Tree Conspiracy
A "metabolically literate" poetics
Who Has Seen the Wind?
by Christina Rosetti
Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.
Once upon a time, there was a child who lived among the trees. Every breath this child inhaled was a gift from these trees, and every exhale—each time the child spoke, sang, or sighed—that new concoction mixed in his small lungs returned to the trees to help them continue to grow. And so the child’s very life was a conspiracy–a “breathing with” the oaks, poplars, maples, pines.
Mythologies and folk traditions around the world link the wind to spiritual power, genius, or the life force, such as chi and prana. The winds are often characterized by the four cardinal directions, with the cold North Wind often considered to be the most powerful, most unruly, most transformative force. For example, In the Danish folktale “The Boy Who Went to the Northwind,” a child travels to the North Wind’s home after it keeps stealing the flour from his family’s storeroom and scattering it across the fields and meadows. Impressed with the boy’s initiative and moved by his poverty, the North Wind gives the boy a magical tablecloth that produces a bounty of food when spread on a table.
In Genesis, God creates Adam by breathing life into his nostrils, and giving him a garden of trees.
1847 depiction of Yggdrasil, the world tree of Norse Mythology In her book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Andreotti describes how modernity has deprived us of “metabolic literacy,” or “the capacity to read what comes out of our bodies and how that part of us goes back into the land to feed other beings that in turn feed us as well.” Andreotti is speaking specifically of our literal and figurative “shit” here: our digested waste is whisked away out of sight through a series of underground pipes, while our trash is similarly thrown “away”—to landfills, to the trash island in the Pacific ocean, to the global south—where we need not acknowledge or deal with it. In this way, we are as infants, shielded from the natural consequences of our actions and thus unable to grasp the reality of the world. Disconnected from the systems of which we’re a part, we don’t know where our food comes from, where our oxygen comes from, where our waste goes, where our prayers and breaths and words go, what effects they may have. And so many of us feel powerless and lack the resilience to meet reality.
Poetry has always been an art of the breath. Poets–like singers–must control and modulate their air into rhythms that aid memory as well as manage their own breathing over extended recitations. I like to think of ancient poets reciting their poems to groups of people huddled around the fire in rapt attention. The poet inhales oxygen from the surrounding trees to sustain him, while those trees drink in the breath expelled from the poet's words, as well as the breath of the listeners when they sigh with appreciation or longing.
Later, poetry deepened its relationship with the trees even further by becoming an art of the written (and not just the spoken) word, taking up residence on countless pieces of paper made from the bodies of trees. If our paper wasn’t treated with so many chemicals, we could shred our old pages and give them back to our trees as mulch, closing that metabolic loop in the same way we breathe from and into each other.
The Autumn after my son was born, when I was a deeply sleep-deprived doctoral student, I used to walk around my neighborhood in Cincinnati with him strapped to my chest and recite “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Shelley. Perhaps because I was so underslept, however, I could only reliably remember the first tercet of the poem, so we paced around and around the neighborhood while I repeated
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing
over and over again. The fallen leaves as I spoke were indeed carried by the Autumn wind and swirled around my ankles and up into little bursts of flame in corners by park fences or spaces between buildings. My breath repeating the familiar lines steadied my unsteady feet while flying off to join the larger breaths around me. The poem was a leaf carrying me and my baby through a difficult time.
In his 1950 manifesto ‘Projective Verse’, Charles Olson writes:
And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination. […]
Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINEThe Norwegian story “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” tells of a young woman goes on a long and difficult journey to free her husband from a curse and bring him back to her. To reach her true love who is being held at a castle “east of the sun and west of the moon,” she goes to the houses of each of the four winds in turn for aid. The East Wind blows her to the house of his brother, the West Wind, the West Wind blows her to the house of his brother, the South Wind. The South Wind blows her to the house of his brother, the North Wind, and the North Wind finally blows her to the castle to complete her mission. Like the lines of a poem, like breath itself, the wind is fickle but carries us little by little where we need to go.
“The North Wind goes over the sea” illustration by Kay Nielson from “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” The two Fellowship years that I lived in Provincetown Massachusetts, the center of the palm of Cape Cod, I used to walk every day at a place called Beech Forest, a trail that circled a pond surrounded by beech trees, and which, on one edge, was bordered by sand dunes that rose up from the trail, dreamlike, melding two landscapes–woods and coastline. There, you could hold seeds in your hand and, if you stood very still, the wrens and nuthatches would flicker down from the trees and land on your thumb to eat from your palm. Walking in that forest one day, I wrote the following poem without the use of pen and paper, my breath, my steps, the trees conspiring:
Vaka Eller Sova Why must we ever wake up? Even the trees sleep all through the season. Are they breathing? Hold your hand above their mouths. Yes, they're still living. Finally, and in unison, they shift in their beds with a sigh. Just under the surface, their eyelids flutter before they sink down again. Now, everyone of us has made our long way back to Autumn. I shouldn't say the trees dream of squirrels because that's my dream. And actually, those eyelids seem sewn into my face, not theirs. Trees don't have faces, but there's one I like to call husband and the two there are sisters. My father and mother are over the mountain.What does a “metabolically literate” poetics look like in this time of deforestation, of plastic islands, of melting ice caps and wayward storms? How can we, as writers, readers, breathers, enlist the help of the four winds, which seem, at times, to have turned against us with their tornados and hurricanes, raging at our immaturity, our hubris, our willful illiteracy? This is a question I want to conspire around with you, with other poets, with the trees themselves. A question to breathe with rather than to answer. But from my explorations, I suspect this poetry is a poetry tuned into the breath, a poetry that moves like a steady wave, that doesn’t rush to declare itself, but that listens, and speaks, and then listens again. It is a poetry that may happen further from the click of the keyboard and the glow of the screen, and closer to the lungs, the trees, our shared body. A brave and humble poetics that–like the young heroes who find themselves at the house of the North Wind—is willing to offer itself in order to receive.
Notes:
-I’ll be sharing these thoughts at this summer’s ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) Conference at the University of Maryland as part of a panel titled “Breathing Together: Poetics of Interbeing.”
-“Vaka eller Sova” means “wake or sleep” in Swedish. This poem was published in my book Darwin’s Mother (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2017).
Also:
- There are spaces available in the summer poetry workshop I’m teaching on Zoom. Reach out to me to register, and see more information here.
- I’m still collecting funds to help support a large family in Gaza with basic food and medical care. Please consider contributing what you can here.
Beautiful!