[040] If You Knew What a Tree Really Was

If you knew what a Tree really was, you would lose your fucking mind.

The fact that you can read this sentence means you are still sane, and therefore, you have no idea what a Tree really is.

There is disagreement about the truth of Trees. The truth of Trees is deeper and wider than you know. However, don’t take any particular truth too seriously. But don’t dismiss any, either. Hold them all on different fingers, as leaves stretched towards the sun.

A friend of mine was told the truth about trees when he was very young when his grandfather took him into the woods. The grandfather walked right up to a little sapling Maple, hardly taller than my friend was at the time. “What is this?” asked his grandfather.

“A tree?” He had hardly spoken before his grandfather smacked the hat right off his head. His ears stung. He was dizzy. A good wallop.

“This is a person! This is a human being! And don’t forget it.” And he didn’t. And that’s what a Tree really is. For some.

Consider a hypothetical kind of vision in which you can only percieve the living cells of a creature. No dead skin or hair or nails, only the actively alive tissue. This kind of vision, let’s call it vivitography. If you could look at a person - a human person - a Homo sapien - and see only their living cells, see vivitographically, you would be freaked out.

Everyone would be bald, for starters. Hair is made from a filamentous protein that has no nucleus, no smooth endoplasmic reticulum, not even one Powerhouse of the Cell™️. So, if you could see only the living cells in a body, you couldn’t see hair. The same goes for nails and the enamel of teeth. Already this is looking like a horror movie: a creature with no hair or eyebrows or eyelashes, pulpy bone fragments instead of full teeth, fingers and toes that end in spongy and raw pink cuticle. Unfortunately that’s not even the worst part. The top layers of your skin are also dead flesh. If you could see vivitographically, all humans would look like horribly sunburned pink monkeys with the skin of a fresh-born mouse and the complexion of watermelon pulp. Much of our beauty, it turns out, depends on the fastidious care of our posthumous surfaces.

Let us say you use this same magical X-ray sight on a Tree. What would you see? Well, the bark is all dead skin. Sloughed-off boreal dandruff which the Tree uses as protection, and lichen uses as a home. So, with our special vivitographic vision, we do not see the bark. The same goes for the wood, as it turns out. Wood itself is not alive anymore. The growth rings of a Tree are active pores that allow the movement of water and sap, but they are not actively dividing cells. It’s all empty plumbing. What are we left with, then? Only the cambium. That paper-thin green layer between the bark and the wood is the only real living part of a Tree. In most species, the cambium is so thin that you can scrape it off with a fingernail. If you could see only the living aspect of a Tree, it would seem to be a massive, wet, green tube; hollow, terminating in a cloud of dancing leaves above and a riotous tangle of roots below. It would look for all the world like those freaky anemones at the petting portion of your local aquarium, which flinch their sticky tentacles at your touch. In one sense, that is what a Tree really is.

Consider this: New College in Oxford, England, founded in 1379, has on their campus a Great Hall. The hall is timbered with gigantic Oak beams. It was found that these great Oak beams, after 500 or so years of venerable service, were infested with beetles. They needed replacement. The problem was that Oaks of this size and stature hadn’t been growing in England for generations, as far as anyone knew. What were they to do? The dons and professors and exchequers searched far and wide, but could not find any Trees which would do. Finally - and you’d be forgiven for wondering what took so long - someone asked the College Forester. He had an answer. This man, responsible for the wild green land owned by the college (of which there is a fair portion), led a group of collegiate elite into the woods. There, he introduced them to a stand of massive, perfectly straight, 500-year-old Oaks. They had been planted by the original builders of New College hall 500 years previously to serve as replacements for just this purpose. When they were cut down and carved into shape and replaced, a new stand of Oaks were planted in their stead.

That’s a good story. Chew on that. Planting a Tree generations in advance for when it will be needed. And you know it’ll be needed because you know how wood behaves over the timespan of half a millenium because you live in a culture that has the beginnings of a grasp on these things. If you want to know what a Tree really is, you have to be okay thinking about hundreds and thousands of years at a time.

Consider Paul Bunyan. How tall he must have been! His shoes alone were as big as a house, big leather meteors crushing the ground on which he strode. A swing of his axe could clear a whole grove of Trees in one go. What must he have thought of Trees? He certainly didn’t replant them as he went. The story goes that he chopped down the whole forest that used to cover the center of the country and Babe the Big Blue Ox danced on all the stumps to knock them into the ground. Now, we call that place the prairie, and it stretches from Minnesota down to Texas. That beflanneled giant and his castrate bull Manifest Destiny’d their way across the continent, turning the forest to lumber and leaving the little people to turn the lumber into homes and churches and axe-handles and gallows – in other words, civilization. He was a terrible machine indeed. What must we think of him, now? Can we condemn a folktale for his part in the subjugation of a continent? I propose that instead we subject him to introgression.

Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about introgression in her essay, Corn Tastes Better on the Honor System. She writes that teosinte, the grassy and humble ancestor of corn, often sits at the edges of corn plantings. Through the genetic mixing of modern sweetcorn and the ancient grandfather alleles of teosinte, the modern corns remain biodiverse and genetically creative. They are reminded of their heritage. They are allowed to take a deep drink of ancient knowings. That is the biological process of introgression, and that is what Paul Bunyan needs a dose of.

They say Paul Bunyan met Babe the Big Blue Ox in a blizzard. This is the story told by Swedish and Norwegian loggers, recently arrived from their Nordic homelands. Back in the fjords, though, it was the ox who found the man.

In the beginning of all things, they say, there was indeed a blizzard. No day, no night, no moon, no sun, no Trees, no land, only wind and cold and dark dark darkness. Ice and frost were the only solid things in the world, and the only living thing in this endlesss winter storm was a cow named Auðumbla. (The letter ð, just so you know, is prounounced somewhere between a d and a th sound. Tap your tongue against your teeth and you’ll get it.) Auðumbla wandered, and licked the ice for sustenance, and wandered more. After time immeasurable, her endless thirsty licking uncovered a hair. Upon further tasting, the hair was revealed to be a part of a head, and so on, until the cow’s warm tongue thawed out a whole man. His name was Ymir, and Paul Bunyan is his shadow in the New World. Ymir and Auðumbla, gigantic beings, the first life in the universe, wandered in the cold.

Through the parthenogenic reproduction of which primordial gods are so fond, Ymir found himself in the company of three grandsons: Vili, Vé, and Odin. Yes, that very Odin of the one eye and floppy hat, though he was yet to lose the former or gain the latter. These three brothers killed their grandsire Ymir. It had to be done, you see, because with his gigantic body they built the world. His flesh became the soil, his bones the mountains. Each hair on his body blossomed into a Tree. A forest from a hairy patch of sacrificial skin! His skull became the dome of heaven, and the three gandsons threw Ymir’s eyes into the sky to become the sun and the moon. His blood, rivers. His brains, the clouds. You can imagine the rest. If you open an anatomy textbook in one hand and a geology textbook in the other you will see the truth of things: the Earth is a Body. How different Ymir is than his northwoods-logging descendant Paul! Don’t you think we might behave differently towards the living forest if our uberfauna predecessor was a self-sacrificing giant rather than an industrial logging machine? Our forests are not, as Paul would have you believe, the raw material for colonization. They are the living body of the primordial grandparent.

There. We have subjected Paul Bunyan to introgression. We have reminded him what his grandfather thinks a Tree really is.

The Lorax was wrong about trees. I don’t say that to be inflammatory, but the guy just didn’t have the whole picture. He spoke for the Trees, but the Trees will tell you themselves: they like to be cut. Trees have, as has been said, “a tendency towards immortality.” You’ve read Braiding Sweetgrass by now, right? You know that sweetgrass grows stronger and flourishes fertilitously when it is responsibly harvested. This is also true of Trees! A responsible harvest of wood and leaves and roots and twigs and bark ecnourages strong growth. This has been known by all boreal cultures since the beginning of time. A coppice - from which we get the word copse – is a Tree that has been chopped down in such a way that it will regrow from the stump. If you do not believe me, if you think this is some kind of logging propaganda or anti-forest rhetoric, ask the beavers. Go to a river which is abundant with whippy, springy Willow saplings. See what the beavers have done: they have cut down Willows everywhere you look, and the stumps from last year already have a vernal fireburst of new shoots exploding upwards. A fountain of green. Under the silty surface of the riverbank, the roots of these Willows crawl deeper, hold more soil, drink and purify more river water than they had before.

Let the record show that the Once-ler was also wrong, of course. His is the Paul Bunyan path: cut it all down, turn it into commodity, let the future crumble into ashes. Like so many conflicting dualities, the correct answer is not to choose a side but to reject the polarity of opposites and recognize that they are two sides to a more complex whole. The beaver, it turns out, is the synthesis of the now-reconcilable duality of the Lorax and the Once-ler. The beaver preserves the forest through the act of cutting it down. Ha! Do you see it now? What a Tree really is?

I promise you, the pastoral fantasy of the “untouched wilderness” is at best a misguided romanticization and at worst a mythic fantasy so decoupled from reality that following it may lead us to complete ecological collapse.

A grandfather says: a Tree is a human being.

A vivitographer says: a Tree is an armored green anemone.

Oxford says: a Tree is a 500-year commitment.

Paul Bunyan says: a Tree is the raw material of civilization.

Ymir says: a Tree is one of my hairs, which grows upon my flesh.

The Lorax says: a Tree must live.

The Once-ler says: a Tree must be cut.

Beaver says: a Tree must be cut to live.

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This story, and many other wonderful essays and images, will soon be published in Gnostic Technology vol. 3

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