold-existence between life and death, human and animal” (Herron and Pilz 2019, 99), and “between craziness and reason” (Heaney 1998, 15). By becoming “other” in the forest, Sweeney, once a king, later turned into a bird-poet, sings of pain and endurance, penitence and wonder. Heaney aptly compared Sweeney’s song to Patrick Kavanagh’s nature poetry, similarly articulating “a lonely but resilient ‘inner freedom’” (Heaney 1988, 14). TAKING SHELTER IN THE TREES The legendary, liminal figure of Sweeney who takes refuge in the woods left such a deep imprint on Heaney’s imagination that it recurs in several later

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poems, essays, and interviews. This is the case, for instance, of the “Sweeney Redivivus” section of Station Island (1984), in which the poem “In the Beech” is written in the double voice of Heaney/Sweeney, as is evident in the closing lines: “My hidebound boundary tree. My tree of knowledge / My thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post” (Heaney 1984, 100). In conversation with Dennis O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones (2008), Heaney spoke about the fact that Heaney and Sweeney rhyme not only phonetically, but also because of their intrinsic affinity. “Sweeney Redivivus” is a sequence of poems whose protagonist, Sweeney the bird-man, is finally free to travel across time and space, tracing back his past adventures and lending his voice to the poet. Through this complex and fascinating figure, Heaney expresses his longing for artistic and intellectual freedom, and his search for inner fulfillment. In the poem “In the Beech,” in particular, Heaney recounts his childhood memories in a series of evocative lines, in which the flight of the bird-man merges with the flight of the American and English aircraft at the military base near Mossbawn. The boy Heaney is a silent witness of what happens, both in the air and on the ground, while he is hiding in “his” tree of knowledge. The voice of Sweeney becomes one with “the child Heaney,” as the poet himself explained in an interview: There are some poems which are clearly autobiographical. There’s one poem called “In the Beech.” Now, the Sweeney figure spends a lot of time roosting in trees . . . It’s one of those universal childhood reveries that you remember being in a tree and the address and the airiness of it, and the secrecy and the removal from the usual world. And in my case, I remember this particular tree I used to climb; I climbed it—I must have been four or five, it was during the war anyway . . . So . . . Sweeney in the tree, and the child Heaney in the tree are merged together there and I use them to re-collect and to re-member. (Heaney radio interview, 1984)

Re-collecting and re-membering, in the closing lines of “In the Beech” Heaney alludes to “his” own version of the biblical tree of knowledge, which is at once personal and universal. Trees and the wish to take shelter featured in Heaney’s writing even before the translation of Buile Suibhne. An example, which anticipates the Sweeney poems, can be found in “Oracle” from Wintering Out (1972), in which the poet links the memory of his childhood to a willow tree. The boy Heaney is perched in his tree and is listening to the echo of his name being called. As McKenna insightfully notices, this is “the aural equivalent of seeing one’s image reflected in the mirror” (2007, 47), and in this case the speaker’s identity is articulated in body parts which are associated with speaking and hearing (“mouth,” “ear,” “lobe,” “larynx”), each corresponding to a part of the body of the tree. The

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child identifies and merges with the willow tree, an image which calls to mind a significant autobiographical passage from Preoccupations (1980): I spent time in the throat of an old willow tree at the end of the farmyard. It was a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots, a soft, perishing bark and a pithy inside. Its mouth was like the fat and solid opening in a horse’s collar, and, once you squeezed in through it, you were at the heart of a different life, looking out on the familiar yard as if it were suddenly behind a pane of strangeness. Above your head, the living tree flourished and breathed, you shouldered the slightly vibrant bole, and if you put your forehead to the rough pith you felt the whole lithe and whispering crown of willow moving in the sky above you. In that tight cleft, you sensed the embrace of light and branches, you were a little Atlas shouldering it all, a little Cerunnos pivoting a world of antlers. (Heaney 1980, 17–18)

The willow tree is described with anthropomorphic features, as a living being with a “throat,” a “mouth,” and a “heart.” The depiction also emphasizes the defamiliarizing effect of the tree, making the ordinary world look strange (“as if it were suddenly behind a pane of strangeness,” Heaney 1980, 18). From its roots to its branches, the tree seems to be reaching for the sky, giving the boy access to a different reality through its whispering embrace. It should also be noticed how the tree becomes an “airy listening post” (Heaney 1984, 100) and a vantage point, turning the child-poet into an attentive listener and a careful observer. The idea of seeking protection in the trees is also at the heart of another poem by Heaney titled “Exposure” from the collection North, which was published at the height of the Troubles, in 1975, only three years after the poet’s move with his family from Ulster to Wicklow, in the Irish Republic. A man in his mid-thirties, Heaney felt a growing responsibility as an intellectual in a time of deep crisis for his country. After defining himself as a “wood-kerne / Escaped from the massacre” (Heaney 1975, 72), one of the rebels who, in earlier periods of Irish history, took refuge in the woods when defeated, to prepare for further resistance, he adds an image which expresses his desire to seek protection in nature, feeling all his frailty and his sense of impotence against the evils of History, as he is “Taking protective colouring / From bole and bark, feeling / Every wind that blows” (Heaney 1975, 72–73). Even in this case, the forest is seen as a place of refuge, offering the poet a symbolic alternative to the politics of violence, while at the same time expressing a feeling of alienation from society and an ambivalent attitude toward exile. When he wrote “Exposure,” Heaney was working on the translation of Buile Suibhne, and some of the lines seem to be spoken in the voice of the “man of the wood,” Sweeney.

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TREES, ABSENCES, AND LUMINOUS EMPTINESS Heaney’s tree-inspired poems and prose excerpts analyzed so far were all written between the early 1970s (Wintering Out, 1972) and the early 1980s (Sweeney Astray, 1983). In the following decade Heaney, in his mid-1940s, had to face the tragic death of both of his parents, a loss which left a deep wound in his life and in his writing career. His mother, Mary Heaney née McCann, died in 1984, while his father Patrick died only two years later, in 1986. This resulted in a deep creative crisis, which translated into a stylistic change: Heaney started to write increasingly “by subtraction,” isolating single, evocative words against the blank space of the page. The symbol of the tree, which is so pervasive in his poems, gradually began to take on a different meaning, associated with absence, light, and silence. This is particularly evident in three poems from the collection The Haw Lantern (1987): “Clearances 8,” “The Wishing Tree,” and “For Bernard and Jane McCabe.” “Clearances” is a sequence of eight sonnets in memory of Heaney’s mother. Heaney chooses a canonical form, which allows him to express his suffering in a series of neat, polished lines. In the last sonnet, the first three lines (“I thought of walking round and round a space / Utterly empty, utterly a source / Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place,” Heaney 1987, 32) echoes the third section of “Station Island” (1984). The empty space left by the mother’s absence is compared to the luminous void created by a chestnut tree, which was planted the year the poet was born and was later felled after the Heaneys moved house, leaving Mossbawn farm. Both mother and tree continue to live on in the poet’s imagination, in the “luminous emptiness” of memory: “Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever / Silent, beyond silence listened for” (Heaney 1987, 32). In his essay “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh” (1988), Heaney openly links his own development to that of the chestnut tree: And over the years I came to identify my own life with the life of the chestnut tree. This was because everybody remembered and constantly repeated the fact that it had been planted the year I was born . . . the chestnut was the one significant thing that grew as I grew. (Heaney 1988, 3)

The “clearances” Heaney alludes to in his sequence are made of silence and space, and may recall the stillness of Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” (1921). If the felled chestnut tree is a blunt symbol of mortality, what lingers in the reader’s imagination is that “bright nowhere” “beyond silence,” a nonlocus associated with eternity and spiritual regeneration. In Eugene O’Brien’s words, “Heaney’s association with the tree gradually became replaced by an

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association with the ‘space where the tree had been or would have been’” (O’Brien 2003, 113). Heaney insightfully wrote: It was not so much a matter of attaching oneself to a living symbol of being rooted in the native ground; it was more a matter of preparing to be uprooted, to be spirited away into some transparent, yet indigenous afterlife. The new place was all idea, if you like; it was generated out of my experience of the old place but it was not a topographical location. It was and remains an imagined realm, even if it can be located at an earthly spot, a placeless heaven rather than a heavenly place. (Heaney 1988, 135)

Similarly, Heaney has clarified that another “tree poem” from The Haw Lantern, entitled “The Wishing Tree,” is associated with the loss of his mother-in-law: “The dead woman in this short poem was my wife’s mother and I associate her with a tree which grew near their home where people used to come and make wishes and drive coins into the trunk” (Heaney in O’Driscoll 2008, 194). The opening lines read: “I thought of her as the wishing tree that died / And saw it lifted, root and branch, to heaven” (Heaney 1987, 56). In Ireland, a “wishing tree” is a tree, often a hawthorn, where it is customary to leave offerings, often hammering pins or nails into the bark as an act of superstition. To have a wish granted, applicants were supposed to focus on their wish while walking around the tree. Like the poet’s dead mother-in-law, the uprooted tree is lifted to heaven, leaving behind a trail of votive objects: even in this case, Heaney gives us a taste of his arboreal poetry, suspended between tangible reality and the visionary dimension which will characterize his next collection, Seeing Things (1991). The last, evocative “tree poem” from The Haw Lantern here taken into consideration is “For Bernard and Jane McCabe.” Initially, these two lines constituted an epigraph dedicated to friends, a married couple with whom Heaney and his wife had spent the holidays. The fact that the epigraph had later been “promoted” to the status of a poem per se shows its significance for Heaney, while it also anticipates the dreamy quality of the following collection. The poem reads: “The riverbed, dried-up, half full of leaves / Us, listening to a river in the trees.” Heaney’s existential and artistic crisis, which followed the loss of his parents, translates stylistically into increasingly “hermetic” writing—into an “Image.” This two-line poem, which has the quality of a Japanese haiku, does not follow the traditional 5–7–5 syllable structure, and there is a seasonal reference in the fallen leaves. Heaney struggles to shun “human-centered emotions” and “thrives on a nature-centered feeling” (Hakutani 2009, 10). The dried-up river visually translates into two blank spaces between the lines, and Heaney is in fact describing an “absent” river, since the riverbed is “dried-up.” The expression “listening to a river

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in the trees” is highly evocative, suggesting that the voice of the dried-up river, where water once used to flow, is recaptured by the wind whispering in the trees. The juxtaposition or superposition of the first and second lines closely recalls the effect created by Pound’s manifesto “Petals on a Bough.” Moreover, the reference to the wind enhances the poem’s allusiveness and awakens the imagination: the trees become increasingly abstract and stylized, an “idea” which is intrinsically related to Heaney’s identity and his poetic voice. TREE. COSMIC TREE. NO TREE. Among his “tree poem[s],” as Heaney himself defined them in Stepping Stones, as if he was aware that they constituted a “sub-genre within his canon” (McKenna 2007, 48), the absent tree which features in “Clearances,” among others, is “the most powerful” of all (McKenna 2007, 47). The poet gradually broadens the meanings attached to this symbol, moving beyond the personal, as is evident in the 1986 pamphlet Towards a Collaboration, a limited edition of the sonnet “Clearances 8,” complete with an abstract illustration by the Dublin-based painter Felim Egan. The pamphlet closes with a page-long meditation on the word “tree,” which “renews the symbol and positions [Heaney’s] work in a broader literary context” (McKenna 2007, 48): Tree. One of the most potent monosyllables in our tongue. A word that roots far into the ground of our human being. Tree of life. Tree of knowledge. World tree. Tree of the cross . . . It is one of those fundamental nouns—like mother or father—each of which ramifies into a whole tree of language in itself. Already, in the dim forest of Indo-European, its trunk was sturdily in place before it branched out into Sanskrit dāru meaning a kind of pine, into Greek dóru meaning wood or a spear, into Old Irish daur and Welsh drewen meaning an oak, into Russian drevo and Swedish trād and old English treo(w). When Felim Egan suggested that we collaborate on a project . . . I just said “Tree,” And then, “No tree. Chestnut tree. Soul tree. Thorn tree. Wishing tree.” I said so because I had been writing poems in which the loss of parents was imagined in terms of the empty spaces where these various trees had once stood, parts of a seemingly immutable landscape. Natural landmarks become marked absences; clearances; eerie brightnesses airbrushed on the air. (Heaney 1986, unpaginated)

If Heaney represents the loss of parents by the empty spaces once filled by certain trees, such representation is informed by the notion of the tree “as an

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ur-symbol encompassing language, time, place and culture” (McKenna 2007, 49). The tree of life is said to grow like the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, and it is believed to preserve humanity from death. The tree of knowledge is also described in the Book of Genesis, where it is associated with the forbidden fruit, which causes the Fall of mankind. The world tree, instead, is linked to the mythology and cosmology of shamanic cultures: the universe is conceived as consisting of three parts (sky, earth, and underworld), which are crossed by a tree, functioning as an axis along which man ascends to heaven. Finally, the tree of the cross consists in the representation of the cross like a tree, from which branches depart bearing the images of the prophets, alluding to Christ’s sacrifice. As such references make clear, Heaney’s “tree poem(s)” are enriched by and delve into “religion, cosmology and epistemology” (McKenna 2007, 49). This multiplicity of meanings sheds further light on the range of trees described in the second part of Towards a Collaboration: “Chestnut tree, Soul tree. Thorn tree. Wishing tree.” These are all products of Heaney’s own personal mythology, his way of constructing his own symbolic tree, which is rooted in a ‘luminous emptiness’ full of potential, “utterly empty, utterly a source” (Heaney 1987, 32).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Deegan, Gordon. “Fairy Bush Survives the Motorway Planners.” The Irish Times, May 29, 1999, accessed January 7, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.iri​​shtim​​es​.co​​m​/new​​s​/fai​​ry​ -bu​​sh​-su​​rvive​​s​-the​​-moto​​rway-​​p​lann​​ers​-1​​.1900​​53. Green, Amanda. 1992. Animals in Celtic Life and Myth. London & New York: Routledge. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. 2009. Haiku and Modernist Poetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harrison, R.P. 1992. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heaney, Seamus. 1972. Wintering Out. London: Faber & Faber. Heaney, Seamus. 1975. North. London: Faber & Faber. Heaney, Seamus. 1980. Preoccupations. London: Faber & Faber. Heaney, Seamus. 1983. Sweeney Astray. London: Faber & Faber. Heaney, Seamus. Radio interview with Paul Vaughan. Kaleidoscope. Broadcast by BBC Radio4, October 11, 1984. National Sound Archive tape #T10618w. Heaney, Seamus. 1984. Station Island. London: Faber & Faber. Heaney, Seamus. 1987. The Haw Lantern. London: Faber & Faber. Heaney, Seamus. 1988. “The Placeless Heaven: Another Look at Kavanagh.” In The Government of the Tongue: The 1986 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures and Other Critical Writings, 10–20. London: Faber & Faber.

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Heaney, Seamus. 1991. Seeing Things. London: Faber & Faber. Heaney, Seamus and Felim Egan. 1986. Towards a Collaboration. Enniskellen: Fermanagh District Council. Herron, Tom and Anna Pilz. 2019. “Cursed to the Trees, Enchanted by the Woods: Sweeney Astray.” Etudes Irlandaises 44 (1): 87–99. Kelly, Fergus. 1999. “Trees in Early Ireland.” Irish Forestry Journal 56 (1): 39–57. MacCoitir, Niall. 2018. Ireland’s Trees. Myths, Legends and Folklore. Cork: The Collins Press. McKenna, Colleen. 2007. “‘A Meaning Made of Trees’: The Unwriting of a Symbol.” In Seamus Heaney. Poet, Critic, Translator, edited by Ashby Bland Crowder and Jason David Hall, 42–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Brien, Eugene. 2003. Seamus Heaney: Searches for Answers. London: Pluto Press. O’Driscoll, Dennis. 2008. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. London: Faber & Faber. Regan, Stephen. 2015. “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 21 (2): 317–40. Saunders, Corinne J. 1993. The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Shokouhi, Marjan. 2019. “Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes: The Historical Loss of Irish Woodlands.” Etudes Irlandaises 44 (1): 17–30. Stevens, Wallace. 1954. The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage. Zucchelli, Christine. 2018. Sacred Trees of Ireland. Cork: The Collins Press.

Chapter 8

Between Ecology and Ritual Images of New Zealand Trees in Grace, Finlayson, Hilliard, and Sargeson Paola Della Valle

Aoteaora1 New Zealand has always been renowned for being a lush and green country, with climates varying from subtropical in the north, to temperate in the central region and cold in the South Island, especially in the inland alpine areas (King 2003, 62). When the Māori, a population of Polynesian origin, migrated to Aotearoa by canoes—sometime in the period between 800 AD and 1300 AD (King 2003, 51–52)—they found a land of forests, inhabited by birds and insects. Having being isolated for a long time, the country had a wide variety of unique native birds, plants, and trees. In 1770, the naturalist on James Cook’s first expedition to the South Seas, Joseph Banks, still described New Zealand as “a land where the bush grew to the water’s edge and trees were filled from ground level to canopy with copious bird and insect life” (King 2003, 15). The landscape however was destined to change dramatically after the migration flows from Britain in the nineteenth century, when Aotearoa New Zealand became a British colony. The presence of humans, first Māori then Europeans, impacted on the flora and fauna of the country in different ways. Extensive research has been conducted on the widespread phenomenon of native bird extinction, due to the first arrival of humans on islands throughout the Pacific, included Aotearoa. Recent studies underline the loss of some bird species as a consequence of a complex series of factors, not just human overhunting (Duncan et al. 2002). First, extinction did not affect all native species but only those apparently most vulnerable to human hunters, especially large-bodied, flightless birds such as the New Zealand moa. As underlined by Duncan, “prehistoric humans hunted a wide variety of birds, only some of which became extinct” (Duncan et al. 2002, 517). Due to prolonged isolation and in absence of 123

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mammalian predators, many species of birds had atrophied wings. Whether flightless or not, all of them were unaccustomed to mammalian predators and lacked predator escape response. Second, there were other impacts associated with human arrival other than hunting, including habitat change and the introduction of several mammalian predators (in Aotearoa, rats and dogs). The first human settlements necessarily implied some clearance of the bush for agriculture and habitation. As Duncan claims: “this habitat destruction may have had a stronger impact on larger bodied birds that required larger tracts of continuous habitat to persist in a locality” (Duncan et al. 2002, 521). Large-bodied bird species, therefore, were doubly doomed to extinction. The evidence that human predation had a role in prehistoric bird extinctions is therefore circumstantial. In conclusion, if hunting contributed significantly to the selective extinction of prehistoric birds in an island avifauna, what appears from recent literature is that extinctions were determined by the complex laws of natural selection. Deforestation by fire was also carried out by Māori to create space for vegetable gardens, tracks, and settlements in a country where 85–90 percent of the land had been covered in dense forest prior to human presence (Wilmshurst et al. 2004, 167). A different story is that of European colonization. The signature of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), between the British Crown and some (but not all) Māori chiefs, brought about large-scale immigration from the UK, in a very short time. In precontact days, the Māori population was around 100,000. In 1830, there were 300 Europeans living in New Zealand. By 1840, the number had risen to 2,000 and by 1860 the European population had surpassed that of Māori for the first time (Della Valle 2010, 12). The British colonization also meant the introduction of the capitalist system, which implied “production for market and profit, private ownership of land and wage labor” (Ulluwishewa et al. 2008, 273; quoted from Gudeman 2001). The new model of development was much more pervasive. As a British colony, New Zealand became the land of people who “fight Nature for a home,” in the words of the poetpolitician of the 1890s William Pember Reeves, who represented the view of most of his compatriots (King 2003, 435). The ultimate mission of British settlers was to turn as much of New Zealand as possible into an agricultural landscape, thus realizing a “Britain of the South,” in appearance and function (King 2003, 435). The parts of the country that were not suitable for farming might yield other resources, such as firewood, gold, coal, and other minerals. Many of the large trees were cut for timber. Rivers and lakes, especially from the early twentieth century, were seen as sources of hydro-electricity and land “as a surface to be covered as far as possible with grass, which was in turn to be converted into food for human consumption in the form of meat, butter or cheese, or into wool. No thought was given to the replacement of native trees with native trees” (King 2003, 436). Today, less than a quarter of New

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Zealand is covered with forest. Cleared land in hilly areas is “prone to erosion” (Wilmshurst 2007). Only in the second half of the twentieth century, some questions started being raised about whether this was the best possible use of the land. In 1955, New Zealand writer Helen Wilson wrote—somehow in justification—that her country had been “too desperately poor to deny the present for the benefit of the future,” that is, to foster sustainable economy and conservationism instead of encouraging immediate gains (King 2003, 437). Māori and Pākehā (New Zealanders of European origin) have had a different approach to natural resources. While the latter were driven by liberalcapitalist economy, the Māori attitude to the environment, including trees, is part of the larger territory of Māori ethics. As Christina Thompson explains:2 Maori respect for the environment meshes with the ethics of the emergent green movement. Maori respect for the integrity of others, good or bad, makes sense in terms of Christian ideals. Maori “work ideals,” which involve cooperative attitudes, consensual decision-making, and respect for both labor and product, fit in a Marxist context. And Maori spiritualism has an odd kind of kinship with the various “Orientalized” religious movements that are associated in the West with a reaction against materialism. But . . . the similarities are largely superficial. The deep structure of Maori values, their metaphysical underpinnings, are radically at variance with the Pakeha world view. To take merely one example, Maori respect for the environment stems from a genealogical view of the connections between mankind and the physical world. Looking after the natural world is not a matter of pragmatism, therefore, but one of obligation. (Thompson 1984, 185)

According to Māori cosmology, in the beginning of time, the Sky Father Rangi lay in the arms of the Earth Mother, Papa. For long ages, they clung together, and their children lived in the darkness of their embrace. The children longed for freedom and wanted light to warm their bodies. Tūmatauenga, god of humankind and, not coincidentally, of war, suggested killing them, but his brothers did not agree to this. All the children’s attempts to separate their parents failed. In the end, Tāne, god of forests, birds, insects, and timber, succeeded: he planted his head on the earth, thrust his feet against the sky, and with an immense effort forced them apart. Separated for eternity, the primordial parents were very sad, and they still grieve for each other. Rangi’s sorrow is visible in the rain and dew that fall from the sky, while the soft mists that rise from the earth are a token of Papa’s longing for her husband. All the children—among whom Tangaroa, god of the sea and fish, and Rongo, god of all cultivated vegetables—were content to stay with their mother. Only one, Tāwhiri, god of wind and storm, objected to the separation and took

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shelter in his father’s embrace. Still angry, he sends his children from time to time to disfigure the land. Tāne also provided his mother with a beautiful mantle of green. He clothed her naked body by bringing his own children, the trees, and setting them in the earth. However, he made a mistake (after all, he was so young) and planted them with their head (the roots) in the soil (Reed 1999, 11; Reed 2004, 10–11). The relevant role played by Tāne in Māori cosmology shows the importance of trees and forests in their mythic imagery and daily life. Māori “closeness to nature” is part of their animistic culture and has become a political issue in the defense of their ancestral land from public confiscation in the past and private development in the present. As John Patterson, one of the first scholars to investigate Māori ethics, explains, central to Māori culture is the concept of mauri, the life force, which unites all Creation and enables it to flourish. The life force belongs to living beings (humans, animals, trees, and plants), but also natural elements (seas, rivers, mountains), social collectives (a village, a tribe, an institution), man-made artifacts, human activities, and events. Patterson also points out the interconnectedness and interaction of all creatures: If one creature suffers unnecessarily, that causes unnecessary harm to many others. After all, all creatures are regarded as kin, related through the whakapapa or genealogical tables that trace all people back to Papa and Rangi, Earth and Sky. The life force or mauri of each creature descends through these genealogical chains, and so is related to that of all other creatures . . . The welfare of the whole depends upon that of each individual; the welfare of each individual depends upon that of the whole. This is why the mauri of each creature is to be respected. (Patterson 1998, 71)

According to this philosophy, humans should live in harmony with nature, not seek to dominate it. While the Bible endows humans with a God-given sovereignty over other creatures (Genesis 1, 28), in the Māori view there is no in-built domination of men over nature, because they belong to the same “family.” This does not prevent us from using other creatures for food or things for real needs. But interfering with other creatures (that is, killing a fish, hunting a bird or felling a tree) needs to be justified (Patterson 1998, 75), as all creatures are part of the same network that will be spoiled if there is not a good reason behind the action. Each creature has mana (power, authority, prestige), another important concept, which is “its value in relation to other creatures” (Patterson 1998, 77). One’s mana is woven in with the mana of the others, in a way that recalls modern ecology and evolutionary biology. Metge underlines how the notion of mana implies “commitment to value” and the importance of “collective responsibility” (Metge 1993, 329), which, in turn,

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leads to the necessity of redressing balance when this has been upset. The restoration of balance is called utu, which includes reciprocation of kind deeds as well as revenge. Utu is neither good nor bad: it is necessary in relation to mana. The importance of traditional knowledge, rituals, and ceremonies is also emphasized: “Spiritual entities such as mauri are thought to be subject not so much to the laws of science as to the traditional laws that govern rituals. To omit the ritual invites trouble” (Patterson 1998, 70). So ancient chants, karakia (prayers), and the respect of protocol are crucial because they represent the link with the past and the re-enactment of the process that gave rise to the original creation. They help restore the mana of an object or person and reconnect it to the original mauri. A Pākehā author with deep knowledge of Māori culture, Noel Hilliard, was able to exemplify the sacredness attributed to trees by Māori, the sense of interconnectedness between all creatures, and the necessity of the restoration of balance through ritual in one of his short narratives “The Tree” (1976), later included in his anthology Selected Stories (1977). The story is about a centenarian matai tree that must be felled to give space to the new community center and because its root system is stopping the installation of sewerage pipes for a new block of houses. The village agrees to what is considered as a necessity. But when the elders see that neither a bulldozer nor chain-saws can manage to uproot the big matai, they perceive something wrong: in their view, a child of Tāne is resisting death and struggling for its life. Later, in the meeting house (the central building of a Māori village or community), they express their feelings in ornate korero (speeches) to the community. This is what one of them says: “Respect” he said, “respect has to be paid to parents. Always. It is traditional and also scriptural. If we do not honour our origins, how can there be respect between those who now are, and those who were, and those who are to come? So it is with Tane and his works. This tree is the child of Tane, as we all are, and we must recognise and respect parenthood. I am a Christian, at least I try to be. But there is nothing in the Christian faith to say I may not honour the feelings and beliefs of my forefathers. Not when it means showing respect for life.” (Hilliard 1976, 104)

The point made by the elders is not that the matai must be saved at all costs. Many trees have been turned into canoes, house parts, and objects useful for man’s survival. But the mauri (life principle) immanent in all beings—human and non-human—deserves respect. The tree is fighting for its dignity, because “it is the living record of all our days and nights together in this place” (Hilliard 1976, 106). It must be thanked for the service given to the humans, for being cover to them in storms and shade from the sun,

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and shelter from wind and rain. The elders always refer to the matai tree as a personal “she.” They decide that the old ways must be followed, that the communication between man and tree must be resumed, as in the old days when “we never knew what it was to be alone or unwanted. To us all things were the children of Sky Father and the Earth Mother as we ourselves are” (Hilliard 1976, 104). Before dawn, the tree felling starts preceded by ancient rituals: chants, invocations, prayers to Tāne. The elders are wearing traditional garments and have resumed their old stone axes. The first chip from the tree is burnt as an offer to the gods. In the second fire, lit with other chips and sawdust, the elders cook some potatoes to feed Tāne and themselves too. Then, they light a third fire inside the gap of the trunk for a while. The work proceeds with the deepening of the scarf and a new burn. Interestingly, the tree-felling method and rituals described by Hilliard are the traditional ones used by Māori tribes in the past and can be found in one of the ancient Māori songs included in the collection Nga Moteatea, edited by Apirana Ngata and Pei Te Hurinui Jones,3 as illustrated by Agate Thornton (Thornton 1999, 17–20). The whole village is present when the tree is finally pulled by flax ropes, and accompanies its death with chants, as in a solemn funeral of an ancestor: He [an elder] kept his ear to the tree for a long time while the people waited in silence. “The tree is speaking to us,” he said at last. “Quick now, we must lose no time. We have all been part of her life and we must all be part of her death; we must share! Bring all the whanau [extended family], quickly.” (Hilliard 1976, 112)

The Māori bond with trees is also seen in their tradition to plant one when a baby is born, which becomes his/her birth tree. In Māori, literature trees come also to symbolize aspects of the human beings they are connected to. An example is in the novel Mutuwhenua, by Māori writer Patricia Grace. The protagonist, Ripeka, is a Māori young woman in the late 1970s, who faces the amphibious condition of being astride two cultures due to her inter-racial marriage. Ngaio is the other name given to her after the tree that was planted at her birth (ngaio tree). The narrator explains that a ngaio tree has a “peaceful appearance” from some distance, but when you get closer to it “you discover the pained twisting of its limbs and the scarring on the patterned skin” (Grace 1994, 1). Ripeka’s turmoil and interior oscillations are exemplified by its shape. Next to it is a ti kouka or cabbage tree, brought down from the bush when her father was a small boy. The ti kouka is his tree. On the last page, after her father’s death, Ripeka plants another ti kouka for her son, the same tree as her father’s because the little boy is going to take his place in the family. Both

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ngaio and ti kouka are sheltered by the big macrocarpa, a centenarian tree with thick, heavy roots that spread wide and deep. The macrocarpa stands for the ancestors and for Māoritanga, protecting the other two smaller trees from the strong wind and the sun’s ferocity. If not for the macrocarpa’s strength, they “would not have taken root and flourished” (Grace 1994, 2). Grace’s narrative exemplifies the concept, previously exposed by Patterson, of the interconnectedness between trees and humans, as members of the same family. The ngaio tree in Grace’s work is connected to one more subtext, the legend of Māori heroine Rona, which concludes the novel. Rona’s image is employed to symbolize a person whose roots are shallow and who is easily taken astray. According to this legend, on a night with a full moon (Rakaunui), Rona went to the spring to fill her calabashes, but the moon suddenly became obscured by a passing cloud and Rona tripped, cursing the moon. Hearing this, the moon came down and snatched her up. Rona caught at the branch of a ngaio, but the tree was uprooted and taken to the sky with her. At full moon she can be seen on its surface, still clutching the tree and her calabashes (Grace 1994, 154). In the last lines of the book, Ripeka evokes Rakaunui and the story of Rona, tracing an analogy between herself and the mythical heroine. The legend comes to symbolize Ripeka’s predicament and her fear of being uprooted. As mentioned above, the transformation of the country into agricultural landscape to meet the targets of capitalist economy reached its apex in the first half of the twentieth century with so-called grasslands revolution, defined by King as “the process by which a combination of bush clearance, the introduction of vigorous strains of exotic grasses mixed with use of herbicides and fertilizers had resulted in the conversion of 51 per cent of the country’s surface area into grasslands (and the percentage would have been even higher but for the alpine spine in the South Island)” (King 2003, 438). Everlarger quantities of fertilizers were requested to feed New Zealand farms. The “revolution” was made possible by the acquisition of Nauru Island in 1919, which Australia and New Zealand plundered for its phosphate-rich limestone and guano rock over the succeeding decades, causing irreparable environmental damage (BFF Editorial Team Envirohistory NZ 2009). The initial prosperity given by this process was destined to show its side-effects in the long run in a country with high rainfall, unstable ground, and lack of fertile soil. The conversion of hill country in particular to pasture has led to erosion, landslides, and flooding—and further loss of fertility as a result of lost topsoil. The potentially negative effects of the so-called scientific farming were acknowledged in an authoritative volume, Pastures: Their Ecology and Management (1990), edited by R.H.M. Langer, which advocated the return to indigenous grasses, the preservation of trees and the re-creation of indigenous landscapes (King 2003, 439).

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New Zealand literature recorded the anxiety of non-conformist Pākehā writers toward deforestation and land consumption, before Māori authors appeared on the literary scene in the 1960s. One of the most sensitive Pākehā writers to these issues is Frank Sargeson, the so-called “father” of New Zealand literature. In his short story “Gods Live in Woods” (1943), he opposes two viewpoints: that of a young rational man, who believes in progress and science as a new faith, and his uncle Henry, an old farmer who has acquired practical knowledge on the land. Henry lives alone on the farm he has broken in from the heavy bush country. He certainly epitomizes the pioneering spirit of the white settler who tamed the land to build his personal pastoral dream, but at the same time he seems to question it constantly. His laconic remarks to his verbose and theoretical nephew reveal his doubts about an exploitative approach to the environment. Sargeson leaves the reader to complete and make sense of Henry’s thoughts, as this dialogue shows: Roy wanted to know, didn’t he feel like cutting the bush out? No, Henry said. I’ve done enough of that. Why? Roy said. Wouldn’t it pay? Oh yes, Henry said, there’d be money in it all right. And they started climbing again and it wasn’t long before they came out of the bush without having gone through very much of it. (Sargeson 2010, 212)

Henry looks knowingly at the slips that scar the soil he has cleared from the bush, and the clean water of the creek coming from the bush and flowing into the turbid lower one. He also mentions a flood that carried away the fence the winter before. All of these are consequences of deforestation. The landslide, in particular, becomes a recurrent image in Sargeson’s fiction, symbolizing the blind Western notion of development as well as moral and spiritual blindness. We find this image again in his novel I Saw in My Dream (1949). Two different attitudes are again juxtaposed: on the one hand the Macgregors, who apply the strict puritanical hard-working ethics of the first settlers to life. They see land merely as a source of economic exploitation. If it does not comply with their interest, it becomes an enemy. They represent the idea of man in combat with nature. On the other hand, Mr Anderson, the most open-minded and reflective of the farmers, cannot but voice his uneasiness. Although his point of view coincides with that of any white farmers trying to make the most of his land, Anderson is the only one who discerns the real problem. Like Uncle Henry in “Gods Live in Woods,” he admires Māori wisdom and perceives a core of rightness in their way of relating to the land. He also realizes how the white man’s presumption to dominate nature is dangerous. An

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example is his account of how one day, when he had run out of rope, some Māori made one simply by cutting some flax from a field (Sargeson 1974, 208). Another is Anderson’s remark on the big “slip” that has blocked a track. He comments: “That’s what happens once you’ve got rid of the bush on this sort of country” (Sargeson 1974, 117). This image foreshadows the disastrous landslide that buries the Macgregors’ house at the end, killing both of them. Symbolically, their moral blindness becomes an eternal physical blindness. Another Pākehā author of the first half of the twentieth century, Roderick Finlayson, follows the same line as Sargeson in his novel Tidal Creek (1948). Throughout the story, the novel explores the divergent attitudes of an old Pākehā farmer, Uncle Ted, and his nephew Jake who has come to visit. Uncle Ted does not want to join the increasing industrialization of farming. His selfcontented frugal life—based on contact with the land, peasant experiential knowledge and seasonal rituals—affirms attitudes that, in the words of the author himself, “are more akin to those of the Maori” (Della Valle 2010, 59). On the other hand, young Jake is rooted in a celebration of progressivism, a restless enthusiasm for technology, and an indefatigable faith in science that in the end seems to be a form of blind non-communication with nature, reaching its apex one day, when he gets lost in the bush. Jake feels the same fear as the first white settlers, for whom the bush was too uncanny, rationally uncontrollable, and therefore dangerous. His reaction is supportive of the settlers’ deforestation: “No wonder the pioneers burnt the bush. Jake remembered white settlers talking about such experiences. Bush fright, they reckoned” (Finlayson 1979, 80). In his essay Our Life in This Land (1940), Finlayson launched a vocal attack on the spread of industrialism, the consumer society, and capitalism in New Zealand and the global world. This may be the reason why, apart from Tidal Creek and a few short stories, he chose to write mostly about Māori. He denounced their dispossession enacted by Europeans and, in the foreword to his collection of short stories Brown Man’s Burden (1938), he openly said that: . . . in spite of the destruction of Maori culture by the European, and the gradual invasion of Maori life by modern materialism, the Maori still retains much of the poetic life of his forefathers . . . There is no place in art for the artificial or the imitative. And for my part, I prefer to write of those, left almost landless by the European, who are still more truly of the land than we who have dispossessed them. (Finlayson 1938, i–ii)

Brown Man’s Burden provides a realistic and sensitive insight into the Māori world. In one of its stories, “The Totara Tree,” the respect of trees by Māori is the center of the narrative. A Power Board Inspector wants to cut

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down a totara, which stands in the way of the new power line they are setting up in the valley. The totara is the birth tree of an old woman, Taranga, who objects to the felling by climbing up the tree and refusing to move. As previously mentioned, planting a tree when a child is born is a Māori custom. The tree becomes tapu (sacred). Taranga’s gesture is taken very seriously by another elder, Uncle Tuna, who still believes in sacredness, but quite humorously by young people. Their commitment to Taranga’s cause turns into a big feast with a lot of drinking, laughing and boasting about their future deeds. Finally, a fire breaks out, burning one of the houses. Uncle Tuna is the only one who does not participate in the binge, but watches in disgust at that “senseless generation” working “their own destruction” (Finlayson 1938, 45). After rescuing Taranga from the fire, they discover she has been dead for some time. Following Uncle Tuna’s advice, they bury her beneath the tree and, since the area is turned into a burial site, it cannot be desecrated and the tree is saved. The gulf between generations is analyzed within a community, depicted through the different viewpoints of its members. This technique, often used by Finlayson, allows him to describe them as individuals in relation to their group, according to Māori culture. Finlayson uses a humoristic approach to the serious problem of Māori younger generations’ fatal attraction to Western progress (the children fingering the inspector’s big car or a young man’s admiration for the 10,000 volts carried by the power lines) and their consequent corruption by it (drinking and mocking traditions) to see what lies behind their contradictory actions and sympathize with them. Uncle Tuna’s disapproving remark “Can’t the Pakeha bear the sight of one single tree without reaching for his axe?” (Finlayson 1938, 41) conveys Finlayson’s concern for the environment and criticism toward Western anti-ecological “progressivist” views. To conclude, the ecological conscious attitude that rose in Aotearoa New Zealand in the second half of the twentieth century, which started the process of limiting industrial farming and deforestation, fostered the preservation of native trees and led to the conversion of some areas to National parks, owes much to the influence of the Māori holistic view about trees and the environment in general. The creation of National parks, sometimes on ancestral Māori lands like the Tongariro National Park, which became the first World Heritage Site in 1993, aroused awareness in the general public that returning ancestral land to Māori could promote shared environmental and cultural patrimony. Ecologically conscious aspects of Māori culture seem to guarantee that the indigenous minority will safeguard a natural patrimony, including trees and forests, on behalf and in favor of the majority of New Zealanders.

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NOTES 1. Aotearoa is the Māori name of New Zealand: it means the land of the long white cloud, which is the image the Māori saw when they first sighted the country. 2. In this and other quotations, Māori words may be written without macron (e.g., Maori, Pakeha, Tāne), because in the past orthographic rules were generally not considered by writers. 3. Over forty years, Sir Apirana Ngata, distinguished Māori leader and scholar, collected and recorded hundreds of songs and chants from the tribes of Aotearoa, which became the four volumes of Ngā Mōteatea, with translations and annotations by Ngata and Pei Te Hurinui Jones. The song Thornton refers to is n. 175.

BIBLIOGRAPHY BFF Editorial Team. “The ‘grassland revolution.’” Envirohistory NZ: people and the environment through history. November 29, 2009, accessed November 11, 2019, https​:/​/en​​viroh​​istor​​ynz​.c​​om​/20​​09​/11​​/29​/t​​he​-gr​​assla​​nds​​-r​​evolu​​tion/​. Della Valle, Paola. 2010. From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Maori Literature. Auckland (NZ): Oratia Media. Duncan, Richard P., Tim M. Blackburn and Trevor H. Worthy. 2002. “Prehistoric bird extinctions and human hunting.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 269 (1490): 517–521. Finlayson, Roderick. 1938. Brown Man’s Burden. Auckland (NZ): The Unicorn Press. Finlayson, Roderick. 1979 [1948]. Tidal Creek. Auckland (NZ): Auckland University Press. Grace, Patricia. 1994 [1978]. Mutuwhenua. Auckland (NZ): Penguin Books. Gudeman, Stephen. 2001. The Anthropology of Economy. Malden, MA (US): Blackwell Publishing. King, Michael. 2003. The Penguin History of New Zealand. Albany, Auckland (NZ): Penguin Books. Hilliard, Noel. 1976 [1977]. Selected Stories. Dunedin (NZ): John McIndoe. Langer, R.H.M. 1990. ed. Pastures: Their Ecology and Management. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Metge, Joan. 1993. “Review of Exploring Maori Values by John Patterson.” The Journal of Polynesian Society 102 (3): 328–29. Patterson, John. 1992. Exploring Maori Values. Palmerston North (NZ): The Dunmore Press. Patterson, John. 1998. “Respecting Nature: a Maori perspective.” Worldviews 2 (1): 69–78. Reed, A. W. 2004 [1963]. Reed Book of Māori Mythology. Revised by Ross Calman. Birkenhead, Auckland (NZ): Reed Publishing. Reed, A.W. 1999 [1946]. Maori Myths and Legendary Tales. Auckland (NZ): New Holland Publishers.

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Sargeson, Frank. 2010 [1964]. Frank Sargeson’s Stories. Devonport, Auckland (NZ): Cape Catley. Sargeson, Frank. 1974 [1949]. I Saw in My Dream. Auckland (NZ): Auckland University Press. Thompson, Christina. 1994. “Review of Exploring Maori Values by John Patterson.” Philosophy East and West 44 (1): 183–86. Thornton, Agathe. 1999. Maori Oral Literature as Seen by a Classicist. Wellington: Huia. Ulluwishewa, Rohana, et al. 2008. “Indigenous Knowledge for Natural Resource Management: A Comparative Study of Maori in New Zealand and Dusun in Brunei Darussalam.” GeoJournal 73: 271–284. Wilmshurst, Janet M., et. al. 2004. “Early Maori Settlement Impacts in Northern Coastal Taranaki.” New Zealand Journal of Ecology 28 (2): 167–179. Wilmshurst, Janet M. “Human effects on the environment.” Te Ara. The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, September 24, 2007, accessed: 20/11/2019, https​:/​/te​​ara​.g​​ovt​.n​​z​/ en/​​human​​-effe​​cts​-o​​n​-the​​-​envi​​ronme​​nt.

Chapter 9

The Tree that Therefore I Am Humans, Trees, and Gods in Cosimo Terlizzi’s Cinema Alberto Baracco

TREES AND PHILOSOPHIES The tree has long been the symbol of life and the perennial cyclicity of nature. Since ancient times, in its position as a connecting element between earth and sky, and in bringing together materiality and spirituality, the tree has been the fulcrum of myths and narratives and also a recurring element in philosophical reflection. The relationship between humans and trees thus has deep, age-old roots. Starting in Pre-Socratic cosmogonic philosophy and continuing into the late medieval period, the tree was often identified as an element that both unites divine and human and mediates between them. Examples of this form of representation can be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Daphne, who is turned into a laurel tree when pursued by Apollo (Metamorphoses, 1.452– 67);1 or Philemon and Baucis, who ask Zeus to be allowed to die together and are transformed into an oak and a linden, eternally united by their trunks (Metamorphoses, 8.616–724).2 Beyond these mythological representations, the tree has also been considered an element for understanding nature and the human being. From the observation of how it comes into being and grows, the tree became useful to philosophical argumentation as simile and metaphor. This argumentative form is already present in Homer, who in Book VI of The Iliad contrasts the bloodlines of men with the generations of leaves that from season to season succeed one another on trees.3 In the thinking of ancient Greek philosophers, the relation between human beings and trees often occurs on the basis of a supposed analogy of the relative biological processes.4 In this regard, the 135

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famous argument developed by Plato in the Timaeus is emblematic. Using the tree as a metaphor for human existence, Plato refers to an ancient tradition that speaks of an age in which there was a close, intimate relationship between gods, human beings, and nature. For Plato, the human being is a celestial plant, an upside-down tree whose roots extend into the sky and whose branches descend into the earth. The Greek philosopher highlights the essential connection that exists between the rational part of the soul, placed in the head and metaphorically represented by the roots, and the intelligible world. The metaphor of the human being as an upside-down tree is useful to Plato so that he can urge a total reversal of perspective and look at the true root of our being and its origin in the intelligible world. Only when attention and care is given to this origin and this dimension of the soul can the human being achieve full and authentic realization, while Plato sees moving away from it, bending down and looking downward, as dispersal into fragmentation and disorder. And as for that most authoritative form of soul within us, we must think of it in this way: that god has given it to each of us as a divinity that dwells at the peak of our body and lifts us up toward our kindred in heaven and away from the earth, since we're not an earthly but a heavenly plant. And we say so most correctly, for it is from there, whence the soul’s first birth sprouted, that our divine part, by suspending our head and root, would keep the entire body upright. (Plat. Tim., 90a, trans. Kalkavage)

As Repici (2000) observed in her discussion of the Timaeus, for Plato the divine seed is sown in the head like in a plowed field, and life therefore gushes from above, like sap that descends downward the body of a tree. From this conception derives the Platonic ethics of human existence: “the divine sower sown his seed; human beings have the task, difficult but not impossible, of becoming farmers of their own souls” (172–173, my translation).5 If for Plato human beings are inverted trees, the metaphor was taken up and overturned by Aristotle, for whom it is the plant that resembles an inverted human. In an analogy based on the nutritional function, if it is the mouth that allows human beings to obtain nourishment, the roots are instead the part that perform this function in the plant: therefore, the plant has its metaphorical head stuck in the ground. In this regard, in Parts of Animals, Aristotle observed, “they come to have their principal organ below; and at last their cephalic part becomes motionless and destitute of sensation. Thus, the animal becomes a plant, that has its upper parts downwards and its lower parts above. For in plants the roots are the equivalents of mouth and head” (Arist. PA IV.10, 686b34–38).

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Aristotle’s aim is to compose a general theory of the soul that can apply to all living beings—humans, animals, and plants. In fact, for Aristotle the soul constitutes the vital principle and the first cause of every biological process and phenomenon. Based on this conception, Aristotle hierarchically organizes the faculties of the soul and the various forms of life: plants had only a vegetative soul, all animals also had a sensitive soul, while only human beings had an intellectual soul. Aristotle readopts the metaphor of the tree in his studies on embryology, where, describing the development of an embryo, he observed: “the vessels join on to the uterus like the roots of plants, and through them the embryo receives its nourishment” (Arist. GA II.4, 740a34–35). The Aristotelian relationship between plants and humans is therefore based on the possibility of establishing analogies regarding the parts of an organism and their functions, according to a scheme that juxtaposes the chain earth-seed-plant, which performs the reproductive function in a visual way, likening it to the hidden chain formed by uterus-semen-embryo (Lucchetta 1990). In addition to the Platonic tradition of the arbor inversa, according to which the tree is an element of connection between matter and spirit, and that of the tree of life of Aristotelian argumentation, in which the tree is an expression of the continuous regeneration of nature, the tree has also been used by philosophy as a symbolic image representing knowledge. With this function, the tree appears in some works by Ramon Llull (anglicized as Raymond Lully), and particularly in his book Arbor Scientiae (1295–1296), where, with encyclopedic intent, the Majorcan philosopher sets out to represent the general framework of human knowledge. Based on common combinatorial devices, knowledge is classified by Llull according to the various realms of reality and systematically related to each other, such as the roots, trunk, and branches, and the leaves, flowers, and fruits of a tree, according to a detailed arboreal symbolism. The Llullian image of the tree of knowledge, symbol of the organization of disciplines, was inspired by Porphyry’s tree (arbor porphyriana), which the neoplatonic philosopher created so that he could represent genres and species in his commentary on Aristotle’s Categories. From this perspective, providing a representative schema for the various branches of knowledge, the tree assumes an epistemological and ontological value, as an expression of the totality of being in its various manifestations. In addition, the tree has also been used to represent philosophy itself. An example of a philosophical tree is offered by René Descartes, who, in a letter to the abbot Picot in 1647, describes philosophy as a tree whose roots are constituted by metaphysics, physics represents its trunk while its branches stand for all other disciplines. Its fruits are a sign of its vitality and depend on the firmness of its roots and the solidity of its trunk.6 Three centuries later, reconsidering this relationship between tree and philosophy, the Italian

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philosopher Giovanni Gentile adopted the metaphor again to explain the connection between phenomenology and logic. In his argument, the tree is identified with the concept, while its root represents sensitive consciousness. In his Defense of Philosophy (1920), Gentile wrote, “if the root cannot be said to be real without the tree, the tree is not without the root” (36). This means that a concept is real, not as a pure and empty entity but because it contains within itself, in an organic and complete way, the phenomenological data of experience.7 At the same time, in his “Introduction to ‘What is Metaphysics’?” (1949), Heidegger employed the metaphor to identify metaphysics as a root which penetrates the terrain of truth and thus nourishes the tree of philosophy: “The truth of Being may thus be called the ground in which metaphysics, as the root of the tree of philosophy, is kept and from which it is nourished” (278).8 Heidegger used the metaphor to argue for the need to overcome traditional metaphysics and shift the analysis from the being of entity to a deeper thought that looks at the original truth of being. MARTIN BUBER’S DIALOGICAL PHILOSOPHY As the previous discussion suggests, the relationship between humans and trees is a true philosophical archetype, and many other examples from the history of philosophy could be given. However, more specifically and consistent with an ecocentric philosophy, I would like to focus on the subject from a dialogical perspective, drawing inspiration from the thought of Italian philosopher and sociologist Franco Ferrarotti, who, in his book Atman. Il respiro del bosco (2012), wrote: “Cutting a tree branch is like inflicting a wound on a human being . . . Trees speak, talk to each other by singing and rustling, they live, they are born and they die like us. Trees are our siblings, or half-siblings, discreet, perhaps shy but, in their own way, loving” (8, my translation). These ideas draw on an ancient tradition inscribed in the words of the Greek poet Diodorus Zonas of Sardis, who in the first-century BC declaimed: “Only keep thy axe far from the oak, for our grannies tell us that oaks were the first mothers” (Greek Anthology, 9.312). Following this tradition and looking at contemporary philosophical thought, it is Martin Buber’s dialogical philosophy that makes the tree our direct interlocutor. For Buber, the tree is a Thou in relation to which it is possible to say the I, through a dialogue that allows human beings to rediscover their most authentic nature. For Buber, the I–Thou relationship can be established in different ways and with different interlocutors, including natural things such as plants, which offer themselves in a dialogue that is before and beyond language. In fact, the I–Thou relationship does not depend on language, which is only its phenomenal manifestation; rather, it is an

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ontological principle and the true foundation of reality. The I–Thou relation is opposed to the I–It relation in which, on the contrary, the other is transformed into an object. The beforeness of the I–Thou relation with respect to the I–It relation is evident in primitive peoples who were unconsciously immersed in a natural world and established a full relationship with everything that surrounded them. Only with subsequent awareness of subjectivity does the I distinguish itself and move away from that primordial unity. What emerges is an otherness in which the other can be made the object of the relationship, as an object of knowledge and an exploitable object, thus becoming an it. The beforeness of the I–Thou relationship is also evident in the behavior of the newborn that even before it perceives external objects is already innately open to relationships, endowed with an inclination which is “a wordless prefiguration of the Thou-saying” (Schaeder 1973, 194). It is this “inborn Thou” (Buber 2004, 28), which is substantial to us and, according to Buber, that offers us the possibility of entering into a full, authentic relationship with being. For Buber, there are therefore two ways of saying and experiencing the world, and two possible attitudes toward the other. Correspondingly, the human being is twofold, because, as Buber wrote, “The I of the primary word I–Thou is a different I from that of the primary word I–It” (Buber 2004, 51). The person that says the I–It has already raised a barrier between himself or herself and the object, because for them having is more important than being. In this way, the I has an experience, but it is not fully in the relationship. On the contrary, the I who says the I–Thou has nothing, but is fully in the relationship, because as Buber observes, “the primary word I–Thou can only be spoken with the whole being” (Buber 2004, 5). To explain these different attitudes toward the world, Buber uses the example of the encounter with a tree, and writes, I consider a tree. I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background. I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air— and the obscure growth itself. I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life. I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law—of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate. I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.

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In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution. It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event. Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it—only in a different way. Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual. The tree will have a consciousness, then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul of dryad of the tree, but the tree itself. (Buber 2004, 14–15)

These notes from Buber’s dialogical philosophy enable us to introduce a reflection on cinematic representation from the perspective of ecophilosophical cinema, a perspective that in my previous works I have identified with the term film as ecophilosophy, which considers film as a particularly effective medium for the expression of a viable environmental philosophy. From this point of view, in the context of contemporary Italian cinema and, within it, in the area of the so-called ecocinema, Cosimo Terlizzi’s work and his recent film Dei (Gods, 2018) are certainly relevant because they show with great clarity how our relationship with the nonhuman being (and, in particular, with the tree) can be effectively expressed through the film medium. The I–Thou dialogical relationship, which is at the center of Buber’s philosophy and which is founded, beyond language and verbal communication, in an intimate and profound closeness and affinity with the other, seems to find a new and effective expression through film images. The juxtaposition of traditional philosophy and film philosophy does not serve to support, according to some hypothetical, untenable principle, the primacy of one over the other, but rather to establish a fruitful, illuminating dialogue between these two different forms of philosophical reflection.

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COSIMO TERLIZZI’S CINEMA When we consider contemporary Italian cinema, we find films where the human–tree relationship is a central theme (e.g., Il segreto del bosco vecchio, Olmi 1993, Il segreto degli alberi, Tofanelli 2012; Alberi, Frammartino 2013; and Alberi che camminano, Colombo 2014; L’uomo degli alberi, Trivero 2018), both as an expression of an ecological ethics that radically opposes the idea of domination of humans over nature, and as a symbolic element in the narration of a more intimate search for identity. From both these perspectives, the cinema of Cosimo Terlizzi is an interesting case study. An eclectic and visionary Apulian artist, Terlizzi followed a path of artistic experimentation which, starting from the photographic studios and art galleries in Bologna, led him to experiment with a range of media, including photography, performance, video-art, and narrative cinema. His works have been presented in numerous galleries and festivals and have received national and international awards, including the prestigious awards for Mediterranean reportage in Marseille and France Doc in Paris. Starting in his earliest works, the relationship between human beings and nature has been at the center of Terlizzi’s artistic investigation. With a poetic, surrealistic style, sometimes with an irreverent and provocative slant, Terlizzi describes his homeland and its contradictions. By emphasizing the boundary line which separates natural from artificial, his works show the illusiveness of the human desire for domination of nature and reveal a deep concern for the disavowal of the sacred, original relationship that binds us to the earth and to other living beings. The ecophilosophical character of Terlizzi’s work is already evident in some of his photographs, such as Palma (Palm Tree, 2010), Il giardino quadrato (The Square Garden, 2010), and Fiori (Flowers, 2010), where nature, oppressed by human action and almost suffocated by cement, re-emerges as a contrasting force. The environmentalist perspective of an exploited nature is well expressed by Terlizzi who, describing one of the photos included in his documentary Folder (2010), observes: “I was in Belgium and I was struck by this black plastic flag used by farmers to scare birds away from a sown field, so I photographed it. It gives this idea of domination of man on earth, of a dominion over an apparently flat territory from which perhaps something will be born. But it is also a sort of funerary monument, a black flag that remains in my conscience” (Iuffrida 2010, my translation). The relationship human beings–nature is also central to Terlizzi’s later works, such as La benedizione degli animali (The Animals Blessing, 2013), an experimental film in which the artist turns his gaze to the animal and frames it within a ritualistic matrix. Reconsidering the ancient, rural tradition of blessing farm animals, and contrasting it with the instrumental and objectifying

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concept of animals which considers them exclusively on the basis of their economic utility for work in the fields or for slaughter, Terlizzi adopts a pluralistic ecocentric approach which returns identity and dignity to the nonhuman animal and celebrates its life. Cosimo, the protagonist of the film, moving about on his family’s farm, explores its spaces and examines the objects of exploitation of animals replacing them and redefining their function. Terlizzi’s camera captures the beauty and uniqueness of nonhuman beings within an essential and poetic dimension, eschewing both the conventional schemes of ecological documentaries and the sugary, bucolic clichés of Disney animation. The forest becomes the protagonist of Terlizzi’s subsequent experimental work, the short film La bestia (The Beast, 2016). Terlizzi introduced the work as follows: “After ‘The animals blessing,’ where I focused my attention on the farm, I felt the need to go beyond the protective fence of man-made place and go into the forest” (Terlizzi, n.d.). Shot in the woods of Switzerland, this short film shows the ambiguities that can be found in the relationship between artificial and natural. The mark a woodsman makes on a tree seems to suggest another reality and open the way to a possible relationship with nature based on a more emotional dimension. Most relevant for our discussion is Terlizzi’s latest work, the film Dei (Gods), produced in 2018 by Valeria Golino, Riccardo Scamarcio, and Viola Prestieri’s Buena Onda, which is Terlizzi’s debut in fiction cinema (see Figure 9.1). Shot in Puglia, between Bari and the provinces of Modugno, Altamura, and Monopoli, Dei could be called a coming-of-age story, focusing on the seventeen-year-old protagonist Martino. Martino lives with his family in a farmhouse in the Apulian countryside, surrounded by sheep and chickens, but also by the discarded appliances and

Figure 9.1  Cosimo Terlizzi (dir.), Dei (Gods), 2018.

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pieces of junk that his father Nicola picks up in the illegal dumps in the area to obtain scrap metal to sell. Their only possession of value is represented by a centuries-old olive tree, which is however threatened by the spread of the Xylella fastidiosa epidemic. Martino helps his father on the farm, but as soon as he can, leaves for Bari, accompanying his close friend Valentina to university to attend philosophy lessons. Through a dialectical narrative structure, the film shows Martino’s path of growth, which unfolds in the context of contradictions between two different forces that move him in opposite directions: the countryside, his family, and his roots, on the one hand, and the city, his friends, and emancipation, on the other. As Terlizzi writes in his direction notes on the film, Dei is an idealized fragment of my adolescence and my inner struggle, divided between the rural world and the seduction represented by the city and a group of friends whom I thought were unreachable. Urbanity and rurality compared as a metaphor for my inner condition. Love for animals and the earth in a visceral sense, on the one hand, my desire for knowledge to discover different things in Bari and at the university, on the other. (Terlizzi, Dei, n.d., my translation)

It is a juxtaposition of spaces and places which is functional to the narrative and expression of a philosophical dialectic that, as the professor explains during a lecture Martino attends, is pending between order and chaos, between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and in seeking the principles of beauty is looking for synthesis and a possible balance. The gods, who appear in the film’s title, are expressions of this beauty and perfect syntheses of the two dimensions of being. The deities of classical Greece not only embody the principle of beauty and harmony, but are also personifications of nature and its manifestations, within a film world that is imbued with spirituality and in which nature plays a central role. They are gods who observe and accompany Martino on his journey of maturation, like the moon, the goddess Selene, which is often shown in the film. In this regard, Terlizzi observes, “the protagonist’s land is the beach of ancient Greece, with all its historical and artistic suggestions. The link with Greece is part of my personality, and I was inspired by the statues of Efebo and Mercury in the search for the young protagonist of the film” (“Dei,” Terlizzi, n.d., my translation). Involved in his intimate struggle, Martino is called upon not to betray his roots while moving on this personal path to growth. The relevance of his relationship with nature is confirmed, not only for the olive tree which dominates the scene in the front yard of Martino’s house, but also because the tree is a recurring presence in his dreams and his privileged interlocutor. Three sequences show Martino who in a dream stands by the tree in an emotionally intense dialogue that is the expression of an original, inseparable

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Figure 9.2  Cosimo Terlizzi (dir.), Dei (Gods), 2018.

bond. In one of these, the lamb that appears in front of the tree and is embraced by Martino is a symbolic and reflected image of an innocence that must not be betrayed and instead has to be protected and preserved in its purity (see Figure 9.2). It is not just the oneiric form of representation that allows the film to convincingly show the dialogical relationship between the protagonist and the tree. Rather, in more general terms, it is film language that is effective in proposing, through images and sounds of nature, often without the need for words, a reversal of perspective, and in expressing the need for the passage from an anthropocentric to a more authentic, ecocentric vision. As a privileged interlocutor of Martino’s intimate dialogue, the olive tree is the symbol of a bond that unites the protagonist with his land. This visceral bond is symbolically shown in several scenes in the film, such as when Martino sinks his hands into the damp earth under the tiles of his house showing an even physical need for contact with it, or when Martino feels the desire to share the emotions of that land with his new city-friends, seeking its voice in a game of echoes. The centrality of the olive tree is shown in the film not only through its relationship with the protagonist, but also through the ways other members of his family relate to it: Nicola, Martino’s father, unlike his son, sees the tree merely as an object and a possible source of income; his grandmother, witness of the past and their common roots, proudly opposes the sale of the tree; and his mother, despite living in poverty, for a form of naive religiousness knows that the grandmother’s prohibition is an inviolable moral principle. The images of the centuries-old tree, whose trunk is so tightly encircled by a ring of discarded, rusting washing machines that it seems to be choking, herald a sad ending.

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Touching in its bitter symbolism, the final scene shows us in an even more eloquent way the relationship that links the olive tree to the characters, as we see it uprooted by order of Martino’s father. There is a mourning for the death of this brother, accompanied by Martino’s tears and his grandmother’s heartrending screams. The film’s final images of the protagonist on his scooter, sadly following the truck that is taking the tree away, are the symbolic representation of a funeral ceremony and expression of a lacerating, irreparable loss. In conclusion, what emerges from our reading of Terlizzi’s work is, once again, the deep relationship that unites us to trees, which questions us not only about how we perceive the living otherness with which we share the world but also about the original meaning of this open, continuous dialogue with nature. When we consider film ecophilosophy, we should recognize that the effectiveness of cinema lies precisely in this: in making us think through images that take us back to the original meaning of our living and sharing the world. NOTES 1. Despite the plea Daphne makes to her father, the river god Peneus, her transformation does not involve the loss of her beauty but rather establishes its conservation in the form of a tree. Daphne remains the object of Apollo’s eternal love, through a mixture of divine, human, and arboreal features that is incisively depicted in Ovid’s verses: “‘Help me father! If your streams have divine powers change me, destroy this beauty that pleases too well’! Her prayer was scarcely done when a heavy numbness seized her limbs, thin bark closed over her breast, her hair turned into leaves, her arms into branches, her feet so swift a moment ago stuck fast in slow-growing roots, her face was lost in the canopy. Only her shining beauty was left. Even like this Phoebus loved her and, placing his hand against the trunk, he felt her heart still quivering under the new bark. He clasped the branches as if they were parts of human arms, and kissed the wood. But even the wood shrank from his kisses, and the god said ‘Since you cannot be my bride, you must be my tree! Laurel, with you my hair will be wreathed, with you my lyre, with you my quiver’” (Metamorphoses, 1.545–559). 2. The charming tale of Philemon and Baucis is one of the most popular Greek myths which inspired many later postclassical artists, including writers, painters, and sculptors. Among them, contemporary English poet Thom Gunn dedicated one of his famous poems to the myth: “Two trunks like bodies, bodies like twined trunks/ Supported by their wooden hug. Leaves shine / In tender habit at the extremities / Truly each other’s, they have embraced so long / Their barks have met and wedded in one flow / Blanketing both. Time lights the handsome bulk” (“Philemon and Baucis,” The Man with Night Sweats, 1992).

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3. Homer declaims, “Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,/ Now green in youth, now withering on the ground;/ Another race the following spring supplies;/ They fall successive, and successive rise:/ So generations in their course decay;/ So flourish these, when those are past away” (Il. 6.181–186, trans. Pope). The simile of leaves is one of the most lyrical of Homer’s work and evokes not only the caducity of human condition but also an analogy between the fall of the leaves and the fall of the soldiers on the battlefield. Trees are often used by Homer for describing his heroes. In this regard, in his detailed study on Homeric similes, William Scott (1974) specified that in The Iliad and The Odyssey the tree simile appears fourteen times, and reflecting on its meanings, wrote: “as trees either stand solidly or are cut down, so also there are warriors who remain unmoving or who fall dead on the battlefield” (70). 4. For ancient Greek philosophers (e.g., Xenophanes of Colophon and Philolaus of Croton), the way plants sprout and bloom from a seed is analogous to human reproduction process, and how trees are tied to the earth and feed on their roots, so the embryo takes root and feeds itself through the umbilical cord. For a detailed discussion on the subject, see Repici (2000). 5. However, the metaphor also served Plato to set a fundamental distinction between the two forms of life. As Matthew Hall (2011) pointed out in his book Plants as Persons, “Although Plato admits some continuity between plants and human beings, his works instigates the process of removing connectivities between plants and humans . . . In rejecting ideas that plants had such faculties as activity, self motion, and awareness without providing any evidence, Plato displays a fundamentally zoocentric philosophy” (21–22). 6. In his “Letter of the author to the translator of the book, that may be used as a preface” included in the book Principles of Philosophy, Descartes (1647) wrote, “Thus, all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principal, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Ethics. By the science of Morals, I understand the highest and most perfect which, presupposing an entire knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom. But as it is not from the roots or the trunks of trees that we gather the fruit, but only from the extremities of their branches, so the principal utility of philosophy depends on the separate uses of its parts, which we can only learn last of all.” 7. In the same passage, Gentile argues: “Concepts are legitimate because they have their first roots in experience. What more do you need?—Now who does not know that roots, like simple roots, and not more than roots, are a simple transitory state of the tree? And that the roots themselves gain their real value, really become roots, that is, they draw reality, because they develop the tree which they are destined for? . . . Now if the tree is the logical concept, and the root the sensitive conscience, this and all the successive degrees of knowledge, up to the logical or rational knowledge, up to the concept, are phenomena (matter of Phenomenology) not reality: transitory states that have their value, not in themselves, but in the end—the concept—to which they tend” (36, my translation).

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8. In his essay, Heidegger (1949) also argues, “As the root of the tree, it [metaphysics] sends all nourishment and all strength into the trunk and its branches. The root branches out into the soil and ground to enable the tree to grow out of the ground and thus to leave it. The tree of philosophy grows out of the soil in which metaphysics is rooted. The ground and soil is the element in which the root of the tree lives, but the growth of the tree is never able to absorb this soil in such a way that it disappears in the tree as part of the tree. Instead, the roots, down to the subtlest tendrils, lose themselves in the soil. The ground is ground for the roots, and in the ground the roots forget themselves for the sake of the tree. The roots still belong to the tree even when they abandon themselves, after a fashion, to the element of the soil. They squander themselves and their element on the tree. As roots, they do not turn toward the soil—at least not as if it were their essence to grow only into this element and to spread out in it” (278).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. 2010. On the Generation of Animals (or De Generatione Animalium). Translated by Arthur Platt. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aristotle. 2012. On the Parts of Animals (or De Partibus Animalium). Translated by William Ogle Oxford: Clarendon Press. Buber, Martin. 2004 [1937]. I and Thou. Trans. by Ronald Gregor Smith. London: Continuum. Colombo, Mattia (dir.). 2014. Alberi che camminano. Italia: OH!PEN. Film. Descartes, René. 1983 [1647]. Principles of Philosophy (or Principia philosophiae). Translated, with explanatory notes, by Valentine Rodger and Reese P. Miller. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. Ferrarotti, Franco. 2012. Atman. Il respiro del bosco. Roma: Empiria. Frammartino, Michelangelo (dir). 2013. Alberi. Italia: Vivo film, Ventura Film. Film. Gentile, Giovanni. 1969 [1920]. Difesa della filosofia (Defense of Philosophy). Firenze: Sansoni. Gunn, Thom. 1992. The Man with Night Sweats. London: Faber & Faber. Hall, Matthew. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1998 [1949]. “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?.’” In Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill, 277–290. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Trans. by Alexander Pope (London: G. Routledge, 1848). Iuffrida, Leonardo. 2010. “Exibart. Arrivederci a Bologna,” (interview with Cosimo Terlizzi). Accessed Nov 22, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.exi​​bart.​​com​/p​​erson​​aggi/​​arriv​​ederc​​ i​-a​​-b​​ologn​​a/. Lucchetta, Giulio A. 1990. Scienza e retorica in Aristotele: sulle radici omeriche delle metafore aristoteliche. Bologna: Il Mulino. Llull, Ramon (anglicised as Raymond Lully). 1515 [1295–1296]. Arbor Scientiae, venerabilis et caelitvs. Lyon: F. Fradin.

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Olmi, Ermanno (dir.). 1993. Il segreto del bosco vecchio. Italia: Aura Film, Pentafilm. Film. Ovid. 2004. Metamorphoses. Trans. by Charles Martin. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Plato. 2016. Timaeus. Translated and edited by Peter Kalkavage. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co. Repici, Luciana. 2000. Uomini capovolti. Le piante nel pensiero dei greci. Roma: Laterza. Scott, William Clyde. 1974. The oral Nature of the Homeric simile. Leiden: Brill. Schaeder, Grete. 1973. The Hebrew Humanism of Martin Buber. Translated by Noah J. Jacobs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Terlizzi, Cosimo. n.d. “Cosimo Terlizzi: La bestia.” Accessed Nov 22, 2019. https​:/​/ ww​​w​.cos​​imote​​rlizz​​i​.com​​/la​-b​​​estia​/. Terlizzi, Cosimo. n.d. “Dei. Un film di Cosimo Terlizzi.” Accessed Nov 22, 2019. https​:/​/ww​​w​.blu​​3velv​​et​.it​​/docu​​menti​​/pres​​sbook​​​/dei.​​pdf. Terlizzi, Cosimo (dir.). 2010. Folder. Italia: Cosimo Terlizzi. Film. Terlizzi, Cosimo. 2010. Fiori (Flowers, 2010). Photograph. Terlizzi, Cosimo. 2010. Il giardino quadrato (The Square Garden, 2010). Photograph. Terlizzi, Cosimo. 2010. Palma (Palm Tree, 2010). Photograph. Terlizzi, Cosimo (dir.). 2013. La benedizione degli animali (The Animals Blessing). Italia: Cosimo Terlizzi, Traffic Gallery. Film. Terlizzi, Cosimo (dir.). 2016. La bestia (The Beast). Italia: Cosimo Terlizzi. Film. Terlizzi, Cosimo (dir.). 2018. Dei (Gods). Italia: Buena Onda. Film. Tofanelli, Alessandro (dir.). 2012. Il segreto degli alberi. Italia: Un fiorino Cinema e Arte. Film. Trivero, Andrea (dir.). 2018. L’uomo degli alberi. Italia: Pacefuturo. Film.

Part III

TREES IN/AND LITERATURES

Chapter 10

Flora J. Cooke’s Tree Stories Progressive Education and Nature in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century United States Bahar Gürsel

Flora Juliette Cooke (1864–1853), “‘The Grand Old Lady of Education’” (Kroepel 2002, 141), was one of the most renowned and productive American primary school teachers of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and was immensely inspired by Colonel Francis Wayland Parker (1837–1902), who was a leading figure in progressive school movement in the United States. Cooke published her Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children firstly in 1893, when she was a teacher at Cook County Normal School in Chicago that was directed by Colonel Parker. The book consists of “charming selections from the best Greek, Norse, Hindu and American Indian myths and legends, and a few of the best animal stories from Grimm and Aesop” along with two biblical accounts about King Solomon, and his wisdom and justice (Cooke 1919, 386). In general, the tales are about various elements and forces of nature such as animals, insects, flowers, and clouds, as well as trees. Apart from encouraging children to adopt the habit of reading, Cooke’s main aspiration in compiling this work was to help the students to learn and experience various forces of nature while appraising historical “myths and fables [which we]re usually beautiful truths clothed in fancy . . . [and we]re quite as true as they were in the days of Homer” (Cooke 1895, iii). By highlighting her endeavors for progressive education, this chapter initially explicates Flora J. Cooke’s teaching method that concentrated on the utilization of nature as an effective tool for the education of primary school children. Furthermore, it scrutinizes Cooke’s “tree stories” to elucidate a prominent and reformist teacher’s depiction of trees, and their significance in nature and human life. It demonstrates the fact that by emphasizing the 151

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“thisness” of each tree that she referred to in Nature Myths and Stories— which employed a number of ancient tales that convey universal messages— Cooke also aimed to denote the importance of being an individual tree in a wide, valuable and significant tree community. Throughout her entire book, her trees loudly and visibly shared important information apart from learning vital things about their and other living entities’ existence, hence became perfect examples for the book’s young readers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States during their quest for becoming virtuous and principled citizens. A PIONEER OF PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES Progressive education commenced as a reaction to traditional education in late nineteenth-century Europe and United States, and turned out to be an important item on the agenda of American educators before and right after World War I. It aimed to educate the future citizens of America in the most excellent way, and concentrated on a student-centered approach, which respected diversity and different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds along with the peculiar abilities and interests of every child. Instead of focusing on the teacher and curriculum, progressive education pursued “student-centered ideals” (Quay and Seaman 2013, 58), and “evolved through individual experimentation” (Beck 1942, 14). Education had to be based on “individual experience, first-hand experience, with real life situations” (Beck 1942, 50). Within this scope, the individual experiences gained directly by the child in nature constituted one of the substantial aspects of progressive education. John Dewey (1859–1952),1 who is widely regarded as “a leader in the Progressive Education Movement in the United States and abroad, also promoted the idea of outdoor education in a film produced by March of Time 1937,” and asserted that the American child was not getting in direct touch with nature hence he was “in danger of losing contact with primitive realities—with the world . . . with fields, with rivers” (Quay and Seaman 2013, xiv). Thus, taking the students out of the classroom and bringing them to nature by organizing outdoor teaching activities turned out to be a significant aspect of allowing the children to individually and independently learn, appreciate, and utilize the realities and forces of nature. Flora J. Cooke was born in Ohio, and at the age of five she witnessed the death of her mother. Later, her mother’s close friends Charles and Luella Cooke adopted her. Like her biological parents, the Cookes “had strong religious ideals, much patience, and a firm belief in the values of education” (Donatelli 1980, 159). When she was nineteen, she started her career as a

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teacher in rural schools. In 1889, she entered Colonel Francis W. Parker’s Cook County Normal School as a student, and the following year she became a teacher in the same school. Later, she turned out to be, in Colonel Parker’s own words, “the best primary teacher [he] ever saw” (Donatelli 1980, 159). In the following years, Parker sent Cooke to different parts of the country as well as Hawaii, Switzerland, and Denmark to give lectures. Eventually, she retired as the principal of Francis W. Parker School in 1934. The school “enrolled children from varied backgrounds” and “developed programs and supported the rights of individual students” (Ohles, Ohles and Ramsay 1997, 73). It also “became a model of progressive education in the United States” and a democratic institution which was run “with the cooperation of principal, teachers and students” (Donatelli 1980, 160). Throughout the entire career of Cooke, the most inspiring figure in her life was Colonel Parker who insisted on the necessity of emphasizing the importance of enabling the children to “observe, make collections for study, and have firsthand experiences with the forces of nature and their results” (Cooke 2005, 164). Like her mentor and role model, she also underlined the significance of nature in primary school education, and at her school “nature study was taught in the lower grades by a science specialist, who conducted two to six periods weekly for each grade” (Kroepel 2000, 110). NATURE MYTHS AND STORIES FOR LITTLE CHILDREN: TREE STORIES FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL EDUCATION Eighteen editions of Flora J. Cooke’s Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children were issued between the years 1893 and 2012 (“Cooke, Flore J. (Flora Juliette) 1864–1953”), yet the 1895 revised version is often erroneously referred to as the first edition of the book in pertinent secondary literature. Cooke penned the book with the intention of facilitating primary school teachers’ objective for finding adequate and appropriate material for reading. From her perspective, “many teachers, who firmly believe[d] that reading [had to] be something more than mere word-getting while the child’s reading habit [wa]s forming, [we]re practically helpless without the use of a printing press” (Cooke 1895, iii). Hence, she aimed to provide the teachers with a collection of “thousands of years old” myths and fables that were “beautiful truths clothed in fancy” (Cooke 1895, iii). Simultaneously, Cooke also aspired to offer first- and third-grade students a set of “wonderful stories” which were told by “the trees and the flowers, and the clouds and the wind” (Cooke 1895, iii). Those stories, she deemed, would “further enhance [a student’s] thought, interest, and observation” about the subjects that the child had come across within the lessons during which he “ha[d] been observing,

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reading, and writing about the sun, the moon, the direction of the wind, the trees, the flowers, or the forces that [we]re acting around him” (Cooke 1895, iv). Generally, when a child “is given a beautiful myth,” he “feels it beauty, but does not analyze it,” yet, via his observations or individual experiences, the student would be able to “see a meaning in the story” (Cooke 1895, iv). The initial reviews of Nature and Myths and Stories for Little Children, which were issued as early as 1894, also emphasized the importance of myths and legends for the education of primary school children. One review referred to the different origins of “more than thirty charming selections” that “ha[d] proved to be most popular with children,” and asserted that “no other teacher since his day ha[d] so completely embodied the spirit, the vision, the pedagogical wisdom of Colonel Parker as ha[d] Miss Cooke” (Anonymous 1919, 386). “Whatever he sees in the world of nature around him the child intuitively personifies” wrote another anonymous critic, and indicated that the stories—which were also familiar to older people—that Cooke told “so simply and so sweetly” in her book charmed the child’s fancy, and awakened his perception to new sense of beauty after strengthening his memory by association (Anonymous 1894, 91). The book consists of a variety of stories, which are classified in accordance with the common attributions of several species, and various forces and aspects of nature. For instance, Cooke brings all insect stories together under the subtitle of “Insect Stories,” or she gathers different myths and legends about animals under the title of “Animal Stories.” For birds, clouds, flowers, and the sun, she employs the same method, and by this means, she facilitates the child reader’s mental categorization of several significant components of nature. In the part titled “Tree Stories,” Cooke assembles five different myths about trees: “Daphne,” “Fairy Story,” “Philemon and Baucis,” “Poplar Tree,” and “The Secret of Fire: A Tree Story.” The first four tales are Ancient Greek myths and legends that concentrate on the individual stories of different species of trees. While articulating these accounts in her book, Cooke pays specific attention to omitting the polytheistic attributes of Greek gods by transforming them to earthly yet eminent characters. Nonetheless, she stays with the general outlines of the authentic narratives. For instance, in Cooke’s version of the story of Daphne, similar to the original account, the protagonist is represented as the daughter of River Peneus.2 Cooke asserts that the “beautiful child” had a special and synergetic relationship with the forest even before her well-known transformation. In the forest “everything awoke when they felt the touch of her rosy fingers, and smiled as they saw her happy face” (Cooke 1895, 74). Apart from “the trees and forest animals,” Daphne “had no wish for other friends” (Cooke 1895, 75). In Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children, Apollo—one of the most renowned

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Olympian gods—is portrayed as a mighty ruler who lived in a palace in the sky. According to Cooke’s account, one day “King Apollo” saw Daphne, instantly fell in love with her, and asked her to leave the cave and the forest where she lived since her “feet [were] too tender for the hard rocky earth” (Cooke 1895, 75). Daphne vehemently rejected the king’s generous offer, and cried for her father’s help who initiated her metamorphosis. The beautiful girl’s feet promptly “became fastened in the soil like roots. A soft bark covered her body, and her beautiful hair became the leaves of the laurel tree” (Cooke 1895, 75–76). Similar to the original myth, the devastated and miserable Apollo gathered some of Daphne’s leaves and stated that “at least [she should] be [his] tree. [Her] leaves s[hould] be ever green, and heroes [should] be crowned with them in sign of victory” (Cooke 1895, 76). “Fairy Story,” on the other hand, pinpoints an individual struggle taken for the salvation of an entire community. In the story, “a stupid race of giants” living among the mountains stole the magic cap of the fairies many of whom were “not higher than a pin” (Cooke 1895, 65). The eagle was not a member of the group of the fairies; nevertheless, he performed a dauntless and self-sacrificing act by bringing back the fairy cap. Basing her account on a well-known Greek myth about the rowan tree, in this story Cooke once again highlights a tree metamorphosis that emphasizes the importance of devotion and self-sacrifice. Rowan trees, which are known as mountain ash trees in America, have a deep-rooted impact on Western myths and folklore. For example, “a Celtic Tree of Life, rowans were frequently planted next to houses to protect the homestead and were often planted near cemeteries to ward off evil spirits and offer protection to the deceased” (Fereshteh 2019, 168). Yet, the original story on which Cooke builds up her tale is about the Greek deity Hebe—the goddess of youth and the cupbearer of gods—and the chalice of ambrosia which was stolen from her by a group of demons. To take back the chalice, Hebe sent an eagle that would fight against the evil robbers. During his brave struggle, the eagle “shed feathers and blood that formed the leaves and berries of the rowan tree where they reached the earth” (Wardley 2014, 38). In Cooke’s version—which is a predominantly Anglo-American and Christian version of the original one—giants stole the magic invisibility cap of a group of fairies who lived in a pine forest. When the “king of birds” saw the fairies afraid and crying with “his sharp eyes,” “a great pity filled his heart,” he decided to help them and flew to the “home of the giants” to take back the cap (Cooke 1895, 68). As it is also articulated in Hebe’s story, the eagle subsequently fought against the giants for the cap, and eventually was injured. The delighted and grateful fairies “had a feast in the eagle’s honor, and healed his wounds with fairy magic” (Cooke 1895, 69). On the mountain where the eagle’s blood and feathers fell, mountain ash trees “with featherlike

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leaves and blood-red berries grew” as a token of “the unselfish love in the eagle’s blood” (Cooke 1895, 70). The Greek legend of Philemon and Baucis was considered to be set in Asia Minor due to its Phrygian origins, and was “a love story in its very different way” (Hard 2004, 577). In Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children, Cooke adheres to the authentic account by making only a few minor alterations. According to the legend, while Zeus (the father of gods) and Hermes (the messenger god) were traveling in Phrygia in human disguise, they stopped by the house of Philemon and Baucis, “a poor and aged peasant couple, [who] welcomed them in their lowly cottage” (Hard 2004, 577). While preparing for their unexpected guests the best dishes that they could, Philemon and Baucis “noticed that the mixing-bowl that they were using for the wine filled itself of its own accord as it was drained, and inferred from this that their visitors must be gods” (Hard 2004, 577). Eventually, the gods who were very annoyed due to the inhospitality and callousness of the other people in the region flooded the entire place, yet saved the couple’s cottage and transformed it into a temple. Zeus and Hermes also granted Philemon and Baucis—who had become the priest and priestess of the temple—their only wish of dying together. After their death, “they were transformed into two trees, an oak and a lime, which grew from a single trunk” (Hard 2004, 578). Cooke, in her nineteenth-century American version of the myth, refers to Zeus as the king of Greece and Hermes as his messenger who disguised themselves as “beggars,” and visited the “hut” of “poor but never unhappy” Philemon and Baucis after being rejected by the rest of the residents of the valley which they visited (Cooke 1895, 71). When Zeus and Hermes turned every dish that they touched to gold, and the milk that the poor couple served to “rich nectar,” Philemon and Baucis realized that the two beggars were in fact the king and his messenger, and “dropped upon their knees” (Cooke 1895, 72). Zeus granted them the award of living and dying together, and “changed their rude hut into a beautiful castle” which suddenly disappeared one morning (Cooke 1895, 72). In its place, the people found an oak and a linden, which were heard whispering to each other many years after the vanishing of Philemon and Baucis who, in fact, had “lived happy, and contented, and protected by Zeus from all harm” as two trees (Cooke 1895, 73). The couple’s physical bodies lost their anthropomorphic features, yet eventually Philemon and Baucis discovered a new, superior and eternal life as immortal arboreal entities. “Poplar Tree,” alternatively, tells the story of a single tree that experienced an unconventional and unaesthetic type of transformation that occurred because of its moral and ethical values. The original account is a Greek legend that focused on a poplar tree under which a pot of gold belonging to Iris—the goddess of rainbow and messenger of the Olympians to whom

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Cooke refers to as “the rainbow messenger”—was hidden by a burglar. An old man, who had stolen the heavy pot from the foot of the rainbow, decided to hide it under the poplar tree at sunset when all the trees in the forest were nearly asleep. In the following morning, Iris realized that her gold was stolen, and asked for Zeus’ help who summoned Hermes for finding the gold.3 Consequently, when Hermes found the forest, Zeus questioned all the trees in their own language, and commanded them to hold their branches up. The honest poplar tree was the first to obey the order, and when it realized that the pot was hidden under its branches, it decided to hold them up in the air forever. The poplar tree was initially ridiculed due to that decision since it “looked like a great umbrella which a storm had turned inside out,” but, in the course of time, “the whole poplar tree family became respected and loved for its uprightness and strength” (Cooke 1895, 68). The last yet the most comprehensive tale about trees in Cooke’s Nature Myths and Stories is “The Secret of Fire: A Tree Story.” The original account that inspired the writer was a Nez Percé (Native American people who have lived in the Pacific Northwest region) myth called “How the Beaver Stole Fire.” It is about a period in time when “there were no people in the world [and] animals and trees talked as just men do now” (Judson 1997, 42). These were also the days when only pine trees knew the secret of fire. One winter, when the weather was very cold, the council of animals decided to steal fire from the trees. While pine trees were also holding their council around a large fire, Beaver hid a live coal and ran away with it. The trees chased the animal, and when they got tired, they stopped on the riverbanks, and stayed there from then on. Beaver gave the fire first to Willows, then to Birches and to other trees. Since “these woods ha[d] fire in them” thanks to Beaver, starting with that moment “animals and Indians [started to] get fire from these woods by rubbing two pieces together” (Judson 1997, 43). Cooke tells the Native American myth about the secret of fire by scrutinizing more thoroughly the differences and initial hostility among different types of trees. She also denotes the collaboration that can occur between different species, and pinpoints the insignificance of physical strength while referring to the brave acorn. Throughout the story, she also emphasizes the gradual collaboration and final unity that the trees achieved. In “The Secret of Fire: A Tree Story,” “young, brave, and strong-hearted” oak trees attempted to learn the mystery about fire from “old, dark, grave-looking” pine trees (Cooke 1895, 61). One excited acorn fell from the limb of one oak, and rolled into the valley, then in a brook where “he heard his good friend, the wind, talking to a pine tree” (Cooke 1895, 62). The pine tree whispered the secret of fire to the wind, yet the acorn kept on rolling in the river in which he later met a group of squirrels. The acorn promised the mother of the hungry squirrels that she would find many nuts if she accepted to carry him to his house. In

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the meantime, he also told all different types of trees to go to a hill where they would learn the secret of fire. In that way, mother squirrel found plenty of nuts to feed her family, and “elms, maples, and hickories” arrived to “the hill across from the blue mountains” where they would fight against the pines to discover the eminent secret (Cooke 1895, 63). There the content squirrel carried the acorn to the top of the tallest tree. The small but courageous acorn started to speak, and every single tree—even the wind—listened to him attentively. He declared that there was no need to fight since all trees possessed the same secret inside their bodies. He also asserted that “to every tree that stretche[d] out its arms, the glorious sun g[ave] this gift” (Cooke 1895, 63). The pine trees once had seen an Indian chief rubbing two pieces of wood, and creating “a tiny spark of fire” (Cooke 1895, 63). This incident had helped them to comprehend the secret. When other trees realized the truth after a brief moment of hesitation, “they spent the whole night singing and dancing” and “many of them settled down upon the hillside for life” (Cooke 1895, 64). The upset and gloomy pine trees, on the other hand, climbed up on the mountain to live in an extended period of isolation. Eventually, they decided to mingle with the other trees in the valley again. In the course of time, the pine trees became “strong and unselfish,” and “[t]hey gave their best trees to the people and their fairest to the children at Christmas time” (Cooke 1895, 65). The transformation that they experienced turned them into the most loved trees in the entire world. TREE STORIES: TRANSFORMATION AND/ OR IMPROVEMENT VIA EDUCATION In her tree stories, Cooke specifies the uniqueness and “thisness” of each tree. Their unique features did not make those trees superior or inferior to each other. Cooke identifies every tree as a distinct component and indispensable aspect of nature. Her tree stories constantly demonstrate a positive transformation for the young reader. By referring to a series of ancient and universal tales that highlight the metamorphoses of human beings into different types of trees, she primarily emphasizes that life, as a single source, consistently and continuously invigorates different species in the world. Hence, possessing completely diverse anatomical and physiological features does not make living entities different from each other. Quite the reverse, natural life, along with the environment, inspires all living entities to live in accord and harmony. By identifying herself/himself with a tree, the child also learns the importance of living in a community that would enable her/him to experience the benefits and advantages of communal life. Concurrently, (s)he grasps the fact that her/his individual support would provide for the improvement and

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enhancement of the community. Within this context, in the Native American story about the secret of fire, Cooke pinpoints the significance of collective life, and indicates that a tiny yet brave and friendly acorn can alter the course of events when it acts decisively for the improvement of its community. She also demonstrates that the pine trees became stronger and unselfish when they were obliged to share their most important secret. For a certain period of time they lived in isolation, yet when they returned to the valley, they also became the most loved of all trees. Additionally, in “A Fairy Story,” the eagle sacrificed his feathers and blood to protect the security and lives of a group of fairies, and manifested the fact that completely different individuals can live together and collaborate for the improvement of their community. The tree transformations that Cooke reveals also underline the significance of individual improvement and development in a lifespan. In most of the accounts in Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children, Cooke always implies a personal betterment for the transformed tree. Daphne, as a consequence of her strong will and determination, requested from her father an instant alteration that would enable her to continue to live in nature. The poplar tree experienced a transformation that did not signify a physical improvement or an absolute metamorphosis, but an ethics-related development that eventually empowered the tree with others’ love and respect. The metamorphosis of Philemon and Baucis, on the other hand, was a distinctive yet exemplary type of improvement. Due to their mutual love and the respect that they showed to other people regardless of their social and economic backgrounds, the humble couple ultimately enjoyed a blissful and eternal life. In brief, by providing these examples Cooke endeavors to present convincing and inspiring paradigms to schoolchildren with which they can associate and identify themselves. Flora J. Cooke was a reformist and progressive teacher who gave utmost importance to providing thorough information about nature to her primary school pupils. In 1903, she indicated the significance of bringing the children into direct contact with nature, and observing them “enjoy[ing] the beauty of nature and appreciate[ing] the laws which underlie its various manifestations” (Cooke 1903, 129). She also asserted “all the work of the school should tend directly to the formation of perfectly developed human beings—toward the creation of an ideal community” (Cooke 1903, 130). By “whet[ting] their appetite for traditional subjects” (Kroepel 2002, 127), in Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children—which was constantly published during the late 1800s and the twentieth century—Cooke aspires to support the development of children by providing brilliant examples from nature. To modify them according to the social, cultural, and religious conditions of her time, she occasionally ascribes white, American and Christian traits to the ancient tales that she highlights. However, she does not alter the moral and ethical

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messages about the universal values that form the basis of all those myths and legends. Her tree stories are about individual entities that lived in harmony and unity with different components of nature. Yet their individualism did not represent isolation and segregation. The distinct characteristics of every tree denoted the positive impact that they had for both themselves and their communities. For this reason, they still constitute exquisite and inspiring examples for “perfectly developed individuals” who endeavor to establish an ideal community living in harmony and unity.

NOTES 1. Flora J. Cooke was the teacher of his children at primary school. 2. Ovid depicts Daphne as the daughter of River Peneios in Thessaly. For detail, see The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology, 155. 3. In another version of the story, Iris was the one who sent Hermes/Mercury to look for it. See Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Golden Hour (Auckland: The Floating Press, 2012), 135.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beck, Robert Holmes. 1942. “American Progressive Education, 1875–1930.” Phd diss., Yale University. “Cooke, Flore J. (Flora Juliette) 1864–1953.” Accessed November 10, 2019. http:​/​/ wor​​ldcat​​.org/​​ident​​ities​​/lccn​​-n852​​​62515​/. Cooke, Flora J. Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children. 1895. Revised edition. Chicago: A Flanagan, Publisher. ———. “Nature-Study and Science Work in the Francis W. Parker School. I. Notes.” 1903. The Elementary School Teacher 4.3: 129–131. ———. “Colonel Francis W. Parker: His Influence on Education.” 2005. Schools: Studies in Education 2.1: 157–170. Donatelli, Rosemary V. 1980. “Cooke, Flora Juliette, Dec. 25, 1864–Feb 21, 1953, Educator.” In Notable American Women: The Modern Period, A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Barbara Sicherman, Carol Hurd Greene, Ilene Kantrov and Harriette Walker, 159–160. Cambridge, MA & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Fereshteh, Andrea Sarubbi. 2019. In the Company of Trees: Honoring Our Connection to the Sacred Power, Beauty and Wisdom of Trees. New York & London: Adams Media. Hard, Robin. 2004. The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology. London & New York: Routledge. Judson, Katherine Berry. 1997. Myths and Legends of the Pacific Northwest. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.

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Kroepel, Gail L. 2000. “Flora J. Cooke: Progressive Educator.” PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago. ———. 2002. “Flora J. Cooke and the Francis W. Parker School.” In Founding Mothers and Others: Women Educational Leaders During the Progressive Era, edited by Alan R. Sadovnik and Susan F. Semel, 124–145. New York & Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ohles, Frederick, Shirley Ohles and George G. Ramsay. 1997. Biographical Dictionary of Modern Educators. Westport, Connecticut & London: Greenwood Press. Quay, John and Jason Seaman. 2013. John Dewey and Education Outdoors: Making Sense of the ‘Educational Situation’ Through More Than a Century of Progressive Reforms. Rotterdam, Boston & Taipei: Sense Publishers. [Review of the book Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children, by Flora J. Cooke]. 1894. The Journal of Education 39.6 (956): 91. [Review of the Book Nature Myths and Stories, by Flora J. Cooke]. 1919. The Journal of Education 89, no. 14 (2224): 385–386. Wardley, Tessa. 2014. The Woodland Book: 101 Ways to Play, Investigate, Watch Wildlife and Have Adventures in the Woods. London: Bloomsbury.

Chapter 11

Talking Trees in Amazonian “Novels of the Jungle”1 Patrícia Vieira

The Amazon river basin is emblematic of the natural world, due to its size, diverse flora and fauna, and relevance in terms of the earth’s biosphere. It covers about 7 percent of the planet’s surface, accounts for over 60 percent of its remaining rainforests and produces approximately 20 percent of the world’s oxygen (Hemming). While the region was inhabited by a large number of Indigenous peoples during the pre-Columbian period, colonial settlement in the region was slow to take root. One reason for this is that foreign explorers and settlers often portrayed Amazonia as a “green hell” that brought only suffering and death to those who ventured into its midst. This view of the rainforest goes back to one of the earliest descriptions of European travel in the Amazon by Spanish Dominican Priest Gaspar de Carvajal. He accompanied Francisco de Orellana in the first Western expedition to travel the length of the river in 1541–1542 and narrated his trip in the book The Discovery of the Great River of the Amazons (Descubrimiento del gran río de las Amazonas). Carvajal focused on the difficulties faced by the expedition, including the antagonism of nature, the paucity of supplies, the diseases and injuries suffered by the Europeans, and the lengthy and tiresome journey. The priest’s view of the area as inhospitable is encapsulated in the very name “Amazon,” which goes back to the mythical, female warriors of ancient Greece reportedly sighted by Orellana’s soldiers, according to the chronicler’s text. In the face of a foreign environment, Carvajal resorted to a theological framework he was familiar with to interpret the local landscape as an inferno. The early view of Amazonian nature as a place hostile to non-Amazonians shaped the perceptions of the region all the way to the twentieth century. Brazilian writer Alberto Rangel, for example, titled his 1908 collection of short stories about the region Green Hell: Scenes and Scenery from the Amazon (Inferno Verde: Scenas e Scenários do Amazonas). Similarly, 163

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Rangel’s friend and renowned Brazilian thinker Euclides da Cunha considered humans to be “impertinent intruders” (116) in the region, facing a “dangerous adversary,” a “sovereign and brutal nature” (125).2 The so-called novel of the jungle that flourished, roughly, in the first half of the twentieth century is indebted to this portrayal of the Amazon as a green hell. These narratives were written during a period of rapid economic growth thanks to the sale of latex extracted from the Hevea brasiliensis, or rubber tree; the price of latex was so high during this period that it was dubbed “the white gold.” Instead of focusing on the wealth of the region as an El Dorado, however, most novels of the jungle concentrate instead on the shattered lives of countless rubber tappers, who flocked to the area from other parts of Amazonian nations and from abroad in the hope of finding an easy ticket to enrichment. Once in the Amazon, they had to contend with an inhospitable environment they were not familiar with and with exploitative labor conditions that reduced workers to de facto slaves, who gave their lives for the enrichment of all-powerful rubber lords. While novels of the jungle frequently fell back into stereotypes about the rainforest, they nonetheless transcended, at times, the formulaic molds for depicting the region and moved beyond human prejudices about its flora. In fact, novels suggest that, rather than victims of the forest, many rubber tappers fell prey to a ruthless version of capitalism uninhibited by state rules and protections. These texts can therefore be read in terms of a critique of modernization that often anticipates environmental discourses from a later period.3 Not only are novels of the jungle critical of the excesses of unbridled extractivism as a path to economic development, but they have also broken new ground in their portrayal of an active, sentient forest that, more than any of the human protagonists, is often the main character in the texts. In what follows, I will discuss the depiction of talking trees in three novels of the jungle: José Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex (La vorágine, 1924), Ferreira de Castro’s The Jungle (A Selva, 1930), and Rómulo Gallego’s Canaima (1935). Written at a time when Amazonian rubber-tapping had entered into an irreversible process of decline as cheaper latex started to be produced in Asian plantations of rubber trees, these novels highlight the uniqueness of Amazonian nature and give voice to its flora as a way to comment upon human beings’ predatory attitude toward the environment. THE VORTEX Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex is a quintessential jungle novel. Its storyline begins with the protagonist and first-person narrator, Arturo, forced to leave

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his native city of Bogotá to find himself, first, in the Colombian plains and, in the second part of the text, in the depths of the Amazon, following the city-to-jungle trajectory typical of these narratives. But the plot progressively evolves from a fairly conventional clash of man (gender intended) against nature to a deeper appreciation of the Amazonian forest that, at points, appears to speak in its own voice. As he and his friends penetrate into the jungle, Arturo feels both entrapped (he writes: “Oh jungle, wedded to silence, mother of solitude and mists! What malignant fate imprisoned me within your green walls?” 179) and seduced by the forest. The most telling moments of communion between the men and the vegetal life surrounding them take place when the members of the group come down with fever. In a delirious state, when the constraints of reason and logic loosen, they approach the forest anew and report their extraordinary visions: “He [Pipa] spoke of the trees of the forest as paralyzed giants that at night called to each other and made gestures. . . . They complained of the hand that scored them, the ax that felled them. They were condemned to flourish, flower, grow, perpetuate their formidable species unfructified, unfecundated, uncomprehended by man” (179). Pipa, one of Arturo’s companions, reproduces in his monologue the voice of talking trees, a long-standing trope of religion and of literature, who complain about the destruction brought to the land by greed and about their inability to communicate their aspirations to humankind. His hallucinations continue, offering a glimpse into a humanless future on earth: “Pipa understood their [the trees’] bitter voices, heard that some day they were to cover fields, plains, and cities, until the last trace of man was wiped from the earth, until over all waved only a mass of closegrown foliage, as in the millennia of Genesis when God still floated in space in a nebulous cloud of tears” (179). The feverish man interweaves visions of the indomitable proliferation of vegetation in the Amazon with human fears of being outlived by plants that will rule over our cities long after humankind’s extinction. He conjures up a neo-Paradisiac flora freed from the havoc wrought in forests by human destructiveness, a vision of a future Golden Age of plant life that is simultaneously alluring and frightening. The encounter between the Amazon’s towering presence and humans also comes through when the protagonist Arturo addresses the jungle directly to describe the profound impression it made on him: “Unknown gods speak in hushed voices, whispering promises of long life to your [the jungle’s] majestic trees, trees that were the contemporaries of paradise. . . . Your vegetation is a family that never betrays itself” (155–56). Each plant is addressed by a divine voice, akin to the Socratic daemon, that articulates its entanglement with its family members, the other vegetal beings who inhabit the forest. But this quasi-animistic language, magical as it may seem, goes back to the

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trees’ concrete existence and their rootedness in the earth: “You [the jungle] share even in the pain of the leaf that falls. Your multisonous voices rise like a chorus bewailing the giants that crash to earth; and in every breach that is made new germ cells hasten their gestation. You possess the austerity of a cosmic force. You embody the mysteries of creation” (156). The plants react to their physical transformations—the falling of a leaf or the felling of a tree; their voices are nothing but a response to their evolving inscriptions in the environment that the novel’s narrator brings to light in his prose. Arturo returns to the “multisonous voices” of the forest when he ponders plant sensation later in the novel. “Vegetal life,” the narrator writes, “is a sensitive thing, the psychology of which we ignore. In these desolate places, only our presentiments understand the language it speaks” (273). Not only does the protagonist acknowledge the sentience of plants but he also realizes that they share a language, which humans are only able to recognize imperfectly. He acknowledges that plants tell their own tales and strives to put these into writing. At another point in the text, Arturo, here clearly enunciating his speculations as an alter ego of the author, mentions how the language of the forest inspired his literary pursuits: “What cities? Perhaps the source of all my poetry was in the secrets of the virgin forests, in the cares of gentle breezes, in the unknown language of all things” (124). At its most thought-provoking, The Vortex succeeds in weaving this “unknown language of all things,” the “secrets of the virgin forest,” into tales that human beings can relate to. THE JUNGLE If the voices of the forest led Eustasio Rivera to question the advantages of modern civilization, a similar shift in values takes place in Ferreira de Castro’s The Jungle. The protagonist of this loosely autobiographical novel, Alberto, was a young law student in Lisbon when his political views forced him to move to Brazil.4 He is driven into the heart of the Amazon somewhat by chance and, once in the forest, he witnesses a progressive transformation of many of the principles he had formerly upheld. Perhaps the most obvious sign of this change is the shift in his politics. Previously a supporter of the monarchy, firmly believing that the masses require guidance from an enlightened elite, Alberto’s direct contact with the plight of destitute rubber tappers eventually transforms him into a proto-anarchist. Running in tandem with Alberto’s political reversal is a subtler shift in his stance toward the forest. Throughout the text, the narrator reproduces many of the commonplace statements on the Amazon that one finds in early texts about the region. Nature is described as “implacable” (29); as a “green prison” (120); and as a “vegetal world [that] had a cruel selfishness,

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an unsuspecting voraciousness and an unavowable tyranny” (142). Still, the hostility of the Amazon toward outsiders is perceived as a punishment meted out to those who wish to “violate its mystery” (63). Toward the end of the novel, the region is described as a dead body passed on from hand to hand and stripped of all its riches: rubber, precious stones, agricultural output, and so on (212–13). In another passage, the narrator commiserates with rubber trees, which are compared to wounded human beings: “They stood before a rubber tree with a large skirt of wounds and scars. It had been so wounded that its bark had developed more in the lower part than in the higher one, as if it was defending itself; and that coating of dark wrinkles and barely healed cuts almost seemed to be fake” (89–90). In these instances, the narrating voice adheres closely to the viewpoint of the forest in a clear denunciation of those who destroy the trees in their relentless pursuit of natural resources. The alteration in values that his time in the jungle triggers in Alberto goes even deeper than his growing sympathy for the plight of a natural environment, the destruction of which he witnesses first hand. The protagonist is in awe when faced with the magnificence of the forest, which dwarfs everything else he has known: “The jungle dominated everything. It was not the first kingdom, it was the first, both in strength and in rank; everything else was secondary. And man was a mere passer-by on the side of the enigma . . . The animal was torn to pieces in the vegetal kingdom” (88). The novel reverses here the traditional great chain of being with humans at the top, followed by animals, and with plants at the bottom. In the forest, plants take center stage and animals, especially humans, are revealed to be mere appendices, irrelevant adornments when compared to the might of the vegetal world. This inversion of perspective acquires clear post-colonial undertones when Alberto recalls his native Portugal through an Amazonian lens: “Seen from there [from the Amazon], Portugal was a fantasy, it perhaps did not exist . . . those who remembered it were not sure whether they lived in reality or if they were dreaming” (65). The foregrounding of the vegetal world and the questioning of Europe’s reality are not fortuitously linked. After all, the denigration of non-European vegetation has gone hand-in-hand with the disparagement of the colonized world and its peoples throughout most of Western history.5 What we witness in The Jungle is an inversion of this colonial bias. From the standpoint of the immense Amazon, Portugal appears to be so small that it turns into an illusion, its colonizing aspirations a blip within the much broader realm of the forest. Ferreira de Castro opens his preface to The Jungle by stating that “I owed this book to that haughty and enigmatic power that is the Amazon jungle” (11). He further discloses in his short commentary on the history of the narrative, written for the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the text’s publication, that his intention had been to present the “scenery” as “the

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main character, alive and contradictory like the ones made of flesh, blood and bone” (19). More than the personal tragedies of countless rubber tappers, including the protagonist Alberto, who saw their aspirations for economic emancipation shattered in the region, The Jungle is about the life of the forest. It invites the reader to adopt the outlook of flora and, from this privileged vantage point, to contemplate the folly of those who endeavor to control the Amazon. CANAIMA Like Eustasio Rivera’s and Castro’s texts, Rómulo Gallegos’s novel Canaima also includes some of the tropes typical of the so-called “novel of the jungle.” The struggle of man against nature so common in these narratives crops up time and again in Canaima. The forest is called “inhuman” (173), a “green inferno” (175) and the main character, Marcos Vargas, is advised to protect himself from the “malefic influence of the jungle” (212). Still, at other points in the text the protagonist and his companions open themselves up to the teachings of the rainforest. A telling passage on this respect appears when Marcos first enters the jungle: Trees! Trees! Trees! . . . The irritating monotony of infinite variety; the overwhelming manifestation of multiplicity and singularity to the point of stupefaction. At first there was disappointment. It was lacking in grandeur . . .. But then he began to feel that the grandeur was in the infinitude, in the obsessive repetition of the one, as it seemed, motif. Trees, trees, trees! . . . This was the fabulous jungle from whose influence Marcos Vargas would now never again be free. . . . Those who cross over and into it are soon something more, or something less, than men. (173)

At first blush, Marcos was disappointed in the forest; he found the monotonous repetition of trees upon trees to be disheartening and thought that it fell short of his expectations. In time, however, the protagonist begins to appreciate some of the features that distinguish plants from humans. The “obsessive repetition of the one . . . motif,” as we read in the novel, points to a key difference between animals and vegetal beings. Plants are not as fully individuated as animals and, especially, as humans. In some species, like grass, it is impossible to determine where an individual begins and ends—is an individual a single blade? a group of blades of grass? the whole field? The repetition mentioned in the text makes this feature of vegetality come to the foreground. Even trees, which appear to be more discreet entities, seem to be all the same. In fact, trees are often so entwined at their roots that one

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cannot define the limits of one single specimen. In a rainforest in particular, trees are frequently covered in moss and other epiphytes that develop in a symbiotic relation to such an extent that it barely makes sense to talk about individuality. In time, Marcos understands that the grandeur of the rainforest lies in this infinitude of plants woven together in a closely knitted pattern, in the reproduction of vegetal motifs ad infinitum. Flora’s mode of existence, where individuation gives way to multiplicity and community, teaches humans an important lesson. It underlines the ties that bind different beings and the centrality of learning to live together. Furthermore, it decenters humanity and offers us a glimpse into other possible modes of being. As the narrator puts it, those who enter the forest turn into “something more, or something less, than men,” that is to say, they manage to relinquish their anthropocentric bias and experience the world from a different perspective. The decentering of humans and their key features of rational thought and movement becomes a leitmotiv in the text. Once Marcos and his companions enter the forest, they start becoming more plant like. In another passage, we read: “under the influence of the . . . jungle . . . he [the count Giaffero] had lost the habit of discursive thought and acquired in its place that of immersion into his deepest intuitions, those that could not be expressed except, at best . . . with a single word in the midst of silence that enveloped it in a halo of significations that had only been suggested” (179–80). By living deep within the forest, the count progressively lost the ability to speak in human language. While this could be read as a regression, it also points to the existence of different forms of communication and expression. Plants may not partake of verbal language but they nonetheless articulate themselves in different ways (through volatiles, growth, etc.), in the same way as the count uses alternative forms of expression. In fact, the count himself regard his move deep into the forest as a cure against the evils of civilization: “There is a part of our thought we like to call our own and yet only belongs to us like the air that covers our planet when we breathe it . . . And you have to heal yourself from this [from the fake existence in the midst of civilization] with period cures, to open some escape valves for all the filth that accumulates in soul so that it does not end up polluting it completely. And for this, young man, there is nothing like the jungle” (182). Far from a regression into a simpler form of existence, the count considers that his life in communion with plants in the jungle is a superior form of being that allows for real thought to emerge, as opposed to the artificial, fake modes of thinking one develops in human society. The move away from humanity as the yardstick used to measure reality is at times achieved through a full-fledged metamorphosis into a plant, an old literary trope that is revisited in Canaima. The protagonist, Marcos Vargos,

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becomes known as “the one that talks to the trees in the jungle and even has turned into one a time or two” (253) and a passage describes how he became a tree and engaged in conversation with other plants. In another passage, we witness the process of Marcos’s metamorphosis into a tree: “Suddenly he felt that his feet had been turned into roots and were sunk deep in the earth, while through his body a thick, dark sap was running, rising for a hundred years toward the highest branches to remain there for another hundred listening to the passage of the wind” (268). Marcos’s transformation alters his sense of time and space. Time becomes protracted and is now measured in hundreds of years and space is transformed, as he becomes rooted to a place. Humans have a lot to learn from these two characteristics of tree life. An expanded time frame, together with a connection to cyclical time, makes plants more attuned to preservation, foregoing the spur of the moment mentality that often guides animal behavior. Similarly, being tied to a place, plants need to cherish and nurture that particular area, least it becomes unsuitable to support life. Instead of depleting and rendering barren a given region, and then moving on to exploit the next one, as some animals, including humans, often do, plants nourish their environment, the bodies of dead vegetal matter providing the soil with the nutrients needed for the growth of other plants. Marcos learns this attachment to a given place from his transformation into a plant, a valuable lesson at a time of rampant environmental destruction. Literary works such Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex, Ferreira de Castro’s The Jungle and Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima struggle between an adherence to preconceived views of the Amazon and a novel approach to the area that abandons the empty rhetoric of the green hell. The most groundbreaking moments in the texts take place when they lend a voice to flora, attempting a necessarily incomplete translation of the rainforest’s tales into human language. In these instances, the narratives become places of inscription, where we find traces of vegetal language, as protagonists listen to, speak to, and sometimes transform into trees. This encounter between the language of the forest and human literary creation draws the readers’ attention to environmental destruction in the Amazon in the early twentieth century, an issue that would come to the fore with renewed urgency decades later with the environmental movement and that is more pressing than ever today.

NOTES 1. The research for this chapter was funded by a Grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Project IF/00606/2015. Sections of the chapter have previously been published in “Phytographia: Literature as Plant

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Writing.” Environmental Philosophy. 12.2 (Fall 2015): 205–220; and in “Phytofables: Tales of the Amazon.” Journal of Lusophone Studies. 1.2 (2016): 116–34. I thank both journals for granting me permission to reproduce a revised version of parts of these articles in the chapter. 2. All quotes from Portuguese originals are rendered in my translation. The page numbers refer to the Portuguese originals listed in the Bibliography. Quotes from novels originally in Spanish are rendered in the translated version listed in the Bibliography. 3. For an ecocritical reading of another novel of the jungle, Ciro Alegría’s The Golden Snake (La serpiente de oro, 1935), see Marcone. 4. Ferreira de Castro himself immigrated to Brazil from Portugal when he was twelve and, like his fictional alter ego, worked for four years on a rubber plantation in the Amazon, on the banks of the Madeira river. 5. For more on the denigration of tropical nature and tropical inhabitants by Western intellectuals, see Arnold (2000) and Stepan (2001).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arnold, David. “‘Illusory Riches’: Representations of the Tropical Word 1840– 1950.” Singaporean Journal of Tropical Geography. 21.1 (2000): 7–11. Carvajal, Gaspar de. The Discovery of the Amazon, According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents. Ed. H. C. Heaton. Trans. Bertram T. Lee. New York: AMS, 1970. Castro, José Maria Ferreira de. 2002. A Selva. Lisbon: Guimarães. Cunha, Euclides da. 2000. Um Paraíso Perdido. Ensaios Amazônicos. Brasília: Senado Federal. Eustasio Rivera, José. 2011. The Vortex, trans. Earle K. James. Bogotá: Panamericana Editorial. Gallegos, Rómulo. 1996. Canaima. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Hemming, John. 2008. Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon. London: Thames & Hudson. Marcone, Jorge. “De retorno a lo natural: la serpiente de oro, la ‘novela de la selva’ y la crítica ecológica.” Hispania. 81.2(1998): 299–308. Rangel, Alberto. 1908. Inferno Verde. Scenas e Scenários do Amazonas. Genoa: Bacigalupi. Stepan, Nancy Leys. 2001. Picturing Tropical Nature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP.

Chapter 12

Gardens of Hell, Trees of Death For a Poetics of Urban Nature in the Lyrics of George Bacovia Roberto Merlo

In its modern phase (from about the 1830s on), in the wake of the affirmation of Romantic nationalism and its “folk-oriented” aesthetics and poetics, Romanian literature developed in close connection with folklore and the rural milieu. In the local peasant traditional culture and way of life, nineteenth-century Romanian writers and thinkers saw a source of “original” and “authentically Romanian” formal models (particularly for poetry) and themes, as opposed to the “foreign” ones found in widespread imitations and translations from other literatures (mainly French and German).1 Along with “national” history and folklore, “national” landscape was one of the three pillars on which, in 1840, M. Kogălniceanu proposed to build Romanian “national literature”: “Our history has enough heroic deeds, our beautiful lands are sufficiently large [emphasis added] and our customs are picturesque and poetic enough so that we can find in them subjects to write about, without being forced to borrow from other nations for this purpose” (Kogălniceanu 2017, 5; my translation). In such a context, nature played a very important role—emblematic in this sense was the popular Pasteluri (Pastels) cycle written by Vasile Alecsandri (1821–1890), the most influential mid-nineteenth century poet—and especially the forest, considered a cornerstone of Romanian traditional “wood civilization.” In the words of historian C. Giurescu, The home of the Romanians, not only in the mountainous and hilly districts, but also in the plain, their sheepfolds and flour mills, their old churches, their furniture, tools and weapons, their means of conveyance by land and water, a great many customs and also spiritual life, including literary and artistic creation, 173

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are all bound up with the forest, being influenced by it and bearing its imprint. (1980, 222)

As such, “His majesty, the forest” and “The wood, Romanian’s own brother”—as the late nineteenth-century Romanian “national poet” Mihai Eminescu (1850–1889) famously dubbed them in his hugely popular poems Codrule, Măria-Ta (Your majesty, O Forest, 1876), and Doina (Lament; 1883)—became cherished topoi of Romantic literature. Some particular trees, like the “glorious,” “superb,” “magnificent” oak and fir tree of the Carpathians that abound in so many Romantic poems, not to mention the linden tree (silver linden) of city parks and boulevards made famous by Eminescu, began a lengthy literary career as aesthetic and symbolic objects. In parallel, after the so-called Great Classics Era (1870–1890), a Romanian Modernism started to emerge, with the import of the French-inspired Symbolism sponsored by Eminescu’s main rival, Alexandru Macedonski (1854–1920), through the pages of Literatorul (The Literate, 1880–1919). While the nineteenth-century Romantic “ruralist” ideal was carried on and emphasized by early twentieth-century influential peasantist currents, namely Sămănătorism2 and Poporanism,3 in the same years the renewed struggle for the affirmation of “modern poetry” was led by well-known linguist and literary critic Ovid Densusianu (1873–1938) from the pages of Vieața nouă (The New Life, 1905–1925).4 Between the 1860s and WWI Eastern Europe saw the most rapid and profound change to date (Armour 2012, 191), a sweeping modernization that meant—for the most part—westernization. As fin de siècle and early twentieth-century Romanian society was deeply marked by the stark economic, political, and cultural contrast between the traditional village and the newly westernized city (Axenciuc 1997, 116), which endured throughout the whole Interwar Era (Murgescu 2010, 271), so Belle Époque (1871–1914) Romanian literature saw the confrontation of two quite different aesthetic and poetic ideals. On the one hand, it brimmed with late-Romantic and Traditionalist dramatic vistas of the mighty Carpathians or majestic Danubian views, as well as with milder and less grandiose—but equally emblematic—countryside panoramas, more or less idealized; on the other hand, it saw the first Modernist attempts at a different take on literature, which specifically aimed to promote “urban-ness” (citadinism) and “urban literature” (literatura citadină) without necessarily shying away from modern city life most troublesome social and psychological issues. In what follows, I propose to take a “phytocritical” outlook at one of the most accomplished and representative poetical work of this particular literary and intellectual climate: George Bacovia’s (1881–1957) lyrics, “considering how plants are rendered, evoked, mediated, or brought to life

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in and through language” (Ryan 2018, 14). Namely, I intend to illustrate the role played by an eminently traditional (and traditionalist) literary actor: the tree, in the eminently modern (and modernist) poetic drama staged by Bacovia. Albeit deeply rooted in the anthropocentric Weltanschauung of its time, Bacovia’s poetic vision is of particular interest from an ecocritical perspective since he acutely problematizes such world view: in the context of a disturbingly gloomy vision of the “city”—the most distinctive anthropic construct of Modernity, both factually and symbolically—Bacovia’s urban “trees” and “gardens” appear as negative embodiments of mankind’s forceful agency over nature and, in a wider perspective, as an exemplary manifestation of the flimsiness of human delusion about progress. Likewise, although Bacovia cannot be considered a “phytophile” (Marder, Vieira 2013) writer nor his poetry properly “phytographic” (Vieira 2017) writing, he nonetheless incorporates in his lyrics’s natural elements—among which trees play a particularly meaningful role—in a way that lends itself to an ecocritical reading. BACOVIA’S MODERNISM: CITIES, GARDENS, AND TREES Debuting as a poet in 1899 under the auspices of Symbolism with the publication of And All (Și toate, CF 206)5 in Macedonski’s Literatorul, Bacovia was considered from the beginning “the urban poet par excellence of Romanian literature” (Negoițescu 1945, 150)—for the urban décor features prominently in his poetry—and, even more aptly, “the poet of the Moldavian province” (Vianu 1944, 144) (Bacovia hailed from the small provincial town of Bacău in south-eastern Moldova, where he spent most of his life until 1933, when he moved definitively to Bucharest with his family). For all intent and purposes, indeed, Bacovia is a poet of the city: the urban landscape, in all its manifestations, is the main setting of Bacovia’s eminently modern(ist) poetic drama, and his vision of the world irradiates from within it. Symbolically, the Bacovian poetic world is a Dantesque structure of “bolgias” (Dimitriu 1981, 143–144), narrowing from the disconcerting boundlessness of the horizon (zare), through the menacing desolation of the wilderness (pustiu) and the open field (câmp) laying beyond the fragile confines of urban civilization, to the squalid slums (mahala) and further into the city (oraș) or town (târg) at its core, a place of gangrenous parks (parc) and withering gardens (grădină), a maze of miserable streets (stradă), alleys (gang), and squares (piață), and then plunging deeper into the house (casă), the empty hall (salon), the suffocating small room (odaie) and, finally, the crypt (cavou).

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Bacovia’s world view falls completely within the dialectic between the internal standpoint at the heart of this symbolic construction, the “city,” and the equally unsettling external fading perspective outside its margins, the “horizon” (Flămând 2007, 189). Firmly rooted in a disquieting urban dimension, Bacovia’s poetic gaze is an urban one, which sees the city as a hostile place of artifice and degradation, and its opposites the field (câmp, câmpie) and the wilderness (pustiu) as threatening spaces of formlessness, desolation, and nothingness. The narrative that Bacovia’s poetic imagery conveys is that of what Berger, Berger and Kellner called the metaphysical homelessness of the modern mind (1974, 77). As such, Bacovia’s poetics is a poetics of the dislocation of Modernity (Merlo 2018), incapable to feel truly at home in the “civilized” world, typified by the city, and at the same time unable to hope for a utopian homecoming into the “natural” one, epitomized by the tree. The natural elements that appear in Bacovia’s poetry, indeed, are neither the inspiring landscape glorified by the Romantics nor the idyllic peasant scenes cherished by the Traditionalists, but they conflate the “gangrenous” nature embedded into modern cities. Specifically, Bacovia’s urban gaze fully captures the disheartening unnaturality—and therefore anthropic artificiality—of urban gardens and trees, as a manifestation of mankind’s anthropocentric ambition to subdue, tame, and control the vegetal world in service of his own desire, as well as a metaphor of the metaphysical homelessness that plagues Modern man. GARDENS OF HELL, TREES OF DEATH Apart from rare exceptions, in Bacovia’s poetry the natural world has two main embodiments. Not integrated into the city, nature is free and wild, oftentimes an unstoppable force of elementary chaos, associated with the desolation of the “wilderness” (pustiu) and emanating a sense of dread and threat. When it appears, this wild nature manifests itself as diluvial downpours (Somewhere Else/Aiurea, CV 151), apocalyptic snowfalls (A Picture of Winter/Tablou de iarnă, P 47; Neurosis/Nevrosă, P 54 or Lonely/Singur, P 68), wilting heat (July/Cuptor, P 66), engulfing mud (Plain Style/Stil simplu, SV 258). Specifically, the wild nature of the open “field,” with its sparse trees, appears like an unsettling void, which incites to extinction (“The trees, rare and snowy, seem crystal. / The calls of loss absorb me”; Winter Twilight/Amurg de iarnă, P 62) and insanity (“The wind is rattling the tree—/ And I sense shivers of madness”; Crises/Crize, CV 140). In the “wilderness,” the “forest” (pădure) and the “woods” (codri)—and, in European culture, at least up to Modern era, in imaginative terms ‘forests’ were closer to the

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‘wilderness,’ as “spaces that seem to be untouched by human intervention” (Rudd 2007, 48)—reverberate with the forlorn call of chaos and nothingness, echoing with earth’s calling man to the grave (Melancholy/Melancolie, P 56), while the crepuscular “forests of Bacău,” like “moaning Absaloms,” incite to extinction and oblivion (A Storm/Furtună, CV 145), and “the sonorous corpse” resounds with the calling of the undifferentiated chaotic void: “A chaos wants to come with me,/ To forget the unique, and the number”— laments Bacovia in Emptiness (Gol, SG 113)—A dry rustling dries me,/ I weep against a tree as on a shoulder.” Embedded into the city, Nature appears to be tamed and fenced. Its manifestations are almost always vegetal, the sickly and meek trees and flowers shackled in parks, gardens, tree-lined avenues or squares, a ravaged and bleak landscape scattered with ghastly trees with skeletal, worn out branches. In this sense, a real declaration of poetics is Décor (Décor; P 41), one of the most expressive and expressionist of Bacovia’s poems: “Trees in white, trees in black,” it starts, putting forth the image of a bleak, winter’s urban park, completely sterilized by the suffocating whiteness of the snow or by the blackening burns of the frost, and continues: Stand in the lonely park, bare: Mourning décor, a funeral bier . . . Trees in white, trees in black.

The trees, along with birds and leaves, compose an immense mourning apparel, proclaiming the death of illusion. Like in a high contrast black-andwhite photograph, everything is leached of color and motionless, suspended infinitely between the ghostly and the lifeless.6 Bacovia’s garden is not an image of harmony, nor is it pleasing to the senses, not even in the baroque form of a delectable frisson: it is a place of miserable death and dissolution, that upsets the mind and grates on the senses. Enclosed and trapped in such wretched places, the tree stands out as a mirror image of mankind’s own destiny of entrapment and degradation. In a way, in Bacovia’s disposition toward urban trees we can see, although grief stricken instead of blissful, the same “uncanny recognition of himself and vegetables linked as animate particles” (Hall 2014, 68) that the Romantic Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) famously put forward in his essay Nature (1836). “In tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature,” as Emerson explains, “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them” (Emerson 1983, 10, quoted in Hall 2014, 68). In his unsettling urban landscape, within the

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miserable confines of the city, Bacovia, the Modernist, beholds the ghastly trees in dilapidated gardens and alleys as fellow victims. The “occult relation between man and the vegetable” is still there, but it is now one of sorrow, and the “nod” of delighted recognition has become a fearful sob of shared suffering: “But I weep, and with the crying night/ The willow outside seems my sister” (Midnight/Miezul nopţii, SG 96). An example of this is the poplar—one of the most iconic urban species, along with the linden tree—in Regret (Regret; CF 169), where the familiar sight of the trees becomes a melancholic memento mori, or in Pastel (Pastel, CF 187), in which the Poeian black ravens falling upon the poplars that “stand alone in loneliness” at the side of the mill stand for as many dark thoughts of death. Bacovia’s “trees in white, trees in black” don’t whisper gently, but wheeze and wail, like in Mystery (Mister; CV 158), where, in a city swept by a maudlin piano music “At a time when autumn’s so empty,” “the poplars also weep in town,/ And everything is in its last agony,” or like in the gloomy Autumn Nerves (Nervi de toamnă; AV 58), where in the town “It’s autumn, it’s rustle, it’s sleep. . .” “It’s coughing, it’s mourning; it’s bare / And it’s cold, with a fine rain,” and “The trees on the street gasp in pain.” As such, Bacovia’s gardens, parks and tree-lined boulevards are not exemplary accomplishments of humankind’s capability to create order and beauty, mirages of what J.D. Hunt (2000) called “Greater Perfections,” that is, the bettering of form and functions of Nature, by mankind, in the form of Garden. They are not earthly approximations of the otherworldly perfection of imagined paradises, man-made slivers of Heaven. Quite the contrary. They are pieces of a modern Hell of our own making, ghostly reminders of the fallacy of humankind’s ambition of advancements, and progress and of our dislocated place in the universe, at home neither in the world we created for ourselves, nor in the one we ideally left behind. The city-embedded nature offers no solace but the promise of death, stillness, and extinction. Likewise, the tree at the center of Bacovia’s Gardens of Hell is not a Tree of Life, nor an Axis Mundi, but a skeletal gallows, a dead husk, a wizened prophet of doom of mankind’s off-centered modern world. Bacovia’s dilapidated tree bears no fruits, it is almost always autumnal or wintry,7 its branches are bare, its bark is scorched by frost. As such, it is often present metonymically in its most fragile and fleeting hypostasis: the leaf, dead, dried, fallen, which seems to invade and suffocate the city like desert’s sand, as in the long series of dissolution-themed poems such as Autumn Notes (Note de toamnă, P 60): “Open up, let me in—adored one,/ I come with boughs and leaves that have dried,” Twilight (Amurg, P 70): “Like great tears of blood / Leaves from the boughs flow—,” Cold (Frig, SG 131): “I’m near a fence that’s rotted,/ And the wind blows wet leaves on lanes—,” Autumn (Toamnă, SG 127), where in “a time of lead” “the wind scatters the rain,/ Autumnal leaves

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rush along/ Fleeing the town streets in a swarm;” or Autumn (Toamnă, P 67), in which “The town gardens are keening,/ Flinging greenery to the town.” In the embedding of what Michael Marder called the “hetero-temporality” of the vegetal (2013, 95) in the hegemonic time of the human—which ask of the trees not to exist according to the ebbs and flows of its own seasonal existence but to serve a purpose in the context of “urban landscaping”—the fallen leaves become a superfluous and annoying by-product of the function of fulfillment that human needs impose on greenery. In Autumn Lead (Plumb de toamnă, P 76), the roaring of a madman in the public garden is closely associated with leaves’ riotous escape: “And in swarms leaves are escaping;/ It’s windy and everywhere hope is lost.” This image is particularly poignant: in his raging folly, the madman eludes the strict rules of conduct of the normative societal order, which requires of us to be quiet and submissive; likewise, in the slow decay and unruliness of its foliage, the tree shows its impossibility to fit into the tidy urban cosmos envisaged by humankind. The tree is a “madman” in his own right, ever the outsider, unfitted for an anthropocentrically reductive idea of order. Forcibly embedded in a mechanism—that of the human-centered modern city—operating in rhythms and according to parameters other than their own, tree-leaves no longer enter the cycle of decay and regrowth, but become a bothersome waste, an upsetting “garbage” to be disposed of. The sweeping presence of the dead and dying foliage is both a warning and a herald of chaos, of the unpredictable, a subversive and uncontrollable force like wind or rain. Bacovia’s ghoulish urban tree stands out as a reminder of the “sheer strangeness” (Marder 2013, 4) of vegetal life, its sharp otherness dulled but not completely blunted by being embedded into mankind’s artificial world. Bacovia’s Garden is a Hell of insanity, loneliness, and decay. It is a mournful place, “dead,” “keening,” haunted by madmen and sickly lovers, “abandoned,” “gangrened,” “ravaged,” “decayed,” “rusted,” a “cancerous” desolation of suffocating stillness, an old, frozen and frightening timeworn ruin, full of ghosts and regrets, as can be seen in Poem in the Mirror (Poemă în oglindă, P 82), Oh, Twilights (Oh, amurguri, P 61), In the Park (În parc, P 81), Echo of Serenade (Ecou de serenade, SG 98), Autumn in the Town (Toamnă în targ, SB 223) or Worldly Stanza (Stanță de lume, SV 269). And the tree, a powerful symbol positively solicited by both late nineteenthcentury Romantics and early twentieth-century traditionalists as an image of strength, renewal, and authenticity of the “truly” Romanian countryside, becomes in Bacovia’s Belle Époque modernist poetics a Tree of Death, a gasping, weeping, dying husk, an image of life smothered by the modern city. Bare and blackened, the tree stands in Bacovia’s bleak and chilly poetic landscape as both a symptom and a symbol of modern man’s lost and not yet found “order of integrating meaning” (Berger, Berger and Kellner 1974, 62).

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Already detached from Romantic utopia (Fanache 1994) and not yet entirely won over by the Positivistic faith in what Leopardi, in The Broom, or The Flower of the Desert (La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto, 1836), famously called “that magnificent / Progressive destiny of Humankind.” (“dell’umana gente, le magnifiche sorti e progressive”) (Leopardi 1966, 261), Bacovia’s attitude toward trees stands at the opposite end of the spectrum with respect of what is promoted and practiced by the late nineteenth-, early twentiethcentury Romanian Romantic and Peasantist poets. The paean of the national landscape is replaced, on the one hand, by the gloomy lament of a world besieged by the all-consuming forces of wild nature, and on the other, by the disheartening sight of decaying tamed nature. The tree is neither “proud” (semeț) nor “glorious” (falnic) anymore, neither in the mournful city nor in the blighted countryside. The trees outside of town are seen as a group, the “forest” or the “wood,” kept at a distance by the kinds of suspicion that R.P. Harrison traces in his book Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (2012): they are and remain mostly alien and distant, unknown and unknowable. Similarly, the trees scattered around Bacovia’s sullen urban landscape, subjected to humankind’s forceful embedding into its own world, shows no signs of distinctiveness. They are no more than silhouettes, contours filled with Bacovia’s own dread of (or longing for) death, dissolution, and nothingness. Be they tamed or wild, the real trees, each a unique and distinctive living nonhuman creature, become the tree, a symbol that bears no name and no individuality, a mere object, part of Bacovia’s dismal décor of Modernity. OF MEN AND TREES Bacovia was a man of his time, and to a present observer his world view appears to fall within the narrow confines of the anthropocentric tunnel vision of Modernity. As his wretched trees are in his miserable city, Bacovia himself was embedded in “the very metaphysical mindset that is now reaching a point of exhaustion,” having contributed “to a dramatic reduction in [natural resources] capacity for self-renewal” (Marder and Vieira 2013, 37). But, as his poetry and even his biography bear witness, he greatly suffered for it: as the man himself was socially awkward and deeply insecure, his poetical work too reverberates with unease, fright, and a profound melancholia. Beyond its undeniable aesthetic value, the lasting appeal of Bacovia’s work lies precisely in his author’s undeniable embeddedness in this Weltanschauung—which is still very much our own—but in a highly conflictual and problematic manner. Through the “dislocated” perspective and deeply troubled overlook of his poetry, Bacovia problematizes the most fundamental tenets of modern

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ethos from within, lambasting the alienating power of his own Modern and anthropocentric gaze. Writing in the first half of twentieth century, in the eye of the modernizing storm that swept the Euro-Atlantic space, Bacovia developed a poetics of dislocation and insecurity, calling into question the centrality of the human ego, the certainty in mankind’s “progress” and its unquestioned agency over the world. His evident unease resonates, after a century, with our own doubts about the course that Western modernity has embarked on and the state it has brought us to. Ultimately, Bacovia’s poetic drama is about the modern human condition, reflected also in its anti-Romantic and anti-Traditionalist relationship with trees and nature in general. In this respect, as far as the presence of trees is integral to the construal of Bacovia’s ghoulish poetical landscape, “imbricating vegetal percipience within the substance of poetic imagination itself,” his poetry can be considered—at least partially—as the product of a “botanical imagination” (Ryan 2018, 9), even a kind of proto-“phytographia,” a literary portrayal of plants “that is indebted both to the ingenuity of the author who crafts the text and to the inscription of plants in that very process of creation” (Viera 2017, 225). What is sure is that Bacovia’s gaze is not affected by our species’ widespread “plant blindness” (Balding and Williams 2016, 1192, quoted in Ryan 2018, 6). His vision of the city eschews the tendencies to overlook vegetal life—especially within the context of “urban landscaping”—reducing it to an “inconspicuous backdrop” of human life (Marder 2013, 3), at the same time avoiding two major potentially negative modalities of literary construction of the vegetal identified by Ryan, aestheticization (plants “as pretty objects and picturesque scenery”) and appropriation (plants “as expendable materials or throwaway matter”) (Ryan 2018, 14–15). It might be even argued that Bacovia goes against both of these modalities, his imagery of miserable urban trees subverting the “pretty objects” trope and showing the ill-fated consequences of the appropriation of trees as “expendable materials” for urban greenery. Voicing a common opinion about “nature,” William Robbins, botanist and former director of the New York Botanical Garden, said that plants afford “an antidote for the artificiality and tension of city life” (Robbins 1944, 442, quoted in Ryan 2018, 6). Roughly in the same period of time, at the other end of the Euro-Atlantic expanse, the Romanian poet Bacovia showed, with his representation of city-embedded trees, the illusory essence of it all. Menacing and disquieting, wild trees, forests, and woods, foreshadow the call of extinction and nothingness, whereas urban trees, gardens, and parks, degraded and gloomy, bear witness to the impossibility of a true reconciliation of the two worlds under the banner of the kind of human civilization epitomized by the

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modern city and—implicitly—of the anthropocentric vision bolstering it, laying claim to or appropriating the vegetal for its own needs and consumption. Bacovia’s depiction of dilapidated parks and rueful city trees imply a critique of the anthropocentric take on vegetal life as a “matter” to appropriate or lay claim to. In his vision, wild nature is not an “antidote” anymore, while the tamed one is a symptom of the very same “artificiality and tension of city life” tackled by Robbins. If we take—in the footsteps of J.C. Ryan’s seminal work on the botanical imagination in contemporary poetry—that a “phytocritical outlook” should aim to “emphasize the agencies of botanical beings in poetic texts and consider how plants are rendered, evoked, mediated, or brought to life in and through language” (Ryan 2018, 14), we could then see how Bacovia’s evocation of urban trees lends itself to a meaningful analysis from an ecocritical perspective. Although by and large they still are images of the vegetal shaped by the human mind, Bacovia’s trees, gardens, and parks “activate and contribute to the process of poetization,” remaining “as a corporeal trace within the poetic substratum” (Ryan 2018, 8). Granted, Bacovia’s eminently modernist construal of the vegetal world could be said to lean toward the “symbolic imposition” or, occasionally, even to give in to the “anthropomorphic temptation” (Marder 2017), by and large falling in the realm of literary “figuration,” where trees occur “as symbols, tropes, or linguistic artifices” (Ryan 2018, 15). Nevertheless, although Bacovia’s trees can be rightly viewed as “symbols” or “tropes,” they also display a powerful poetical “presence,” one that transcends the symbolical through an undeniable corporality and sensoriality: the looming bulkiness of the wood, the black of frost-bitten bark, the rustling of dried leaves, the smell of rotting greenery. Likewise, even if in the case of Bacovia one can hardly speak of an ecological awareness, much less of an ecocritical one, in the relationship he establishes with trees on a poetic level, particularly with urban trees, we can see—as a part of a wider critique of Modernity—the elements of an unsympathetic take on the utilitarian relationship in which man has encapsulated trees, embedding them in cities and transforming them into tools and commodities. From an ecocritical perspective, then, what we may call Bacovia’s “arboreal imagination” could be seen as an exemplary illustration of how writers can make “visible” those “invisible” environmental issues their readers may not be aware of (Westling 2012, 84). Through a fictional and highly symbolical situation, Bacovia helps us experience the lamentable commodification of trees fettered by human desire, as well as realize—more subtly—that the same is true for us, too. Through his forlorn vegetal imagery, what Bacovia calls into question—rooted in broader poetic marginalia on the increasingly acute condition of what Berger, Berger and Kellner called the metaphysical

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homelessness of the modern mind (1974, 77)—is the violent dislocation of both humans and trees brought about by a flawed and misunderstood modernization. Bacovia’s distinctively “gloomy” lyrics are permeated by a powerful feeling of “insecurity” (Scarlat 1987, 104), born out of the inescapable inability to believe in the “delusion” of Modernity Max Weber talked about (2005, 124), the grand illusions of human civilization itself, such as order, security and meaning. As a brilliant critic put it: Bacovia’s poetry shames the feeling of collective peace. His constant alarm before the familiar matter demonstrates the inconsistency of the defense systems, the falsity of the representations used to feed the state of calm and vegetative fulfilment of the being, the illusory good conscience, sprung from frequent, monotonous contact with a familiar landscape that has worn down the true meaning. (Raicu 2005, 25)

The ailing tamed trees of Bacovia’s devastated city parks and the menacing ones of his frightful forests express exactly this “constant alarm.” Devastated and sick, lifeless, the first manifests the consequences of humankind attempt to subdue nature and encapsulate it in his own alienating constructions, where the Modern mirage of culture reveals itself a delusion. The latter, threatening and alien, embody the anxiety of separation, of incomprehension, the loss of the Romantic dream of nature. He does not point out an exit from such a Modernity—either envisaging an impossible return to a patriarchal orthodox peasant utopia, like the more reactionary Romanian traditionalists of his time did, or singing the praises of the Machine Age, like Futurism, for instance, had done—because he feels there is none. Critics have unanimously pointed out how Bacovia’s melancholy offers no consolation: there is no way out, the ancient has lost its home in nature (even if purely ideal, as that of Romantics and Peasantists), and the modern has not yet found a replacement in a city perceived as alienating, dilapidated, false, and even more so in a place and a time—Belle Époque and Interwar Romania—in which urbanization and modernization were superficial and incomplete. In Bacovia’s world, “The empty town. . ./ A remote citadel;/ Greenery gouged. . .,” all that is left is just a heart-breaking, all-encompassing woe: For electric cables, paralyzing it, Like a symbol, A bird drops in the town—yet one more sadness. Autumn Notes (Note de toamnă, P 87).

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NOTES 1. For sociohistorical reasons, the modern Romanian culture of Austrian-, Hungarian-, and Russian-ruled territories developed along partly different paths until after WWI. In this context, “Romania” and “Romanian” will refer to the state formed with the so-called “Little Union” of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1859), later proclaimed Princedom of Romania (1866) and ultimately Kingdom of Romania (1881). It came to be known as the “Old” Kingdom, in contrast to the interwar “Greater” Kingdom, born out of the ashes of World War I, through the so-called Great Union (1919) with the (Old) Kingdom of Romania of the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian provinces of Transylvania, Banat, Bucovina, and Bessarabia. 2. From the name of the magazine Sămănătorul (The Sower, 1901–1910), founded by George Coșbuc (1866–1918) and Alexandru Vlăhuță (1858–1919) and directed in its heydays (1905–1906) by the hugely influential historic, politician, and conservative ideologue Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940). 3. From popor ‘people.’ Poporanism was promoted principally by the magazine Viața românească (Romanian Life, 1906–1916, 1920–1940), led until 1930 by literary critic Garabet Ibrăileanu (1871–1936). 4. The ideological and aesthetical confrontation between “traditionalism” and “modernism” continue under new guises in the interwar period. After World War I, the most influential torchbearer of “modern literature” will be the literary critic Eugen Lovinescu (1881–1943), who contributed to the definition and affirmation of “modernism” by means of the magazine Sburătorul (The Flyer; 1919–1922, 1926–1927) and its namesake literary circle, as wells as through his influential Istoria civilizației române moderne (History of Modern Romanian Civilization; 3 vol. 1924–1925) and Istoria literaturii române contemporane (History of Contemporary Romanian Literature; 6 vol., 1926–1929). One of the main opponents of Lovinescu’s ideas from a “traditionalist” standpoint was the conservative monthly Gândirea (The Thinking, 1921–1944), led from 1928 by the authoritative “orthodoxist” thinker Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972) (Terian 2014, 21–22). A new player entered the literary arena in the early 1920s, with the coalescence of a Romanian avant-garde front around the magazines Contimporanul (The Contemporary, 1923–1930) and Integral (1925–1928). By the mid-30s, “modernism” had already become a cornerstone and a canonical instrument of literary critics (Omăt 2008/1, 12). 5. Henceforth, I will cite Bacovia’s poems as follows: English Title (Romanian Title, volume of first appearance abbreviation page(s) of Bacovia 2007). Abbreviations: P=Plumb, 1916; SG=Scântei galbene, 1926; CV=Cu voi . . ., 1930; CF=Comedii în fond, 1936; SB=Stanțe burgheze, 1946; SV=Stanțe și versete, 1949–1954; AV=Alte versete, 1899–1956. 6. Bacovia’s urban gardens and parks are not lush: trees and flowers are generic entities, nothing more than symbols, their individuality diluted into an undifferentiated otherness. Explicitly mentioned are poplars and linden trees of avenues and city parks (the latter also boasting a certain literary tradition in Eminescu’s poetry)

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and, as for flowers, the conventional roses and lilies so darling to the fin de siècle sentimentalism. 7. There are exceptions, like Springtime Notes (Note de primăvară, SG 110), Courage (Curaj, CF 184) or Summer Night (Noapte de vară, CF 207), where “the forest is full of fantasy—/ Under the lindens still in bloom.” But even when springtime occasionally enter stage, as in the two Springtime Nerves (Nervi de primăvară, P 79 and SG 109), an autumnal gloom is often close, “Disquieting expectations,/ Loneliness”—like in At the Shore (La ţărm; CF 183)—lurking beneath the surface. The same ambivalence is seen in Prosaic Verse (Verset prosaic; SV 298), where the lament for life’s many “miseries. . ./ And stunted aspirations” is accompanied by a bittersweet hopefulness: “But life’s flow is also sweet. . ./ Perennial spring.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Armour, Ian D. 2012. A History of Eastern Europe 1740–1918. Empires, Nations and Modernisation. Second Edition. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bacovia, George. 2007. Complete Poetical Works and Selected Prose of George Bacovia. Translated by Brenda Walker and Stelian Apostolescu. With an introduction by Mihai Cimpoi. London; Chester Springs; Bucharest: Forest Books. Berger, Peter L., Brigitte Berger, Hansfried Kellner. 1974. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Densusianu, Ovid. 1980. Ideal și îndemnuri. Ediție îngrijită, prefață și note de Călin Manilici. Dacia, Cluj-Napoca. Dimitriu, Daniel. 1981. Bacovia. Iași: Junimea Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1983. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr, eds, Volume 3. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fanache, Vasile. 2001. Bacovia. Ruptura de utopia romantică, ediția a III-a revizuită, Cluj-Napoca: Dacia XXI. Flămând, Dinu. 2007. Ascunsul Bacovia. Editia a II-a, revăzută și completată. Bistrița: Pergamon. Giurescu, Constantin C. 1980. A History of the Romanian Forest. Translated from the Romanian by Eugenia Farca. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România. Hall, Dewey W. 2014. Romantic naturalists, Early Environmentalists. An Ecocritical Study, 1789–1912. Farnham: Ashgate. Hunt, John Dixon. 2000. Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden Theory. London: Thames & Hudson. Kogălniceanu, Mihail. 2017. Opere. 1. Scrieri literare: Programe literare. Proza. Teatru. Versuri. Memorialistica. Corespondența. Texte alese şi stabilite, note, comentarii şi glosar de Dan Simonescu şi Andrei Nestorescu. Rrevizuire filologică, cronologie şi indici de Monica Vasileanu. Repere critice de Dorina Rusu şi Nicolae Mecu. Cuvânt înainte de Alexandru Zub. Introducere de Eugen Simion. Bucureşti:

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Academia Română; Fundaţia Naţională pentru Ştiinţă şi Artă; Muzeul Naţional al Literaturii Române. Leopardi, Giacomo. 1966. Selected Prose and Poetry. Edited, translated and introduced by Iris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs. New York: New American Library. Lovinescu, Eugen. 1998. Istoria literaturii române contemporane. Chișinău: Litera. Marder, Michael and Patrícia Vieira. 2013. “Writing Phytophilia: Philosophers and Poets as Lovers of Plants.” Frame 26(2): 37–53. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. With a foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press. Marder, Michael. 2017. To Hear Plants Speak. In Patrícia Vieira, John Ryan, and Monica Gagliano (eds), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 103–125. Merlo, Roberto. 2018. “La città e il deserto. Prolegomeni a una poetica spaziale nella lirica di George Bacovia.” Romania orientale 31: 157–171. Negoițescu, Ion. 1945. “Poezia lui Bacovia.” Revista Cercului Literar, 1(6–8): 11–26. Omăt, Gabriela. 2008. Modernismul literar românesc în date (1880–2000) și texte (1880–1949). 2 vol. București: Editura Institutului Cultural Român. Raicu, Lucian. 2005. Învingătorul. In Idem, Calea de acces, 7–44. Polirom: Iași. Robbins, William. 1944. “The Importance of Plants.” Science 100 (2603): 440–443. Rudd, Gillian. 2007. Greenery. Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval English Literature. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Ryan, John Charles. 2018. Plants in Contemporary Poetry. Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination. New York and London: Routledge. Scarlat, Mircea. 1987. George Bacovia. Nuanțări. București: Cartea Românească. Vianu, Tudor. 1944. “Figuri și forme literare (I. Minulescu; G. Bacovia).” Revista Fundațiilor Regale, 11(7): 139–148. Vieira, Patrícia. 2017. Phytographia: Literature as Plant Writing. In Patricia Vieira, John Ryan, and Monica Gagliano (eds), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 215–233. Weber, Max. 2005 (1920–1921). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. With an introduction by Anthony Giddens. London; New York: Routledge. Westling, Louise. 2012. “Literature and Ecology.” In Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies. Edited by Greg Garrard. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 75–89.

Chapter 13

The Poetization of the Exotic in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Literature Nikolaj Gumilëv’s Palm Tree Giulia Baselica

In a quotation dating back to 1936, the poet and literary critic Vladislav Chodasevič affirmed that Decadentism was the mainstay of the work of the poet Nikolaj Gumilëv (1886–1921), an indisputable reference to the same exoticism1 that contemporary critics captured as representative of external everyday life, as well as of a reprocessing of artificially recreated emotions. In this respect, Chodasevič quotes G. Ivanov,2 according to whom Nikolaj Gumilëv forces himself to become at a time, lion hunter, soldier, and conspirator, thus providing the conventional representation of the violence that the typical decadent poet inflicts on himself to get poetic material and inspiration (Chodasevič 1996). Chodasevič disproves Ivanov’s observation by pointing out the essential honesty and sincerity of Gumilëv who, through the poetic depiction of exotic scenarios, narrates his own life revealing his interiority, which characterizes an essential part of his work. The poetic sophistication in Gumilëv unites the refinement of the verse and the literary image. In the Acmeist poet Gumilëv, the exotic element, according to Chodasevič, represents the legitimacy to play, act, and mystify, as well as theatricality (Chodasevič 1996). Furthermore, the exotic motifs would seem, in this perspective, to reify verbal objects typical of an artificial and decorative world, a masking achieved through the first-person narrative that renames things, transforms intentions, and distorts reference elements (Faoustov 2009). The Gumilëvian exoticism essentially takes shape in the African landscapes that inspire the collections Romantičeskie cvety (Romantic flowers, 1908), Čužoe nebo (Foreign sky, 1912), Kolčan (The Quiver, 1916), Kostër (The Bonfire, 1918), Ognennyj

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stolp (The Pyre, 1921), Šatër (The Tent, 1921) in scattered poems and in narrative and theatrical works.3 The poet went on several trips to North and East Africa4 and in 1913 took part in an expedition organized by the Imperial Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology of St. Petersburg.5 However, African motifs had already appeared in his first poetic compositions, then in the Romantičeskie cvety collection—where the image of Lake Chad, considered by Gumilëv to be the heart of black Africa, inspires numerous lyrics—suggested, at least in part, by reading the works by Jules Verne, Captain Mayne Reid and, above all, by Ryder Haggard.6 If in Romantičeskie cvety the African imaginary still appears rather conventional and abstract, a sort of idealization of Africa, expression of an exotic East, as reminiscence of the British Pre-Raphaelites, and the work of Russian Art Noveau artists, the Čužoe nebo collection marks a decisive change in the poetic representation of the African theme (Yastremski 2018). Between 1908 and 1910, he made two trips to Africa, to Egypt in 1908 and to Abyssinia in 1910, and his poetic compositions dedicated to African nature present concrete details generated by his direct experience.7 The collection The Tent consists entirely of lyrics inspired by the African theme.8 Exotic geography, along with travel, are recurring themes in Gumilëv’s poetry in the period between the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century, and the inspiring source of these themes is to be found in contemporary French poetry (Kulikova 2017), which brings a profound renewal to the Eastern theme in European culture through the works of Leconte de Lisle, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud. Accepting the ascendancy of French poetry, combined with his own travel impressions, Nikolaj Gumilëv conjures up an original image of the East and Africa, giving shape to a new Russian consciousness of history, which in itself includes both Western and Eastern traits. In the African lands, the Russian poet discovers a primordial world: the appropriation, here ideal and poetic, of new spaces and unexplored regions is, for the white man, a source of vast and unusual inspiration.9 Only in those places and in those regions of poetry does Gumilëv the poet, the Adam, find his own, primitive paradise (Kulikova 2017). Not only poetry, but also French painting (Derain, Matisse, Gauguin, Picasso) offers Gumilёv a vast figurative imagery from which to draw inspiration, authentic poetic material, then reinterpreted and reworked (Kulikova 2017). The wild chromatic expressiveness of the Fauves, a provocative reference to the wild naturalness inherent in man, likely guided the Russian poet toward the expression of primordial nature. In portraying the everyday life of the Abyssinian people, Gumilёv introduces into his poetry the marked traits of another world, populated by other peoples, whose conscience, differentiating from the consciousness of civilized man, stands out. This lyrical-conceptual

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procedure becomes evident in the poem “Ekvatorial’ny les” (1918), in which the ecocritical theme of the opposition between a civilized man, therefore corrupt, and a wild man, therefore pure being primordial, is outlined against a natural landscape, also wild and primordial in the stark profile of the mountains or the forest in the distance. It is therefore perhaps possible to note that also in Gumilëv’s poems as in the works that Greg Garrard analyzes in his historical examination, “wilderness has an almost sacramental value: it proffers the promise of a renewed, authentic relation between humanity and the earth, a post-Christian covenant, found in a space of purity, founded on an attitude of reverence and humility” (Garrard 2004, 59). In 1922, the critic Julij Aichenval’d, with the intention of tracing an allround portrait of the recently deceased poet,10 dwelt on his depiction of Africa and his lyrical and proud reverie: that of obtaining from his beloved continent, the last and extreme asylum for his body, as a sign of gratitude for the poems he dedicated to that faraway land. Such is the message of “Daj eto dorogu mne tornuju” (Give this even road to me) (Ajchenval’d 2000) and Africa gives his poems rich wildlife and lush flora, of aloe, cactus, very tall grasses and palm trees. The poetic transfiguration of the African landscape would seem to recover, in an age going beyond symbolist instances, a perspective that could be defined as “neoromantic,” which induces one to “exalt virgin landscapes—from glaciers to forests, from moors to islands”—or at least far “from the routes of modernity” (Scaffai 2017, 78) and which “taught European men to prefer uncontaminated and scarcely anthropized nature to the social landscape or the garden itself” (Scaffai 2017, 78). Gumilёv composes his lyrical African world, investigates it as a traveler and as a poet (Kulikova 2017) and dedicates to it, in addition to the Šatër collection and some poems and translations, the documentary prose Afrikanskij dnevnik, (African travel diary, 1913) which constitutes, in his heterogeneous blend of poetic descriptions and travel notes, a sort of authentic material background, a sort of fabula of the sužet or lyrical intertwining of Gumilevian verses (Kulikova 2017).  Of the composite image of Africa, the palm motif in the Gumilëvian poetic universe is a powerful synthesis of iconographic and symbolic value. The palm immediately appears as an exotic motif in Russian literature: in the statistical survey proposed by Epštejn (Epštejn 1990) out of three thousand seven hundred poems characterized by the theme of nature only seven are dedicated to the image of the palm. The most properly connotative tree of culture, and therefore of Russian poetry, is the birch, mentioned in eightyfour lyrics (Epštejn 1990, 46). In the poetics of Gumilëv the tree has no exclusive relevance in an exotic imaginary: it is an eternal and universal motif; it is the unattainable example of life, a synthesis of perfect harmony. Between the end of 1915 and the

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beginning of 1916, he composed the poem Derevnja (The Trees). To its first stanza he entrusted his thought: “Ja znaju, čto derev’jam, a ne nam/Davno velič’e soveršennoj žizni,/ Na laskovoj zemle, sestre zvezdam,/ My—na čužbine, a oni—v otčizneˮ “I know: to the trees, but not to us,/ Perfection of the life is given, whole,/ And on the Earth—the sister of the stars—/ We live in exile, while they do at homeˮ (Bonwer 2000). The aim of this contribution is primarily to point out in the poetic opus by Nikolaj Gumilëv (composed between 1906 and 1921) the occurrence of the palm tree motif, inextricably linked, as we have seen, to the experience of traveling in Africa. Secondly, we will try to identify, of each occurrence, the peculiar connotations acquired by this poetic image, to explore and depict a dynamic polysemy of the palm motif. The analysis will take place not according to a chronological sequence, but rather by examining the multiple issues addressed. The recurring motif in Gumilëv’s poetry leads one, finally, to investigate the kind of relationship that, by means of this exotic tree, was established between the poet and the Russian literary culture of his time. The approach to the study of the interaction between texts and cultures, motifs and literatures, in terms of opposition “ownˮ versus “alien,ˮ introduced, in primis, in Jurij Lotman’s studies, will possibly provide a plausible answer (Lotman 1996). If in ancient Mediterranean civilizations the palm was a symbol of beauty and harmony,11 in the cultures of the Near East and Africa it refers to the concept of fertility, due to the rich variety of foods and beverages that can be obtained from this plant.12 In its first appearances in Gumilёv’s poetry, the palm seems to be connoted with a specific sacral value.13 For example, it opens the poem “Rošči pal’m i zarosli aloe” (Groves of palms and aloe covered slopes, 1908. In Žemčuga, The Pearl, 1910) and introduces a natural setting consisting of a few, essential elements: in addition to the palm, aloe (also a sacred plant, used by the Egyptians and the Jews to embalm the dead before burial), the sky, and a stream. The colors are intense: the vivid and dark green of the palms and the bright note of the aloe contrast with the opaque silver of the stream and the infinite blue of the sky, illuminated by the gold of the sun rays: “Nebo, beskonečnoe goluboe,/ Nebo, zolotoe ot lučej”; “Skies are infinite blue and blue in their scopes.” In this exotic setting, the lyric ego does not find peace and dialogues with its own heart, which yearns for something still unknown, while, instead, could claim itself imperiously, like the herbs of that charming garden: “Razve ty ne vlastno žit’, kak travy/V etom upoitel’nom sadu?” (“Can’t you live like grasses of the wild/ In this earthly orchard of delight”) (Karpov). The sacred meaning of the palm, the image introducing the lyric, is intensified if placed in relation to the vision of the sky, which occurs twice in the first stanza, the second time closing it, in a crescendo of light and color. The palm, therefore, stretching upward to the

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sky, gilded by the sun, which in turn also recalls the gold of the icon, with its golden background, on which the Christian artist paints. The sacredness of the palm, pagan and Christian at the same time, along with the pagan and Jewish sacredness of aloe, seems to transform the seductions of the heterodox, to which the poet’s heart meekly yields, into a metaphor: “Dlja čego ž soblaznam inoverca/Ty sebja pokorno otdaeš’? /Для чего ж соблазнам иноверца/Ты себя покорно отдаёшь?” (“Why do you submissively give in to /The temptations of a Gentileˮ). In the long “Poem of the Beginning,” a sort of poetic cosmogony, a mixture of Gnostic sources related to the creation of the universe, motifs taken from the Enuma Elish epos and the legends about the disappearance of Atlantis, the palm is, apparently, an accessory and decorative element, a pictorial detail. However, in terms of comparison, it metonymically unites the three main planes of the poem itself: the sensorial and sensual (with an explicit hint to the olfactory image of the fragrance of the palm), which, in turn, refers to the spiritual plane, identified in the evocation of Om, and the more prosaic dimension of the effort required to travel the path leading to the forest. In the verses of “Poema načala” (The Poem of the Beginning), a slender palm is the term of comparison of a winding and impassable path that leads into the forest: “Gde v lesu/zmeilas’ tropa/. . . Pal’m strojnej i krepče platanovˮ (“Where, in the forest a path wound through / . . . Than palms more slender and stronger than plane trees”). Another term of comparison is the scent that the palm spreads at noon, referring to the clear, intense and full voice, pronouncing the forbidden word, Om: “Golos jarkij, gustoj i polnyj / Kak poludennyj zapach pal’mˮ (“A clear, intense and full voice / Like the scent of palm trees at noonˮ). The sacral connotation of the palm reappears in another poem, “Galla” (1918. In Šatër, The Tent, 1921). Here, the palm is surrounded by an aura of sacredness, which brings it closer to the image of a mosque: “I tainstvennyj gorod, tropičeskij Rim/Šejch-Gussejn ja uvidel vysokij,/Poklonilsja mečeti i pal’mami svjatymˮ; (“And in the mysterious city, a tropical Rome, / I saw the High Šejch Gussejn / I bowed to the mosque and the sacred palmsˮ).14 In the famous lyric “Žiraf” (The Giraffe, 1907. In Romantičeskie cvety, Romantic Flowers, 1908), the flexible (strojnye) palms identify a tropical garden, on which the intense perfume of extraordinary herbs blows gently. Here, the garden becomes the inspiring motif of a fairy tale that opens and closes with the evocation of Lake Chad and the elegant wandering of a giraffe: “How shall I tell you about tropical gardens, about slender palms/ about the perfume of unimaginable grasses. . ./ You’re crying? Listen . . . far away, near Lake Chad,/ a delicate giraffe grazes up and downˮ (Raffel and Burago 1972, 37). The image of the palm, in this poem, only appears in the last verses and does not seem to acquire a preeminent emantic value;

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however, the connotative adjective “flexuous”’ gives it a non-secondary role. Indeed, the palms are here flexuous (strojnye) of the flexuosity (strojnost’) that characterizes the central image of the poem itself, the giraffe: “emu gracioznaja strojnost’ i nega danaˮ (“He is blessed with sinuous beauty and with happinessˮ). In a series of poems inspired by Gumilëv’s visits to Africa, composed between 1918 and 1919, and all characterized by a remarkable extension, the palm tree is a recurring presence. It is, however, a stylized element, a constant reference to the exotic impenetrable vegetation. The palm is therefore, with its permanent connotations or fixed epithets, safe and powerful, a thin albeit secular trunk and a luxuriant, fan-shaped foliage. In the poem “Sentimental’noe putešestvie” (A Sentimental Journey. Gumilëv 1994), the thin trunks of the palms are nostalgically evoked in absentia: “Tol’ko vspomniš’–i net vokrug/Tonkich pal’m, i fontan ne b’etˮ (“But you remember—and around there are no / Thin palms, and the fountain does not spurtˮ). It is a leafy fan in the poem “Egipt” (Egypt, 1919. In Šatër, The Tent, 1921)–“Izurumrudnye eti ravniny/I raskidistich pal’m veeraˮ (“Those emerald plains / And the fans of the leafy palmsˮ), while it rises powerful and black, in the African nature set on fire by the sun, in the poem “Cepi bašen” (Rows of towers, 1918. Gumilëv 1994)—“Solncem rošči/Sožženy,/Pal’my moščny/I černyˮ (“By the sun glades / Are burned / The palms are powerful / And blackˮ). Huge palm trees have secular trunks in the poem “Sachara” (The Sahara, 1920. In Šatër, The Tent, 1921): “I čudovščinych pal’m vekovye stvolyˮ (“And the secular trunks of the huge palm treesˮ), while with the cactuses and tall grasses they give life to the luxuriant vegetation of the “enchanted country,” koldovskaja strana, in the verses of “Abissinija” (Abyssinia, 1918. In Šatër, The Tent, 1921): “Pal’my, kaktusy v rost čelovečeskij travyˮ (Palms, cactuses, herbs as tall as a man). In the verses of “Karakalla” (Caracalla, 1906. In Romantičeskie cvety, Romantic flowers, 1908), the palms constitute a static image, whose conventionality is defined by the poet himself, who assimilates the scene to “bizarre cameos”: slovno prichotlivye kamei (like bizarre cameos) depicting desert gardens. Here with dark palms, (s tёmnych pal’m), dangling snakes (svisajut zmei). In the poem “Putešestvie v Kitaj” (A Voyage to China, 1910. In Žemčuga, The Pearl, 1910), which represents a sort of digression in the exotic Gumilevian imaginary,15 the palm is configured as an element not so ornamental and accessory, as it is semantically connotative of a nocturnal landscape, in which the “lyric Weˮ is waiting for an appearance—“Čto nam prigresitsja v noč’ u pal’myˮ (“What will appear next to the palm tree in the night?ˮ), and asks how the sap of the trees will inebriate them—“kak op’janjat nas soki derevˮ (“How will the sap of the trees inebriate us?ˮ). In the wild nature of the “remote China” (dalekij Kitaj), it would seem that the

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secret paradise to which the “lyric we” has surrendered, is to become concrete: Brosili vse zavetnyj raj (We have all abandoned the secret paradise). Thus, the typical arboreal element of the African landscape is grafted here in a different exotic context to represent the magical meeting place of supernatural spirits and heavenly visions. Right next to the palm tree the lyrical We awaits the materialization of Paradise, in the spirit of Pushkin and Baudelaire (Stich, 1902–1910). Of ominous omen, sinisterly evoked by glowing steel and by the cry of Erinni, palm trees, along with pines, are to be attacked by weeds in the poem “Neždanno pal na naši rošči inej” (Suddenly the frost has fallen on our thickets, 1909. In Gasparov 1993), whose last verses announce the coming of the fierce Asura warriors. To the palm, in the fairy tale “Princessa Zara”16 (Princess Zara), is tied a royal camel with silky hair as white as milk. The beast will lead the princess and her mysterious and charming companion to the shores of Lake Chad (during the journey the two protagonists will encounter groves of palms with large leaves and ripe orange fruits). Once at their destination, the princess kills the young man and shortly thereafter, at sunset, a hyena rips open the white silky-haired camel, tied to the palm. The image of this tree connects here with the blood motif (recalled in the final bloody scene and chromatically evoked by the ripe orange fruits of the palm trees that accompany the journey of the two protagonists) and of the sacrifice made by a pure and innocent creature, represented by the white camel. Even in “Nevol’nič’ja”17 (The Slaves’ Song) with the palm tree Gumilëv dwells on a poetic reflection on the theme of cruelty, here, however, highlighting the ruthlessness of the European settler, who comes out of his tent every morning, unfolds a long whip and sits in the shade of a palm tree: “on saditsja pod ten’ju pal’myˮ (“he sits down in the shade of a palm treeˮ) (Naydan 2018, 30); his face is protected by a green veil; he places a bottle of whiskey beside him and whips the slaves who get lazy. The palm therefore is eternally present at every event; she is a silent motionless witness of every act of cruelty and every injustice perpetrated by man. In a different perspective, of opposite sign, is the literary motif of cruelty connected with the palm tree. In the verses of the long, dramatic, poem “Ekvatorial’nyj les” (The Equatorial Forest, 1918. In Šatër, The Tent, 1921), the palm surmounts the grave of a European man who died after a gorilla had attacked him: “Ja ego zakopal u podnožija pal’my, Krest postavil nad grudoj ogromnych kamnejˮ (“I buried him at the foot of a palm tree, A cross I placed on a heap of large stonesˮ). Finally, the palms are the first element of the landscape of Kaffa, described in the verses of “Pal’my, tri slona i dva žirafa” (“Palms, three elephants, and two giraffes,” 1911. In Gumilëv 1998–2007). The enigmatic, zagadočnaja,

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Kaffa is evoked in the image of animals—the elephants and giraffes as well as the ostrich, the rhinoceros, and the leopard—and, in the palm, which is the emblem of the natural landscape of the ancient Ethiopian region. The initial position of the term palmy, palms, in the first verse connects with the first element, Ja (I), of the fourth verse, at the end of the first stanza. The lyrical I expresses joy in being, yet again, guest and singer of that land: “Ja opjat’, opjat’ tvoj gost’ i bard” (“I am again and again your guest and bard”). In effect, the palm tree represents for Gumilëv not only and exclusively a literary motif, but also an essential, as well as ambivalent, constitutive element of his vision of Africa, of that exotic but no longer exoticizing landscape, and concretely internalized in his own consciousness. Along with the three rivers, the Nile, the Neva, and the Seine, the palm tree becomes the emblematic synthesis of various landscapes and of biographical, emotional, and literary experiences, in the famous poem “Zabludivšijsja tramvaj”18 (The Tram that Went Astray, 1919): “My proskočili skvoz rošču pal’m,/Čerez Nevu, čerez Nil i Senuˮ (“We crossed a palm grove/The Neva, the Nile and the Seine”). The image of the palm tree, with all its multiple meanings, thus becomes the object of an initial process of estrangement in the Gumilëvian vision, which would undergo a subsequent evolution in a naturalizing perspective, which in turn would imply the consequent defamiliarization of the lyrical self (Scaffai 2017). In a short letter sent from Varna to the poet Valerij Brjusov on 13/1619 December 1909, before setting off for Abyssinia, where he would stay for just over two weeks, the poet summarizes his plans for the trip. He wrote that he was going to shoot at two or three baboons, rest a little while lying under the palm trees, and then return to Petersburg and attend the poetry lessons of his mentor, Bryusov himself, at the “Academy of Verse.ˮ A few days later, on 12/25 December, he wrote to his friend Yevgeny Znosko– Borovsky from Cairo, describing the city as beautiful, although it was full of palms and adventurers. In the early twentieth century, the palm tree was a pictorial subject in the artistic production of Henri Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, and Dufy, as a connotative component of the Mediterranean landscape, in particular of the seaside and the worldly context of the Côte d'Azur. By contrast, the Gumilëvian palm is a realistic image of an authentic natural context, not a stereotype of an exoticism by now of widespread use and still a sacred icon of the Gumilëvian imaginary. Finally, the palm tree appears in the setting of the first performance of the play for children Derevo prevraščenij (The Tree of Transformations), written on commission in 1918. The palm, in this Indian-inspired story, embodies the doctrine of metempsychosis as it is the magic tree capable of making the good and evil that dwell in human beings visible through metamorphosis; and in

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this final act the palm reveals the most authentic and profound meaning of its function, masked by an apparently enigmatic ambivalence. If we examine the Gumilevian lyric production characterized by the palm tree motif, we can see that its first appearance dates back to 1906 (in Caracalla), before the poet’s journey to Africa, and recurs constantly until 1910 (in A Voyage to China). In this period, the image of the palm is, in essence, a sort of cameo, a slender and elegant tree, the typifying emblem of exotic silent gardens, where the lyric I can find peace, but where the struggle between the forces of nature can also take place. In this poetic experience, the final image of the palm connects with the expectation of an unknown appearance. Then a long period follows, in which the poetic Gumilevian imagination does not contemplate the palm motif, which nevertheless reappears in the last phase of Gumilёv’s poetic production. From 1918 to 1921, the palm tree reappears with new connotations: it is leafy, dark, and eternally powerful and, in its last appearance, near the end of the poet’s life, the fragrance it releases seems to connect with the sound of the Om, the expression closest to cosmic existence in time and space.20 Although the literary motif of the palm symbolically fulfills the poet’s aspiration to escape to other worlds, it is precisely his characterizing connotation of extraneousness that enables Gumilëv’s return to Russian literature and culture. His refusal of mysticism, particularly typical of the later phase of Symbolism to which the Acmeist movement he led was opposed to, made him embrace the romantic exoticism of faraway and secluded countries, with the complementary exaltation of courage, recalled by a wild and dangerous nature (Lotman and Mints 1989). The exotic palm tree is introjected into the Gumilevian poetic imagination and becomes an integral part of its interior landscape, in which the hiatus between his own cultural background and alien cultures is canceled, and both become essential sources of inspiration. Thus, what is “alien” becomes “own,” transforming and changing its own physiognomy (Lotman 1992): Russian literary culture, through the poetry of Gumilëv, welcomes a new and thematic exotic scenario. The literary palm motif, along with numerous other arboreal elements, contributes to giving shape to that dynamic sphere—identified by John Charles Ryan—within which plant species activate a peculiar process of poetization, following which the arboreal element, in this case the palm, remains in a tangible form, grafted into the poetic substance itself (Ryan 2018).

NOTES 1. Dmitrij Merežkovskij, contemporary poet of Gumilёv, notes the importance of the theme of the forest and the steppe expressed in the primordial and innate tendency

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to expansionism, as true manifestation of the wandering Russian soul celebrated in nineteenth century by Russian poets such as Puškin, Lermontov, Kol’cov (Costlow 2013). Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry and interaction with its own references suggest a new vision of nature: “Many poets cherish an integral synthetic image of the world, embracing some hitherto ignored larger aspects of nature” (Lavrenova 1998, 231). 2. The note by Georgij Ivanov, poet, writer, and critic, a friend of Gumilëv, had appeared in the volume N. Gumilëv, Čužoe nebo: tret’ja kniga stichov, (Berlin, Petropolis, 1936). 3. Unless otherwise indicated, the English translations of the titles and verses in this essay are mine as they have never been translated into English. After the title of each poem, the reader will find in bracket the year of its composition and the English title of the collection where it originally appeared. Later, they have all been included in Nikolaj Gumilëv. Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v desjati tomach, Moskva: Voskresen’e, 1998–2007. Quotations from poetry, prose, and dramas mentioned in this essay come from this publication. 4. He left for Africa for the first time in 1907, but there is no evidence that he actually reached the destination; then he had the opportunity to organize a long stay in Cairo and in the Horn of Africa, between the end of 1909 and the first months of 1910. 5. He collected Ethiopian folklore and ethnographic objects which he donated to the Museum; moreover, together with his assistant, Nikolaj Sverčok, he took more than two hundred photographs that constitute an interesting testimony of early century Africa. 6. The poem “Zaklinanie” (Incantation) derives from the novel Cleopatra by Haggard; while “Žiraf” (Giraffe) became the cornerstone of the collection itself, as well as an authentic connotation of the poet in the prewar Bohemians circles. 7. The poet, while not abdicating his role as a romantic poet and dreamer, places himself before poetry as a scholar and researcher—ethnologist, archaelogist, and folklorist—offering a completely unusual perspective: the Abyssinian poems do not present themselves as poems about Abyssinia, but as poems by Abyssinians (Skatov 1998). 8. There are references to places that Gumilëv had visited: Abyssinia, the governatorate of Galla, Somalia, the Red Sea, Egypt, and Sudan. 9. Gumilёv is animated by an intense cosmic feeling, by virtue of which he does not stop at the contemplation of external nature, but penetrates its essence—through visual, auditory and tactile experience—which he goes through as a divine emanation (Ajchenval’d 2000). Thus “Poetry revisits cosmic themes, enriching them with earthly reality” (Lavrenova 1998, 231). 10. In 1922, Julij Ajchenval’d published Poety i Poetessy (Moskva, Severnye dni), in which the article Gumilëv was printed—the same had already been published in 1913 in the essay collection Siluety russkich pisatelej (Moskva, Naučnoe slovo). 11. In the “Song of Songs,” the bridegroom, in exalting the beauty of the bride, compares the stature of the young woman to a palm, and her breasts to date palm fruits; while Ulysses in the Odyssey, assimilates Nausicaa to a young palm sprout. 12. The Egyptians considered the palm patroness of love and music and dance protector, identifying it with the Goddess Hathor who, in the animal Kingdom,

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acquired the appearance of the Celestial Cow that created the world and the sun. A further name of the Goddess was Imait, the female form of Ima, the Sacred Tree. On sarcophagi, on tomb scenes and in the Book of the Dead, Hathor draws the Water of life and pours it on the dead. The palm is therefore also a symbol of immortality, glory, and victory; it is associated with the sun, perhaps because of its real resembling sun-rays and its brightness. The palm is as well to the Phoenix, as Homer did when depicted in “Hymn to Apollo,” the birth of the Greek deity. Finally, already in antiquity, the palms “were real stone palm trees, or terrestrial trees, linking the pediments of the sky with the base of earth. Such symbolism was typical of the Christian churches, too” (Cattabiani 1996, 86). 13. It might be interesting to note that in 1838 the Russian poet Michail Lermontov had composed a poem entitled “Three palms,” a sort of parable, with some references to the Bible, where these trees represent the ephemeral values of beauty and elegance, allegorically symbolizing human aspirations, passions, and contradictions. Lermontov was one of Gumilëv’s favorite poets: the Lermontovian themes of courage, passion, proud and at the same time suffered solitude characterized Gumilëv’s world view. Like Lermontov, he experienced the precocious, intense awareness of his own peculiar individuality in a world that he felt to be foreign and distant. The Acmeist poet shared with Lermontov the awareness of the coexistence of evil and good in the human soul. He knew perfectly the action of those contrasting and opposing forces capable of transforming an individual into an avenger or inducing him to seek solitude, closing himself up in his own inner world (Friedlender 1990). 14. The image of the palm, as a characterizing landscape element, occurs in other lyrics, such as “Alžir i Tunis” (composed in 1918 and published in Čukovskij 1962; “Otvet” (composed in 1919 and published in Gumilëv 1989; “Leopard” and “Moi čitateli” (composed, respectively, in 1920 and 1921 and both published in the collection Ognennyj stolp, in 1921. 15. China constitutes a real Leitmotiv in the poetic work of Nikolaj Gumilëv, who published in Petrograd in 1918, under the print of Giperborej publishing house a collection entitled Farforovyj pavil’on (The Porcelain Pavilion), which “displays kaleidoscopic images from Classical Chinese poetry, infused with a melancholic mood and united with the themes of secret longing and unfulfilled desire” (Zhang 2015, 84). 16. The story was composed between 1907 and 1908 and published in volume, in 1922 in Prague by the publisher Mysl’ in a posthumous edition, Ten’ ot pal’my (The shadow of the palm) in 1922. 17. The poem “Nevol’nič'ja” (The Slaves’ Song) was composed in 1910 and published in 1911 in the volume Antologija (Moskva, Musaget). 18. The poem “Zabludivšijsja tramvaj” (The Tram that Went Astray) was composed in 1919 e published in the journal Dom iskusstv (1, 1921). 19. The first date refers to the Julian calendar, the second to the Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in Russia in 1918. 20. The image of the palm tree is so deeply rooted in the poet’s mind that it is also recalled in a critical context. In dealing with the poetic translation, Gumilëv states that the dactyl verse, resting on the accented syllable, shakes the two unstressed syllables, just as the palm tree shakes its top. It is a mighty verse, the author specifies, telling us

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of the quiescent forces of nature, of the deeds of gods and heroes—even under this circumstance the Author seems to imply his perception of this tree (Gumilëv 1990, 69–74).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ajchenval’d, Julij. 2000. “Gumilëv.” In Pro et contra, edited by Jurij Zobnin, 491– 504. Moskva: RchGI. Bonwer, Yevgeny. 2000 Nikolaj Gumilev, The Tree. https​:/​/po​​etryl​​overs​​page.​​com​/p​​ oets/​​gumil​​ev​/​tr​​ees​.h​​lm. Accessed November 20, 2019. Burton, Raffel and Alla Burago. 1972. Selected Works of Nikolai S. Gumilev. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cattabiani, Alfredo. 1996. Florario. Miti, leggende e simboli di fiori e piante. Milano: Mondadori. Chodasevič, Vladislav. 1996. “O Gumilëve.” Sobranie sočinenij v 4 tomach. t.2, 383–385. Moskva: Soglasie. Costlow, Jane T. 2013. Heart-Pine Russia. Walking and Writing the Nineteenth Century Forest. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Čukovskij, Kornej. 1962. Sovremennik: Portrety i etjudy. Moskva: Molodaja gvardija. Epštejn, Michail. 1990. Priroda, mir, tajnik vselennoj. Sistema pejzažnych obrazov v russkoj poezii. Moskva: Vysšaja škola. Faoustov, Andreï. 2009. “La sémantique de l’exotisme dans la littérature russe du début du XX siècle.” Études de Lettres, 2–3: 125–42. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge. Gasparov, Michail. 1993. Russkie stichi 1890–1925 godov. Moskva: Vysšaja škola. Gumilëv, Nikolaj. 1911. “Nevol’nič’ja.” In Antologija, Moskva: Musaget. Gumilëv, Nikolaj. 1921. “Zabludivšijsja tramvaj.” In Dom iskusstv, 1921, 1. Gumilëv, Nikolaj. 1989. “Otvet,” Naše nasledie, 1989, n. 4. Gumilëv, Nikolaj, 1990 [“Perevody stichotvornye”]. Pis’ma o russkoj poezii. Edited by Georgij Friedlender Moskva: Sovremennik, 69–74. Gumilëv, Nikolaj. 1994. Pamjatniki kul’tury. Novye otkrytija. Moskva: Rossijskaja Akademija Nauk. Gumilëv, Nikolaj. 1998–2007. Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v desjati tomach. Moskva: Voskresen’e. Karpov, Michael. Nikolaj Gumilev, Translations, http://gumilev​.ru​/languages​/582 Kulikova, Elena. 2017. “O magistral’nych i marginal’nych putjach russkoj poezii: «čužie zvezdy» Nikolaja Gumilëva i Pavla Bulygina.” Kritika i semiotika 2: 146–64. Lavrenova, Olga. 1998. “Nature and Environment in Russian Poetry.” In Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook, edited by Patrick D. Murphy, Terry Gifford, Katsumory Yamazoto, 229–35. Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Lotman, Jurij. 1992. “Problema vizantijskogo vljanija na russkuju kul’turu v tipologičeskom osveščenii,ˮ Stat’i po semiotike i tipologii kul’tury. Tallinn: Aleksandra.

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Lotman, Jurij. 1996. Vnutri mysljaščich mitov. Čelovek–tekst–semiosfera–istorija. Moskva: Jazyki russkoj literatury. Lotman, Jurij and Zara Mints. 1989, Stat’i o russkoj i sovetskoj poezii. Tallinn: Eesti Paamat. Naydan, Michael (ed.). 2018. Nikolai Gumilev’s Africa. London: Glagoslav Publications. Ryan, John Charles. 2018. Plants in Contemporary Poetry. Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination. London and New York: Routledge. Scaffai, Niccolò. 2017. Letteratura e ecologia. Forme e temi di una relazione narrativa. Roma: Carocci. Skatov, Nikolaj. 1998. “O Nikolae Gumilëve i ego poezii.” In Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v desjati tomach, I, 3–9. Moskva: Voskresen’e. Yastremski, Slava. 2018. “Introduction: on Gumilëv’s African Poetry.” 9–12. In Nikolai Gumilëv’s Africa. London: Glagoslav Publications. Zhang, Hui Andy. 2015. “Recognition through Reinvention: The Myth of China in the Spiritual Quest of Russian Poets of the Silver Age.” 452°F. 13: 82–98. https:// www.raco.cat/index.php/452F/article/view/299079. Accessed November 20, 2019.

Part IV

TREES IN THE ARTS

Chapter 14

Mother Sequoia Waiting for an Imperceptible Enlightenment among Millennial Trees Tiziano Fratus

There is this silence of mine. And there is the silence that dwells in big trees. And there are the vast forests that are the big silences, all sorted and arranged. And then, there’s the immensity of existence, pulsing, coming to life, dying. And at the end, or at the beginning, there’s my mind, that never stops, not even when I ponder, it clips along and slots in. A good meditation combines this silence of mine with the silence of the forest, making them vibrate together, an assonance that evokes the beginning and the end. Nothing else.1

Sequoias. Colossal Trees. Gigantism. Immensity. Wonder. Incredulity. Loneliness. How many emotions do we feel when standing in an old towering forest of sequoias in California? Unfortunately, we have lost the visionary virginity of the first generations who met them, back in the nineteenth 203

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century, when the chance to see these “living things”—so tall, so large—simply failed, giving in to an imagination crowded of legends, beliefs, superstitions. Nowadays, we are ready to meet the forests even before leaving home: we have seen them in so many images, we have read so many books about them, so that we feel as if sequoias have never had any secrets for us. As if we were old pals. So we can get to know the story of how these monumental children of Mother Nature were first “discovered” by white people, how they were first seen by explorers, pioneers, brave bear-skin hunters. Just consider the names of some cities as we know them today: San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, or El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles sobre El Río Porciuncula, that is, L.A., the angels’ city. Just get a glimpse of their portraits and you’ll find out where the tallest, bulkiest, oldest sequoias are, where the Grizzly Giant is, and the patriarchs—General Sherman, or General Grant—or we can picture Yosemite, the Giant Forest, Mariposa, or Nelder Grove. On a book page or on internet, we can easily stumble into Abraham Lincoln, John Nelder, John Muir, Galen Clark, James Hutchings, Walt Whitman, Walter Fry, Floyd L. Otter, Wendell Flint, Shirley Sargent and many, many others.2 Probably, these tree names fail to ring a bell today, but in the past these plants played a significant role in the transformation of the untamed wilderness into the biggest natural “amusement park” in the world. And yet, despite the wide range of information we can have access to, it still happens that we get immersed into a fragment of a forest and find ourselves speechless. Naturally, before the white men arrived, before they reached the last territories prior to the closing of the Frontier, the local Natives coexisted with these colossal wooden creatures. Hunters-gatherers walked into this continent sometime between 40,000 and 12,000 years ago. Those peoples respected the environment, never cut trees down, and made a living with what the forest offered them: some game, some fruits, some wooden chips. But then the angry and hungry white men arrived with their voracious rapacity and everything changed. Of course, under extreme conditions, they could live on hunting, nature was either a prey or predated. Or, according to some American writers such as Annie Dillard or Annie Proulx in her monumental Barkskins: Here grew hugeous trees of a size not seen in the old country for hundreds of years, evergreens taller than cathedrals, cloud-piercing spruce and hemlock. The monstrous deciduous trees stood distant from each other, but overhead their leaf-choked branches merged into a false sky, dark and savage . . . it is the forest of the world. It is infinite. It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning. No one has ever seen its farthest dimension. (Proulx 2016, 5)3

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Then, in my thirties, I finally got to visit Big Sur. I was drawn there by the literary evocations of Jack Kerouac’s and Henry Miller’s lives,4 and by the images of a dream coastal landscape. My first encounter with an old sequoia forest took place in Pfeiffer State Park. Those were my years of solitude and dismay. I had just lost both my parents and I was on my own, wondering restlessly and unsatisfied, glowering at a hypocritical society I could not belong to. Standing there, I had an epiphany: with their “songs of silence,” the old woods were cracking that blanket of ice that separated me from the rest of the world. It was as if the surface of a lake was starting to break, the very sound of the ice cracking in spring. I put down some words—a poem—and soon they became the definition of Homo Radix (Rootman in English), the nickname that I eventually adopted for myself, homage to the Latin root of my last name. I am a rootman. I am a man who woke up as a tree, with leaves trembling in the breath of the wind, carrying stories told by other creatures. I am a rootman who finds peace and joy in his new land. I am a man who has found his roots by travelling the world. A man constantly seeking roots. I am a rootman who moves around to get connected with nature. I am a man who gradually becomes a tree in a landscape of trees that become more and more man-like. I am a man who is not ashamed to listen to the trees. After all, every poet is destined to become a tree. I am a rootman and these notes are my acorns, my racemes, my cones, my woodgrain.

That’s what I wrote. In one go. I was holding a handful of cones and in a heartbeat I radically changed my future. Fifteen years have passed by, fifteen years of walks in the woods and visitations with my tree companions both in Italy and around the world, dozens of books have been published, and poems written, joyful and painful personal events have occurred. I have been visiting the vertical distances of the Alps, my natural space, my spiritual and dendrosophic space, where I go to learn, as if a still and stern maestro with a long beard living in peace in those woods could help me find what Buddhist call “emptiness.” My maestro can help me tame my thoughts or, to say it with Eihei Dōgen, the monk who in the thirteenth century founded Soto Zen School, think the non-thinking (hi-shiryo).5 After so much time, I re-read the poem that I wrote during my first years of “arboreal thirst,” when I felt that every day I had to pay visit to one big tree, be it a three or four centuries old chestnut, or a larch on a mountaintop in the Aosta Valley, a centennial tree in a historical garden, a beech, or an Appennine olm,

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I started To breathe in the hollow trunk of a mulberry tree, I crossed the threshold of adulthood to inhabit a continent that stretched between the paper and the bark. I went back to unlock the landscape through baby eyes, the vibrating fire of a wrinkled zen monk

The mulberry tree belongs to my childhood, to the landscape of the low province of Bergamo, in the Po Valley, where for many generations it used to be a precious asset: many women of poor families like mine used to make a living by cultivating silkworms. Hence, “the paper” and “the bark” are the two limits of my adulthood, a space that comprises me and offers me vital lymph that seeps every vacuum of time. The vibrating zen monk stands for my daily spiritual practice. And yet, when I was writing the poem, Buddhism just sounded like an exotic word to my ears. Later, through meditation in nature which I improved season after season, I understood. I found out that there is a walking meditation—so dear to Trick Nhat Hanh6—that I was practicing without being aware of it. For instance, every time I started hiking to highaltitude mountain tops looking for monumental trees—some specific larches or certain stone pines—the hours that separated my departure from my arrival were mainly spent to get undressed. It was a stripping process that did not limit itself to my body and the material world: to get physically enlightened, taking off the sweater that I had put on early in the morning, to keep walking in short sleeves now, drinking water while losing familiarity with the objects that generally surrounded me. When I left home, my mind was jammed with bad thoughts and worries, but at the end of the day I felt transformed, unloaded and ready—even though for a short time—to welcome the wonder that I was to meet on my way. How many times have I been enchanted by the flaming lights of a sunset, while I was sitting in meditation, listening, worshipping the silent voices of those time-sculpted giants!

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Nature is my first root, my first source in writing poetry and prose. Every morning I spend some time in a little reserve, a few kilometers from home, and walk around a pond to free my mind, to meditate near a murmuring stream. I watch the aristocratic and elegant flight of white herons and cultivate my personal way of what I jokingly call “silvobuddhism” or “woodbuddhism.” From the seed concept of Homo Radix, the search for a migrant and natural identity, the discipline of dendrosophy and finally a meditative and spiritual practice of sylvan, sylvatic, wooded Buddhism are finally achieved. This is the definition that I jokingly wrote for it: Silvo or Eco-Buddhism - n. [from Latin selva, “forest,” from Greek oikos, “home, environment”]. Practice of meditation in the woods, inspired by the teachings of Buddhist masters of past and present; it is primarily articulated in sitting meditation exercises (zazen) and walking meditation, followed by the reading of classics and other forms of spirituality or poetry writing. It is preferably practiced in mountain forests or in the woods near the countryside, or in arboretum and in public or private parks in town.

Meditation in nature is a rooting side of the spiritual path that a Buddhist monk chooses to embrace. Nonetheless, it can be the same for those who live between two worlds: a world of daily needs and a world of meditation and study. In these past decades, many North American scholars in ecology, ecosophy, nature writing, and ecocriticism have drawn attention to a scholarship on spirituality, frequently related to Buddhism, that eventually has taken many names: “Spiritual ecology,” “Green mindfulness,” “Green Buddhism,” “Buddhist environmentalism,” “Ecodharma,” and whose main representatives are Stephanie Kaza—author of Conversations with Trees, an excellent book that is very similar in concept to my “silvari”—Joanna Macy and David R. Loy. It is not by chance that many Buddhist centers were founded in the vastness of American mountains, where nature listening goes hand in hand with a deep meditative practice. But what can we expect from these new hybridizations? Stephanie Kaza writes, I have been struck by what could be called “green zeal,” an almost fervent sense of engagement with environmental concerns. People feel passionately about protecting rain forests and whales; they want everyone to know that polar bears and penguins are threatened. Behind the passion is a deeply felt need to do something right, to find a way to correct our past environmental errors. . . . Green zeal is necessary to change our ways quickly, to meet environmental goals that would be impossible without global cooperation. (Kaza 2008, x, xi)

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Stephanie Kaza is a Buddhist woman and her environmentalism dates back to the very first celebration of Earth Day in 1970. At that time, this was the position of a small militant minority; today the climate crises that affect us so frequently have become daily bread for the new generations. The philosophical manifesto of the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center in Colorado states that it “brings Buddhism and Dharma back into the natural world where they originated, and fosters the clarity and compassion needed to better address the ecological crisis and inextricably related social justice issues” (https​:/​/ro​​ckymo​​untai​​necod​​harma​​retre​​atcen​​ter​.o​​​rg​/ab​​out/). Poets too have opened their doors and windows, thus allowing their papers to be fertilized by nature. This is what Jim Harrison, William Stanley Merwin, the Australian poet Les Murray and Mary Oliver have done before their recent deaths. I had the pleasure to translate some of Mary Oliver’s poems, who also wrote: “Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem” (Oliver 2017, 234). The experience of meditating at the feet of centuries old or millennial trees—abandoned chestnut trees in the Italian mountains, or Australian Ficus trees in the gardens and botanical gardens of Sicily, Sardinia, Ligury, or the great sequoias of the vast American spiritual lands—lavish me with emotions and peace. Zen atque Natura matres sunt, I wrote using ancient Latin, the same sound of my surname, the same sound of botanical names of plants and creatures; or the maxim: Radico ergo sum. This is the core of my humble, personal, intimate, deep (I hope) practice of cultivating my mind, as silent as an old tree.

NOTES 1. All poems in this chapter are written by Tiziano Fratus. This chapter was translated by Daniela Fargione. 2. Published in 2019 by Bompiani after ten years of hard work, my essay Giona delle sequoie (2019) explores these and many other characters that make up the “human hi/story” of that corner of the world. Nowadays, they are mostly protected in state and national parks in California. 3. I wrote a review of this novel for the Italian newspaper il manifesto: “Maestosa e selvatica è la foresta del mondo.” Accessed June 25, 2020. https​:/​/il​​manif​​esto.​​it​/ma​​ estos​​a​-e​-s​​elvat​​ica​-e​​-la​-f​​orest​​​a​-del​​-mond​​o. 4. Jack Kerouac, Big Sur, McGraw-Hill, 1989 (It. transl. by I. Legati. Milano: Mondadori, 2018); Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hyeronymus Bosch, New York: New Directions, 1957 (It. transl. by V. Mantovani Big Sur e le arance di Hieronymus Bosch. Torino: Einaudi, 1979). 5. Eihei Dōgen (1200–1253) wrote many books among which the monumental Shōbōgenzō, one of the most influential philosophical essays in medieval Japan and translated into many languages.

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6. The first books by Trick Nhat Hanh that I have read were Peace is Every Step. The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. (Ed. by A. Kotler). New York: Bantam Book, 1991. (La pace è ogni passo. It transl. by L. Baglioni, Roma: Ubaldini, 1993) and The Path of Emancipation: Talks from a 21-Day Mindfulness Retreat. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2000. (Il sentiero. Discorsi di un ritiro di meditazione. It. transl. by Tiziana Faggiani. Roma: Ubaldini, 2004).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Eihei Dogen. 2013. Shōbōgenzō (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, ed. by Kazuaki Tanahashi, transl. by Robert Aitken and Steve Allen). Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications. Fratus, Tiziano. 2019. Giona delle sequoie. Viaggio tra i giganti rossi del Nord America. Milano: Bompiani. Kaza, Stephanie. 2008. Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications. ______. 2019. Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications. Proulx, Annie. Barkskins. New York: Scribner, 2016.

Chapter 15

Performing with Spruce Stumps and Old Tjikko On the Individuality of Trees Annette Arlander

How to develop and depict our relationship to trees; how to practice or perform such a relationship within contemporary urban life? In the Nordic countries the popular warning, not to overlook the forest for the trees, could be reversed; we tend to neglect the trees and focus on the forest, often for profit. Despite the necessity of thinking in terms of ecosystems, approaching individual trees might be a way to increase the understanding of our shared participation in zoe (Braidotti 2017), to imagine a planthroposcene (Myers 2017). A post-humanist perspective prompts us to realize that the landscape or environment consists of life forms and phenomena with differing degrees of volition, needs, and agency. What forms of performing could be relevant in this situation? One possibility is to approach individual life forms, like singular trees, and explore how to perform together posing for the camera with them. In an artistic research project “Performing with Plants” at the Stockholm University of the Arts Research Centre, I have visited two spruce stumps and two pine trees in Lill-Jansskogen, a wood near the city center, regularly in the year 2018. Posing with them repeatedly for a video camera on tripod, I have explored what it could mean to perform with trees, trying to respect their sense of place and time. A core challenge evoked by the current interest in the notion of the Anthropocene is exactly this: how to relate to other beings and entities whom we share this planet with. And in terms of performance: how to perform with, include, or at least acknowledge the contribution of other beings than humans in our performances. Despite the flourishing research into plant sentience and the popular attention to the topic, there is no way for a performer to know what a tree wants, except on a very general level. How, then, to perform with 211

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plants and contribute to the development of a livable future for humans and plants? I will focus on three individual spruce trees, which are often considered anonymous crop for spruce plantations, a staple species in forestry. This focus on individuals is not meant to deny that it is difficult to ascertain where a specific tree begins or ends, or to disregard that trees form networks and ecosystems or symbiotic relationships not only with other trees but with fungi, bacteria, and all kinds of microorganisms. They are, in fact, in a constant exchange with their environment, as humans are as well. Nor is it meant to deny that forests or woods or substantial areas covered in trees are needed for producing effective carbon sinks, cooler and fresher urban air, flood resistance, and other benefits. Emphasizing individualism is a risky strategy in the current neoliberal capitalist cultural climate, where individualism is exaggerated anyway. It can nevertheless be useful to focus on singular trees, as an important first step toward decolonizing our relationship with “nature.” As ecofeminist Val Plumwood (2003) pointed out, colonial thinking tends to emphasize a very strong difference between “us” and “them,” and to see “them” as all alike, stereotypical, non-individualized. Thus, attending to particular trees might work as a way to help us see trees as life forms whom we have much in common with, despite our undeniable differences. Big old trees are traditionally venerated almost everywhere in Europe, and probably elsewhere as well. This is exemplified, for example, in the Celtic tree alphabet, popularized by Robert Graves (1948) and the so-called Celtic tree calendar, where each lunar month is designated by one tree. In Finland, Ritva Kovalainen and Sanni Seppo have compiled the popular book Puiden kansa, Tree People (1997), with sayings and stories about trees in Finnish folklore. It provides an instructive background to the current debates regarding the increase of cellulose production versus maintaining forests as carbon sinks. According to one counting—they vary considerably of course, depending on the type of tree and soil and climate—the growth of approximately 2.5 hectares of Finnish forest is needed to cover the carbon footprint of a Finn living in the Southern part of the country (Pape-Mustonen 2017). According to another account, “a mature leafy tree produces as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year” (Helmenstine 2019). Trees are our true allies, not only in producing the oxygen we breathe but also in mitigating some of the disastrous effects of the climate crisis. To take another approach to trees and geological time, in spring 2019, I had the opportunity to spend a day with one of the oldest trees in the world, Old Tjikko, a relatively small spruce tree, which grows on Fulufjället mountain in a national park in western Sweden, not far from the Norwegian border. A large part of the spruce grows as a shrub along the ground, and it is this part that 9,950 years old according to carbon dating. The tree is a clone, which

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means that new shoots grow from old roots. That would be a topic for the well-known photographer Beth Moon (2014), who has spent fourteen years photographing the oldest trees in the world. Or for Thomas Pakenham, who is famous for his book Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996). The first spruce tree I performed with, once a week for a year in 2007– 2008, is a tall solitary spruce on Harakka Island in Helsinki and has no name. Compared with Old Tjikko it is a baby in terms of age, although much taller, and so are the spruces and spruce stumps that I spent one year within 2018– 2019, in the center of Stockholm. The latter are not individuals in the same sense. These recent visits are part of the artistic research project “Performing with Plants” at Stockholm University of the Arts, funded by the Swedish Research Council. Rethinking our relationship with the environment is a central task for artists today. Artistic research can contribute through its capacity to allow and to generate hybrid forms of thinking and acting. This project participates in the discussion by way of developing artistic practices and producing artworks that can critically question existing conventions and habits in our relationship with the environment, and by theoretically reflecting on, based on practical exploration, what it means to collaborate with plants and especially trees. The core questions explored by the project are, according to the research plan: (1) How to collaborate with nonhuman beings, such as plants (trees and shrubs)? (2) How to further develop experiences from previous attempts at performing landscape? (3) How to create actions with plants, in which humans can be invited to participate and join in? An overarching research problem is how to perform landscape today by collaborating with trees and other plants, taking into account the current post-humanist and new materialist understanding of our relationship to the environment. Today I would perhaps write the word with inverted commas, “environment,” following Stacy Alaimo (2010), since the idea of a separable “environment” is actually part of the problem to be addressed. To designate certain parts of existence to serve as “environment,” surroundings or backdrop to humans is no longer automatically acceptable. Humans are dependent on other life forms that create and maintain the biosphere of this planet. Many artists are aware of this dilemma and try to move beyond simple visual representations of landscape or vegetation. Historically speaking, there is no lack of artistic engagement with plants, from vegetally inspired ornamentation on textiles, pottery, and architecture to paintings, poems, and science fiction stories of plants. Living plants are present in much contemporary art; they are used as material in practices as divergent as garden design, floral arrangements, and contemporary bio art. Three examples involving coniferous trees can exemplify various approaches: Agnes Denes’ Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule (1996) in Ylöjärvi, Finland, with

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11,000 planted pine trees, is an early example of a large-scale environmental rehabilitation project. Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s video portrait of a single spruce, Horizontal (2011), shows how our representational system is built to depict humans. Marcus Maeder’s sonification of biological processes in Trees: Pinus Sylvestris (2016) translates the suffering of a pine tree for human ears. Some artists prefer to let the plants perform, as the upside-down hung trees readjusting their growth in Natalia Jeremijenko’s Tree Logic, or the trees drawing in Tuula Närhinen’s Windtracers. Performing with trees in their own environment is undertaken by some performers such as the aerial dancer Anna Rubio, who is hanging in trees, and by the participants in community art projects like Standing with the Saguaro (Eisele 2014), where members of the public were invited to share their experiences of standing with a saguaro cactus in a national park in Arizona. The difficulty in collaborating with trees on stage can be exemplified by Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan performing with a bonsai in Tree Duet (Davis 2011, 55). As an artistic research project, my attempts differ from current artistic engagements with plants, which tend to be linked to bio art and work with the vegetal in laboratory circumstances, or to focus on making the vegetal processes perceptible for humans, for instance by sonification. Rather than working with vegetal growth as material in the tradition of bio art or making biological processes understandable for humans with the help of technology, I have explored everyday forms of embodied action, posing for the camera together with trees in the places where they grow. Concerning communication, in my performing with plants I am not attempting to communicate with trees, to enter into a dialogue, to understand them or make myself understandable to them. Rather, I am trying to be aware of sharing the same time and space with them. By sitting in or on trees, or on tree stumps, as in this case, I try to explore how “being with” or “becoming with,” could visually take place beyond language. In terms of artistic context, the project can be positioned at the intersection of performance art, media art (or video art), and environmental art, in the encounter of traditions—performance art’s emphasis on embodied presence, video and media art’s valuing of repetition, transformation, and critical reflection on technology as well as environmental art’s sensitivity to the possible effects and side effects an artwork can produce. A broader context for the project is the growing interest in plant studies, to some extent as a further development of the burgeoning of animal studies (Derrida 2002; Haraway 2008) and post-humanist thinking (Wolfe 2009; Braidotti 2013). Discussions have focused on plant rights (Hall 2011), plant philosophy or plant thinking (Marder 2013; Marder 2015; Marder and Irigaray 2016; Irigaray 2017, Coccia 2019), plant theory (Nealon 2016), the language of plants (Kranz, Schwan, and Wittrock 2016; Gagliano, Ryan and Vieira 2017), and queer plants (Sandilands 2017). There is a current “plant

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turn” (Myers 2017) in science, philosophy, and environmental humanities, with an abundance of popular accounts of recent scientific research on plant sentience, intelligence, and communication (Mancuso and Viola 2015, Wohlleben 2016; Chamovitz 2017). An emerging field of critical plant studies (Vieira, Gagliano and Ryan 2015; Gibson and Brits 2018) can be linked to “art’s return to vegetal life” (Gibson 2018) and to looking at plants in art (Antennae 2011; Aloi 2018). Discussions on plants and performance, however, are mostly linked to ecology in broader terms, with some exceptions such as an interest in “vegetalized performance” (Nicolić and Radulovic 2018) and some attempts at performing with trees, junipers, or pines (Arlander 2010; 2015; 2018a; 2018b; 2019a). There is no issue of Performance Research “On Plants,” or “On Vegetation” devoted to plants and art. One basic form of performing with plants is of course agriculture (Pollan 2002). And forestry, too. Elsewhere (Arlander 2020), I have tried to schematize various ways of plants performing for humans and humans performing for plants or with plants, as in the cases I will describe. INDIVIDUALITY OR PERSONHOOD OF TREES In his study Plants as Persons, a Philosophical Botany (2011), Matthew Hall investigates the relationship to plants in various philosophical and spiritual traditions. He examines “the marginalization of plants using the themes of radical separation, zoocentrism (an animal-centered outlook), exclusion, and hierarchical value ordering” and argues “that these notions predominate in Western discussions of plant ontology” (Hall 2011, 4). Hall’s analysis shows how “the continuity of life has been ignored in favor of constructing sharp discontinuities between humans, plants, and animals” (Hall 2011, 157). What we have in common, “characteristics such as life and growth have been rejected in order to focus on the gross differences” (Ibid.). Hall tries to structure “relationships in a heterarchy rather than a hierarchy” and to recognize “connectedness in the face of alterity,” which stands in sharp contrast to what he calls the “Western ethic of exclusion” (Hall 2011, 11). He therefore prefers to understand plants as persons and claims that “to place plants in the ontological category of persons is neither fanciful nor deluded” (Hall 2011, 13). On the contrary, “the inclusion of plants in relationships of care is based upon close observation of plant life history and the recognition of shared attributes between all beings” (Ibid.). Hall “argues for recognizing plants as subjects deserving of respect as other-than-human persons” and “advocates including plants within human ethical awareness,” reminding us that an ethic constitutes an ideal of human behavior, rather than a description

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of it. He writes: “In an ecological context, moral action is enacted respect and responsibility for the well-being of the others with whom we share the Earth” (Ibid.). Insisting that “the recognition of plants as autonomous, perceptive, intelligent beings must filter into our dealings with the plant world,” Hall asserts that “purely instrumental relationships with plants no longer fit the evidence that we have of plant attributes, characteristics, and life histories—and the interconnectedness of life on Earth” (Hall 2011, 13). According to contemporary science, “the intellectual basis for treatments of plant life as inert, vacant, raw materials is demonstrably false,” he notes, and thus “the continued denial of plant autonomy and the exclusion of plants from human moral consideration is no longer appropriate” (Hall 2011, 156). The questions he then poses are: “What shape should human-plant ethics take? How can we move from a stance of exclusion and domination to one of inclusion and care? How can plants be incorporated into dialogical relationships?” (Ibid.). This last question is a core problem when performing with trees. Hall recommends “the recognition of plants as other-than-human persons,” as “a powerful way of incorporating plants within social and moral relationships of care and nurturing.” “Yet,” he notes, “persons are not exempt from use.” We cannot avoid eating plants. “Human persons must act harmfully toward plant persons in order to live and the necessary harm done to plant and animal persons is accepted, ritualized and celebrated as a fact of being alive” (Hall 2011, 161). This can be done with “the conviction to only harm plant persons when necessary and to encourage the growth of plants where possible” (Ibid.). Three broad areas of developing “an ethic of dialogical respect” are identified by Hall: the first concerns “lessening the wastage of plant lives in plant products” (Hall 2011, 163), the second relates to “the sheer (predominantly Western) overconsumption of plant products” (Hall 2011, 164), and the third “is the unnecessary, unthinking use of plants” like “the use of plants to feed massive numbers of animals for the world’s wealthiest nations to consume,” he adds (Hall 2011, 165). Most importantly for our concerns here, he suggests that we understand plants as “active, self-directed, even intelligent Beings,” and act accordingly by “working closely with plants in collaborative projects of mutual benefit” (Hall 2011, 169). Moreover, “working closely with individual plant persons” can “shift the view of nature as an organic, homogenized whole,” an attitude which “contributes to the backgrounding of nature” (Hall 2011, 169). The “recognition of plants as persons” promotes “the view that nature is a communion of subjective, collaborative beings that organize and experience their own lives” (Ibid.). If seen as nonhuman persons in this manner, my attempts at performing with the spruces could be understood as an attempt at contact or a gesture

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of respect, even if not directly a collaborative project of mutual benefit. It is possible to regard the spruces in my examples as persons to enter into a temporary dialogical relationship. This kind of approach, however, might not be as easy with regard to other types of vegetation. Old Tjikko on Fulufjället or the single spruce tree on Harakka Island is fairly easy to see as nonhuman persons; but what about the spruce stumps in Lill-Jansskogen? A tree stump in the midst of other trees, essentially a cadaver, is not easy. In contrast to extending personhood to plants, to regard as a person in the same manner, philosopher Michael Marder emphasizes almost the opposite, namely the dispersed and divisible life of plants, and challenges humans to recognize planthood in themselves. The division of the world into mineral, vegetal and animal kingdoms, “the great chain of being” with rocks at the bottom and humans at the top is a traditional stratification that influences our way of making and understanding performances. In his study Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), Marder offers a critique of this legacy by proposing a vegetal anti-metaphysics and introduces the notion of “vegetal democracy,” a principle that concerns all species without exception. For Marder, “the vegetal democracy of sharing and participation is an ontopolitical effect of plant-soul” which must “eschew the metaphysical binaries of self and other, life and death, interiority and exteriority.” Moreover, “every consideration of a post-foundational, post-metaphysical ethics and politics worthy of its name must admit the contributions of vegetal life to . . . the non-essentialized mode of ‘living with’” (Marder 2013, 53). What this vegetal democracy might mean in practice, however, Marder does not explain. According to Marder, an inherent divisibility and participation are nevertheless paramount in the life of plants. Moreover, a vegetal being must “remain an integral part of the milieu wherein it grows” and its relation to the elements is not domineering but receptive (Marder 2013, 69). Could the idea of vegetal democracy help us in developing methods for performing with trees? Divisibility and participation make sense in many types of performances, even for working with a small assemblage of camera, tripod, human body, and tree (or tree stump), as in my examples. The situation is not democratic, however; as an artist I am responsible for the setup, and for accepting and signing the final result. For Marder, thinking is not the sole privilege of the human subject, which leads him to introduce the notion it thinks. The vegetal it thinks, which might mean for instance a tree that thinks, refers to a much more undecided subject. It thinks is not concerned with “Who or what does the thinking?” but “When and where does thinking happen?” Marder explains, because it arises from and returns to the plant’s embeddedness in the environment (Marder 2013, 169). “When it thinks, it does so non-hierarchically and, like the growing grass, keeps close to the ground, to existence, to the immanence of what is

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‘here below’” (Ibid.). Moreover, “at the core of the subject who proclaims: ‘I think,’ lies the subjectless vegetal it thinks, at once shoring up and destabilizing the thinking of this ‘I’” (Marder 2013, 170). Marder’s antimetaphysics is not compatible with Hall’s idea of plants as persons, which nevertheless triggers the question of how to respect the integrity and specificity of individual trees as partners in performance. Here, the individual cannot be understood in the sense of indivisible, for most plants are exactly the opposite, that is, divisible. Rather, we can perhaps understand individuality in the sense of being unique as a result of the trees’ situatedness, their responses over time to the specific circumstances where they grow, a sense of plant individuality emphasized by scientists as well (Trewavas 2011, 29). Next, I will describe three examples of working with individual spruce trees, or spruce-persons, on Harakka Island in Helsinki in 2007–2008, in Lill-Jansskogen in Stockholm in 2018–2019, and on Fulufjället in western Sweden on May 24, 2019. THE SPRUCE ON HARAKKA The first individual spruce that I worked with is growing in the center of Harakka Island in Helsinki. Weekly visits during the year 2007–2008 recorded on video resulted in a triptych called Under the Spruce I-III (28 min.). The synopsis reads as follows: “I sit under the only spruce tree on Harakka Island once a week for over a year (January 6, 2007–February 3, 2008). The video is shot from three angles: the hill, the path and underneath the tree.” On August 9 and 11, 2018, I revisited the spruce and recorded a video, into which I could insert the old three-channel installation from 2008. I did not recreate the performance, though, sitting on a wooden stool under the spruce and recording my sitting from three different perspectives, a full shot, a midshot and a close-up of the spruce. When returning to the site ten years later, I focused on the spruce in full shot only.1 In “Performing with Trees: Landscape and Artistic Research,” a text that I wrote shortly after making the work in 2008 and which was published in an anthology entitled Blood Sweat and Theory—Research Through Practice in Performance (2010), I describe the background for the work, how performing with trees has not been a central occupation of mine, and how the trees have been supporting me rather than the opposite. There is a tradition of protecting trees through various activist actions in Finland, a country depending on its forest industry. For example, the Koijärvi movement in the 1970s, where young people, some of whom later formed the green party in Finland, protested against the destruction of a forest by chaining themselves to trees. This

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was an event that I did not take part in. My own history with trees begins with fiction. A radio play in four parts, Keijut (Fairies) I–IV, from 1999, based on Irish fairy tales, had the protagonists named after trees. They were, according to the so-called Celtic tree horoscope, based on the birth dates of William Butler Yeats (William White Poplar), Samuel Beckett (Samuel Sycamore), and Seamus Heaney (Seamus Rowan), as well as myself (Ann Fir), translated into Finnish. A more recent (still ongoing) project where trees have been involved “in person” is titled Puut Puhuvat (Trees Talk) and consists of short monologues, to be listened to in headphones hanging from the branches of the tree, and later via QR codes. The first trees talking on Harakka Island were speaking Finnish for more than two months during the summer of 2003. Later, some hawthorns in Turku in 2010 were speaking Finnish, Swedish, and English alternatingly. This was a rather theatrical or fictional way of using trees to hang stories on. My starting point for performing in front of the camera with trees was an interest in the relationship between performer and environment. In performing landscape, the human figure easily becomes the main thing and the landscape recedes into the background to serve as scenery, or backdrop. Performing landscape comes to mean performing in the landscape. To search for alternatives to this predicament, I chose a specific element in the landscape to work with, such as a tree, to perform with in a more coexisting sense. Instead of a performer and environment, we have a performer and a co-performer, where the tree is an individual on a more “equal footing” with a human being. On the basis of my performances with various trees and shrubs, I have distinguished three modes of use: (a) tree as support (to sit on, to hang from, to lean on), (b) tree as co-performer or “neighbor” (to lye next to, to sit with, be a shadow of) and (c) tree as shelter (to sit in, to hide under) as in the above mentioned Under the Spruce I-III. These three alternatives—the tree as support, co-performer, or shelter— could be understood as three different approaches to the relationship between performer and environment more generally. (1) Contrast or contradiction where the human figure stands out from the surroundings through movement, or a contrasting color. (2) Confluence or sharing, where the human figure seems to dissolve into the environment to some extent, by participating in the relative immobility of a tree, sharing the changes of the seasons and the weather with it. (3) Camouflage or disappearance, where the human figure is hidden in or by the tree and can no longer be distinguished from the landscape. Playing with words we could call these strategies contrast, confluence, and camouflage or differing from, dialoguing with, and dissolving into the surroundings. Disappearing into the landscape—partly due to a miscalculation—is evident in Under the Spruce I–III. The spruce is the only tree of its kind on the island and growing quite centrally there. I wanted to examine three different perspectives on the tree; a wide

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view showing the spruce in full, a view from the path showing the surrounding vegetation and a close-up, a subjective view from under the spruce, from the point of view of the spruce, as it were. I imagined the human figure would be visible sitting under the spruce, at least in the view from the path, but this is not the case in most of the images. Thus, the final triptych with three parallel and synchronized videos is really a portrait of the spruce. The hints at human presence, at the beginning and at the end when the human figure is going to sit under the spruce and returns from there, are subtle. In terms of the relationship between performer and tree, we could say this is a form of camouflage, the performer is hiding, or disappearing in, behind or under the tree. When I looked at my earlier attempts at performing with trees, searching for some useful models, I formulated these three strategies—contrast, confluence, and camouflage—which describe the visual relationship between performer and environment but are not really sustainable models for our relationship to trees in general. How about today? How to perform with a spruce? How to perform with a spruce? Can the human and the spruce perform on the same scale? In space, spatially? In time, temporally? How to record a performance with a spruce? From what perspective and distance? In 2008, I tried three distances, repeated each time, once a week for a year. The same action—sitting on a wooden stool under the spruce—was repeated, but only while going in under the spruce and coming out from there is the human visible. In the edited work the entering in the beginning, and exiting at the end is visible only once, as evidence; she was there. Revisiting the spruce ten years later, without a stool, without performing with the spruce, without entering the image, I recorded only the full view, and chose another angle, to get a better view of the whole spruce. The whole spruce? Almost half of the tree, its roots, are underground, invisible. When presenting the work, new questions arise. How to bring the material “on stage?” As projections only? As a miniature model, in plastic? As a big branch of the spruce, to bring in the idea of scale? Or as a miniature house plant, a tiny spruce, a living entity, albeit in a pot? Or by storytelling, only? This problem became evident when I considered how to show the video compilation The Spruce Revisited as part of a lecture performance in Stockholm.2 In the end, I placed a small spruce plant in a pot on a table in front of the video projection and invited audience members to sit on a cushion “under” it while watching the video, to emphasize the scale by way of contrast and as a reminder of the near impossibility of performing with living trees on stage. THE SPRUCE STUMPS IN LITTLE JAN’S WOOD The performances with spruce stumps took place during the year 2018 as part of the project “Performing with Plants.” They spanned the Chinese year of the

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dog, between February 16, 2018 and February 3, 2019, in Lill-Jansskogen or Little Jan’s Wood, between the campuses of the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University in the center of Stockholm. Four sites were visited repeatedly, two spruce stumps and two pine trees, often three times a week. The performances were recorded by a video camera on tripod and were edited into rough time-lapse videos. Removing the entering and the exiting from the image creates an impression of a continuous action or pose. Here, I will focus on the performances with the spruce stumps, the performances with the pines I have discussed elsewhere (Arlander 2019b). On the first site, I sat on an old spruce stump with the felled trunk still attached to it, relatively close to the camera. On the second site, I sat on a small spruce stump on the ground among tall spruces, this time further away from the camera. In both places, I was turning my back to the camera and wearing a pale pink woolen scarf. I also made notes on a blog. For example, on March 9, 2018, while preparing for a discussion about Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) and remembering a lecture by Rick Dolphijn in Helsinki, I wrote: Bennett’s vibrant materialism now seemed much closer to object-oriented ontology, although she makes a distinction between objects and things. But she also speaks of “the outside” in a rather confusing way. What unites these two occasions, the lecture and the chapter, was a reference to the ancient atomism of Lucretius. Bennett uses Lucretius to affirm that “so-called inanimate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other bodies: a kind of thingpower” (Bennett 2010, 18). Dolphijn referred to Michel Serres and his “Birth of Physics,” with links to Lucretius, to assert that new materialism is a physics that does not “discover,” that does not “invent laws,” that does not represent in any way, that understands that bodies are linked to brains . . . that flows (and that sees “a solid state” only as a very slow form of flowing).3 Well, trees are not things, and their power is not thing-power, although one might wonder in what way a dead tree trunk or a stub is alive. If human hair continues to grow on a corpse, then I could imagine the cells in a spruce trunk keep working for quite a while. Sitting on the relatively freshly cut stump of a huge spruce tree is actually rather morbid, I suppose, and I do sense or feel the sheer physical power of the heavy trunk next to me. The small stump on the ground, on the contrary, could almost be a rock. But let's see if this changes in Springtime. (“Three Winter Walks” blog post 9.3.2018)

On August 21, I wrote: At first, I did not even notice it, the huge slice of bark that was hanging loose on the side of the spruce stump, where I make my first stop during the short walk in

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the woods in Lill-Jansskogen. I sat there as if nothing special had happened, and was rather surprised at the recovery of the greenery, consequent of the sporadic rains. . . . Only while uploading the still images on the Research Catalogue did I notice the difference compared to the previous images. And when I returned the second day, marveling at the brilliant sun spots here and there, I understood the dramatic change. Did it fall off all at once, or little by little during the week? (“The Skin of the Spruce” blog post 21.8.2018)

Such surprises, like the sudden falling off of the bark, form the drama of repeated performances. The most important performance taking place while I am sitting on the spruce stumps, is probably the exchange of oxygen, carbon dioxide and other chemicals that we perform, not only the spruces and me, but the rest of the surrounding vegetation as well. We could call them transcorporeal exchanges, using the term coined by Stacy Alaimo (2010, 3). She understands “human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” and by doing that she “underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’” (Alaimo 2010, 2). Trans-corporeality emphasizes “movement across bodies” and “reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures” (Ibid). Alaimo notes that it is also helpful in cultivating “a tangible sense of connection to the material world in order to encourage an environmentalist ethos” and to counteract the tendency to disconnect and treat “‘environmental issues’ as containable, eccentric, dismissible topics” (Alaimo 2010, 16). OLD TJIKKO ON FULUFJÄLLET I spent most of Tuesday May 14, 2019 on Fulufjället mountain in western Sweden together with one of the oldest trees in the world, the spruce Old Tjikko, Camilla Johansson Bäcklund and a broiling sun. It took a while to get up on the mountain; it was off season, wet snow and water everywhere, the paths nearly undetectable. Despite starting out six in the morning from the nearest village with the ominous name Mörkret or “darkness,” we did not reach the spruce until approximately 10 am. And we had to leave Old Tjikko around 8.00 pm in order to return to the village before midnight. I published my un-corrected notes from the day (in Swedish) on my blog, originally written in a small notebook after each recorded session with the spruce. They were ten all in all, one every hour from 10.30 am to 7.30 pm. The first and last note are here presented in rough translation (by me):

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10.30. The first image with old Tjikko—it is so small! And it has several “tops” among its lower branches. It grows like the junipers in the outer archipelago, like a shrub along the ground. The “ordinary” spruce that rises from among the branches is actually rather unremarkable, one could perhaps say modest. I chose to stand next to it, in the snow between its branches and to hold on to it. To be honest, I felt mainly my frozen toes. After that I sat down on the rock nearby and looked at the miniature spruce next to me—When I stepped out of the image Camilla went to stand next to the spruce for a while. This, was the first encounter. The sun is shining, right now everything is extremely beautiful! . . . 19.30. The last session, and the sun is still shining. I wished for some clouds in order to end with a feeling of dusk. But the mood was a little melancholic anyway. I left Camilla to stand alone with Old Tjikko at the end, and now the camera is running, waiting for a final fade-out. But it seems to be in vain. There is only sun, sun, sun and a long time to sunset, despite the evening approaching—Bye bye, Old Tjikko, take care during the next thousand years, or so. (“En dag” blog post 16.5.2019)

I edited several videos based on those recordings, with both of us together with Old Tjikko, and with only me and the spruce. My aim is to add the working notes as a voice-over, but that remains to be done. The problem of performing with a tree could be considered from the perspective of a dualistic world view, as an encounter with “the Other” that remains forever incomprehensible, beyond reach, irrevocably different and demanding our respect for that difference. There is no way for me to enter into a dialogue with a spruce, even less with a spruce stump. Thinking of trees as such ultimate others is only one possibility, however. Recent scientific studies of plant behavior and plant genetics have revealed that we share a lot of life processes with plants due to our common descent from one-cell organisms; plants seem to have capacities earlier thought of as the sole capacity of humans, or later animals, like associative learning and some form of memory (Mancuso and Viola 2015; Chamovitz 2017; Gagliano et al. 2017). Therefore, a monist ontology, suggested by Rosi Braidotti (2017), with a continuum between the human and the nonhuman, where differences are rhizomatic rather than dualistic, and her idea of zoe rather than bios as the ruling principle, makes more and more sense. The relationality with nonhuman entities is crucial here. However, much we would think of ourselves as being a geological force, the masters and culprits of the Anthropocene, we are not the only ones involved. The notion of planthroposcene proposed by anthropologist Natasha Myers (2017), is a reminder to put our self-importance into perspective. Myers notes

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that whether one locates the origin of the Anthropocene “at the invention of agriculture” or at “the ravages of colonialism,” with “the industrial revolution and the vast expansion of plantation agriculture and forms of accumulation by dispossession,” or links it to “petrocapitalism’s extractive ‘exuberance’” or to “agriculture’s chemical and industrial revolutions,” all these have had “devastating consequences for both plants and their people” (Myers 2017, 2). What she “half cheekily and half seriously” calls the planthroposcene, “is an aspirational episteme” and an attempt at helping humans “to recognize their profound interimplication with plants” (Myers 2017, 3). The planthroposcene does not refer to a time period but is rather “a call to change the terms of encounter, to make allies with these green beings” (Myers 2017, 4). Could these examples, my attempts at performing in front of a camera together with the three spruces described above, be understood as steps toward new kinds of encounters? Sitting under the tall singular spruce on Harakka Island weekly for a year in 2008, sitting on the two spruce stumps in Lill-Jan’s Wood in Stockholm for a year in 2018 and spending one day with the ancient Old Tjikko on Fulufjället are not changing the terms of encounter in a deeper sense. If we think of the relationship between the human performer and the tree in these three examples as imaginary models for the relationship of humans and the “environment,” none of them provides a good image of our real position of interrelatedness and dependency. Sitting on a spruce stump places the human being as the central character, separated from the rest of nature. Although I am trying to experience contact and to create an image of confluence, I am actually performing a contrast, using the stump as a support, and remaining visually separated from the trees. Sitting under the spruce the performer-environment relationship is different; now the performer seems to have disappeared altogether, or has positioned herself behind the camera, in the subjective close-up from under the spruce. Standing next to Old Tjikko suggests a somewhat different relationship to the tree-partner in performance. I am creating an aesthetic relationship to the tree, in a double sense. First, for myself, by focusing on the sensual experience of encountering the spruce during a whole day, and second, by creating an aesthetic image for the spectator, positioning myself next to the tree in the image. The relationship could perhaps be called dialogical. There is a connection, or some form of acknowledgment between the human figure and the tree, at least visually, in display. In these three examples, the human figure seems to be sharing the temporality of the spruces in some manner, while none of these images indicate interdependence in any obvious or easily understandable way. Such simple actions or performances, meeting the trees where they grow, could nevertheless be considered steps toward acknowledging and respecting the strange individuality of trees.

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NOTES 1. The video compilation is available online, as a small file. The Spruce Revisited. https​:/​/ww​​w​.res​​earch​​catal​​ogue.​​net​/p​​rofil​​e​/sho​​w​-wor​​k​​?wor​​k​=521​​487. Accessed April 4, 2020. 2. As part of “How to do things with performance in alliance with things, concepts, bodies or plants,” in the conference Alliances and Commonalities at Stockholm University of the Arts 25-27.10.2018. Accessed April 4, 2020. https​​:www.​​uniar​​ts​.se​​/ engl​​ish​/n​​ews​/e​​vents​​-autu​​mn​-20​​18​/al​​lianc​​es​-co​​mmo​na​​litie​​s​-201​​8​_1. 3. Notes from a lecture by Dolphijn in Helsinki 2.3.2018.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahtila, Eija-Liisa. Horizontal. Accessed April 20, 2020. http:​/​/cry​​stale​​ye​.fi​​/eija​​-liis​​ a​_aht​​ila​/i​​nstal​​latio​​ns​​/ho​​rizon​​tal. Aloi, Giovanni (ed.). Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. 2011. Special issue, ‘Why Look at Plants?’ 17 (Summer). Accessed October 17, 2020. http:​/​/www​​.ante​​nnae.​​org​.u​​k​/bac​​k​-iss​​ues​-2​​011​/​4​​58347​​5958. –––––– . Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. 2011. Special issue, “Beyond Morphology” 18 (Autumn). Accessed October 17, 2020. http:​//​ www​​.ante​​ nnae.​​org​.u​​k​/bac​​k​-iss​​ues​-2​​011​/​4​​58347​​5958. –––––– . 2018. Introduction. Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art. Critical Plant Studies 5. Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi: 1–35. Accessed October 17, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.aca​​demia​​.edu/​​38248​​295​/A​​loi​_W​​hy​_Lo​​ ok​_at​​_Plan​​ts​_In​​​trodu​​ction​​_pdf. ______. 2010. Bodily Natures. Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Arlander, Annette. 2020. “Performing with Plants in the Ob-scene Anthropocene.” Nordic Theatre Studies 32, 121–142. Accessed October 17, 2020. https​:/​/ti​​dsskr​​ift​ .d​​k​/nts​​/issu​​e​/vie​​​w​/876​​3. ______. 2019b. “Performing with a Pine Tree” In Ziegler, Denise (ed.) I experience as I experiment—I experiment as I experience. Experience and experimentality in artistic work and research. Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, 15–26. ______. 2019a. “Resting with Pines in Nida—attempts at performing with plants.” Performance Philosophy 4, no. 2, 452–475. Accessed April 20, 2020. https://doi​ .org​/10​.21476​/PP​.2019​.42232. ______. “En dag med (ett av) världens äldsta träd,” Performing Landscape, blog post 16.5.2019. Accessed April 20, 2020. https​:/​/an​​nette​​arlan​​der​.c​​om​/20​​19​/05​​/16​/e​​n​ -dag​​-med-​​ett​-a​​v​-var​​lde​ns​​-alds​​ta​-tr​​ad/. ______. 2019. The Spruce Revisited. Accessed April 20, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.res​​earch​​ catal​​ogue.​​net​/p​​rofil​​e​/sho​​w​-wor​​k​​?wor​​k​=521​​487.

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______. 2018b. “Breathing and Growth—performing with plants.” Dance and Somatic Practices Issue 10, no. 2, 175–187. ______. 2018a. “Performing with Plants.” In Leena Rouhiainen (ed.) Perilous Experience CARPA 5 Colloquium Proceedings. Nivel 09. Accessed April 20, 2020. http:​/​/niv​​el​.te​​ak​.fi​​/carp​​a5​/an​​nette​​-arla​​nder-​​perfo​​rming​​-w​ith​​-plan​​ts/. ______. “Three Winter Walks,” Artistic Research in Stockholm, blog post 9.3.2018. Accessed April 20, 2020. https​:/​/ar​​tisti​​crese​​archi​​nstoc​​kholm​​.word​​press​​.com/​​2018/​​ 03​/09​​/thre​​e​-wi​n​​ter​-w​​alks/​. ______. “The Skin of the Spruce,” Artistic Research in Stockholm, blog post 21.8.2018. Accessed April 20, 2020. https​:/​/ar​​tisti​​crese​​archi​​nstoc​​kholm​​.word​​press​​ .com/​​2018/​​08​/21​​/the-​​skin-​​of​​-th​​e​-spr​​uce/. ______. 2016. “Performing with plants—Att uppträda/ samarbeta med växter” Research application, project website. Accessed April 20, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.res​​ earch​​catal​​ogue.​​net​/v​​iew​/3​​1655​0​​/3165​​51. ______. 2015. “‘Becoming Juniper.’ Landschaft performen als künstlerische Forschung” [Becoming Juniper as Artistic Research]. In Erika Fischer-Lichte and Daniela Hahn (eds) Ökologie und die Künste. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 141–157. ______. 2010. “Performing with Trees: Landscape and Artistic Research.” In John Freeman (ed.) Blood, Sweat and Theory—Research Through Practice in Performance. London: Libri Publishing, 158–176. ______. 2008. Under the Spruce I-III. Accessed April 20, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.av-​​arkki​​ .fi​/w​​orks/​​under​​-the-​​spruc​​​e​-i​-i​​ii/. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2017. “Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism.” In Grusin, R. (ed.), Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 21–48. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Oxford, UK: Polity Press. Chamovitz, Daniel. 2017. What a Plant Knows. A Field Guide to the Senses. Updated and expanded edition. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Coccia, Emanuele. 2019. The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture. Translated by Dylan J. Montanari. Cambridge: Polity Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Translated by Davis Wills. Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002), 369–418. Eisele, Kimi. 2014. “How to Duet with a Saguaro.” Performing Ethos 5.1–2, 53–64. Gagliano, Monica, John. C. Ryan and Patrícia Viveira. (eds) 2017. The Language of Plants. Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis London: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, Prudence. 2018. The Plant Contract: Art’s Return to Vegetal Life. Critical Plant Studies 3. Leiden, Boston: Brill Rodopi. Gibson, Prudence and Brits, Baylee. (eds) 2018. Covert Plants. Vegetal Consciousness and Agency in an Anthropocentric World. Santa Barbara, CA: Brainstorm Books. Graves, Robert. 1948. The White Goddess. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Hall, Matthew. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. New York: Suny Press. Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Helmenstine, Anne Marie. 2019. “How Much Oxygen Does One Tree Produce?” ThoughtCo. Accessed April 4, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.tho​​ughtc​​o​.com​​/how-​​much-​​ oxyge​​n​-doe​​s​-one​​-tree​​-pro​d​​uce​-6​​06785​. Irigaray, Luce. 2017. “What the Vegetal World Says to Us.” In Gagliano, Monica, John. C. Ryan and Patrícia Vieira (eds) 2017. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 126–135. Irigaray, Luce and Michael Marder. 2016. Through Vegetal Being. Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Jeremijenko, Natalie: Tree Logic. Accessed April 4, 2020. https​:/​/ma​​ssmoc​​a​.org​​/even​​ t​/nat​​alie-​​jerem​​​ijenk​​o/. Kovalainen, Ritva and Sanni Seppo. 1997. Puiden kansa, Tree People. Accessed April 4, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.rit​​vakov​​alain​​en​.co​​m​/cop​​y​-of-​​puide​​n​-kan​​sa​​-tr​​ee​-pe​​ople. Kranz, Isabel, Schwan, Alexander and Eike Wittrock. (eds) 2016. Floriographie. Die Sprachen der Blumen. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Mancuso, Stefano and Alessandra Viola. 2015. Brilliant Green. The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Washington: Island Press. Marder, Michael. 2015. “The Place of Plants: Spatiality, Movement, Growth.” Performance Philosophy 1, 185–194. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Moon, Beth. 2014. Ancient Trees—Portraits of Time. New York, London: Abbeville Press. Myers, Natasha. 2017. “From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene: Designing Gardens for Plant/People Involution.” History and Anthropology. Accessed April 4, 2020. http:​/​/dx.​​doi​.o​​rg​/10​​.1080​​/0275​​7206.​​2017.​​​12899​​34. Nealon, Jeffrey T. 2016. Plant Theory: Bio Power and Vegetable Life. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Närhinen, Tuula: Windtracers. Accessed April 4, 2020. http:​/​/www​​.tuul​​anarh​​inen.​​net​ /a​​rtwor​​ks​/wi​​​nd​.ht​​m. Pakenham, Thomas. 1996. Meetings with Remarkable Trees. New York: Random House. Pape-Mustonen, Terhi. 2017. “Helsinkiläisen hiilijalanjäljen sitomiseen tarvitaan 2,5 metsähehtaarin kasvu.” Maaseudun Tulevaisuus 29.9.2017. Accessed April 4, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.maa​​seudu​​ntule​​vaisu​​us​.fi​​/ympa​​risto​​/hels​​inkil​​%C3​%A​​4isen​​ -hiil​​ijala​​nj​%C3​​%A4lj​​en​-si​​tomis​​een​-t​​arvit​​aan​-2​​-5​-me​​ts​%C3​​​%A4he​​htaar​​in​-ka​​svu​ -1​​.2076​​78. Plumwood, Val. 2003. “Decolonizing relationships with nature.” In William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan. 2003. (eds) Decolonizing Nature. Strategies for Conservation in a Post-colonial Era, 51–78. London and Sterling VA: Earthscan Publications Ltd.

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Pollan, Michael. 2002. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the World. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Accessed April 4, 2020. Rubio, Anna: http:​/​/www​​.fron​​tiers​​inret​​reat.​​org​/a​​ctivi​​ties/​​anna_​​rubio​​_all_​​the​_t​​​rees_​​ i​_met​. Accessed April 4, 2020. Sandilands, Catriona. 2017. “Fear of a Queer Plant?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23, no. 3, 419–429. Schwan, Alexander. 2016. “Wilting Flowers in Dance. Choreographic approaches to floral ephemerality.” In Isabel Kranz, Alexander Schwan, and Eike Wittrock (eds) Floriographie. Die Sprachen der Blumen. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 259–285. Trewavas, Anthony. 2011. “Aspects of Plant Intelligence.” Antennae, 17, 10–42. Vieira, Patrícia, Monica Gagliano and John Ryan (eds) 2015. The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World. Lanham, Boulder and New York, London: Lexington Books. Wohlleben, Peter. 2016. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate—Discoveries from a Secret World. Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Chapter 16

Tuning and Being Tuned by a Patch of Boreal Forest Works from the Boreal Poetry Garden, Newfoundland, Canada Marlene Creates

Figure 16.1  Marlene Creates’s House in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, Canada, 2019. Source: Photo by Brian Janes.

In 2002, I moved from a small wooden townhouse built in 1893 in downtown St. John’s, which is the capital city of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to a contemporary open-plan house in Portugal Cove, surrounded 229

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by boreal forest and a stream running through it, called the Blast Hole Pond River. Since moving here, this place has become my studio, the source of my subject matter, and the platform for public, multidisciplinary events. The boreal forest is described as the largest intact ecosystem left on Earth. It’s a halo of vegetation around the crown of the planet, dominated by coniferous trees, just south of the tundra and the permafrost. There is no elm, no oak, no chestnut, hickory, cedar, walnut, or even yellow pine in the boreal forest. The main coniferous trees where I live are black and white spruce, larch, and balsam fir. There are also some deciduous trees and shrubs, such as birch, willow, and alders. I call this site The Boreal Poetry Garden. “Boreal” simply means “northern,” as in aurora borealis, the northern lights. The word comes from Boreas, who was the Greek god of the north wind.

Figure 16.2  The Sign for The Boreal Poetry Garden. Source: Photo by Marlene Creates.

I’ve come to a stage in my life where I value the exquisite lightness of words—because they don’t require frames, or shipping crates, or rented storage space. In 2005, I started transitioning to a new way of presenting my work. What I’ve been attempting to do inverts much of the practice I’d been following for many years: instead of traveling to find subject matter, I’m paying attention to just one place—the living world in my immediate surroundings. And one of the main modes of presentation includes people coming to the patch of boreal forest where I live and work.

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Figure 16.3  Marlene Creates Reading Site-Specific Poetry in The Boreal Poetry Garden for the 2011 UN International Year of Forests. Source: Photo by Don McKay.

I came to poetry because I’m a visual artist who works mainly in photography. I would explain this paradox by saying that I had experiences in the forest that could not be photographed—something either too ephemeral, or something involving one of the senses other than the visual, particularly sounds. So I turned to words. I decided to read my poems out loud to people right in the spots where the words arose, and in 2005 I started inviting people to go on a poetry walk through the site. I lead the group along the paths and I stop at certain points to read out a poem that refers to something right in the spot where we’re standing. The poems are site specific, and I will only read them in the spots where they arose because the whole environment is part of the poem—in fact, it’s the best part. The poems are just a way to point to what’s there, or to something fleeting that happened there at one time. I’ve invited different experts to collaborate with me on these walks. Some of the first collaborators included a boreal ecologist, a geologist, a marine bird biologist, other nature poets, and several acoustic musicians. Then, in 2014, the theme of the events was the tactile and the events included two contemporary dancers. The UN International Year of Soils was in 2015 and one of my collaborators was a mycologist who told us about the amazing things taking place underground in the forest, right where we stood. In 2016, the theme was the element of the air, especially the wind. I invited musicians whose instruments require the wind to sound—an accordion player and a clarinetist. In 2017, the theme was the element

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of fire and its accompanying light. My collaborators included a scientist who researches the role of fire and light in the ecology of the boreal forest, and a fire breather who performed and juggled fire in a clearing in the forest. In 2018, the theme was the element of water, and we focused on the Blast Hole Pond River. My collaborators included an environmental interpreter of freshwater habitats and a singer-songwriter who performed her songs about water as we stood beside the river. I asked everyone, including all the visitors, to wear something blue. There are a few simple documentary videos of some of these events on the “Liveart Media” page of my website.1 I’ve made what I call “A Virtual Walk of The Boreal Poetry Garden” with a series of site-specific video poems. This is an internet project that you can access from the home page of my website by clicking on the play button on the image of me standing in front of the little waterfall. This takes you to an aerial photograph, where you click on the little box that says “click to start,” which takes you to a close-up aerial photograph of the site.2

Figure 16.4  A Virtual Walk of The Boreal Poetry Garden, 2010. Screenshot of the internet project: aerial photograph of the artist’s home and surrounding boreal forest with the list of video-poems. Source: Aerial photograph provided by the government of Newfoundland and Labrador.

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If you click on any of the titles, a short video will play with me reading a site-specific poem in the spot indicated on the aerial photo. The question that arises is: What is an artist like me—who has focused on the sensorial aspects of the tangible, natural world—what is she doing making a virtual walk for the internet? Part of the answer is that it is a way to reduce my carbon footprint as an artist. I’ve had misgivings for several years about the materials required for frames, crates, and shipping my work to the outside world. The decision to create the Virtual Walk was an environmental as well as an aesthetic one. For me, these two aspects are actually very closely related—aesthetics and the environment. It’s good to remember that the internet, though it renders everything virtual, can also gesture back to the tangible; just as poetry, when it is vocalized, or voiced, can move us back from the page to the sensorial and musical aspects of language. In responding to the land that surrounds me, the form my work takes is becoming more and more dematerialized. The on-site events and the Virtual Walk are ways for me to move away from making art objects and relying on gallery exhibitions to a more interactive, participatory practice. I started The Boreal Poetry Garden by composing short, haiku-like poems, handwriting them on small pieces of card, setting them up in the spot that the words refer to, and then photographing them. The poem is actually placed temporarily in situ.

Figure 16.5  Stillness and Quiet from The Boreal Poetry Garden, 2007. Diptych of sitespecific poems, handwritten on card and photographed in situ. Source: Photo by Marlene Creates.

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Stillness, like the moment after the moose bolted, clipped the turn: hoofbeats in the footpath. Quiet, as the lull when the black-backed woodpecker stops knocking overhead in the crunnick grove.

In calling it The Boreal Poetry Garden, I’m not using the word “garden” in the sense of a planted place. I mean garden as a place set apart from other places. I’m calling it a “poetry garden” because what I’m planting is poems. It’s also a garden because working with these six acres uses my entire body and all its senses. I haul out blown-down trees (and use them for firewood to heat the house), I groom paths, I make constant judgments and decisions on pruning, even if the decision is to leave something alone. I call it “tuning” this patch of boreal forest.3 One of the inspirations for The Boreal Poetry Garden is the rich Newfoundland vernacular. It’s an abiding inspiration for me because of my interest in the relationship between language and the land. Newfoundland vernacular is not slang; it’s a recognized dialect of English in its own right. Some English words from seventeenth-century Dorset and Devon survived in Newfoundland after disappearing in England (Story, Kirwin and Widdowson 1982). These are just a few examples: crunnick: a dead, weathered branch with no bark droke: a wooded valley with steep sides flashet: a small pool of water in a marshy place goowiddy: bog myrtle shrub lund: sheltered from the wind nug: a chunk of wood sawn off a log for fuel scrag: stump of a tree withyrod: wild raison shrub

Many other linguistic groups also settled Newfoundland, including Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Norman and Breton French, Portuguese, Basque, and Spanish. Several successions of Indigenous people have inhabited what is now the province of Newfoundland and Labrador for over eight thousand years:

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people called Maritime Archaic Indians, Thule, Groswater and Dorset Eskimos, and Beothuk. Indigenous Mi’kmaq, Innu, and Inuit still live there. So there are words from many linguistic groups in the local vocabulary.

Figure 16.6  Devil’s Blanket, Blast Hole Pond River, Newfoundland, Winter 2012–2013, from the series A Newfoundland Treasury of Terms for Ice and Snow (2011–2014). Source: Photo by Marlene Creates.

Of course, winter is a major feature in the boreal forest and the trees have adapted to withstand a heavy snow load. There is a wide local vocabulary in Newfoundland to distinguish specific phenomena in winter weather. I found over eighty such terms in the local dialect for ice and snow, and I produced a series of photographs, two videos, and a book based on these terms (Creates 2015). These are a few of them: ballicattered: covered with a layer of ice from spray or waves blossoms of snow: large snowflakes clinkerbells, ice-candles: icicles clumper: a small chunk of ice or snow the size of a dumpling crudly snow: soft and disintegrating snow after mild weather that crunches underfoot devil’s blanket: a snowfall that hinders your usual work dwy: a brief snow flurry ice-blink: the dazzle of the ice

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living screecher of a storm: a storm with severe howling wind lolly: soft ice or snow floating on the surface of the water pummy: ice broken into a mixture of chunks and slush scuddy weather: uncertain weather with sudden gusts of wind and snow or rain silver thaw: coating of ice from freezing rain sishy ice: fine, granulated ice floating on the surface of the sea sleery snow: soft and motley snow slottery snow: heavy, wet snow sparrow batch: a light snowfall in April said to bring back the sparrows. Who wouldn’t want to write poetry when you have words like that in the local vocabulary? These words are boreal poetry to me. They are also precise, practical, evocative, sonic, and lyrical. Knowing them helps us actually see different phenomena, instead of winter being just a cold, white blur. But this vocabulary is now a fragile intangible artifact. The loss of local linguistic complexity is a result of major changes in Newfoundland, particularly the decline of the fishery as an occupation. And these terms are fragile for another reason: global warming. As the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane says in his book Landmarks (which is a book about the power of language to shape our sense of place) “once natural phenomena go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit” (Macfarlane 2015).

Figure 16.7  Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2007—ongoing. 6 excerpts (2011) from a sequence of 81 photographs, 2007–2015. Source: Photos by Marlene Creates.

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My greatest aspirations as an artist are presently constituted by this one place. I’ve been slowly tuning my body and my reflexes to its details. This is what I mean by “being tuned by a patch of boreal forest” in the title of this article. I’m coming to know this habitat by engaging with it in various ways: corporally, emotionally, intellectually, instinctively, linguistically, and in astonishment. These six black-and-white photographs are excerpts from an ongoing project that I started in 2007, titled Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand. It’s a series of photographs about some of the trees in the forest where I live and work. I could just go around and photograph my hand on any tree, but these are trees that I’ve individuated. I’m interested in the particularity of each tree and the circumstances that bring me to differentiate certain trees among the thousands in this particular patch of boreal forest. Even when I’m being my most attentive, there are still many trees I have not yet noticed enough to remember as individuals. Each year I continue the series of photographs with some of the trees that have come to my attention. But what I should say is my attention has come to them.

Figure 16.8  Our Lives Concurrent for 58 Years Until the Hurricane, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2010. A cross-section from each of 22 spruce and fir trees that were felled by Hurricane Igor on September 21, 2010, arranged according to the trees’ positions in the forest. Source: Photo by Marlene Creates.

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On September 21, 2010, Hurricane Igor hit Newfoundland and it felled quite a few trees at my place. As a way to turn the loss into something, I made a work titled: Our Lives Concurrent for 58 Years Until the Hurricane. The “Our” in the title refers to me and the trees because I was 58 years old at the time and it turned out that all of the trees that were blown down had been standing throughout my lifetime until the day of the hurricane. I had the assistance of an ecologist from Memorial University who dated the trees using a very powerful microscope on the cross-sections of the tree trunks. The installation is comprised of the twenty-two cross-sections, arranged according to the trees’ positions in the forest, and a key (not shown) indicating the age of each tree when it was blown down by the hurricane. It turned out—and this was the greatest revelation from doing this project—that the diameters of the trees were not relative to their ages. One of the trees—9 inches in diameter at its widest point—was 96 years old when it was blown over. Another one—only 3 inches in diameter—was 108 years old.

Figure 16.9  Two Cross-Sections from Trees Felled by Hurricane Igor in 2010 on OneFoot Square Floor tiles to Show their Relative Sizes. Left: 96 years old, 9 inches at widest point; Right: 108 years old, 3 inches at widest point. Source: Photo by Marlene Creates.

I photographed both of these cross-sections on a one-foot square floor tile so you can see their relative sizes. On the left is the one that was 96 years old and 9 inches at its widest, and on the right is the one that was 108 years old and only 3 inches in diameter. It was growing on a height of land where it was quite exposed, and the soil was very thin. Location, location, location.

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Figure 16.10  Two Views of a Tip-Up from Hurricane Igor, September 21, 2010. Source: Photo by Marlene Creates.

Two years later, Hurricane Leslie hit Newfoundland. It felled almost three times as many trees in the forest around my house as the previous hurricane. This is the poem I wrote about this particular tip-up and I read it to visitors when we’re standing beside it. After Hurricane Leslie, September 11, 2012 They didn’t fall one by one this way and that but together spruce and fir full of needles and sap lying in a stripe across the land all pointing to the northwest. From the southeast it came, at 135 kilometres an hour, channeled by tolts and drokes. But their roots were braced for prevailing westerlies. Many now horizontal were twisted and cracked off, more had their sodden roots thrown upright,

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their pans of moss and little seedlings now dangling in the air beyond reach, the underside of the flaps like the inside of a death mask, a mold cast by the roots over bedrock. Tip-ups, the boreal ecologist told me, leave canopy gaps overhead and bare soil below, microsites, a footing for birch, aspen, cherry, willow, berry shrubs, and herbaceous stuff. And that, she said, is the silver lining. This transformation is not on our time scale, she added. We have to have patience. You’ve got to think by fifty or a hundred years for the forest. But meanwhile the Atlantic is producing hurricanes at double the rate of the previous two decades. They feed on warm seawater: warmer oceans, stronger hurricanes. Did they make a sound when they fell while I was inside by the fire? I don’t know, but when I came upon them the next day I sensed their silent cries.

To conclude on a positive note: This is the bedrock that was exposed when the tip-up occurred. There are already some little balsam fir seedlings starting to grow on it. NOTES 1. http:​/​/www​​.marl​​enecr​​eates​​.ca​/l​​ivear​​​t​.htm​l 2. http://marlenecreates​.ca​/virtualwalk/ 3. Cfr. “Tuning and Being Tuned by a Patch of Boreal Forest.”

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Figure 16.11  Balsam Fir Seedlings Growing on the Boulder Exposed by the Tip-Up in Figure #10, Nine Years after the Hurricane, 2019. Source: Photo by Marlene Creates.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Creates, Marlene. 2015. Brickle, Nish, and Knobbly: A Newfoundland Treasury of Terms for Ice and Snow. Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s, Newfoundland: Boulder Publications. Macfarlane, Robert. 2015. Landmarks. UK: Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House. Story, G. M., W. J. Kirwin, and J. D. A. Widdowson, eds 1982. Dictionary of Newfoundland English. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press.

Part V

TREES AND TIME

Chapter 17

Tree Photography, Arboreal Timescapes, and the Archive in Richard Powers’ The Overstory Daniela Fargione

INTRODUCTION When in an interview for the LA Review of Books Richard Powers was asked to discuss the genesis and the nonliterary sources of inspiration for his latest novel, The Overstory, he replied that for more than fifty years he had looked at trees as mere aesthetic objects, not being able to tell an elm tree from an ash tree, until he was offered a job as a professor at Stanford, in Northern California. To elucidate the sequel of this personal story and the enlightenment that came with it, Powers reminds that Palo Alto, where he resided for a stint, is in the Silicon Valley, right at the center of a digital revolution, with the corporate headquarters of Google, Apple, Intel, Facebook, eBay, HP, Netflix, and countless more companies that are busily creating our future. But if the future is being invented in this little strip that runs from San Francisco to San Jose, to the west of it are the Santa Cruz Mountains covered in redwood forests. From time to time, in order “to escape the digital-utopian future” (Hamner 2018), the writer used to take long hikes “in the past,” where he eventually came to realize that all those forests were second-growth redwood forests since they had been all cut down to build San Francisco. The Silicon Valley, in short, had erased a large natural patrimony from the past to create a technological future. One day, while walking in “what felt as a Cathedral,” the writer came across “a survivor,” one tree “almost as old as Christianity” (Powers 2018b) that had escaped the loggers. Seeing that tree gave him the spur to restore in writing what had been erased by felling, the very first seed for his new story. The visualization of trees and of their imbrications with the human, the description of this humanarboreal interdependence, was at the core of his 245

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next fictional endeavor, one that could not rely on traditional novelistic techniques and human time scale for the simple reason that they do not allow trees to be the main characters of a story. The real challenge, Powers adds, was “to create identification and empathy for something that we do still share a quarter of our genes with, something that makes our lives possible but it is so alien to us”1 (Powers 2018b). This hindrance is due to what one character defines “Adam’s curse” (Powers 2018, 114), namely the faculty to identify only with things that look like us, a sort of plant-blindness that inhibits humans to perceive the vegetal world. Richard Powers’ narration resonates with the words of several scholars who, in the wake of a renewed philosophical interest in the nonhuman “other,” with all its relevant ontological and ethical implications, are currently exploring “the question of the plant,”2 a question that Michael Marder considers still “dormant”: “If animals have suffered marginalization throughout the history of the Western thought, then non-human, non-animal living beings, such as plants, have populated the margin, the zone of absolute obscurity undetectable on the radars of our conceptualities” (Marder 2013, 2. Italics added). Marder concedes that the encounter of humans and plants corresponds to the intersection of completely different worlds and temporalities, but he also argues that this gap may dwindle when recognizing traces of the human in the plant and vice versa: “The human body and subjectivity alike are . . . strange archives, surfaces of inscription for the vestiges of the inorganic world, of plant growth, and of animality—all of which survive and lead a clandestine afterlife in us, as us” (Marder 2013, 10). Being The Overstory an immense epic on time, imperiled biomes and multiple entanglements, this monumental narrative requires that we “put ourselves entirely in the plants’ shoes, or rather roots” (Marder 2013, 10). Coherently, the overstory of the title refers to both the arboreal perspective and to the time frame adopted in the story: almost four billion years, where humans, in their transient appearance, have been somehow interrelated with trees and plants. Because of its scope, The Overstory has rightfully been considered a virtuous example of the Great American Novel: more than 500 pages of distilled erudition that slowly builds up a book “obsessed with the erotics of knowledge,” to use Richard Powers’ words (Powers 2019). But also, as I will demonstrate, with the urgency to start a process of visualization and documentation, an archival project that draws on history, truth, memory, empathy, and is dictated by the peril of death, by the threat of extinction. In this sense, this is also a novel on time and time recording, which is a ceaseless and paradoxical activity for trees as they tell the time when they stop living: their concentric bands are another way of indexing, another catalog of seasons and experience, another way to photograph and elude death. As in his first novel, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance (1985), it is “the universal language” (Powers 1985,

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39) of photography that Powers relies on to create a multidimensional depth to the flat images of the forests that we humans are familiar with, for “photographs, like the genetic material in each living cell, represent coded material from the past, an encrypted solution to the problem of survival” (Powers 1985, 334). “Art,” states Richard Powers, “is a way of saying what it means to be alive, and the most salient feature of existence is the unthinkable odds against it. For every way that there is of being here, there are [sic] an infinity of ways of not being here” (Morrow 2020). One of these consists in the failure to preserve our sentient forests. CLICKING AND MOURNING: CAPTURING EXTINCTION WITH PHOTOGRAPHY Ideally, The Overstory resumes many of the themes of Richard Powers’ first novel, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance (1985), and of August Sander’s photograph bearing the same title. In this well-known portrait, three young men stand behind each other with their heads cut off by the line of the horizon and their bodies facing the same forward direction. In their dandyish upright posture, they wear elegant hats, fancy suits, and wooden canes; they proudly look straight into the camera, but with their feet firmly set on the ground they reveal so much about their class and history. These are men on the cusp of modernity, three farmers in 1914, looking over their shoulders with a compliant attitude and incoherent attire, but very well determined to go to their country dance. Unfortunately, they seem completely oblivious that a deadly dance is awaiting them: World War I. The German photographer included this very popular shot in the massive and incomplete project called Men of the Twentieth Century, an immense archive showing a pictorial survey of the German society’s class structure during the Weimer Republic—from bricklayers to farmers, from circus performers to bankers, from bakers to philosophers. The work, explains Richard Powers in his first novel, is “a meticulous examination of human appearance, personality, and social standing, a cross-sampling of representative types, each fitted into a sweeping scheme of categories and subcategories” (Powers 2001, 39). Arguably, the best German portrait photographer of the twentieth century dedicated to the Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity), Sander hoped to collect a total of 600 images to create his visual index of social types, an ambition that was shot down by Hitler’s Third Reich.3 The “Three Farmers on their Way to the Dance” was the sixth of Sander’s first photo-book whose introduction, written by the artist himself in third person, describes it as an “immense self-imposed task—the like of which has never been attempted

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before on this scale . . . And he has brought the task to completion with the fanaticism of a seeker after truth and without prejudice either for or against any one party, tendency, class, or society.”4 For Sander, the art of photography lays precisely in its power to reveal the truth (Jones 2000, 3). Now, if we substitute human types with tree types, physiognomic analysis with phytobiography, human time with tree time, we may possibly start grasping what Richard Powers’ The Overstory is: a colossal photo-book, very similar to Sander’s project, aiming at storing images of a world that will be visualized in the post-Anthropocene, an epoch that will not contemplate human presence, a world without us. And yet, the questions of life and death that the writer tackles on a planetary scale do not concentrate on a future dimension, neither are they tinted with nostalgic overtones. Rather, they are strongly rooted in the present moment since they are already affecting all of us today as a tomorrow’s certainty. As Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, also The Overstory is “a narrative ‘dance’ between stories situated on different time levels and told in different voices and from different perspectives” (Ickstadt 2010, 56), what Powers calls “remembering forward” (Hendricks 2000, 28 qtd. in Ickstadt 2010), a technique that implies a connection between the past and the future: “When we come behind the photographer’s shoulders into conjunction with the gaze, we have the macabre feeling of being its object, the sense that the sitters mean to communicate something to us, to all posterity” (Powers 1992, 258). It was Roland Barthes—followed by eminent theorists such as Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and John Berger to name a few—who has explained how death and photography co-mingle in ways no other arts can do. And yet, in his seminal Camera Lucida, Barthes argues that there is “nothing Proustian in a photograph . . . The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed” (Barthes 1999, 82). In his inquiry on photography, Barthes attempts at reaching “the thing which is seen by anyone looking at a photograph and which distinguishes it in his eyes from any other image” (Barthes 1999, 60). In the essay, Barthes’s “thing” (eidos or noeme) stands for that peculiar feature that differentiates one photograph from other images. The eidos of the photographic experience that Barthes applies in the representation of his dead mother portrayed as a young girl in the “Winter Garden Photograph” consists in the irreducible reality of its existence and the impossibility of the medium to regain what has been lost in time. Eventually, he understands that his desire to capture the essence of his mother by writing an image of her is destined to fail: writing his mother’s body is “an endless operation of tracing. He can do nothing but repeat her image by copying it again and again. For an artist looking through the camera lucida and for a writer, like Barthes, using words to produce a textual ‘camera lucida,’ the object of study is always a reflection,

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never a person. Writing, drawing, and tracing begin, therefore, not with the thing itself, but with its image” (Stamelman 1990, 282). Richard Powers’ The Overstory opens with the image of a chestnut tree from which one of the main stories germinates (this first section is aptly called “Roots”) to eventually converge with the others at the very end of the book. Only then will five of the main human characters—Nicholas, Olivia, Douglas, Mimi, and Adam—join in a series of tree-saving actions (barricades, arson, and sabotage) reminiscent of the Redwood Summer and the Timber Wars that took place at the end of 1990s in Northern California and South Oregon with the aim to protect old-growth redwood trees from felling.5 The chestnut fruits in the opening pages were picked up in a Brooklyn park and brought to Iowa by Jørgen Hoel, who emigrated from Norway before the Civil War to start a farm in America. The patriarch of this family saga plants the fruits at the edge of a cornfield, where the Hoel chestnut trees would spring, mature, and contribute to “the outstanding visual feature in both urban and rural landscapes” that dominated the eastern half of the United States (TAFC, https​:/​/ww​​w​.acf​​.org/​​the​-a​​meric​​an​-ch​​estnu​​t​/his​​tory-​​ameri​​​can​-c​​hestn​​ ut/). At the turn of the century, however, a blight introduced by a parasite fungus, devastated the forest ecosystem, decimating the American chestnut largely used as lumber and nut-crop. Yet, Powers’ fictional tree, unlike a couple of Jørgen’s children, resists and becomes the only “survivor” to “the chaos of God’s will” (Powers 2018, 15, 9). In a way, the Hoel chestnut, the “sentinel tree” (Powers 2018, 10), may be recognized as both the tree that the writer was “pierced” by when walking in the Cathedral of the Silicon Valley (Powers’ “Winter Garden”) and the time keeper of his fictional story. The shrinking of the farm as a consequence of progress and modernization is chronicled through the tree images that are assembled, generation after generation, for seventy-six years by the men of the family who also track the development of the technology that records the inexorable passage of time. After burying his father beneath the chestnut that the old man had planted, John Hoel “is free to chase after the latest machines” (Powers 2018, 11): he invests two dollars in the purchase of a Kodak No. 2 Brownie and “on the first day of spring, 1903, he takes a full-length portrait of the sentinel chestnut leafing out” (Powers 2018, 11); he would make a ritual out of it, to be repeated every month at the same time with the only objective “to document what time hides in plain sight” (Powers 2018, 12). Unwittingly, John is the very first artist of the Hoel dynasty, and he even instinctively understands that what we see is not as significant as what we do not: the angle of his camera never varies, the vagaries of chance (the different weather circumstances, the seasons, the light) affect the composition of his photographs and when he assembles the first year’s twelve black-and-white prints, he sees that every shot is the same but what each shows is different. Apparently, his aesthetic

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stance suggests a limit: the art of photography, as any other representational form, can capture only fragments of time and truth.6 This is very evident to the third Hoel photographer, Frank Jr., who keeps alive the “pointless” and “ill-advised promise” of photographing the chestnut tree, laying each photograph in a balsam box without remembering what kind of ritual this is, like St. Olaf’s Day that the family keeps celebrating only because they are used to. And yet, this gives him a “blind purpose”: it is a “monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life” (Powers 2018, 15) until, during World War II, Frank realizes that he had gathered 500 photos of a survivor, the only chestnut that had “escaped the Holocaust” (Powers 2018, 15) and that dendrologists and common people alike now come to see as a curiosity. In the cold winter of 1965, the No. 2 Brownie cracks and is substituted by an Instamatic. And even if the Twenties “do not roar for the Hoels,” the photos do not show the Depression’s costs, since “the story happens outside his photo’s frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree” (Powers 2018, 16. Italics in original). Outside, “extinction sneaks up on the Hoel farm” (Powers 2018, 17) and their resistance not to be swallowed up into monocrop factories, the progressive future of agricultural America, is too big of a challenge and is inscribed in those 775 photos that Nicholas Hoels looks at as if watching a time-lapse documentary.7 By flipping the images that chronicle the three-quarters of a century family history he evokes hundreds of memories of his farm life: “It’s all encoded somehow in that animated tree” (Powers 2018, 19), and although nobody in the family can explain the point of that endeavor, he finally understands that it “makes you think different about things” (Powers 2018, 19). Everybody should “think different” about things when the reference point is the same horizon of extinction that Sander’s threes farmers were facing while walking to their dance. Most of the human characters in Powers’ book are fully aware of it and death becomes a sort of refrain throughout their narratives: botanist Patricia Westerford, for example, clinically concludes that: “Death is everywhere, oppressive and beautiful” (Powers 2018, 134), while the doctoral student Adam Appich admits that: “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long” (Powers 2018, 56). But it is Douglas Pavlicek, a Vietnam veteran, to be the most vocal among them: by talking directly to trees, he encourages them to “Hang on. Only ten or twenty decades. Child’s play, for you guys. You just have to outlast us. Then no one will be left to fuck you over” (Powers 2018, 90. Italics in original). Thus, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, awarded with the Pulitzer Prize just as Extinction Rebellion8 activists were demonstrating in the streets of London, is a passionate invitation to envision “meaningful alternative” (Knights 2019, 13) to cope with the current climate crisis and deforestation:

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“We’ve already taken ninety-seven percent of the old ones. Couldn’t we find a way to keep the last three percent?” (Powers 2018, 164) says Patricia Westerford, the visionary researcher who discovers that trees have an intricate communal behavior. And yet, when Patricia finally publishes her book, The Secret Forest, illustrating her revolutionary theories about tree life and tree awareness and eventually restoring her credibility in the scientific community, she states that “Dying is life, too” (Powers 2018, 464). In her final conference that she agrees to deliver in front of a very curious audience, she claims that “We scientists are taught never to look for ourselves in other species” (453) and that “Men and trees are closer cousins than you think” (454), and repeats what trees have taught her: “Save us? What a human thing to do” (Powers 2018, 329. Italics in original). Most people do not know that a “forest takes care of itself” (Powers 2018, 221) and that a “dead tree is an infinite hotel,” a rotting log is “home to orders of magnitude more living tissue than the living tree” (Powers 2018, 282). With this truth in mind, the novel and the included photographs function not only as “a memento mori that performs the work of memorialization and mourning for the lost and vanishing species” (Mudie 2006, 22), but also as an exercise in imagination. In Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction, Claire Colebrook wonders if there is another “mode of reading the world, and its anthropogenic scars, that frees itself from folding the earth’s surface around human survival. How might we read or perceive other timelines, other points of view and other rhythms?” (Colebrook 2014, 23). The effort required is to imagine a post-Anthropocene world, whose narratives cannot be “human-all-too-human” (Colebrook 2014, 25): the pictures of the planet that we are leaving behind require that the future seer be completely free from the anthropocentrism of the aesthetic image. In the Anthropocene era, an epoch featured by image saturation, photography and other plastic arts cannot limit themselves to merely mirror humanity but rather to think of “the inextricable intertwining with fragile life” (Colebrook 2014, 144 qtd. in Mudie 2016, 25). By unloading photography from the burden of its crystallized role of “memory aid and . . . mausoleum with life preserved like a death mask” (Zylinska 2018, 57) as Roland Barthes confined the medium to and from the melancholia it entails, we could see photography as concerning as much with death as with life: similarly to a plant that relies on the sun for its photosynthesis—the process that transforms light energy into chemical energy—in the same vibrant way photography harnesses energy from the light to draw and transmit coded visual information. As Patricia Westerford explains: It’s a miracle, she tells her students, photosynthesis: a feat of chemical engineering underpinning creation’s entire cathedral. All the razzmatazz of life on

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Earth is a free-rider on that mind-boggling magic act. The secret of life: plants eat light and air and water, and the stored energy goes on to make and do all things. She leads her charges into the inner sanctum of the mystery: Hundreds of chlorophyll molecules assemble into antennae complexes. Countless such antennae arrays form up into thylakoid discs. Stacks of these discs align in a single chloroplast. Up to a hundred such solar power factories power a single plant cell. Millions of cells may shape a single leaf. A million leaves rustle in a single glorious ginkgo. . . . They think she’s nuts, and that’s fine with her. She’s content to post a memory forward to their distant futures, futures that will depend on the inscrutable generosity of green things. (Powers 2018, 124)

Joanna Zylinska perceptively argues that “photography as an embalmer and a carrier of imprints testifies to the continued existence of solar energy and to its photosynthesis-enabling capabilities” (Zylinska 2018, 67): photography will continue being a practice of life for as long as it keeps life as duration in deep time, an act that transcends human control. In this sense, it is the sentinel tree that acts as a camera instead of being the passive object of the human gaze. We can understand this reversal of roles at the beginning of the book, when we read about the dramatic accident that kills the entire Hoel family. When the night before Christmas Eve Nick tries to come back home from Omaha where he went to see an art exhibition, a terrible blizzard strikes the region and prevents him to be home on time for the festivities. He hits the road before dawn but, when he reaches the farm, he finds out that the propane heater had a malfunction: Nick blunders through the front door, trips down the porch steps, and falls into the snow. He rolls over in the freezing white, gasping and reviving. When he looks up, it’s into the branches of the sentinel tree, lone, huge, fractal, and bare against the drifts, lifting its lower limbs and shrugging its ample globe. All its profligate twigs click in the breeze as if this moment, too, so insignificant, so transitory, will be written into its rings and prayed over by branches that wave their semaphores against the bluest of midwestern winter skies. (Powers 2018, 23)

The sentinel tree is the sincere photographer of humanity throughout the centuries: “The older the world, the more likely it is to be both useful and true . . . the word tree and the word truth come from the same root” (Powers 2018, 501). And while on his way to his deadly dance in the forest-cathedral of the Silicon Valley, Richard Powers did not catch, visually, a survivor. Quite the contrary: he was the survivor caught in the tree’s archive.

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BLINDNESS AND THE ARCHIVE: IMAGES AND VOICES The first portfolio of August Sander’s Men of the Twentieth Century—is called Stammappe, the Original Portfolio from which, like a trunk (Stamm) of a family tree, all the others derive. It is a collection of “archetypes” and consists of twelve images of peasants, each of which has its own title: “The Philosopher,” “The Fighter of Revolutionary,” “The Sage,” “The Woman of the Soil,” and so on. The fact that they are named is particularly significant for they cast doubt on any attempt to duplicate the same portrait practices of the police, the hospital, and the mental asylum (Jones 2000, 5), which tended to stigmatize the deviant on the ground of physiognomic assumptions while making his/her monstrosity spectacular. The way we read each single image affects the way we read this project as a whole. Andy Jones argues that “Sander’s peasants clearly do not conform to the Nazi mythologization of them as eternal and unchanging (Jones 2000, 5), while John Berger posits that these pictures are “images of change”: in subverting “the terms of physiognomic analysis, his peasants are presented as bearers of knowledge in their own right” (Ibid.). His sitters, in fact, are not objectified, but rather they retain their status of “self-authoring subjects. The Stammappe thus exceeds the discursive limits of the instrumental archive.” (Jones 2000, 6). As a consequence, each single portrait “contains the ‘reported speech’ of the sitter,” (Edwards 1990:75, quoted in Jones) and the onlooker is required not only to see but also “to listen to the ‘voices’ of the image” (Jones 2000, 6), which have a sonorous quality. Richard Powers’ nine human characters portrayed in The Overstory may be considered as “archetypes” of the Anthropocene, attesting the inventorial agenda of the writer’s project. In addition, each of them is somehow related to a matching “tree type”: Nicholas Hoel, the obsessed environmental artist, corresponds to the American chestnut that survives the decimating blight on the family’s Iowa farm; Mimi Ma, a half-Chinese engineer, is symbolized by the mulberry tree that her immigrant father plants in their backyard; Adam Appich, a doctoral student in psychology, is connected to a maple; Douglas Pavlicek, a pilot shot out of the sky in Vietnam, is saved by a banyan; Neelay Mehta, son of a Sylicon Valley engineer and a computer genius himself, is bound to a wheelchair after falling from an oak; Patricia Westerford, the hearing-impaired visionary botanist who discovers that trees communicate with each other, finds secrets written on a beech trunk; the married couple Ray Brinkman, an intellectual-property lawyer interested in the legal rights of trees, and Dorothy Cazaly, a stenographer, will eventually be engaged in a harmless activism by not mowing their manicured backyard anymore; and finally Olivia Vandergriff, a druggy college student, who after a near-death

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experience, hears voices with their planetary messages, eventually becoming an eco-warrior. As in Sander’s archive, these pairs are not passive sitters; rather, they convey historical experience, knowledge, and universal meaning. And yet, they keep their individual voice. Interspersed in the novel, like a sort of spiritual chants, these voices open each of the four arboreal sections of the book—Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds—compelling the nine human characters (and their readers alike) to experience a less anthropocentric kind of listening. On the very first page of the book, for instance, we are introduced to an anonymous woman sitting on the ground, leaning against a pine that speaks to her “saying things, in words before words . . .. All the ways you imagine us . . . are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above” (Powers 2018, 3). Not by chance, to preserve his family history and memories, all the voices of the different members that generation after generation grew old under the sentinel tree’s shadow, Nick decides “to bury the art. The stack of photos—that flip-book of a century of chestnut growth—goes in, too. Safer there than everywhere aboveground” (Powers 2018, 201). And not by chance, when inaugurating a new season of life as activists, most of Powers’ characters change their names and take on tree pseudonyms: “Doug-fir,” “Maidenhair,” “Watchman,” “Mulberry,” “Maple”: They [Nick and Olivia] christen themselves with forest names that night, in the soft drizzle of the redwoods, on a blanket of needles. The game seems childish, at first. But all of art is childish, all storytelling, all human hope and fear. Why shouldn’t they take new names for this new work? Trees go by a dozen different labels. There’s Texas and Spanish and false buckeye and Monillo, all for the same plant. Trees with names as profligate as maple seeds. There’s buttonwood, aka plane tree, aka sycamore: like a man with a drawer full of fake passports. (Powers 2018, 216)

In a sort of synergistic encounter with their environment, Powers’ characters experience what Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement defines as “recognition,” namely a passage from ignorance to knowledge, which “is not the same kind as the discovery of something new: it arises rather from a renewed reckoning with a potentiality that lies within oneself” (Ghosh 2016, 5). Ghosh recognizes this all-encompassing presence while writing in the Sundarbans, the great mangrove forest of the Bengal Delta, where “the flow of water and silt is such that geological processes that usually unfold in deep time appear to occur at a speed where they can be followed from week to week.” The mangrove forest, where Ghosh was creating his own catalog, is such a dynamic landscape that its “very changeability” leads to

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“innumerable moments of recognition” (Ghosh 2016, 6). And yet, humans mostly miss them, scientists included. While lecturing her students, Patricia Westerford states that “It’s the refrain of all good science: ‘How could we not have seen’?” (Powers 2018, 122. Italics in original) and that the human adage “Improve forest health,” is nothing but “science in the service of willful blindness: How could so many smart people miss the obvious? A person has only to look” (Powers 2018, 138–139. Italics in original). Eventually, she concludes that trees are trying to get their attention (Powers 2018, 395) and the paradox is that it seems easier to listen to them rather than seeing them: “No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible” (Powers 2018, 423. Italics in original). On more than one occasion, Powers affirms that our incapacity to see makes us a “plant-blind” species and not only because we cannot tell one kind from another, but also because we tend to miss the great complexity of entire biomes. Also trees, as other nonhuman creatures, have agency, personhood, and purpose that humans tend to deny: “You and I, the mighty oak, the humble lichen and the beetle that live on the oak, are all related—we all share a common ancestor”: so state Richard Dawkins and Yan Wong (2004) in The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, which traces the story of life on earth as a series of interlocking biographies of specific species. So, when Vietnam veteran Douglas falls from the sky and thinks “I’m dead” (Powers 2018, 83. Italics in original), he hears a voice near his face that corrects him: “No. Tree saved your life” and a great truth comes over him, while listening to the snarl of saws and feller bunchers, somewhere in the distance: “Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible” (Powers 2018, 89. Italics in original). In Powers’ story, hoarder and phycologist Adam Appich offers the best contribution to the process of “unblinding.” Convinced of the deep illness of humankind, he wants to understand how people can “come to independent moral decision that run counter to their tribe’s beliefs” (Powers 2018, 236). Years later, he would become an academic whose expertise is “the confirmation bias,” the selective modality of our thought according to which we tend to believe or accept as true only information that is consistent with our personal beliefs or sentiments. As a consequence, we have an immediate exclusion of all those data that are in contradiction to our crystallized ideas or theories. In one of the final scenes in the book, while in the company of environmental activists gathered around a campfire, Adam argues that “[t]he best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story” (Powers 2018, 336, 488), and it may even

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be written on the bark of a beech as Patricia learns from her father: “if you see a trunk carved full of letters, it’s a beech that becomes the word book, in language after language.” As a matter of fact, beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters and will continue telling stories even (or especially) after humans will be extinct. In the meantime, we should keep listening to their voices: “The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear” (Powers 2018, 4. Italics in original). TIMESCAPES, DENDROCHRONOLOGY, AND MEMORY “The redwoods do strange things. They hum” (Powers 2018, 254). But if the forest is full of sounds, also time makes noises. It is again Roland Barthes who claims so in his Camera Lucida: “For me the noise of time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches—and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood” (Barthes 1999, 15). Yet, when the camera can only take snapshots of crystallized anthropocentric presents and pasts, or, in other words, if the archive is exclusively human, then it proves to offer an inadequate short-term sight, illsuited to record and reflect the whole index of voices and cultural memories of the Anthropocene. Because this era is itself a kind of “prospective archeology” (Mertens and Craps, 2018, 135), to be recognized as a geological stratum it requires that humans be extinct or, at least, that the human industrial time and lifestyle have come to an end. If we can concede that a time when humans no longer exist is behind the corner, are we also able “to imagine ourselves as if viewed from a position beyond the humanly inscribed archive?” (Colebrook 2014). If so, we also need to acknowledge a time beyond the human which necessarily raises more questions: “is the ethics of human time simply concerned with how ‘we’ manage the planet for future human generations, or is there some debt to time beyond the human?” (Ibid.). Indeed, the Anthropocene demands new ways of thinking about the different dimensions of time: pasts, presents and futures need to be seen through new lenses that would eventually destabilize our common idea that “moments follow after each other like beads knotted on a string” (Wenzel 2017, 6). “What is time?” we read toward the end of Richard Powers’ novel: “People have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its

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being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died” (Powers 2018, 358). The Overstory, then, is—among many other things—a novel about the multiple ways of recording multiple times. Dendrochronology, the science of studying time by way of trees, is “a postmortem practice encircled by beginnings and endings” (Murphy 2018. Italics added): in order for humans to read the stories registered in trees’ trunks, trees need to be chopped. In this sense, they also function as doomsday clocks, and to remind us of the interlacings of time and death Richard Powers uses small images of tree cross-sections to separate chapters or segments in the book. Moreover, it is worth noticing that the human story of the novel starts with a very specific temporal information that the reader cannot ignore: “Now is the time of chestnuts” (Powers 2018, 5). From there—should we call it “Richard Powers’ Stammappe?”—the book grows like a tree and we soon realize that it cannot evolve and be concluded within one character’s life-time: we need different generations of human characters and a long literary form to tell their stories through a narrative technique that, as stated above, Richard Powers calls “remembering forward.” Rick Crownshaw has defined it “speculative memory,” as a way to envision “a more fully realized Anthropocene in nearfuture scenarios” (Crownshaw 2017, 4). This also implies that to talk about time and memory means to talk about different forms of remembrance, ask which “Anthropocene” is remembered, and consider the positionality of who is remembering (Crownshaw 2017, 5) as the uneven distribution of a future that is already here requires alternative ways of configuring and rationalizing time. As Richard Powers insinuates: “Acquiring tree consciousness, a precondition for learning how to live here on Earth, means learning what things grow and thrive here, independently of us. Wendell Berry suggests in his poem, ‘In A Country Once Forested,’ the soil remembers, even under the concrete” (Brady 2018).9 At the end of the novel, Ray Brinkman, the intellectual-property lawyer who wonders whether trees can have legal rights, is stuck in bed after a stroke. He himself gradually transforms into a tree and his apparent passive environmental activism consists in a gesture meant to let nature renew itself without human intervention. Together with his wife Dorothy, he comes to the conclusion that nature has been reduced to an artificial manicured landscape and they consequently decide to restore a sort of wilderness in their backyard: “Wealth needs fences. But fences need wood. Nothing left on the continent even hints of at what has gone. All replaced now, by thousands of miles of continuous backyards and farms with thin lines of second growth between them. Still, the soil remembers, for a little while longer, the vanished woods and the progress that unmade them. And the soil’s memory feeds their backyard pine” (Powers 2018, 422. Italics in original). The soil remembers; we, humans, do not. And so we let loggers cut the trees,

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and by cutting the trees also delete millennia of memories; they do not know that some of them were around before Jesus was born (Powers 2018, 164); nor do they care to squelch life itself, that indeed “has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory” (Powers 2018, 453, 482). Finally, our species’ failure to conceive and experience time is also reflected in the various technologies that humans have invented to facilitate the process of recording: writing, photography, and cinema, for instance. Powers hints that even these tools seem to have exacerbated the already short time span of our attention: arboreal time and plants’ memory are foreign concepts to us. However, at the same time, he cannot dodge the sophistications of certain technical devices (videogames included) that might instead contribute to shape our visualization of the changes that take place “at the speed of trees” (Powers 2018, 498). Our incapacity to see trees and conceive other temporal forms is well explained in a sort of parable by Neeley, the genius engineer of the Silicon Valley, who remembers his favorite science fiction story about some aliens who land on earth but cannot be seen by humans as “they operate on a different scale of time. They zip around so fast that human seconds seem to them as tree years seem to humans” (Powers 2018, 487). The anthropogenic acceleration of the slow processes of climate change and extinction makes this time “deadly” as it is too rapid for all other living creatures to adapt. If there is any hope of human survival, the writer states in an interview (Brady 2018), we may find it in younger generations teaching us to see the scales of time our “ancestors” operate in. “It could be the eternal project of mankind, to learn what forests have figured out” (Powers 2018, 285).

NOTES 1. This genetic interdependence of humans and trees is expressed, almost with these very words, by Patricia Westerford, possibly the most compelling character in The Overstory, a forestry scholar who proves how trees communicate, have their own agency, and take care of each other, a radical position that will cost her an academic career. Later on, Patricia will publish her PhD dissertation with the title The Secret Forest, whose opening reads: “You and the tree in your backyard come from a common ancestor. A billion and a half years ago, the two of you parted ways. But even now, after an immense journey in separate directions, that tree and you still share a quarter of your genes” (Powers 2018, 132). 2. I am here referring to the “question of the animal” that starting with Peter Singer’s condemnation of the human “tyranny” of animal oppression (“speciesism”) and his call for animal rights in 1975, has now gathered a wide array of acolytes, such as Giorgio Agamben (2003), Jacques Derrida (2008), Donna Haraway (2007) and Cary Wolfe (2003) just to name a few. Similarly, a “plant question” is being explored by eminent scholars all over the world (cfr. Monica Gagliano, Stefano Mancuso, Michael Marder,

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John Charles Ryan, Patrícia Vieira), whose efforts are meant to engage humans with the “plantness” (Darley 1990) of the vegetal world. Richard Powers’ novel, however, specifically concentrates on trees, which is the real originality of this work of fiction. On the theme of trees and among Power’s real sources, see Colin Tudge’s The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter (2006) and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2016). 3. Of his 30,000 negatives, only 300 survived, along with his personal notes. A selection of sixty plates for his first publication, Antlitz der Zeit (Face of Our Time, 1929), was seized and destroyed in 1936, while his entire collection would eventually perish in 1944 in Cologne, burned in a fire. 4. In his article “Reading August Sander’s Archive” (2000), Andy Jones explains that this was the publisher’s advertisement for Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (1929), later reprinted in Face of Our Time (1994), which is also the title of the fourth chapter of Powers’ first novel. 5. The strategies carried out by Powers’ fictional characters are the same of the real-life group Earth First! and echo the ecoterrorist actions of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, who were involved in the explosion of a bomb and eventually released because of lack of evidence against them. 6. A very similar circumstance can be found in Smoke (1995), a movie written and directed by Wayne Wong and Paul Auster. Here Auggie Wren, the main character and owner of a cigar shop, takes a picture from the same New York street corner every morning at the same time. 7. Time-lapse photography, often connected to data collection and analysis, has proven to be of great communicative and scientific value for the visualization of usurpation and destruction of different ecosystems. If in the past works by photographers such as Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins were of invaluable effect in shaping the American imagery and fostering a sense of protection of the natural world (Fargione 2016); nowadays, works such as Extreme Ice Survey founded in 2007 by James Balog (whose network of time-lapse cameras have recorded the fast pace of glaciers receding) and The Deforestation of the Amazon by NASA (illustrating how massive logging have provoked serious environmental impacts, soil erosion, and biodiversity loss) have given visual evidence of aggressive anthropogenic changes in landscapes over time. 8. Quite interestingly, Extinction Rebellion claims to be structured as a decentralized, self-organizing network whose inspirational model is holicracy. Marco Bertaglia, the first to import XR in Italy, uses the metaphor of the plant to explain it: each part of this living organism has a specific task, but they all interact with each other (Turquet 2019). 9. The young woodland /remembers the old, a dreamer /dreaming /of an old holy book, /an old set of instructions, /and the soil under the grass /is dreaming of a young forest, /and under the pavement the /soil is dreaming of grass (Berry 2006, 4).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barthes, Roland. 1999 (1980). Camera Lucida. New York: Hill & Wang Publications.

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Berry, Wendell. 2006. (2005). Given. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint. Brady, Emily. “Richard Powers: Writing ‘The Overstory’ Literally Changed My Life.” Chicago Review of Books. April 18, 2018, accessed July 20, 2020. https​:/​/ch​​ irevi​​ewofb​​ooks.​​com​/2​​018​/0​​4​/18/​​overs​​tory-​​richa​​rd​-po​​wer​s-​​inter​​view/​. Colebrook, Claire. 2014a. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2014b. “The Anthropocene and the Archive.” The Memory Network. January 27, 2014, accessed July 20, 2020. http:​/​/the​​memor​​ynetw​​ork​.c​​om​ /bl​​og​/20​​14​/01​​/27​/t​​he​-an​​throp​​ocene​​-an​d-​​the​-a​​rchiv​​e/. Crownshaw, Rick. 2017. “Speculative remembrance in the Anthropocene.” In “Memory studies and the Anthropocene: A roundtable.” Memory Studies, 11.4: 3–5. Darley, Marshall W. 1990. “The Essence of ‘Plantness.’” The American Biology Teacher 52.6: 354–357. Dawkins, Richard and Yan Wong. 2016. (2004). The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Edwards, Steve. 1990. “The Machine’s Dialogue.” Oxford Art Journal, 13.1: 63–76. Fargione, Daniela. 2016. “Oltre l’antropocentrismo: il sublime ecologico nel contesto anglo-americano.” CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism. 8: 113–127. Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Hamner, Everett. “Here’s to Unsuicide: An Interview with Richard Powers.” LA Review of Books, April 7, 2018. Accessed July 13, 2020, https​:/​/la​​revie​​wofbo​​oks​.o​​ rg​/ar​​ticle​​/here​​s​-to-​​unsui​​cide-​​an​-in​​tervi​​ew​-wi​​th​​-ri​​chard​​-powe​​rs/. Ickstadt, Heinz. 2010. “History, Narration, and the Frozen Moment of Photography in Richard Powers’ Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.” In Exposed Memories. Family Pictures in Private and Collective Memory, edited by Zsófia Bán and Hedvig Turai, 55–66. AICA: International Association of Art Critics: Hungarian Section: Distributed by Central European University Press. Jones, Andy. 2000. “Reading August Sander’s Archive.” Oxford Art Journal, 23.1: 3–21. Knights, Sam. 2019. Introduction: “The Story so Far.” In This Is Not a Drill: The Extinction Rebellion Handbook, edited by The Extinction Rebellion, 9–13. London: Penguin. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Mertens, Mahlu and Stef Craps. 2018. “Contemporary Fiction vs. the Challenge of Imagining the Timescale of Climate Change.” Studies in the Novel, 50.1: 134–153. Morrow, Bradford and Richard Powers. “A Dialogue.” Conjunctions, 34, accessed July 13, 2020, http:​/​/www​​.conj​​uncti​​ons​.c​​om​/pr​​int​/a​​rticl​​e​/bra​​dford​​​-morr​​ow​-c3​​4. Mudie, Ella. “Beyond Mourning: On Photography and Extinction.” Afterimage (2016) 44.3: 22–27. Accessed July 20, 2020. https://doi​.org​/10​.1525​/aft​.2016​.44​ .3​.22.

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Murphy, Benjamin. 2018. “Tree Time and Mortality in the Eyes of Alfred Hitchcock, Richard Powers, and Ursula K. Le Guin.” The Millions, October 16, 2018, accessed July 20, 2020. https​:/​/th​​emill​​ions.​​com​/2​​018​/1​​0​/alf​​red​-h​​itchc​​ock​-r​​ichar​​d​-pow​​ers​-a​​ nd​-ur​​sula-​​k​-le-​​guin-​​on​-cl​​imate​​-ch​an​​ge​-an​​d​-nar​​rativ​​e​.htm​​l. Powers, Richard. 2001 (1985). Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. New York: Harper Perennial. Powers, Richard. 2018a. The Overstory. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Powers, Richard. 2018b. “Richard Powers on The Overstory” Shakespeare and Co., Paris. October 1, 2018, accessed July 15, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​ v​=1JF​​​oiOn0​​XkI. Powers, Richard. 2019. “By the Book: Richard Powers,” The New York Times, March 28, 2019, accessed July 13, 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​019​/0​​3​/28/​​books​​/ revi​​ew​/by​​-the-​​book-​​richa​​​rd​-po​​wers.​​html. Stamelman, Richard H. 1990. Lost Beyond Telling: Representation of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. TAFC (The American Chestnut Foundation). “The American Chestnut,” n.d., accessed July 20, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.acf​​.org/​​the​-a​​meric​​an​-ch​​estnu​​t​/his​​tory-​​ameri​​ c​an​-c​​hestn​​ut/. Turquet, Olivier. 2019. “Marco Bertaglia: Extinction Rebellion vuole una rivoluzione colorata, collettiva, di amore per la nostra terra,” pressenza, October 2, 2019, accessed July 20, 2020. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pre​​ssenz​​a​.com​​/it​/2​​019​/1​​0​/mar​​co​-be​​rtagl​​ia​-ex​​ tinct​​​ion​-r​​ebell​​ion/. Zylinska, Joanna. 2018. “Photography after Extinction.” In After Extinction, edited by Richard Grusin, 51–70. Wenzel, Jennifer. 2017. “Past’s futures, future’s pasts.” In “Memory studies and the Anthropocene: A roundtable.” Memory Studies, 11.4: 5–7.

Chapter 18

Family Trees Mnemonics, Genealogy, Identity, and Cultural Memory Eva-Sabine Zehelein

When in 2018, Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts released a five-minute video in which she talked about her biography and heritage, she hoped to end a tedious and overall unproductive debate. Over the years, she had frequently mentioned that, according to family lore, she is descended from Native Americans, from the Cherokee tribes.1 This claim to that specific heritage and her right of belonging to a minority had ever since 2012, when she ran for the Massachusetts Senate, provided her political opponents with a weak spot to prod to impair both her personal as well as political credibility (Cillizza 2018). Had she used this self-identification for university and job applications as a minority (hire) and boosted (Harvard’s) diversity numbers? (The answer to the former seems to be no,2 the answer to the latter, yes3). And wasn’t this a very cheap move to appropriate cultural pedigree of a—not necessarily unproblematic—kind?4 Since Warren had never delivered any proof, President Trump repeatedly called her “Pocahontas” or “Fake Pocahontas,” and finally challenged her: in July 2019, he offered her campaign $1 million for a charity organization if she did a DNA test. And Warren took up the greasy gauntlet. And she released the five-minute video about it. None of the—disastrous—effects were surprising: commentators chided her for having yielded to Trump’s primitive provocation; Native Americans protested that cultural belonging or tribal citizenship had nothing to do with DNA tests; the explanatory power of the test itself, done by Carlos Bustamante at Stanford, was called into question since the finding that there is “a Native American in her family tree somewhere between 6 and 10 generations ago” simply puts the American Indian share of her DNA “within a range of 1.5

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percent and 0.09 percent—just like millions of other white Americans” (Jacoby 2018; Scher 2019). And, by the way, Trump never settled his debt. This story about Warren’s “Native American problem” (Cillizza 2018) reminded many of a previous debate involving politicians and their personal lineage—perhaps most prominently the endless debate about Michelle and Barack Obama’s heritage and roots. Senator Obama confronted the topic head on in his “race speech” during the 2008 presidential campaign when he described himself as “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. . . . I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners, an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters” (Obama 2008). Here, though, practices of racial othering and the concomitant controversy about his citizenship did not end. For instance, it took one of the most prominent voices of the citizenship conspiracy proponents, Donald Trump, until September 2016, when he had finally emerged as Republican presidential candidate, to publicly acknowledge that “President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period” (Pramuk 2016). The racialized debate about family lineage and “purity” on a national level also flared up in Great Britain once the American actress of Suits fame, Meghan Markle, was officially announced as Prince Harry’s fiancée in November 2017. Investigations into and debates about Meghan’s family tree led Markle to publicly embrace her multiracial identity5 and flushed racist remarks to the surface.6 These three narrative nuggets connect straight back to a number of racist tropes such as the “one drop-rule” of the nineteenth century, as well as to unfortunate misunderstandings of affirmative action and diversity politics today. To put genetics and “blood lines” at the center of both, self-identification and racialized taxonomies, for matters of social ex- and inclusion and individual as well as collective narrative formation loomed large in these highly mediated stories about “mixed race” identifications. And they might serve to illustrate that genealogical matters crystallize questions of personal and collective identity, of belonging, of nationality, and of race and ethnicity. This paper, however, is not interested in tracing the genealogy of genealogy, so to speak (Weil 2013), or in defining the national “genealogical imagination” (Tyler 2005). Rather, it sets out to think about a specific aspect of genealogy, one of its most prominent practical tools and visual effects, namely the family tree. Family trees are rooted in, draw from, and are constituted through a plethora of discourses and debates from a variety of disciplines. And given the limitations of this article, I can only venture along a limited number of paths, taking necessary turns at occasional nodes or intersections/bifurcations, and leaving aside many a fruit(ful) aspect and promising branch of discussion. I employ a transdisciplinary approach, drawing primarily on cultural and feminist studies, anthropology and sociology

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(genealogy and family sociology/new kinship studies), as well as biology (genetics) and geography. First, I aim to sketch why and how deeply rooted and invested family trees are in genetic and biological essentialism in many Western cultures, to illustrate discourses about individual as well as collective identities and memories, about belonging, race, ethnicity, and nation. Second, my contribution calls for a re-drawing of family trees based on a re-thinking of family and kinship along different lines of belonging, especially when it comes to new families. Third, it employs the small and limited example of the family tree to show that the age-old anthropological distinction between “biological” and “social” kinship, always problematic, finds a space of rapprochement in new family trees which are not After Kinship, as Janet Carsten provocatively titled (Carsten 2004), but right in the middle of today’s lived family lives and realities. FROM THE DESIRE TO KNOW AND THE NECESSITY TO TELL What distinguishes trees, together with shrubs and vines, from all other plants is that they have woody, perennial stems (Kuhns no date). Trees have roots, usually one stem, and most of them produce secondary limbs (branches), which carry leaves or needles, and are either deciduous or evergreen. The tree is an iconographic motif and visual archetype par excellence. Symbolizing fertility, growth, decay, rebirth it has been employed by numerous cultures and religions for many centuries to picture complex information and establish an ontological order—from, say, sacred trees such as the Tree of Life (Lima 2013, 16–19) via family trees (Tree of Jesse, consanguinity trees), visualizations of domains of science (Roman Llull’s Arbor Scientiae, 1296) and evolution (Charles Darwin’s “Tree of Life,” 1859) (Ragan 2009, no pag.; Gontier 2011, 515–38; 536f.), to twenty-first-century abstract nodelink diagrams charting the genesis of literary history (Moretti 2005), and then “treemaps” and further forms of space-filling techniques in the fields of statistics and computer science (Shneiderman in Lima 2013, 145ff.). The Tree of Jesse, the iconographic depiction of Jesus’ ancestors, drawing on Matthew and Luke, was the “root” (pun intended) of family tree history. Since the eleventh century and since Medieval times, the tree had been drawn to visualize and map complex kinship knowledge. It was used by aristocracy and nobility to illustrate and prove lines of descent and family belonging established via marriage and blood, to confirm titles to property and land, prepare arranged marriages, cement worldly power, as well as social status. With the rise of the bourgeoisie and the expansion of democratic societies, family trees—together with heraldic seals, emblems, coats

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of arms, but also painted family portraits and gravestones—were gradually democratized (Weil 2013, chapter 2 and 3). Everyone could now draw a family tree, acquire a narrative of ancestry and descent, of lineage and belonging. For (former) slaves, the possibility to prove who their family was and who belonged to whom was of essence to try and win freedom and rights, to keep or pull together families fractured through the system of slavery, to celebrate difference (Weil 2013, 140), as well as to then claim their place in the national (genealogical) narrative (Weil 2013, 198). As of the late nineteenth century, many Americans, for example, of “German, Huguenot, Scotch, Swedish, Irish, and even German Jewish origin . . . all used genealogy to attempt to counterbalance what they perceived as the undue weight of Anglo-Saxonism in the United States” (Weil 2013, 135). A century later, genealogy “had become family history. Americans were not looking for a narrow, exclusive status any longer. Rather, they wanted to link their lives broadly to those of relatives in previous generations to connect with the past and to make the past part of the present. They emphasized identity, not pedigree. Every American family was now entitled to its history and its sense of a collective ancestry” (Weil 2013, 198). Today, ancestry sites, genealogical societies and communities, and (digitalized) genealogical archives enable every one of us to embark on a journey of discovery to satisfy a desire to know and a necessity to tell. The concept of a tree itself is not phylogenetic, but a man-made taxonomy. And so are family trees. A family tree is a social construction deeply rooted in discourses about ancestry, belonging, ethnicity, and descent, of relatedness as a concept, but also of genetics as a master text. It is part of genealogical practices, aiming to create, define, and embed individual as well as collective identities. One might conceptualize it as a schematic epistemological template or diagram which draws on notions of organisms and their growth or evolution, and thus forms an organic semiotic system and mnemonic device. Nature and culture, the biological and the social, merge in one icon. The aim has always been to order and chart, to represent and remember forms of belonging along maternal or paternal lines of kinship. A traditional family tree functions to performatively establish and testify to transgenerational lineage on the basis of sex, procreation, marriage, and biological as well as genetic essentialism7 in dendritic form—“blood lines” are the branches of the tree. This genetic/“blood” bond thus essentializes blood and genes. Phrases and idioms such as “blood ties,” “blood brothers,” or “blood is thicker than water” testify to the long tradition of this metaphor (Meyer 2005; also Johnson 2013). Blood (and genes) become powerful symbols and narrative tropes to literally naturalize lines of descent, of belonging, and of non-belonging. They are also the basis for constructions of race and powerful and wide-ranging

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discourses about racial hierarchies and differences (Sweet 2005; Nash 2002; Sollers 1997). Whereas today we understand identity as flexible, adaptable, and constantly under (re-/de-)construction, genealogy seems to suggest that identity is something to be discovered, unearthed, or pieced together, in order for us to become “whole” (www​.ancestry​.com). Genealogy is, with Smith and Watson (2001), a creative act of self-life writing in a present that draws from the past and employs practices of (re-)memory, as conceptualized by Marianne Hirsch (1997). People construct narratives about themselves in time and as parts of a deep and broad narrative, which provides markers of belonging and togetherness (Giddens 1991; Nash 2005). The contemporaneity of genealogy and its situatedness in the present necessitates the construction of a larger framework drawing on historical archives, biological data, and cultural repertoires to situate a unique self in a present with roots in a larger communal historical context of belonging. Belonging is culturally conditioned and part of a rhetoric of kinship, which leads to a practice of kinship that mixes biological as well as social/cultural imaginaries. And it has always been established through various narratives: oral history and memories, as well as through supporting archives—documents such as marriage, birth, and death certificates. We make sense, then, because we are part of this larger transgenerational organism. We are because all those other people were and have been. And what we are and where we are on the socio-historical trajectory is at least in part determined and passed down to us from the previous generations and their decisions when and with whom to procreate and continue the family lineage (Nicolson 2016). Thus, to build a family tree caters to an inbred desire to know who I am on the basis of “where I come from,” and my identity and personal self can become, once my story can be and has been told. To learn (more) about an eighteenth-century great-great-great-grandmother, what she did, where, and how she lived, allegedly helps me better understand my twenty-first-century self and contributes to me being “complete” or “whole,” because my family story “emerges” (www​.ancestry​.com). All genealogical stories seem to claim a certain “truth factor”—documents and genetics establish factuality and authentification to the narrative construction. Yet just as with all other narratives and diagrams, family trees say at least as much about the past they aim to chart, than about the present in which they are created, and about their respective creators (and they also potentially influence the future—how will I deal with the information I have received?). And then, family trees and genealogies can indeed be manipulated, they can deliberately ex- or include members. Depending on the agenda of the creator of the family tree, a family “liability,” a “bastard,” or a criminal may be “forgotten,” a family branch pruned out, or, intending to increase genealogical

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capital and family status, a line may be drawn to a famous person one desires to be related to—Hugo Chavez claims he is descended from the Aztec emperor Montezuma (Suarez no date), Matthew and Luke claim that Jesus is descended from David and Abraham (Matthew 1:6), or even from Adam and God (Luke 3:23–38). Genealogical narrative techniques such as stretching the lines of descent as far into the past and over as many generations as possible, cutting, pasting, and interweaving of ancestors and narrative lines to prove either a “purity” of descent or a multilinear and complex heritage (Tiger Woods calls himself “Cablinasian”8), might all be employed to shape the story according to the desired or envisioned necessary final narrative. They can also, as the examples of Elizabeth Warren, the Obamas, Meghan Markle and, say, Hillary Clinton9 illustrate, serve political purposes, and shape, as well as be shaped by, the “imagined communities” à la Benedict Anderson,10 the collective national imaginary. FROM THE DESIRE TO TELL AND THE NECESSITY TO KNOW Today, the interest in genealogy has reached an unprecedented level, making it—maybe—“the second most popular hobby in the U.S. after gardening, and the second most visited category of website, after pornography” (Rodriguez 2014). Four factors might have been key for this current popularity: the digitalization of many archives and historical sources, which makes them easily accessible to many and from everywhere, the availability of relatively cheap DNA testing on the basis of a simple cheek swipe with a Q-tip, the desire to tell the world about you and your genealogical discoveries, as well as the necessity to know. Paternity tests are one (in)famous example. DNA tests are accepted proof to establish a child’s belonging to a man, and thus legal rights for both, as well as obligations for the man/father toward the child. Another example is DNA tests aiming to establish blood relationships and satisfying the desire to draw an arbor consanguinitatis on the basis of genetics. The democratization of genealogy has led to blossoming industries catering to a high demand for “recreational genomics” (Felzmann 2015) to foster and support self-identity projects. A plethora of ancestry sites (e.g., Ancestry​.co​m, FamilySearch, 23andMe, MyHeritageDNA and Family Tree DNA), and TV shows (e.g., the highly successful Who Do You Think You Are? or African American Lives and Faces of America) cash in on this desire to talk about one’s private past, to establish links on the basis of genetic ancestry testing and shared DNA which the narratives and family memories and mementos have not been able to provide.

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This can be very helpful, and you may discover that your family is directly linked via so and so many generations to Napoleon Bonaparte, or to Abraham Lincoln. Yet, it can also be a more or less serious blow to yourself and ego— Oprah Winfrey had to confront that, contrary to family lore, she has no Zulu origins (Yang 2007). And to add many previously unknown people to your family might also have disorienting and destabilizing effects. As Deborah Cohen has shown in Family Secrets (2013), secrets and privacy “share a common past” (3). Within Victorian families, secrets “were a strategy of defense and protection, a means of guarding a black sheep as well as the family’s reputation. . . . The family was supposed to be transparent within . . . and opaque from without” (4); keeping its secrets in the privacy of the home. Yet today, social mores have changed, and privacy “is a hallowed right, while secrets are perceived as damaging” (3) and thus the public revelation of ancestral secrets, for example, in TV shows, is today framed as a positive and necessary way to know one’s self better (2). “Finding family secrets is no longer the embarrassing by-product of a genealogical investigation; it is the reward” (258) and “privacy is not the ability to hide but the right to tell without cost” (268). The desire and assumed right to tell without cost, the wish to dig for family stories and exhume secrets, also involve genetic testing as a form of authentification. Genes are taken as scientific proof to reveal a “truth,” and allegedly lead to the discovery of a “truer self” that shares certain character or personality traits with the genetic ancestors. This speaks to an understanding of family-based exclusively on genetic ties, and of DNA as a major factor in determining who you are. The gene “has become a powerful and pervasive icon—an almost magical force—with social meaning that is independent of its biological properties . . . genetics has become a window on human nature, a cultural narrative, a science with social and figural significance” (Anker and Nelkin 2004, 1). Kinship based on genetics thus elevates the gene in an unprecedented and problematic way to the role of Rosetta Stone. This is problematic for one because these genetic tests are not without their tricky aspects as Young, for example, has shown: it is difficult “to identify unique markers that definitely identify someone as a member of a given racial or ethnic group” (34); all testing companies can only draw on the respective samples and data they have accumulated, and thus all databases are different, which by necessity draws doubts on any representativeness of reference materials (35). And finally, it is difficult to determine ancestry by comparing DNA with a reference database consisting of contemporary people (36). Conceptualizations of kinship based on genetics are also problematic, because they reduce the human being to a molecular text, determined by a “code script,” as Erwin Schrödinger in his canonical work What Is Life? (1967) called the gene, which (just) needs decoding, a “secret of life” that

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can be comprehended fully once the combinations of GCAT (the four nucleic acids of which DNA consists) have been decrypted. According to this frame, genes are the gateway to understanding the essence of the self, as well as of her fate. If the body is “readable,” the body becomes controllable and perfectable, and this challenges the nature of personhood.11 An (in)famous past example with ongoing reverberations is the eugenics movement, in the context of which the family tree was “both the research and propaganda methodology”; it tracked “the history of talented families, defective families, racially hybrid families, or of leprous, tubercular, epileptic, criminal, and alcoholic families,” and was thus also used to illustrate dysgenic developments (Bashford and Levine, eds 2010, 10; Aspinall 2018, 12). For the eugenics movement, race was transmitted genetically and biologically, and bore a “language of fractions”—terms such as “full blood,” “pure blood,” “halfbreed,” “mulatto,” “octoroon,” and “hybrid” entered the lexicon (Aspinall 2018, 9). Phenotypical characteristics were added as visible racial markers, such as skin color, as well as a plethora of cultural stereotypes ascribed to black people, such as moral degradation and promiscuity, to naturalize and normalize racist concepts (Aspinall 2018, 11). Today, a major selling pitch for DNA ancestry tests is the detection of potential (future) health risks, such as diabetes or coronary heart diseases, and genetically inheritable diseases, such as Huntington’s disease, Marfan, Klinefelter, and Turner syndrome. AncestryHealth, for instance, advertises its service like this: “This new DNA experience empowers you to make better, ongoing choices for you and your family’s health, for generations to come.” “Your genes aren’t just about you—they’re something you share with the people closest to you. Uncovering potential health issues early can help empower you with information, so you and your family can move toward a healthier future.” Underneath the surface of the “necessity to know” rhetoric lurk highly problematic conceptions of health, blatant genetic essentialism, as well as notions of new eugenics and the perfectibility of man. This site draws heavily on genes as the Rosetta Stone and panacea for understanding who we are, down to the molecular GCAT level, and the ticket to a “healthier” life for myself and my offspring which I have a duty to buy. In his by now-canonical work on The Politics of Life Itself (2007), Nikolas Rose had pointed out the increasing medicalization and pathologization of the human body, the commodification and tradability of body parts, down to the sequencing and selling of the human genome, as well as the idea of the duty to perfect mankind. It must suffice for the given context to join Anker and Nelkin in their diagnosis that “genetics has become a spectacle, a new mythology, even a theology. A source of power and progress, the helix has a ‘double edge’” (Anker and Nelkin 2004, 194).

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FROM THE RIGHT TO BELONG AND THE NECESSITY TO KNOW Already in 1997, Donna Haraway complained: “I am sick to death of bonding through kinship and ‘the family,’ and I long for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality, and persistent hope. . . . Ties through blood—including blood recast in the coin of genes and information—have been bloody enough already” (Haraway 1997, 265). And ever since, new kinship studies have chipped away at the deeply ingrained notion that kinship is synonymous with nuclear family structures. Franklin and McKinnon (2001, 1–44) as well as Carsten (2000) have popularized the term “cultures of relatedness” to break open kinship as well as genealogy for other possibilities and practices, discarding genetic essentialism and biological determinism. Since biblical times and beyond, the lived realities of families have always been in flux and changing. Today, too, many and ever more families are founded through and grow via other means than heteronormative sexual togetherness. Families with adopted family members or children welcomed to families through assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) re-tell the family tree narrative. Roots as defined via genetics can only establish “Half of the Family Tree” (D’Orazio 2006). Already in 2006, D’Orazio argued for the right of every donor-conceived child to know its full genetic history, also for medical reasons (genetically inheritable diseases). Today, there is a general consensus, in some countries also manifested by law, that everybody has a right to know her parents and family history. However, the deeply entrenched notion that kinship and belonging are first and foremost and strongly established via “blood” and genetic descent has dominated many research projects and scholarly literature on genealogy. Instead of questioning this social construct, it is reaffirmed and employed as the fundamental tenet of thinking about families, kinship, genealogy, and thus also about family trees. With a very refreshing new approach, Elizabeth Povinelli has suggested to distinguish between the “twins” genealogical and intimacy grid, which are intertwined and interwoven. Genealogical grids are those of lineage and family belonging on the basis of heterosexual sexuality (often within the institution of marriage), procreation, and generational descent. “The European heterosexual family became more explicitly theorized and politically elaborated as the core institution of the nation-state even while the genealogical surface of that family was being diversified” (Povinelli 2002, 215–238; 225– 226). These grids are in general the only acceptable organization patterns for nations to perform their democratic and regulatory duties vis-à-vis kinship— inheritance, marriage, child welfare, capital gains, etcetera (Povinelli 2002,

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218). Intimacy grids, however, are based on and defined by intimate recognition and the right to belong between those individuals involved. “Love makes a family. And laws that stifle the natural connection between love and family by restricting reproductive technologies (with adoption as a legal reproductive technology) are therefore perverse and antidemocratic” (Povinelli 2002, 229). And it is these intimacy grids which need to be explored further as new variations of an old trope, the family tree, representing another equally valid right to belong and necessity to know. FROM THE RIGHT TO KNOW AND THE NECESSITY TO BELONG In the final part of this article, I will discuss two forms of family trees in greater detail. One is from a children’s book, the other from a sociological study. Both employ the family tree to talk about new families in new ways along lines of belonging established not only by genetics, but first and foremost by love and intimacy. For her children’s book Your Family: A Donor Kid’s Story (2018), Wendy Kramer, founder of the Donor Sibling Registry Site and vocal advocate for the rights of donor-conceived children, especially the right to know their donor, has re-framed the image of the family tree. On the title page, all family members are placed as stylized drawn polaroid pictures somewhere, maybe even randomly, within the tree’s foliage—from top to bottom and left to right: Cosmo (the family dog), grandma and grandpa, my donor, my brother, my parents, my cousin, my half siblings. Clearly, this family tree does not follow any genealogical logic and the placement of the individual family members has no overarching ordering principle. The inclusion of a cousin without the respective link via uncle or aunt to the child’s parents, the spatial distance between the donor and “my half siblings” (on the basis of the narrative we can assume they are children conceived by the same donor sperm), as well as that between the grandparents and the parents denies any genetic organizational principle. What both the book’s narrative and cover aim to illustrate is that family is a group of people longing to belong, bound also, yet not exclusively, by genetics, but rather by love: “All families are connected by love. And some are also connected through biology” (no page). The child was “born out of love” and just the same way as all other children, “from a tiny sperm cell and a tiny egg cell” (no page). What distinguishes donor kids is that their parent(s) needed either an egg or sperm donor. And the donor is a generous person who provided the missing cell and is then framed as “a special type of biological parent who is different from the parents who raise you and take care of you” (no page)—he belongs, and can be a member of the family, but

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he is also separate from the parental unit to which the child belongs. On the family tree, he is primo inter pares, and the fundamental principle of all family trees, namely hierarchy, is diffused. Family is not determined by genes alone, it includes the family dog, too. Kramer’s narrative also explains that not all families follow the nuclear family model (one person identifying as a man, one person identifying as a woman, who parent together); there can be gay couples as parents, or single parents (by choice). Kramer thus tries to negotiate on the one hand the necessity of genetic material to have a child and the need to acknowledge fully the genetic bond to the donor, which also means that possibly other children have been conceived with his sperm, and thus, that due to the genetic connection the children might share certain features or traits or predispositions. Yet, at the same time, despite the central role and significance of the donor, family is conceived not in genetic, but in social terms. The family tree serves to illustrate this definition and praxis of kinship. And it remains important as a natural and naturalizing symbol of family lives. Ragan has shown that previous to the tree diagram, network diagrams were being used (e.g., by Donati and Buffon), and that today, too, the trees have been widely supplanted by network diagrams again: “The Network of Life preceded the Tree of Life and might again supersede it.” In their study on donor sibling networks, Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin (2019), Hertz and Nelson, too, talk about networks, yet revert to the family tree to illustrate the family constellations: “This modern rendition of the family tree approximates how donor siblings and donors are located within a broader network” (75). Hertz and Nelson have introduced a radically different and complex family tree register. They have opted for an artistic, beautifully drawn assemblage of trees12 instead of for the linear abstract diagram. This enables them to package more and different information into the visualization of “New Kin.” Since for their study, the horizontal set of connections (that between donor siblings) is at the center of investigation, Hertz and Nelson decided to put one focus on the horizontal level, that is, the “roots,” “ground zero” (Hertz), or rhizome. From the perspective of the respective donor child, they asked how these children might position their donor siblings on a family tree together with the traditional relatives, and where the donor would then be located. The images focus on illustrating the individual family constellations (“trees”) and their connection with and to each other. Two examples shall serve to illustrate their approach. In “Connected Soul Mates” (Hertz and Nelson 2019, 158), four donor siblings with their respective family tree are depicted, three of them closely connected both via the roots (the thicker the roots, the larger the rhizome, the more contact), as well as via the branches. One tree, that of Charlie and his mum, is only marginally connected to the others, via one root, indicating a certain

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distance to the rest of the group. Within the rhizome as well as in the overstory of the trees, the names of the donor children are mentioned. What might at first glance appear as redundancy is a way to emphasize that the siblings are connected on the horizontal level, but also via the overstory and their respective parents. The donor remains on the left sideline, as a dot. He is not relevant for this donor sibling network as such, whereas the image describing “Michael’s Clan” (Hertz and Nelson 2019, 80) shows the donor and his wife at the center. Since it is because of his initiative that some of the children conceived through his sperm have come into contact with each other, he has a very prominent position high in the air between the foliage of the trees. Here, too, the children are connected to each other via the roots, yet there is also in addition an intense connection of the trees’ branches with each other and through the donor. The form Hertz and Nelson have chosen captures the genetic relatedness of the donor siblings, their social bonds with each other, their individual family relationships and situations, the families’ social contacts to each other, as well as the relationships to the donor. It illustrates that donor sibling networks “are created by choice and yet build on connections that are purely genetic in their origin” (Hertz and Nelson 2019, 11). These new family trees pay heed to both, genetic as well as social belongings in new families of choice. And they also show that donor sibling networks open up new possibilities for rich, healthy, and supportive family trees and forests, based on “genes, medical technology and the human desire for affinity and identity” (Hertz and Nelson 2019, 3). KNOWING—TELLING—BELONGING The natural beauty of the tree—its roots, stem, branches, and foliage—have always inspired humans through the centuries to think about structures and connections, dependencies and belonging, growth and time. Buddha attained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree (a large fig tree or banyan tree) (Lima 2013, 23); in the summer of 1666, Isaac Newton grasped gravity when he saw a “Flower of Kent” fall (Keesing no date); and in 1859, Charles Darwin employed the idea of a stem and its branches to explain the theory of universal common descent and evolution—change and adaptation over generations (Darwin 2009). Drawing on nature and sketching a family tree is a performative act of self-inscription into time and space. It creates individual selves as well as collective bodies, it draws on historical archives and (collective) memory work (Halbwachs 1992). What computer scientist Ben Shneiderman has said about his revolutionary invention, the “treemap,” might apply to all tree diagrams. They “are simple, practical, shareable, actionable, and occasionally attractive. But they are also imperfect, solve only some problems,

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and have limitations, so much room remains for future innovation” (Lima 2013, 8). The history of genealogy and family trees in America remains largely unwritten so far. But family trees as mnemonic devices and genealogical tools have always contributed to the national fabric of America as well as to individual constructions of (family) identity. And now, that (digitalized) archives and ancestry search websites are so popular, ever more diversifying forms and sorts of family trees will continue to grow and provide us with additional views on (American) culture and cultural memory. However, the strong focus on genetics, genetic inheritance, and genetic testing, in itself not uncontested in its potential to help us know anything meaningful or reliable about who we are and what connects us to each other and the past generations, will hopefully make space for a much larger and fertile clearing, one in which the families we live every day can draw their own trees of belonging—colorful, unique, part and parcel of the beauty of the silva hominum.13

NOTES 1. Already in a 1984 cookbook, edited by her cousin, titled Pow Wow Chow, she contributed five recipes as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee” (Chabot 2012). 2. “Warren changed her listed ethnicity to Native American in December 1989, nearly three years after she was hired as a white woman by the University of Pennsylvania Law School” (Linskey 2018). 3. “To rebut accusations in 1996 that Harvard’s Law school faculty was insufficiently diverse, a university spokesman identifies Warren and a Native American woman.” The Fordham Law Review described her as “Harvard Law’s ‘first woman of color’” (Jacoby 2018). 4. Cf. Rebecca Nagle (a member of the Cherokee Nation) in Huffington Post: “Like many other white families, Warren’s ancestors replaced the truth of their complicity in Cherokee dispossession with a tale of being Cherokee. If that’s not wrong, if that’s not racist, I don’t know what is” (Nagle 2019). 5. Having an African American mother and a “Caucasian” father of Dutch-Irish descent, who has two children from a previous marriage, her biracial background, marked through her skin color, has always othered her, no matter how hard she has tried to be “more than an ‘other.’” In an interview with Elle in 2015 Markle spoke about her struggle to ‘find the right ethnic box to tick’ (solution: draw your own one) and to learn to present herself “as who you are, not what color your parents happen to be” (Markle 2019). “While my mixed race heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with one foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that” (Markle 2019; see also Gaither and Sims 2019). During the 2019 trip to South Africa with her husband, however, Markle openly identified as woman of color. At Justice Desk, an NGO, she delivered a short message to children

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of a township, saying that she was there “as a mother, as a wife, as a woman, as a woman of color and as your sister” (Ledbetter 2019). 6. Former BBC Radio 5 Live presenter Danny Baker lost his job after he had commented on the birth of Harry’s and Meghan’s son with an image of a couple, holding hands with a chimpanzee dressed in clothes, and a caption: Royal Baby leaves hospital” (Anon 2019). 7. “Genetic essentialism reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral complexity, with their genes” (Nelkin and Lindee 2004, 2). 8. He identifies as having Dutch (Caucasian), Native American (Indian), as well as African American (black) and Thai as well as Chinese (Asian) ancestors (Younge 2010). 9. Clinton, herself a Methodist, talked broadly about her Jewish heritage when running for Senator of New York. Her grandmother’s second husband had been a Russian-born Jew (CBS News 1999). 10. In his by now-canonical study Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson defined the nation as “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). Useful for the given context is here his idea that communities (in his case nations) are characterized by deep horizontal comradeship (7) and they are imagined in the sense that in the minds of all members, who will never be able to all know each other, “each lives the image of their communion” (6). 11. Many scientists have argued fiercely against this reductionism. For example, Keller (2002) or Lewontin (1992). 12. Drawn by Todd Siler, an artist who is deeply invested in metamorphing as “engines of creativity, invention, learning and discovery that power our communications” (www​.toddsilerart​.com​/biography). 13. This is for P and R––always whole, always rooted, hopefully always soaring and flourishing. Thanks go to Rosanna Hertz (Wellesley College) and to my collaborators and friends at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center for their unconditional support.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ancestry. www​.ancestry​.com. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities—Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anker, Suzanne, and Dorothy Nelkin. 2004. The Molecular Gaze. Art in the Genetic Age. Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Anon. 2019. “Danny Baker ‘So, So Sorry’ for Disastrous Tweet.” BBC News, May 10. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bbc​​.com/​​news/​​enter​​tainm​​ent​-a​​rts​-​4​​82262​​47. Accessed November 20, 2019. Aspinall, Peter J. 2018. “How the Use by Eugenicists of Family Trees and Other Genealogical Technologies Informed and Reflected Discourses on Race and Race

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Crossing during the Era of Moral Condemnation: Mixed-Race in 1920s and 1930s Britain.” Genealogy 2(3): 1–15. Bashford, Alison, and Philippa Levine, eds 2010. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carsten, Janet. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CBS News. 1999. “Hillary Has Jewish Roots.” August 6. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cbs​​news.​​com​/ n​​ews​/h​​illar​​y​-has​​-jewi​​​sh​-ro​​ots/. Accessed November 20, 2019. Chabot, Hillary. 2012. “’Pow wow factor’: Elizabeth Warren Touted Native Roots in ’84 Cookbook.” Boston Herald, May 17. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bos​​tonhe​​rald.​​com​/2​​012​ /0​​5​/17/​​pow​-w​​ow​-fa​​ctor-​​eliza​​beth-​​warre​​n​-tou​​ted​-n​​ative​​-r​oot​​s​-in-​​84​-co​​okboo​​k/. Accessed November 20, 2019. Cillizza, Chris. 2018. “Elizabeth Warren Might Have Actually Made Things Worse with Her DNA Gambit.” CNN ThePo!nt, October 17. https​:/​/ed​​ition​​.cnn.​​com​/2​​018​ /1​​0​/16/​​polit​​ics​/e​​lizab​​eth​-w​​arren​​-dona​​ld​-tr​​ump​-p​​​ocaho​​ntas/​​index​​.html. Accessed Novemebr 19, 2020.​ Cohen, Deborah. 2013. Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. D’Orazio, Pino. 2006. “Half of the Family Tree: A Call for Access to a Full Genetic History for Children Born by Artificial Insemination.” Journal of Health & Biomedical Law 2: 249–76. Felzmann, Heike. 2015. “’Just a Bit of Fun’: How Recreational is Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing?” The New Bioethics 21(1): 20–32. Franklin, Sarah, and Susan McKinnon. 2001. “Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies.” In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, edited by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 1–44. Durham: Duke University Press. Gaither, Sarah E. 2015. “’Mixed’ Results: Multiracial Research and Identity Explorations.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24(2): 114–119. Gaither, Sarah E., and Jennifer Sims. 2019. “Examining Meghan Markle and Prince Harry: An African Journey.” Psychology Today, November 18. https​:/​/ww​​w​.psy​​ cholo​​gy​.co​​m​/int​​l​/blo​​g​/dif​​feren​​t​-ide​​ntiti​​es​-di​​ffere​​nt​-pe​​rspec​​tives​​/2019​​11​/ex​​amoni​​ ng​-me​​ghan​-​​markl​​e​-and​​-prin​​ce​-ha​​rry. Accessed Novemebr 20, 2019. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gontier, Nathalie. 2011. “Depicting the Tree of Life: the Philosophical and Historical Roots of Evolutionary Tree Diagrams.” Evolution: Education and Outreach 4(3): 515–538. Halbwachs, Maurice.1942 and 1952. On Collective Memory. Edited, translated and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Haraway, Donna J. 1997. Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleManTM_ Meets_OncoMouseTM: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge.

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Hertz, Rosanna, and Margaret K. Nelson. 2019. Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jacoby, Jeff. 2018. “Elizabeth Warren, typical white person.” Boston Globe, October 16. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bos​​tongl​​obe​.c​​om​/op​​inion​​/2018​​/10​/1​​6​/eli​​zabet​​h​-war​​ren​-t​​ypica​​l​ -whi​​te​-pe​​rson/​​6b3qM​​UGf8i​​​vlOtW​​V1lmQ​​YM​/st​​ory​.h​​tml. Accessed November 20, 2019. Johnson, Christopher H., ed. 2013. Blood and Kinship: Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present. New York: Berghahn. Keesing, Richard. No date. “A Brief History of Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree.” https​:/​ /ww​​w​.yor​​k​.ac.​​uk​/ph​​ysics​​/abou​​t​/new​​to​nsa​​pplet​​ree. Accessed November 20, 2019. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2002. Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors and Machines. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kramer, Wendy. 2018. Your Family: A Donor Kid’s Story. Self-published by the Donor Sibling Registry and Wendy Kramer. Kuhns, Michael. No date. “What is a tree?” Utah State University Forestry Extension. https​:/​/fo​​restr​​y​.usu​​.edu/​​tree-​​ident​​ifica​​tion/​​what-​​​is​-a-​​tree. Accessed November 20, 2019. Ledbetter, Carly. 2019. “Meghan Markle Tells South Africa: I’m Here with You ‘As a Woman of Color and as Your Sister.’” HuffPost, September 23. https​:/​/ww​​ w​.huf​​fpost​​.com/​​entry​​/megh​​an​-ma​​rkle-​​princ​​e​-har​​ry​-so​​uth​-a​​frica​​_n​_5d​​88ba​5​​3e4b0​​ 849d4​​72cb8​​03. Accessed November 20, 2019. Lewontin, Richard C. 1992. Biology as Ideology. The Doctrine of DNA. New York: Harper. Lima, Manuel. 2013. The Book of Trees. Visualizing Branches of Knowledge. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Linskey, Annie. 2018. “Ethnicity Not A Factor in Elizabeth Warren’s Rise in Law.” Boston Globe, September 1. https​:/​/ww​​w​.bos​​tongl​​obe​.c​​om​/ne​​ws​/na​​tion/​​2018/​​ 09​/01​​/did-​​claim​​ing​-n​​ative​​-amer​​ican-​​herit​​age​-a​​ctual​​ly​-he​​lp​-el​​izabe​​th​-wa​​rrern​​ -get-​​ahead​​-but-​​compl​​icate​​d​/w​UZ​​ZcrKK​​EOUv5​​Spnb7​​IO0K/​​story​​.html​. Accessed November 20, 2019. Markle, Meghan. 2015. “I’m More Than an ‘Other.’” Elle. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ell​​e​.com​​/uk​/ l​​ife​-a​​nd​-cu​​lture​​/news​​/a268​​55​/mo​​re​-​th​​an​-an​​-othe​​r/. Accessed November 20, 2019. Meyer, Melissa L. 2005. Thicker Than Water: The Origins of Blood as Symbol and Ritual. New York: Routledge. Moretti, Franco. 2005. Graphs, Maps, Trees. Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso. Nagle, Rebecca. 2019. “Elizabeth Warren Has Spent Her Adult Life Repeating a Lie. I Want Her to Tell the Truth.” Huffington Post, August 23. https​:/​/ww​​w​ .huf​​fpost​​.com/​​entry​​/eliz​​abeth​​-warr​​en​-ch​​eroke​​e​-apo​​logy_​​n​_5d5​​ed7e6​​e​4b0d​​fcbd4​​ 8a1b0​​1. Accessed November 20, 2019. Nash, Catherine. 2002. “Genealogical Identities.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20: 27–52. Nash, Catherine. 2005. “Geographies of Relatedness.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(4): 449–62.

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Nelkin, Dorothy, and M. Susan Lindee. 2004. The DNA Mystique. The Gene as Cultural Icon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nicolson, Paula. 2016. Genealogy, Psychology and Identity: Tales from a Family Tree. London: Routledge. Obama, Barack. 2008. “Senator Barack Obama Addresses Race at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.” Washington Post, March 18. https​:/​/ww​​w​.was​​hingt​​onpos​​ t​.com​​/wp​-d​​yn​/co​​ntent​​/arti​​cle​/2​​008​/0​​3​/18/​​AR200​​80318​​01081​​.html​​?​sid=​​ST200​​ 80318​​01183​. Accessed November 20, 2019. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. “Notes on Gridlock: Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality.” Public Culture 14(1): 215–238. Pramuk, Jacob. 2016. “Trump: President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.” CNBC, September 16. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cnb​​c​.com​​/2016​​/09​/1​​6​/tru​​mp​-pr​​eside​​nt​ -ob​​ama​-w​​as​-bo​​rn​-in​​-the-​​unite​​d​​-sta​​tes​-p​​eriod​​.html​. Accessed November 20, 2019. Ragan, Mark A. 2009. “Trees and Networks before and after Darwin.” Biology Direct 4(43): no page. http:​/​/www​​.biol​​ogy​-d​​irect​​.com/​​conte​​nt​​/4/​​1​/43. Accessed November 20, 2019. Rodriguez, Gregory. 2014. “Roots of genealogy craze: column.” USA Today, May 12. https​:/​/eu​​.usat​​oday.​​com​/s​​tory/​​opini​​on​/20​​14​/05​​/12​/g​​eneal​​ogy​-a​​meric​​ans​-t​​echno​​ logy-​​roots​​-porn​​-webs​​​ites-​​colum​​n​/901​​9409. Accessed November 20, 2019. Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Scher, Bill. 2019. “’Pocahontas’ Could Still Be Elizabeth Warren’s Biggest Vulnerability.” Politico August 27. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pol​​itico​​.com/​​magaz​​ine​/s​​tory/​​ 2019/​​08​/27​​/poca​​honta​​s​-eli​​zabet​​h​-war​​rens-​​bigge​​st​-vu​​​lnera​​bilit​​y​-227​​912. Accessed November 20, 2019. Schrödinger, Erwin. 1944. What Is Life? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Siler, Todd. http://www​.toddsilerart​.com​/biography. Accessed November 20, 2019. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 2001. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sollers, Werner. 1997. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Suarez, Tirso. No date. “Hugo Chavez and Montezuma.” http:​/​/www​​.vcri​​sis​.c​​om​/in​​ dex​.p​​hp​?co​​ntent​​=lett​​ers​​/200605180840. Accessed November 20, 2019. Sweet, Frank W. 2005. Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise and Triumph of the One-Drop Rule. Palm Coast: Backintyme. Tyler, Katharine. 2005. “The Genealogical Imagination: The Inheritance of Interracial Identities.” The Sociological Review 53(3): 476–494. Weil, François. 2013. Family Trees–A History of Genealogy in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Yang, Andrew. 2007. ‘Is Oprah Zulu? Sampling and Seeming Certainty in DNA Ancestry Testing.” CHANCE 20(1): 32–39. Younge, Gary. 2010. “Tiger Woods: Black, white, other.” The Guardian, May 29. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/sp​​ort​/2​​010​/m​​ay​/29​​/tige​​r​-woo​​ds​-​ra​​cial-​​polit​​ics. Accessed November 20, 2019.

Index

Adams, Stephen J., 109 Adams, William M., 227 Aeneas, 22, 23 Aesop, 151 Agamben, Giorgio, 258n2 Agathon, Abba, 88 Ahtila, Eija–Liisa, 214, 225 Aitken, Robert, 209 Ajchenval’d, Julij, 189, 195nn9–10, 198 Alaimo, Stacy, 213, 222 Alecsandri, Vasile, 173 Alegria, Ciro, 171n3 Allen, Steve, 209 Aloi, Giovanni, 215, 225 Aluli–Meyer, Manulani, 48 Amato, Joseph, 64, 66 Amma, Theodora, 88 Anderson, Benedict, 268, 276n10 Angiolillo, Zannino G., 108 Anker, Suzanne, 269, 270, 276 Anyte of Tegea, 76 Apollo, 27, 52, 54, 69, 97, 98, 100, 107n5, 135, 145n1, 154, 155, 197 Apostolescu, Stelian, 185 Appich, Adam, 250, 253, 255 Ariel, 14, 23, 24 Ariosto, 4, 22, 24 Arista, Noelani, 43, 48n3 Aristotle, 32, 136, 137, 147

Arlander, Annette, 12, 13, 211–28 Armour, Ian D., 174, 185 Arnold, David, 171n5 Aronofsky, Darren, xi Artem, Lachin, 84 Aspinall, Peter J., 270, 276 Attis, 52, 100 Auster, Paul, 259n6 Axenciuc, Victor, 174 Bacigalupo, Massimo, 98, 99, 103, 107n9, 108, 109 Backlund, Camilla Johansson, 222 Bacovia, George, 8, 9, 173–86, 184nn5– 6 Baechler, Lea, 109 Baglioni L. 208n6 Balding, 181 Balog, James, 259n7 Bambridge, Tamatoa, 40, 49 Bán, Zsófia, 260 Banks, Joseph, 123 Baracco, Alberto, 7, 135–48 Barack, Obama, 264, 268 Barad, Karen, 2, 16 Bari, Judi, 259n5 Barr, Jessica Marion, 58, 66, 66n5 Barthes, Roland, 14, 248, 251, 256, 259 Baselica, Giulia, 10, 187–99 281

282

Index

Bashford, Alison, 270 Baucis, 29, 33, 52, 100, 104, 105, 107n10, 108n15, 135, 145n2, 154, 156, 159 Baudelaire, Charles, 188, 193 Beaglehole, John Cawte, 42, 48 Beck, Robert Holmes, 152, 160 Beckett, Samuel, 219 Bell, Joshua, 40, 49 Benjamin, Walter, 248 Bennett, Jane, 114, 121, 221, 226 Berger, Brigitte, 185 Berger, John, 248, 253 Berger, Peter L., 176, 179, 183, 185 Berlant, Lauren Gail, 52, 67 Bernard de Clairvaux, 6, 95, 98, 100, 103, 105, 107n2, 108 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 27 Berry, Wendell, 257, 259n9, 260 Bertaglia, Marco, 259n8, 261 Bird, Rose, 64 Blackburn, Tim M., 133 Bladow, Kyle A., 52, 67, 68 Bland Crowder, Ashby, 122 Bonnard, Pierre, 194 Bonwer, Yevgeny, 190, 198 Borgnino, Emanuela, 4, 39–50 Brady, Emily, 257, 258, 260 Braidotti, Rosi, 55, 63, 64, 67, 211, 214, 223, 226 Brink, André, 4, 25, 36 Brinkema, Eugenie, 54, 56, 67 Brits, Baylee, 215, 226 Brjusov, Valerij, 194 Brooke Smith, William, 96, 97 Brosse, Jacques, 97, 98, 100, 102–5, 108n13 Bubandt, Nils, 69 Buber, Martin, 7, 17, 138–40, 147, 148 Buddha, 6, 274 Budge, Wallis, 94 Burago, Alla, 191, 198 Burger, Bettina, 67 Burton, Raffel, 198

Bush, Ronald, 103, 108 Butler, Judith, 52, 54, 55, 63, 67 Cajete, Gregory, 49 Caracciolo, Marco, 51, 67 Carpenter, Humphrey, 96, 109 Carsten, Janet, 265, 271 Caruth, Cathy, 3, 21, 22, 35nn3–4, 36 Carvajal, Gaspar de, 163, 171 Casella, Stefano Maria, 6, 95–110 Castro, José Maria Ferreira de, 8, 164, 166–68, 170, 171n4 Cattabiani, Alfredo, 76, 77, 83, 97, 98, 100, 109, 197n12, 198 Cazaly, Dorothy, 253 Cerulli, Enrico, 87, 94 Chabot, Hillary, 275n1 Chamovitz, Daniel, 215, 223, 226 Chavez, Hugo, 268 Chodasevic, Vladislav, 187, 198 Cillizza, Chris, 263, 264 Clocke, Paul, 40, 49 Clorinda, 21, 35n3, 35n5 Coccia, Emanuele, xiiin1, 5, 17, 214, 226 Coetzee, J. M., 17, 27, 36 Cohen, Deborah, 269 Colebrook, Claire, 251, 256, 260 Colombo, Mattia, 141, 147 Concilio, Carmen, 1–17, 21–37 Conty, Arianne, 47, 49 Cook, James, 42, 47, 48, 123 Cooke, Charles, 152 Cooke, Flora Juliette, 8, 151–60, 160n1 Coșbuc, George, 184n2 Costlow, Jane T., 72, 84, 196 Cottino, Gaia, 4, 39–50 Craps, Stef, 28, 35n3, 36, 52, 256, 260 Creates, Marlene, 13, 14, 229–41 Creo, Tom, xi Crownshaw, Rick, 257, 260 Čukovskij, Kornej, 197n14, 198 Cunsolo, Ashlee, 5, 52–54, 60, 63, 66, 67 Cyparissus, 52–54, 64

Index

Da Cunha, Euclides, 164 Dangor, Achmat, 4, 27–29, 36 Dante, 4, 22, 24, 97, 104, 107n2, 109 Daphne, 23, 27, 32, 52, 69, 97, 98, 100, 135, 145n1, 154, 155, 159, 160n2 Darley, Marshall W, 259n2, 260 Darwin, Charles, 33, 43, 51, 66, 66n1, 67, 265, 274 Davis, Lucy, 214 Dawkins, Richard, 255, 260 De Angelis, Irene, 6, 7, 111–22 De Bruyckere, Berlinde, 11, 17, 27, 36 Debussy, Claude, 108n17 Dechend, von, Hertha, 108n13, 109 Deegan, Gordon, 111, 121 De Garzela, Miraut, 99–101 Deleuze, Gilles, 28, 35n1, 54, 58, 62, 67, 68 de Lisle, Leconte, 188 Della Valle, Paola, xii, 7, 123–34 Deloria Jr, Vine, 44, 49 Dennison, Julie, 105, 109 Densusianu, Ovid, 174, 185 De Orellana, Francisco, 163 Derain, André, 188 Derrida, Jacques, 214, 226, 258n2 De Santillana, Giorgio, 108n13, 109 Descartes, René, 137, 146n6, 147 Dewey, John, 152, 161 Dillard, Annie, 204 Dimitriu, Daniel, 175, 185 Diodorus Zonas of Sardis, 138 Dmitrovskaja, Marija, 77, 84 Dōgen, Eihei, 205, 208n5 Dolphijn, Rick, 221, 225n3 Donatelli, Rosemary V., 152, 153, 160 D’Orazio, Pino, 271 Drenthen, Martin, xiiin2 Dryope, 23, 52 Dufy, Raoul, 194 Duncan, Richard P., 123, 124, 133 Eales, Samuel J., 108 Edwards, Steve, 253, 260 Egan, Felim, 120, 122

283

Eihei Dōgen, 205, 208n5 Eisele, Kimi, 214, 226 Eliade, Mircea, 98, 100, 101, 107n7, 109 Eliot, T. S., 107n4, 108n12, 109, 121 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 177, 185 Eminescu, Mihai, 174, 184n6 Epštejn, Michail, 189, 198 Faggiani, Tiziana, 208n6 Fanache, Vasile, 180, 185 Faoustov, Andrei, 187, 198 Fargione, Daniela, 1–18, 208n1, 245– 61, 259n7 Feinberg, Richard, 49 Felzmann, Heike, 268 Fereshteh, Andrea Sarubbi, 155, 160 Ferrarotti, Franco, 138, 147 Filer, Colin, 40, 49 Finlayson, Roderick, 7, 123, 131–33 Fisher–Lichte, Erika, 226 Fitzgerald, Robert, 37 Flamand, Dinu, 176, 185 Fornander, Abraham, 49 Frammartino, Michelangelo, 141, 147 Francis of Assisi, 107n3 Franklin, Sarah, 271 Fratus, Tiziano, 4, 12, 13, 203–9, 208n1 Frazer, James George, 99, 100, 109 Freeman, John, 226 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 21, 22, 35n4, 36, 51, 52 Friedlender, Georgij, 197n13, 198 Fujikane, Candice, 49 Gadamer, Hans–Georg, xii, xivn3 Gagliano, Monica, xiiin1, 186, 214, 215, 223, 226–28, 258n2 Gallego, Rómulo, 8, 164, 168, 170, 171 Galzigna, Liberale, 50 Gan, Elaine, 69 Garrard, Greg, 186, 189, 198 Gaspar, Cecile, 40, 49 Gasparov, Michail, 193, 198 Gauguin, Paul, 188

284

Index

Gentile, Giovanni, 138, 146n7, 147 Ghebreyesus, Tedros Adhanom, xii, xiiin1 Ghosh, Amitav, 6, 16, 254, 255, 260 Gibson, Prudence, 215, 226 Giddens, Anthony, 186, 267 Gifford, Terry, 198 Giurescu Constantin C., 173, 185 Glissant, Edouard, 2, 17 Golino, Valeria, 142 Gontier, Nathalie, 265 Grace, Patricia, 7, 123, 128, 129, 133 Graves, Robert, 97, 109, 212, 226 Green, Amanda, 112, 121 Green Hurd, Carol, 160 Grimm, Jakob Ludwig, 151 Grobler, Diek, 35n8 Grosfoguel, Ramon, 34–36 Grosz, Elizabeth, 51, 52, 68 Grusin, Richard, 226 Guattari, Félix, 28, 35n1, 54, 62, 67 Gudeman, Stephen, 124, 133 Guenon, René, 98, 103, 109 Gumilëv, Nikolaj, 10, 187–95, 195n1, 196nn2–3, 197nn13–15, 197n20, 198 Gunn, Thom, 145n2, 147 Gürsel, Bahar, 8, 151–61 Haggard, Ryder, 188, 195n6 Hahn, Daniela, 226 Hak Kyung Cha, Teresa, 260 Hakutani, Yoshinobu, 119, 121 Halbwachs, Maurice, 274 Hall, Dewey W., 177, 185 Hall, Jason David, 122 Hall, Matthew, 13, 66, 67, 146n5, 147, 214–16, 218, 227 Hamner, Everett, 245, 260 Han, Kang, 4, 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 51–69 Hanh, Trick Nhat, 206, 208n6 Haraway, Donna, 63, 64, 67, 214, 227, 258n2, 271 Hard, Robin, 156, 160 Harrison, Jim, 208 Harrison, R. P., 113, 122

Hathor, 196n12, 197 Hau’ofa, Epeli, 49 Heaney, Patrick, 118 Heaney, Seamus, 6, 7, 111–219 Heaney McCann, Mary, 118 Heath-Kelly, Charlotte, 65, 67 Heath–Stubbs, John, 186 Heidegger, Martin, xii, xivn4, 138, 147n8 Heliades, 52 Helmenstine, Anne Marie, 212, 227 Hemming, John, 171 Hendricks, Jefferson, 248 Hensley, Nathan K., 68 Herakles, 102 Herman, David, 58, 67 Hermes, 156, 157, 160n3 Herron, Tom, 114, 115, 122 Hertz, Rosanna, 274, 276n13 Hilliard, Noel, 7, 123, 127, 128, 133 Hirsch, Marianne, 267 Hlavajova, Maria, 67 Holbraad, Martin, 48n2 Homer, 135, 146n3, 147, 151, 197 Hundertwasser, Friedrich, 11, 12, 17 Hunt, John Dixon, 178, 185 Ibraileanu, Garabet, 184n3 Ickstadt, Heinz, 248, 260 I’ičnaja, Natal’ja Vladimorovna, 74 Ingold, Tim, 40, 42, 49 Iorga, Nicolae, 184n2 Irigaray, Luce, 69, 214, 227 Isaiah, Abba, 88 Iuffrida, Leonardo, 141, 147 Ivanov, Georgij, 187, 195n2 Jacobs, Joe, 56 Jacobs, Noah J., 148 Jacoby, Jeff, 264, 275n3 Jaščin, Zachar, 72, 76, 77, 82, 84 Jeremijenko, Natalia, 214, 227 Johnson, Christopher, 266 Jones, Andy, 259n4, 260 Jones, Owen, 49, 248, 253

Index

Jones, Pei Te Hurinui, 128, 133n3 Judson, Katherine Berry, 157, 160 Jurecic, Ann, 66n7, 68 Kafka, Franz, 4, 27–29, 36 Kalkavage, Peter, 136, 148 Kanehe, L. M., 46, 49 Kantrov, Ilene, 160 Karpov, Michael, 190, 198 Kavanagh, Patrick, 115, 118, 121 Kaza, Stephanie, 207–9 Keesing, Richard, 274 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 276n11 Kellner, Hansfried, 176, 179, 182, 185 Kelly, Fergus, 115, 122 Kelly, John N. D., 94n1 Kerouac, Jack, 205, 208n4 King, John Michael, 109 King, Michael, 123–25, 129, 133 Kirwin, W. J., 234, 241 Kite, Suzanne, 43, 48n3 Knights, Sam, 250, 260 Kogălniceanu, Mihail, 173, 185 Kohn, Eduardo, 43, 49, 58, 67 Kol’cov, 196n1 Kornienko, Natal’ia Vasil’evna, 73, 84 Kotler, A., 209n6 Kovalainen, Ritva, 212, 227 Kramer, Wendy, 272, 273 Kranz, Isabel, 214, 227, 228 Kroepel, Gail L., 151, 153, 159, 161 Kuhns, Michael, 265 Kulikova, Elena, 188, 189, 198 Ladino, Jennifer K., 52, 67, 68 Laka, 45 Lambert, Shannon, 4, 5, 51–69 Landman, Karen, 5, 52–54, 60, 63, 66, 67 Langer, R. H. M., 129, 133 Latour, Bruno, xii, 40, 47, 49 Lavrenova, Olga, 196n1, 196n9, 198 Ledbetter, Carly, 276n5 Legati, I., 208n4 Lenihan, Eddie, 111

285

Leopardi, Giacomo, 180, 186 Lermontov, Michail, 196n1, 197n13 Levine, Caroline, 52, 53, 57, 61, 66n4, 67 Levine, Philippa, 270 Levy, Deborah, 4, 51, 52–68 Lewis, Jason Edward, 43, 48n3 Lewontin, Richard C., 276n11 Ley, Ruth, 36 Liebermann, Yvonne, 67 Lima, Manuel, 265, 274 Lindee, M. Susan, 276n7 Linskey, Annie, 275n2 Litz, A. Walton, 109 Llull, Roman, 137, 147, 265 Long, Litt Woon, 54, 68 Lotman, Jurij, 190, 195, 198, 199 Lovinescu, Eugen, 184n4, 186 Lovitt, W., xivn4 Loy, David R., 207 Lucchetta, Giulio A., 137, 147 Lyall, Sarah, 54, 68 Mabillon, John, 108 MacCoitir, Niall, 115, 122 Macedonski, Alexandru, 174, 175 Macfarlane, Robert, 236, 241 MacNeill Miller, John, 51 Macy, Joanna, 207 Maeder, Marcus, 214 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 108n12, 108n17 Mancuso, Stefano, 4, 15, 17, 33–36, 39, 41, 43, 48n1, 227, 258n2 Mandela, Nelson, 4, 25–27, 35, 36 Manfred of Swabia, 97 Marchalik, Daniel, 66n7, 68 Marcone, Jorge, 171n3 Marder, Michael, 4, 12–14, 21, 23, 26, 31–33, 36n12, 53–55, 60, 64, 68, 175, 179–82, 186, 214, 217, 218, 227, 246, 258n2 Marenco, Franco, 48 Markle, Megan, 264, 268, 275n5 Martin, Charles, 148 Martz, Louis L., 109

286

Marzec, Andrzej, 31, 33, 37 Mason Vaughan, Virginia, 35n6, 37 Matisse, Henri, 188, 194 Matthew, 88, 89, 265, 268 Mawyer, Alexander, 49 McCabe, Bernard, 118, 119 McCabe, Jane, 118, 119 McCarthy, Tom, 55, 56, 58, 68 McGahey, Robert, 108n12 McKenna, Colleen, 116, 120–22 McKinnon, Susan, 271 McNeill, William, 147 Mecu, Nicolae, 185 Meier, Franziska, 109 Menning, Nancy, 65, 66n2 Merežkovskij, Dmitrij, 195n1 Merlo, Roberto, 8, 173–86 Merola, Nicole M., 53, 66, 68 Mertens, Mahlu, 256, 260 Merwin, William Stanley, 207 Merzljakov, Aleksej, 77 Metge, Joan, 126, 133 Meyer, Melissa L., 266 Michaels, Anne, 10, 17 Mignolo, Walter, 34 Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn, 58, 68 Miller, Henry, 204, 208 Miller, John MacNeill, 51, 68 Mints, Zara, 195, 199 Montanari, Dylan J., 226 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 160n3 Moon, Beth, 213, 227 Moretti, Franco, 265 Morrow, Bradford, 247, 260 Mudie, Ella, 251, 260 Mulligan, Martin, 227 Munch, Edvard, 51 Murphy, Benjamin, 257, 261 Murphy, Patrick D., 80, 84, 198 Murray, Les, 208 Myers, Natasha, 55, 62, 65, 68, 211, 215, 223, 224, 227 Myrrha, 52 Nadel, Ira B., 108 Nagle, Rebecca, 275n4

Index

Napoleon, 72, 269 Narby, Jeremy, 43, 49 Närhinen, Tuula, 214, 227 Narogin, Moodrooro, 15 Nash, Catherine, 267 Nausicaa, 196n11 Naydan, Michael, 193, 199 Nealon, Jeffrey T., 214, 227 Negoițescu, Ion, 175, 186 Nelkin, Dorothy, 269, 270, 276n7 Nelson, Margaret K., 273, 274 Nesterach, Dmitrij, 84 Nestorescu, Andrei, 185 Newton, Isaac, 274 Ngai, Sianne, 52, 68 Ngata, Apirana, 128, 133n3 Nicolic, 215 Nicolson, Paula, 267 Nietzsche, Friedrick, 108n12 Nims, John Frederick, 37 Nixon, Rob, 3, 17 Oak Taylor, Jesse, 51, 58, 68 O’Brien, Eugene, 118, 119, 122 Oðinn, 6, 100, 102, 103 O’Driscoll, Dennis, 116, 119, 122 Odysseus, 102 Ogle, William, 147 Ohles, Frederick, 153, 161 Ohles, Shirley, 161 O Ki’ili, Tevita, 43, 50 Oliveira, Katrina-Ann Kapā’ anaokalāokeola Nākoa, 44 Oliver, Mary, 208 Olmi, Ermanno, 141, 148 Omăt, Gabriela, 184n4, 186 Oosthuizen, Adam, 25 Origo, Iris, 186 Orpheus, 108n12 Osorio, Jonathan, 50 Ovid, 4, 22–27, 37, 51, 53, 54, 104, 108n15, 135, 145n1, 148, 160n2 Pakenham, Thomas, 213, 227 Palladius, 89, 92 Palmer, R. E., xivn3

Index

Papa, 125, 126 Pape-Mustonen, Terhi, 212, 227 Parker, Francis W., 8, 151, 153, 154, 160, 161 Parsons, Talcott, 186 Pasquinelli, Matteo, 32, 36n10, 37 Passi, Alessandro, 109 Patterson, John, 126, 127, 129, 133 Patton, Paul, 67 Pavlicek, Douglas, 250, 253 Pearson, Norman Holmes, 109 Pechawis, Archer, 43, 48n3 Pedersen Morten Axel, 48n2 Pele, 45 Pember Reeves, William, 124 Peneus, 145n1, 154 Peralto, Leon No’eau, 44, 46, 47, 50 Petkevič, Vladimir, 5, 71, 72, 80–83 Phantom, Norm, 29 Philemon, 29, 33, 52, 100, 104, 105, 135, 145n2, 154, 156, 159 Philolaus of Croton, 146n4 Philomele, 25 Phoebus, 23, 97, 145n1 Picasso, Pablo, 11, 188, 194 Picot, 137 Pilz, Anna, 114, 115, 122 Piumetti, Igor, 5, 71–84 Plato, 32, 108n12, 136, 146n5, 148 Platonov, Andrej, 5, 71–81, 84 Platt, Arthur, 147 Plumwood, Val, 60, 61, 66, 68, 212, 227 Pollan, Michael, 215, 228 Poltorak, Mike, 42, 50 Polydorus, 22, 23 Ponge, Francis, 31 Pontani, Filippo Maria, 76, 84 Pope, Alexander, 146n3, 147 Potter, Polyxeni, 51, 68 Pound, Ezra, 6, 95–103, 105, 106n1, 107nn2–6, 108n14, 109, 110, 120 Poussin, Nicolas, 69 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 271, 272 Powers, Richard, 1, 13, 14, 17, 21, 24, 25, 34, 37, 53, 62, 67, 245–52, 254– 58, 258n1, 259nn2–5, 260, 261

287

Pramuk, Jacob, 264 Prestieri, Viola, 142 Prospero, 14, 23, 24 Proulx, Annie, 204, 209 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, 65, 68 Puškin, Aleksandr, 74, 196n1 Pygmalion, 26 Quammen, David, xii, xiiin1 Quay, John, 152, 161 Quijano, Anibal, 34 Radulovic, 215 Rae, Paul, 214 Raffel, Burton, 191, 198 Ragan, Mark A., 265, 273 Rahn, Judith, 67 Raicu, Lucian, 183, 186 Ramsay, George G., 153, 161 Rangel, Alberto, 163, 171 Rangi, 125, 126 Reed, A. W., 126, 133 Regan, Stephen, 115, 122 Reid, Mayne, 188 Repici, Luciana, 136, 146n4, 148 Rimbaud, Arthur, 188 Ripeka, 128, 129 Rivera, José Eustasio, 8, 164, 166, 168, 170, 171 Robbins, William, 181, 182, 186 Rodger, Valentine, 147 Rodriguez, Gregory, 268 Roffe, Jon, 51, 52, 68 Rose, Nikolas, 270 Rubio, Anna, 214, 228 Rudd, Gillian, 177, 186 Rusu, Dorina, 185 Ruthven, Kenneth Kowles, 99, 110 Ryan, John C., xiiin1, 57, 69, 175, 181, 182, 186, 195, 199, 214, 226–28, 259n2 Saint–Amour, Paul, 52, 53, 58, 59, 69 Sander, August, 14, 247, 248, 250, 253, 254, 259n4 Sandilands, Catriona, 214, 228 Sargeson, Frank, 7, 123, 130, 131, 134

288

Saunders, Corinne J., 115, 122 Sawicki, Bernard Łukasz, 6, 87–94 Scaffai, Niccolò, 189, 194, 199 Scamarcio, Riccardo, 142 Scarlat, Mircea, 183, 186 Schaeder, Grete, 139, 148 Scher, Bill, 264 Schrödinger, Erwin, 269 Schwan, Alexander, 214, 227, 228 Scott, William Clyde, 146n3, 148 Seaman, Jason, 152, 161 Seifrid, Thomas, 73, 84 Seppo, Sanni, 212, 227 Sewell, Elizabeth, 108n12 Seymour, Nicole, 52, 69 Shakespeare, William, 4, 22–24, 27, 35n6, 37 Shneiderman, Ben, 265, 274 Shokoui, Marjan, 112, 113, 122 Sicherman, Barbara, 160 Siler, Todd, 276n12 Simion, Eugen, 185 Simonescu, Dan, 185 Sims, Jennifer, 275n5 Singer, Peter, 258n2 Sinjavskij, Andrej, 83n1, 84 Skatov, Nikolaj, 196n7, 199 Smith, Deborah, 36, 67 Smith, Linda Tuhivai, 41, 50 Smith, Ronald Gregor, 17, 147 Smith, Sidonie, 267 Smith, William Brooke, 96, 97 Sollers, Werner, 267 Solomon, 151 Sontag, Susan, 248 Spenser, Edmund, 4, 22, 24 Spiridonova, I. A., 79, 84 Stamelman, Richard H., 249, 261 Stark, Hannah, 51, 52, 68 Starowieyski, Marek, 93, 94 Steer, Philip, 68 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 171n5 Stevens, Wallace, 118, 122 Stobie, Caitlin E., 63, 69

Index

Story, G. M., 234, 241 Strathern, Marilyn, 39, 50 Suarez, Tirso, 268 Sverčok, Nikolaj, 196n5 Swanson, Heather, 69 Sweeney, 113–17 Sweet, Frank W., 267 Sycorax, 24 TamaseseTa’isiEfi, TuiAtuaTupua, 40, 50 Tan, Kaylene, 214 Tanahashi, Kazuaki, 209 Tancred, 21, 22, 35n5 Tāne, 125–28 Tangaroa, 125 Tasso, Torquato, 21, 24 Tāwhiri, 125 Terlizzi Cosimo, 7, 135, 140–45, 147, 148 Thompson, Christina, 125, 134 Thornton, Agate, 128, 133n3, 134 Thunberg, Greta, xii Tofanelli, Alessandro, 141, 148 Tolkien, J. R. R., 9 Tonzig, Sergio Stefano, 5, 17 Tracey, Hugh, 35n8 Treanor, Brian, xiiin2 Trewavas, Anthony, 218, 228 Trivero, Andrea, 141, 148 Trofimov, Stepan, 71, 74, 75, 77–83 Trump, Donald, 263, 264 Tryphonopoulos, Demetres P., 109 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 3, 17, 50, 55, 58, 69 Tudge, Colin, 259n2 Tūmatuenga, 125 Turai, Hedvig, 260 Turquet, Olivier, 259n8, 261 Tutter, Adele, 52–54, 69 Tyler, Katharine, 264 Ulluwishewa, Rohana, 124, 134 Ulysses, 196n11 Utsler, David, xiiin2

Index

Valéry, Paul, 56 Van Dooren, Tom, 63, 64 Varlamov, Andrej, 74, 84 Vasileanu, Monica, 185 Vattimo, Gianni, 31, 36n12, 37, 186 Vaughan, Alden, 35n6, 37 Vermeulen, Pieter, 65, 69 Verne, Jules, 188 Vianu, Tudor, 175, 186 Vieira, Patrícia, xiiin1, 8, 163–71, 175, 180, 186, 214, 215, 222, 226, 228, 259n2 Viola, Alessandra, 11, 17, 215, 223, 227 Virgil, 4, 22, 37 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 39, 41, 50 V’jugin, V. Ju, 84 Vladislavić, Ivan, 9, 17 Vlăhuță, Alexandru, 184n2 Wagner, Roy, 39, 50 Wallace, Rob, xii, xiiin1 Ward, Benedicta, 94 Wardley, Tessa, 155, 161 Warren, Elizabeth, 263, 264, 268, 275nn1–3 Watkins, Carleton, 259n7 Watson, Julia, 267 Weber, Max, 183, 186 Weil, François, 264, 266 Wenzel, Jennifer, 256, 261 West, Page, 40, 49 Westling, Louise, 60, 69, 182, 186 Whatmore, Sarah, 39 Whitman, Walt, 64, 204 Widdowson, J. D. A, 234, 241 Wilmshurst, Janet M., 124, 125, 134 Wilson, Helen, 125 Winfrey, Oprah, 269

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Witemeyer, Hugh, 97, 99, 101, 107nn7– 8, 110 Wittrock, Eike, 214, 227 Witzany, Gunther, 63, 69 Wohlleben, Peter, 2, 17, 215, 228, 259n2 Wolfe, Cary, 214, 228, 258n2 Won-Chung, Kim, 63, 64, 69 Wong, Wayne, 259n6 Wong, Yan, 255, 260 Woolf, Virginia, 60, 69 Worthy, Trevor, H., 133 Wortley, John, 94 Wotan, 102, 103 Wright, Alexis, 4, 29, 30 Xenophanes of Colophon, 146n4 Yamazoto, Katsumory, 198 Yang, Andrew, 269 Yastremski, Slava, 188, 199 Yeats, William Butler, 99, 219 Yggdrasill, 100, 102–5, 108n13 Younge, Gary, 276n8 Young–Leslie, Heather, 42, 50 Zabala, Santiago, xi–xiv, xiiin2, xivn5, 31, 36, 37, 186 Zambon, Francesco, 109 Zehelein, Eva–Sabine, 15, 263–75 Zeus, 135, 156, 157 Zhang, Hui Andy, 197n15, 199 Znosko–Borovsky, Yevgeny, 194 Zolkos, Magdalena, 59, 64, 69 Zolla, Elemire, 100, 108n14, 110 Zub, Alexandru, 185 Zucchelli, Christine, 122 Zylinska Joanna, 14, 251, 252, 261

About the Editors

Carmen Concilio is an associate professor of English and Postcolonial literature at the University of Turin, Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Modern Cultures. She is President of AISCLI (www​.aiscli​.it) and she has recently published Imagining Ageing. Representations of Age and Ageing in Anglophone Literature (Transcript 2018) and Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie with Daniela Fargione (Il Mulino 2018). Her research fields are the literature of Canada, India, Australia, South Africa and the Caribbean, Urban studies, Photography, Migration and Human and Environmental Rights. As far as the Environmental Humanities are concerned, she has published also on topics such as water and megadams, waste, and gardens. Daniela Fargione former Fulbright scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, currently teaches Anglo-American Literatures at the University of Turin, Italy. Her research interests include environmental humanities (climate change, food and migrations); the interconnections of contemporary American literatures and the other arts (music and photography); theory and practice of literary translation. Among her latest publications: ContaminAzioni ecologiche. Cibi, nature e culture coedited with Serenella Iovino (Led Edizioni, 2015) and Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie (Il Mulino, 2018), coedited with Carmen Concilio. She is one of the two current translators of Julian Barnes’s works (Einaudi).

291

About the Contributors

Annette Arlander, DA, artist, researcher, and pedagogue, is visiting researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, and was recently a professor in performance, art, and theory at Stockholm University of the Arts. Personal website: https://annettearlander​.com Alberto Baracco is a lecturer in film studies at the University of Basilicata. His main areas of research are film philosophy and film ecocriticism. His recent publications include the two monographs Philosophy in Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Hermeneutics of the Film World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and the two essays “I Can Quit Whenever I Want. The Academic Precariat in Italian Cinema” (in Law, Labour and the Humanities, Routledge 2019) and “Soggettività e natura” (in Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie, Il Mulino, 2018). Giulia Baselica is an assistant professor of Russian Literature and Culture at the University of Turin. Her research focuses on Russian Literature, Cross-cultural relations between Russia and Italy; Hodoeporic topics regarding Russian travelers in Italy and Italian travelers in Russia, Comparative Literature Studies (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), Translation from a theoretical and cultural perspective. Her publications include Le parole della religione come metafora del mondo. Osservazioni sulla poetica achmatoviana (Le carte russe, 2005); “I Translation studies e la teoria della traduzione in Russia” (Tradurre, 2018) and “Il Raskol’nikov afghano di Atiq Rahimi. Una riscrittura dostoevskiana” (Parole rubate, 2019). Emanuela Borgnino has got a PhD in Cultural and Social anthropology and has been Visiting Scholar at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She is 293

294

About the Contributors

currently teaching Island Studies as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Turin. Her main field of study is Environmental Anthropology intersecting with Indigenous Knowledge and Sovereignty. Her research field is northern Oceania (Hawai’i and Japan) where she has been conducting extensive researches on the topic of ecological responsibility, socialization of nature, and the role of Indigenous ontologies in the age of the Anthropocene. Stefano Maria Casella teaches English and Anglo-American literature at Università IULM, Milan. He has published several essays and book chapters on T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s poetry and poetics, criticism, thought, religiosity and ideology, Dantescan influence (for both) and musical operas (for Pound); on Modernism and modernist journals (Blast); on comparative literature (English, Anglo-American, Italian, classical Greek, and Latin). His most recent study area also includes environmental literature and ecocriticism, in particular, Henry Beston’s works and thought, with three groundbreaking essays on his poetics/aesthetics (Peter Lang 2018), his ethical-economic thought (Traugott-Bautz 2020), and his philosophy and spirituality (Odoya 2020). Gaia Cottino, PhD in Cultural Anthropology, is currently an adjunct professor at the American University of Rome and at the CIEE Global Institute of Rome. She has carried out extensive fieldwork activities in Oceania, in Hawaii and Tonga, where she first focused her research interests on food, agriculture, health and body issues, and more recently, on farming practices and indigenous ways of knowing. Thanks to a post-doc grant from the Alsos Foundation, she spent the past two years in the Italian Western Alps researching the interrelation between food production, repopulation, and migrations in marginal areas. Marlene Creates is a Canadian environmental artist and poet who lives in Newfoundland, surrounded by an expanse of boreal forest that has been the focus of her work since 2002. For over forty years, her art has been an exploration of the reciprocal relationships between human experience, memory, language, and the land. Her work has been presented in over 350 exhibitions and screenings across Canada and internationally, and she has held over forty site-specific, multidisciplinary events in The Boreal Poetry Garden. She curated several exhibitions, worked in artist-run centers, and taught visual arts at colleges and universities. In 2019, she received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. Personal website: www​.marlenecreates​.ca

About the Contributors

295

Irene De Angelis is an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Turin. Her publications include The Japanese Effect in Contemporary Irish Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); a monograph on W.B. Yeats’s Noh Plays (2010) and a study of Derek Mahon’s international outlook in his poetry. She has written essays and book chapters on authors as varied as Rudyard Kipling, W.S. Maugham, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Bennett; Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Marina Carr. Her research interests include East-West Studies, Ecocriticism, Literature and the Visual Arts, the representation of ageing in Literature, and Modern Manuscript Analysis. Paola Della Valle is an assistant professor in the Department of Foreign Modern Languages at the University of Turin. Her main interests include New Zealand and Pacific literatures, Postcolonial criticism and Gender studies. She is the author of three volumes: From Silence to Voice: The Rise of Maori Literature (Auckland, 2010), Stevenson nel Pacifico: una lettura postcoloniale (Roma, 2013) and Priestley e il tempo, il tempo di Priestley (Torino, 2016). She has published in Le Simplegadi, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, NZSA Bulletin of New Zealand Studies, Ricognizioni, Semicerchio, Loxias, Textus and Il castello di Elsinore. She is part of the editorial board of the Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies. Tiziano Fratus is an Italian poet and author. He lives in a little house in the countryside, working around the concepts of “Homo Radix,” “Dendrosophy,” “Silva itinerans,” and practicing zen meditation in the woods. His poetry has been translated into ten languages (in the United States, Creaturing. Selected Poems, Detroit: Marick Press, 2010). Among his last books, the travelogue and essay Giona delle sequoie. Viaggio tra i giganti rossi del Nord America (Bompiani, 2019, Jonas of the Sequoias. Travel among Red Giants in North America), the collection of poems Sogni di un disegnatore di fiori di ciliegio (Aboca, 2020, Dreams of a Cherry Flowers Sketcher). Personal website: Studiohomoradix​.co​m. Bahar Gürsel is vice chair and assistant professor at the Department of History of Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey) where she currently teaches U.S. cultural history, Cold War history, modern British history and Italian Unification. Her areas of interest include social and cultural history of the United States and Europe, nineteenth-century children’s literature, ephemera studies, imagology and visual culture. She is the author of a number of articles and book chapters on U.S. and Italian History, and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century representations of the East in the West.

296

About the Contributors

Shannon Lambert is a PhD researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. She is a member of the ERC-funded project “Narrating the Mesh” (NARMESH) led by Prof. Marco Caracciolo. Shannon received her Master of Philosophy (Language and Literature) from the University of Adelaide for a thesis which used Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian theories to reread animals in early modern texts. Her PhD within the NARMESH project, titled “‘Scientific bodies of work’: Embodied experiments in contemporary ‘lab lit,’” uses “bodies” and “affects” as entry points for exploring the discursive interrelationships between representations of, and attitudes toward, human–nonhuman relations in contemporary science. She has a forthcoming article in the journal PUBLIC on interspecies communication in the early modern stag hunt. Roberto Merlo is associate professor of Romanian Language and Literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin. His research focuses mainly on the modern linguistic and literary history of Romanian culture. He also translated from Romanian contemporary novels, poem anthologies and plays, and curated the Italian edition of academic books on Romanian linguistics, history, and anthropology. Amongst his recent publications: The Dacian Myth in 19th Century Romanian Literature (2011); Marta Petreu, The Apocalypse according to Marta (2016); The Charm, the Song and the Scream. Three poets from Central-Eastern Europe (2017; in coll.). Igor Piumetti holds a PhD in Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures (Slavistics). Currently, he teaches Russian Language at the University of Turin and Russian Literature and Translation at the University of International Studies in Rome. His research fields are Russian theatre, ecocriticism, computational linguistics, and onomastics. His publications include articles about Russian theatre (D.I. Fonvizin, A.P. Čechov, A.P. Platonov) and Russian poetry written by war veterans. He is coeditor of Contaminazioni slave (Trauben, Torino, 2014). Bernard Łukasz Sawicki is a monk of the Benedictine Abbey of Tyniec in Cracow, Poland, holds a Master of Art in Theory of Music and Piano in F. Chopin University of Music in Warsaw and is Doctor of Sacred Theology at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Cracow and the Pontifical Athenaeum Sant’Anselmo in Rome where he has been teaching since 2013. He has published the following: The Concept of the Absurd and Its Theological Reception in Christian Monasticism, The Music of Chopin and the Rule of Saint Benedict: A Mystical Panorama of Life, and other texts on theology an art. Patrícia Vieira is a senior researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra and a professor of Spanish and Portuguese

About the Contributors

297

at Georgetown University. Her fields of expertise are Latin American and Iberian Literature and Cinema, Utopian Studies and the Environmental Humanities. Her most recent book is States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture (SUNY UP, 2018). Personal website: www. patriciavieira​.ne​t. Santiago Zabala is ICREA research professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author or editor of thirteen books and has written for The Guardian, the New York Times, and Al-Jazeera. His most recent book is Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). Eva-Sabine Zehelein is currently an adjunct professor of American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt and Visiting Scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center (with support by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung). She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American literatures and (popular) cultures, leads an international and interdisciplinary research group on “Family Matters,” and is currently investigating the (bio)politics of reprogenetics and assisted reproductive technologies in transnational (auto/ biographical) texts through a reproductive justice lens. Among her publications: Family in Crisis? Crossing Borders, Crossing Narratives, coedited with A. Carosso and A. Rosende Pérez (Transcript, 2020).