Roots and Branches

So Man is not what he appears.

I had been blind a thousand years

Wisdom older than the seers,

Beauty much too deep for tears,

And holy silence bursts the ears.

Ssh. The music of the spheres.

About a month ago, my friend Brian and I took a canoe trip down the Kennebec River. This particular body, being an inland river of Maine endowed with not only swift current but also a state mandated building ban buffer anywhere within 30 feet of the shoreline, has incrementally expanded its width due to the absence of impediments: the remnants of many trees, the ground swept from under them, litter the limits of the waterways, toppled over and rested within several feet of sometimes more than murky water. One particular tree, mammoth in size, came down parallel to the bank, with its huge root system jutting out from one end and portions of its now bleached white trunk, speckled with the the near withered nubs of branches, sticking in and out of the water level.

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove Unleaving?

Leaves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and By, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

-Hopkins, "Spring and Fall"

Not unlike the bleached white, bird-picked-clean carcass of a beached whale, this felled beast (did I mention its size? About 8 canoe lengths—maybe even over 80 feet) demanded further inspection. Brian steered and sidled our boat up to the edge of the tree and I jumped out and onto a small footing afforded to me by the lower tide. Brokering the behemoth's back, I turned first towards the end which would've been its pinnacle (you know me, always in pursuit of perspective), whose penultimate posture slid silenced into the sleek sinking of the stream. As I approached as far as that end afforded, I turned back towards what would have been the "root" end of the body and to my surprise saw a lush shoot of green jutting out of the labyrinthine mangle of its long-since-exposed root system. I had to do a double take: up until that unexpected sight, the tree was nothing but (beautiful) death and general obscurity. Yet here stood a sign of life staring, starting anew: in fact, the new sapling was the old tree itself! From what I saw, it looked as though the new growth above and supported by the dead wood was the business end of something still alive (and connected to life) way down deep in the old roots, yet its true life mechanism obscured (just furthest most former height of the tree) beneath the water. And that is some mystery to me. That's what I love so much about this place. The natural world warrants such limitless wonderment. Nothing ever works quite in the ways we plan for or anticipate (or am I imposing too much of an autobiography?).

A friend of mine wrote in his most recent letter:

 "Even though I too am susceptible to the beauty of nature including human nature, I cannot quite prevent the "claw" of nature from surfacing: destruction, demise, and too often untimely or violent death. I recall seeing a documentary on life in the Amazon, in which a Harpy Eagle seized a large sloth, carrying it to its nest (a remarkable feat in itself, given the size of the sloth): there were fantastic shots of it and the sloth, the sloth raising one of its paws to ward off the eagle's beak..."

The seemingly dead tree that I stood on was felled but not licked; nature does not operate within the matrix of total destruction, that is, only man is the

"Wretch, under [whom] a comfort serves in a

Whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep"

In my estimation, while I take his observation regarding the brutality of the Harpy Eagle (and by extension, the "claw" of nature) seriously, a thousand strikes at branches (or stem) will not yield the same result as one swift cut at the root: if there's something down deep not dug, it finds a way, and I do not see the "natural" system of nature (and the human) as sufficiently exposed at the surface (if ever). Which is what I mean when I utilize the concept of "Terror," namely, that there is a wide-world sweep into which we, as men whom "fish with the worm that hath ate of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm," need the symbolizing human act for..... what I can't say, but for which must indeed be "the products of multiple experiences, some remembered, most lost in the mists of human timelessness," and yet are never not known (as the "branch" inducing phenomena of the symbol), that is, as something separate from ourselves and our story.
After all, Terry Russell, a brilliant student at the University of California, Berkeley, once wrote a quasi-poetic travel book entitled "On the Loose" in which he stated the following:

"The eloquence of the wilderness is not a pattern for human eloquence. There lives no hardier fool than whoever shouts, "The scene inspired me to set pen to paper." or Burch to canvas, or thumb to lyre. The wilderness inspires nothing but itself. Our babblings and scratchings resume in the den or studio, whenever things resume their comfortable and incorrect proportions."

I agree with the distinction and acknowledge the foolishness of the endeavor— only time will speak to what I've accomplished. Fortunately, I am still young (and not that).....

I strove with none, for none was worth my

strife:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature,

Art:

I warm'd both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks: and I am ready to depart.

-Walter Savage Landor, "Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher"

Which brings me to a second sight, migrant worker shacks.

Around two weeks ago I took about a 3 hour business trip up Coastal Route 1 to visit a farm in Maine's northern agricultural hinterlands. The ride up was beautiful. Route 1 is known for its attractive scenery and how it meanders through several of the (non-sprawled-suburban) and sleepy little towns of the Maine tourist coast; the road is the main inboard/outbound terminal for Acadia National Park, and you get the impression that it was designed as such. Upon the conclusion of my farm business and not wanting to see the same sights twice (as such is my prerogative), I followed rural route 9 to Bangor with the intention of riding Interstate 95 back down towards Augusta. The local way of travel proved far more revealing. About 5 miles beyond the orbit of Bar Harbor (the capital of Acadia), a second Maine of ever-dwindling people and money emerged. Route 9 replaced the beautiful bridges, bays and mountains with the desolate sight-blight-scape of rural under-development and poverty: tumbledown houses, broken barns, rusted husks of cars and equipment, and the sneaking sense of the fraudulent wealth of the coast. After about 30 minutes of this type of travel, I entered the heart of "wild blueberry country" and saw, amongst the sprawling fields of low-vine blueberries, hundreds of migrant worker shacks. These chipboard constructed and cheap blue paint places were usually grouped in clusters of probably around 100, each with its own affixed number (for distinction, of course) and surrounded by a perimeter fence of barbed wire. Each hovel looked exactly as the one beside it and all were no larger than perhaps a Saturn sedan with all doors open. That was it: no windows and no plumbing, and discernible infrastructure for food, fuel, or (dareisayit) entertainment. Is such the life of those without money or rights? "The meek shall inherit the Earth." But they will have to work it first, dejectedly. And down the road from this the human face of 99 cent blueberries (for Mcdonald's 2for1dollar pies, no doubt) stood a "full gospel" chapel calling itself the "Church of the Open Bible." I could only ask: what about open eyes? The orphans and widows of your own day are concentrated only a few doors down, beyond the perimeter fence. So we return to the claw of nature? And as we once more return to that Old Eagle, I wonder who is the better hunter and/or rooster aka branch-sitter: man or animal?

"Are you all by yourself?" asked the man and his wife as suddenly I crunched through the spring snow past their house trailer.

Are you all by yourself? Asked the gull.

Are you all by yourself? Asked the stars.

If a man is all by himself on this miraculous Earth, a neighbor is no help.

- Terry Russell

This same letter writing friend also wrote:"Philosophers, west and east, emphasize oneness, whether it is the unity of the individual, the unity of the human kind, he unity of nature, the unity with God; it can even be said that the mind in itself conceiving, judging, and reasoning seeks unity. Unity has been politicized, socialized, deified: all humans are equal, we are one all embracing community, we belong to one God. Yes, and yet I experience as much difference as the unity being expatiated and almost demanded of us."
And quotes:

"There is no god to be known if it not

Become the human solitary soul,

Dazed, wandering, in a wilderness, one

Mind self-reflecting, seeking, longing

For a cross to climb, to be nailed into."

Perhaps then the only meaningful connection open to mankind (that is, the inheritors of this Earth) is the mindful recognition of our journey towards the graveyard: some may be glorified to Golgotha and some placed in the pauper's field, but still, we must all make it there first. And we will, as men and women sentenced to dwell in the decay of drawn down (and numbered) days. But until then we must

Leave: Part of ourselves.

Take: sand in our cuffs, rocks, shells,

moss acorns, driftwood, cones, pebbles,

flowers,

Photographs.

But is the picture a tenth of the thing?

A hundredth?

Is it ant without the smell and salt

breeze and the yellow warmth when the fog lifts?

Oh! but I got all that, too.

It is exposed for ever on the sensitive

emulsion sheet

of my mind.

So why do we do it?