Trading Stories with Trees at Night

Image: Exploration of the Sources of the Orinoco River by Remedios Varo

There is a clearing in the woods. It’s found after the dark between the trees, after you stoop to pass beneath the arch where it is written: “Abandon certainty all ye who enter here…” 

Scripture, when holy, is palimpsest. Word is midrash upon midrash, all the way down.  In this clearing we find there is a hole in us that passes through, into the Not-us. It is a well at world’s end. The rope there, wrapped around the spindle of all we love, is given its length, its reach into the deep, by the number of strands spun from the perception of others we allow to be woven into our own. On the bucket is written the names of the three steps of creation picked from the pocket of Ein Sof’s longing and dream: Let there be…

To live is to care for.

After the shattering, to gather, to raise, to disclose. Tikkun Olam.

One element of all of the above is counterword. Poetry being also composed of that element is training in the abandonment that is our entry to the clearing. It is not often exactly the water first seen dancing  in the bucket, as the rope sings and the surface clears the black but it is also not not that water.

Draw Down

River, in this slipshod night,
come down from the hills,
meet us as those once darked
now lit by dark accounting 
at the great dam of our separation.

Out from the trees,
a murmur of sparsile fevers
unconstellated, faces bereft of forest,
gone to fire, come-to calling
cleft from seam, spike and shaker
sharing dreams of breach and flow—
between each mad-sledge
swing a singing current 
of passage and an outpour
of longing to ring
and to level.

I believe materialism, and its accompanying thing-making and property claims, is primarily a wound to the imagination. I just finished Etty Hillesum’s diaries, an account by a Jewish mystic in the months leading up to her transport into Auschwitz. It left me a bit fractured. To see through such eyes without the resolve toward wonder that they possess, without enough of the threads of Sophianic perception yet woven into my own rope, was a rushing in were angels fear to walk. On the morning after such “seeing” , it can feel like the light at the mouth of the well in our soul was snuffed out and the bucket and rope cut loose into the deep. Mirror neurons ain’t nothin to fuck with. Still, the price for going around and not through is higher still. It is better to count the handspans of your tether early rather than late. Vicarious and remove is too often just one’s early coordinates on the spiral.

I wonder if it isn’t our lack of skill with wounds of the imagination, the vicarious and the far deeper embodied and up close, is what most exposes fledgling culture to tooth and claw and what most facilitates all the various forms of murder we grow conditioned to and eventually name civilization.

Reading Etty’s words, and words of those brined but unbowed in that same sea’s salt, I find a remnant, lending itself unto amulet, of an utter refusal to allow such imaginal desecration. She is ward against this wound. Speaking in such times of safeguarding “G-d in our hands”, she is Siddur. Her last communique, scribed on a postcard and thrown from the cattle-car as it headed into Poland: “We left the camp singing.”

 A few months before, already deep in the terror, following an entry on her sense of breaking her body like bread for the lonely souls around her, she wrote this entry on poetry and safety:

 “I always return to Rilke. It is strange to think that someone so frail, who did most of his writing within protective castle walls, would perhaps have been broken by the circumstances in which we now live. Is that not further testimony that life is finely balanced. Evidence that, in peaceful times and under favorable circumstances, sensitive artists may search for the purest and most fitting expression of their deepest insights so that , during more turbulent and debilitating times, others can turn to them for support and a ready response to their bewildered questions? A response they are unable to formulate for themselves, since all their energies are taken up in looking after the bare necessities? Sadly, in difficult times we tend to shrug off the spiritual heritage of artists from an “easier” age, with “What use is that sort of thing to us now?”

 It is an understandable but shortsighted reaction. And utterly impoversishing.

 We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds.”

 
We, technicians of the autonomous individual that we are, might balk at some of the language here. The idea of being unable to formulate a response for ourselves tilts a bit toward servitude and dependence in our ears. But experience is never at the mercy of argument and only hubris would rush in to correct a woman dancing where angels fear to tread. I think she is less concerned with our theories of intellectual hierarchy than with sending word about how fast world’s end and how much better off it is to go through the bottleneck with carrier bags full. I think poetry is not only past and present, memory and spell, it is also future. It is vow. The “others” that can turn for support to the Word we string may very well be ourselves, further on into the however it will be when some things (things long accustomed to) come to an end.  

In 1939, at a world’s end,  the German poet Bertolt Brecht wrote this poem to his descendents as he went into exile. Here, below, is the first section, highlighting the key line that his heirs Paul Celan and, later, Adrienne Rich would then respond to with their work.  

To those born after

Truly, I live in dark times!

An artless word is foolish. A smooth forehead
Points to insensitivity. He who laughs
Has not yet received
The terrible news.

What times are these, in which
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!
And he who walks quietly across the street,
Passes out of the reach of his friends
Who are in danger?

It is true: I work for a living
But, believe me, that is a coincidence. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I have been spared. (If my luck does not hold,
I am lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves!
But how can I eat and drink
When I take what I eat from the starving
And those who thirst do not have my glass of water?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would happily be wise.
The old books teach us what wisdom is:
To retreat from the strife of the world
To live out the brief time that is your lot
Without fear
To make your way without violence
To repay evil with good –
The wise do not seek to satisfy their desires,
But to forget them.
But I cannot heed this:
Truly I live in dark times!

On the other side of the war and all that happened with the Holocaust, Celan replied to Brecht, hinting that even the Word itself was implicated in what had happened in the Shoah and the other violences of totalitarianism:

 A leaf, treeless,
for Bertold Brecht:

What times are these
when a conversation
is nearly a crime,
because it includes
so much being spoken.

(by Paul Celan)

Finally,  Adrienne Rich wrote this piece that builds on the two before but captures the dark tide of one toxin receding  and another’s rise. I hear in it, or in the decades that follow on the heels of all three works, an underline of how no violence in the human order ever remains there, upending Brecht’s original misunderstanding and planting in its compost a vital counterword demanding a vision of that which happened and is happening. It is a poem, bringing the other two with it, that approaches a refusal of the boundaries claimed by human exclusivism without denying the legitimate human cry that it is planted in.

What Kind of Times Are These
by Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread,
but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

---

This is not somewhere else but here. Counterword isn’t always strictly opposition. It can be graft. An adjustment to another topography or substrate. My piece below, which follows like a child on the heels of these others, isn’t a counterword to the work as much as it is to my own potential misreading of the last line. In this here, I don’t want to go on talking about trees, still monologue-ing in a language too easily translatable to the thing-making speech upon which the horrors of the century these poems pass through are founded. Here it is below, just to place it where it belongs, not at the head of these others but at their feet. 

Trading tales with trees at night

The settling weight of dark now brings
the swimmers to the channel,
crossing to the lip of kin
as bone and bark unravel.
As in serum so in phloem,
aortic arcing moonbit thrum
speech and breeze and signal come
together, each one undone
as senses dangle lash and leaf
along the tangled skein
of dusk's shift-shape of glory.

The tell that speaks from dirt to blood
flares what's person down within,
the waters of the birch-ringed deep
tide upon that same strung swing
that counts the ties out as it creaks;
turgor slipping down to root
darkness closing over brute
and the axe once carried here to take
becomes unbearable burning weight.

In times like these we break our vows
by luciferin wing-lit light
vermillion pressed to rhytidome
this time we face awake the night
and bare our story to the boughs
syntax thick with crime and lack
as the cockcrow dowries all come due
our only hope is to hear back.