The Tree In Changing Light (13 page)

P
UTTING THE
tree's age at around seventy or eighty when I first saw it I was wrong—calculating age in trees egotistically through the human lifespan. But the tree was older, perhaps two hundred years, or three, or four, and I should have known—the fall of a leaf was a whisper to the living.

 

We wrote philosophies, built faiths, and took every kind of comfort from trees. They gave language to our existence as we put down roots, stretched our limbs, budded in infancy and were felled in old age. They were mute companions to our lives and worshipped beyond ourselves as the better part of balance and aspiration. They offered steadiness and long patience even as we failed in those. They were meeting points and sites of rough justice. They gave the idea and supplied the material for shelter. They offered an image of completion, which was an illusion, but it was enough. Theirs was a whisper in the wind to the human ear both tragic and hopeful. Civilisation grew from exploiting, destroying, venerating and
looking back on them. Trees led us to ourselves and we stood against them trunk to trunk, arms upon branches, our thoughts tangled in the stars.

 

Because a tree bloomed seasonally we felt its body like our own. A tree stood still and yet suffered change. A tree growing old grew down into itself. Trees could not heal wounds, only cover them up. Trees were magnificent survivors. Trees got used. Trees behaved erratically under stress. Trees strove to fulfil an ideal shape but were twisted out of it by pressures of existence.

 

‘There is a beautiful type of neglect of the perfectness of the Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that picture of Paolo Uccello's of the battle of Sant Egidio, in which the armies meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild roses; the tender red flowers tossing above the helmets, and glowing between the lowered lances.'

 

Whole sections of tree died and the tree still lived; limbs fell off; the trunk shattered; roots flew into the air after a storm and the tree re-rooted itself. The oldest wood was in the core of the tree and the tree became younger towards the outside. The pith at the centre of a new twig was gradually enclosed in the centre of a trunk many metres across. The tree grew by placing a covering of wood over the whole of itself while the old tree remained held inside. Even in old age when the tree
started dying at the top it continued coating itself with living material and sending out shoots. The part of the tree that lived was a thin material of bark and inner bark covering a skeleton of wood. Buds broke out lower down having awaited their moment in tissue.

 

Visiting my friend in the spinal unit he asked me how many trees would grow on five acres. Lying there paralysed from the neck down, smiling and talking about trees, it didn't matter to him for those few minutes that he was a ‘ventilated quad' (what he remembered each morning when he woke—imagine it). The block was bare and maybe this was something he could do when at last they took him home, manage hundreds of trees into existence and oversee every aspect of their lives—olives, nuts, citrus. I pictured him on his five acres after his workmates built the house for him, getting around in an electric wheel-chair on shaded paths damp with sprinkler throw.

 

‘From every leaf there was one slender fibre, or at least a fibre's thickness of wood, that descended through shoot, through spray, through branch, through stem and through trunk into root. It lost nothing of its energy until, mining through the darkness, it took hold in cleft of rock and depth of earth, as extended as the sweep of its green crest in the free air.'

 

A burnt-out eucalypt with a hollow inside balanced on a sandstone cliff-edge of the Blue Mountains. It was held
upright by a flow of bark like a bucket of paint poured down. Embattled leaves made a stark headdress against the sky. Yet as long as photosynthesis kept working and water was avail-able the tree kept growing, producing new wood to maintain the water-carrying link between roots and leaves. A physical pump action drew what scant water there was—enough—up through the inert, almost entirely dead material—wood—which was so thin it was only a shell.

 

The roots of trees were fingers taking the earth, clenching for support and scrounging for nourishment. The Caribbean ‘knee' tree lifted a root in badly drained soil and avoided waterlogging by this method. Trees drew water into their roots in wet areas and released water through roots into dry areas. They pumped, breathed, and the air was changed.

 

Even in the dry forest, trees were columns of water. It was hard to credit this function of their lives. They stood on a bare-earth floor of ant mounds and grasstree spears. Their leaves hung down, sharp-angled to the sun. There was no movement anywhere, just the crackle of twigs and the desolate call of a crow. Meantime moisture trickled upwards and fed the leaves in the economy of life.

 

A friend went out in the morning when the frost was minus five. The sun burned white. She looked twice at the tree at the end of her yard and called the children out. ‘There was
no sun yet, the tree was in shade,' she told me in wonder, ‘but I swear the tree gave out warmth. Its trunk was surrounded by shimmers of air movement, a mirage.' She made a shape in the air with her hands—the column of the tree.

 

As the tree grew, producing flowers and seeds, it required energy. When this energy was obtained from foods stored in the wood such as starch, oxygen was needed to release the energy from the starch in the process of respiration observed in all living things.

So the tree breathed.

 

I heard from a friend, who heard it from someone else, that a certain tree sucked up so much water that when someone else again put their ear to the trunk they heard the sound of water trickling up through the wood.

 

Was it possible to know nothing about trees and yet experience with certainty what they were? To know nothing in the same way we know just rudiments of people—yet readily love them, possessed by the certainty of knowing them?

 

Watching the battery input on the solar inverter react to light was to feel the leaf reacting to sunlight. An oscillating torrent of amps formed sugars within seconds as the thought went running through me, making the connection.

Trees were the prism of light varying itself in matter. Leaves turned to the food-generator of the sun:

 

‘In very large trees, leaves were counted up to five million in number—making a mass of constantly adjusting surfaces. In deciduous trees, as leaves started to die in autumn, there was a tactical retreat, and re-usable proteins and chlorophyll were broken down and drawn back into the tree. Leaves changed colour because their greens were gone with the chlorophyll, allowing the leaf to turn yellow from pigments previously masked. Likewise with red pigments, which mixed with the yellows forming oranges, reds, purples, blues.'

 

Many beautiful effects derived from the tree's adaptations were defects to the sawmiller. Various names diminished the most embattled and characterful trees—‘unsound pith', ‘cone holes', ‘needle trace', ‘encased knots', ‘gum veins', ‘gum pockets'.

A section of sawn eucalypt thrown away resembled a painting of a sacked city following a fiery dawn, when glass towers were melted to amber and bloodlike beads marked an area of growth rings.

 

Coolabah trees went walking on a night of low moon on a floodplain of the Darling River. Out beyond the shearers' quarters they gathered like a population coming in, getting home through the river mist.

Still half asleep I went back to my bunk and folded myself in dreams. Between the trees and my dreaming about them there was no division.

 

I remembered a dream from years before, opposite in feeling:

 

‘Heavy-footed, wrapped in slimy furs, the accusers plodded through trees and climbed the gravelly slope to my window. They loitered in dark reproachful groups tapping on glass. Above them, behind, the stars they arrived from gathered and drifted. Their leader turned, raised a sleeve to the glass in a gloomy gesture. Alive in his hand were the yellowy seeds of failure.'

 

The boy kept saying no, resisting what his parents asked of him. Creating difficulties for himself he was all hard shell, all seed casing. Any view of him not asserted by himself felt like an imposed shape before any shape was begun. Yet who he was he couldn't say, didn't even feel, mostly. He went on building protection around himself until the character of the shell seemed everything about him that mattered. And he thought that was all that was going to happen in his life.

 

I was drawn to trees without knowing why. ‘Longing to grow, I looked outside myself, and the tree inside me grew.' I read these words and wanted understanding. If there was a physical tree in an actual place, in myself, where was it?

Asking the question seeded an answer. Branch, root, hand, step, sensation—it was an urge complete in itself, an outburst unfolding. No need then for any parable of trees. The direct speech of feeling was allegorical, and irreplaceable by anything else.

 

Planting out was taking trees from a nursery tray and putting them in the earth. Planting out was kneeling, breaking open ground, getting dirty, smeared with soil, holding a trembling seedling in a work routine that was agricultural and primitive, sacramental and sexual. Planting out was the physical character of the spiritual tree continued.

 

Light, upon which trees depended, and which the tree's function could be botanically described as existing to catch, stood blazing above the tree and transformed it.

 

The living principle of the tree was in the painting, ‘Nude descending a staircase', in which dimensions of life were energised by the human trunk moving through time. ‘The balance of the bough of a tree was quite as subtle as that of a figure in motion.'

 

The old man lay in his hospital bed hot-handedly thinking of nothing but seeding. And there was the tree, feeding itself to the edge of his awareness.

‘To find nature herself, all her likenesses have to be shattered; and the further in, the nearer the actual thing.'

 

The bloodwood at Quondong stock camp lived in my thoughts,
Eucalyptus dampierii
molten in the first light, bowed by heat soon after. Under the rough outer bark prising itself off like scabs were small, almost tiled powdery pale brown and grey surfaces marked by old branch wounds closed over. Higher up the tiling was more marked and showed in a thicker outer bark, scabby but chocolate-squared with an appearance of being glued by hand.

 

When someone said, ‘Why should I plant a tree if I'll never see it grown?' I thought, look at the seedlings in the moist ground, they are beseeching.

 

Trees roused turmoil in the night. Wind roared through their branches. In a night of storm, anxieties were sounded in the trumpet blast of leaves. In the morning stillness their voice was gone and the tree was a blue vase of light.

 

Trees were an element of infinity lending shape and style to ordinary being. ‘Depression is a husk covering the seed of all that is holy. The value of delight is its ability to combat the destructive power of the imagination.'