The Tree

Living near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and having, for some genetic reason I can’t explain given my genteel upbringing, a wild nature, I visit the garden often to have conversations with the plants and animals there. My main conversational partner is the Caucasian wingnut tree (1). First I noticed it was a massive organism, with a trunk nine feet in diameter. Its limbs were out control, some careening off toward the meadow nonstop with no concern for what would support them in the future. Others climbed toward the sky then changed their minds more than once to create sculptural meanderings that revealed no apparent logic. In winter the tree looked dead, beaten up, torn, split, gnarled, its thick bark rough and unshapely to the point of being monstrous. But in spring, every year, in a rebirth of mythic proportions, the serrated leaves reappeared in profusion, followed magically by erotic catkins comprising semi-circular “samaras” adhering to long seed heads. The seeds themselves so profuse, each a green miracle with its wings that looked like, well, a wingnut. They hung from the branches in such weighty numbers among the thick bunches of leaves that I began to see why the trunk and branches were so shredded. By December, this explosion of life had vanished, the plant looking grimly deceased from its heaving effort at reproduction.

This century-old member of the walnut family became an inspiration to me, as my own body grew gnarlier, with blemishes, wrinkles, bald-spots, bolls and splits in the frame. If this tree could keep up its production year after year, why not me? (This website itself is Exhibit A in that production: sprawling, illogical, teeming with imperfections. One of the poems, “Emotions upon Gazing at a Wingnut Tree,” is about the tree, and contains a noted imperfection. The poem can be found on the Free Verse page of the website.)

2012 marks the year I got my first smart phone. I started casually snapping photos of the tree from this or that angle, capturing maybe a sense of its Halloween spindliness, or its verdant lushness, or its whimsical branchiness, or the inner beauty of its nature made external in the fanciful shadows that it cast, or its interspecies lustiness as it reached out to the weeping beech across the path. I had no particular project in mind when I took the photos, but it became a ritual every time I visited the garden. I wouldn’t stop for long, necessarily, just enough time to record some new perception, or some old perception from a new angle. With the advent of this website, an idea came to me to use the photos as backdrops for the poems, to make sure they were set apart from the prose in a way that signified their central importance.

The poems might be seen as the fruit of the efforts I share with the wingnut to continue the business of life.
I arranged the photos in order of the months, but not chronologically, i.e., a January 2016 photo might be followed by a February 2013 photo. It seemed to me that one could make a statement about the way the cycles of the seasons worked outside of linear time. This reflected, in a metaphoric way for me, how the cycles of the themes in my work didn’t match any kind of linear order, or development. What are the themes of anyone’s life? Once you remove them from time-bound systems of thinking, you might discover new and deeper patterns in your identity, and perhaps, by extension, in human nature, and, by extension from human nature, in the patterns of nature itself.

Here are the pictures in a gallery and slide show that reflect this system of organization. You will forgive the flaws in the craft of these photos. They are not high in technical or compositional quality. But there is an idea behind them, and you might find it interesting to witness a wondrous natural phenomenon play out in time and space as you scroll through these ten artificially constructed years. I have slowed the tempo down to a contemplative rate so that the experience can have a meditative dimension. I have temporarily embedded a video of the slide show accompanied by Philip Glass’ “Low Symphony” (Symphony #1, Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies Conductor, 1992) as a demo. Attending to the 25 minute presentation with patience and suspended narrative expectations has the potential to inspire.