Kate Khan

"…There are two types of World Tree, one vertical, the other horizontal. Admittedly, the distinction is more for convenience of description and classification, and in the World Tree the horizontal and vertical are interwoven and merge. In Genesis, we find both trees: the Tree of Knowledge is vertical and enables contact with the gods, its sanctity impugned only by a taboo, a moral nuance optional in the mythology. What the Ophites, serpent-worshippers, did was simply to remove the moral veneer, the tinge of transgression, from the biblical story and restore the vertical tree to its eternal role of linking the earth below with the divine world above, of ascending to ultimate knowledge and wisdom, the knowledge of good and evil. The horizontal tree is the heavenly tree of life, the source of fertility. It, too, has a taboo attached: it may not be cut down if procreation and abundance are not to end". (Bibikhin, Vladimir. The Woods / translated by Tait, Arch. Polity Press, 2021. P. 57–58)“

Can't see the wood for the trees? Can't see the trees for the wood?

The World Tree was a cross, now — a ghost-tree. The forest is "just wood", aristotelian hyle, the primordial matter of an active life, the ineffable chord. We are taught to plane, build, hew, and uproot to sail off on the final voyage beyond the horizon over and over again. Logging is the erasure of living memory, the polishing of bark, the disciplined and vital act of human plunder, the seizing of nature's re-source. An odd skill — to forget how to distinguish the particular behind uniformity. The vertical is a mast that stands as an impossible dream of self-oblivious, titanic, doomed greatness. The forest falls, chips fly, lacquered planks arrange themselves into even rows. The cobbled ground of horizontals is an unreliable meeting point, a linear radical path from nowhere to nowhere. To be felled — why? To become a desk and keep scraps of thought in your drawers? To become a Wardrobe? a Bench? a Cello?

A fruit no more, now — flesh. Flesh of a tree that lost its songs, yet finds them again...

Is nothing sacred anymore? Is all a sacred dance of saws and axes?

So be it. Let it be so.

No one can touch my tree. Not even me. But all can hear it.

My tree sings. It has many bodies and no face. My tree is alive, intricate, timid. It doesn't know its name. It knows many forms. It brims with the secret music of growth: it stretches towards the sun, seeks not to block the paths of others, on the contrary — stays in the half-shadows; the lines and cracks on the bark are secret paths where a passing glance may find refuge.

Not a cross, but a crossroad, not a crucifix, but a place for an encounter; not a log, but a secret temple. A temple of midday rest in a quiet grove where I will await You as a dryad draped in sunlight. Let the water feed the roots, let the flow of sap quicken, let the branches adorn their austere thinness in curls of green.

No one's tree, no one's haven — a quiet hospitality for everyone and no one at all.

"From the diametrically opposed ends of sheer difference and selfsameness, but also material and ideal being, plants and gods present counterpoints to human (and indeed, animal) desires and involvements in the world"

(Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. P. 124)

In the shadows of a wide-branched plane tree, Socrates gives Phaedrus lessons in writing and love. Cooled by the shade, thoughts come in order, sophistics gives way to the divine poetics of life. Plant life resembles the quiet flow of vita contemplativa: fed by pure sunlight, branches and leaves softly rustle, as if listening and echoing the words. There is no place for deceptive pollinations and the dizzying dance of bees; only water and air, ἀρχαί, nourishing green youth. The tree is not yet a book, not yet separated from its rhizomatic roots: thus the eidos imprints on the soul, rather than on paper. The geometry of branches, coming from the wholeness of the trunk, is like an exercise in the dialectic of one and many. The tree, slowly but surely, reaches towards the sun, like the philosopher does — towards rediscovering forgotten truths.

Socrates: "By Hera, it is a charming resting place"

(Plato. Phaedrus. 230b)

Coming home, from the welcoming manly shadow to the supple figure of the generous olive. Millennia ago, the wise women of Athens who chose Athena's generous gift — the olive tree of harmony and peace — lost their voices. The mute world revealed its truth in the gift of the oil lamp; to burn and give. A woman of Athens chooses light instead of blood and prefers the warm wisdom of the earth to the tempestuous fury of the sea. In that olive grove I shall wait for you, my Beloved: stripped of your earthly guise, you will restore my voice, you will give it back to me.

“I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,

Knowing the truth of things unseen before;

Of Daphne and the laurel bow

And that god-feasting couple old

that grew elm-oak amid the wold.

'Twas not until the gods had been

Kindly entreated, and been brought within

Unto the hearth of their heart's home

That they might do this wonder thing;

Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood

And many a new thing understood

That was rank folly to my head before”.

(Ezra Pound “The Tree”, 1908)

In the vastness of a mighty oak the daughter of Eve recognises the shadow cast by the ancient tree of fortitude — a guard against illusions. The son of Cain, hunched over under the weight of time, doomed to repeat the words of others, approaches her.
"I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard… and therein lies my sweetness."
A tale of temptation surrendering to virtue — eternal as a shadow. Eros has sharpened his arrows, and birds have weaved their nests. In the beginning was the branch, and the branch was in trinity with the trunk and the root.

I shall know you, my Beloved, by the christmas tree and beneath the veil of the weeping willow, now and ever and unto the ages of ages; you, who has left our earthly dwellings, shall be resurrected not as God, nor as human, but as a quiet whisper of leaves, as a timid reminder of lives past. I shall know you in the evening dew and see you in the tender ripple of reflections. You are at the very roots and origins, in the harmony of beginnings and in the drifting notes of pollen.

After long ages, in a no one's place where earth meets water, you sing me a forest song, in the land where myrtle and laurel grow...

“Mon arbre dans un siècle encore malentendu,
Dressé dans la forêt des raisons éternelles
Grandira lentement, se pourvoira de feuilles,
A l'égal des plus grands sera tard reconnu.

Mais alors, il fera l'orage ou le silence,
Sa voix contre le vent aura cent arguments,
Et s'il semble agité par de nouveaux tourments,
C'est qu'il voudra plutôt se débarrasser de son trop de science”

My tree, in a century still misconceived,

Stood in the forest of reasons eternal,

Will grow, will adorn its branches with leaves,

Will stand tall, at last recognised by the equals.

Then in its voice, amid a storm or a silence,

A hundred reasons against the wind will sound.

And when it seemingly suffers in face of new torments,

It will merely try to shake off excess knowledge.

(Francis Ponge, “My Tree” (1926); English translation by Maria Sinyavskaya)