Weeks 21-22: Tree

In which the podcaster defends asymmetry, antagonizes Buddhists, and takes you on a journey somewhere very close you’ve never been.


Referenced Texts

The Overstory by Richard Powers
https://www.richardpowers.net/the-overstory/

 
Poetry and Flash Prose (by Richard Loranger)

"I Daphne May" was originally printed in the chapbook Poetry is a Form of Light (1986, Clamor Press, SF), and was reprinted in Mammal (2023, Roof Books, NYC).

"Earth Punk" can be found in Unit of Agency (2021 & 2024, Collapse Press, Oakland, CA).

"Sun Sonnet" can be found in in Mammal (2023, Roof Books, NYC).

For more information on these and other books, go to http://richardloranger.com/books-chapbooks.

THE NEXT POD WILL BE CAST ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 22. 

BECAUSE I SAID SO.

Chapters

• 25:44 Jump to Meditation

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 17 – WEEKS 21-22: Tree

This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Episode 17, covering Weeks 21 and 22 of My 12-Month Video Fast. I do love a good prime number, don’t you?

So: Tree? Whaddaya mean “tree”?

Believe it or not, these things, these cast pods, these spores are still about this video fast, at least in my mind.

Tree?

So I’ve been treating this fast as I would an addiction, which evidence shows it essentially is. And if you listened to some of the earlier episodes – especially Episode 2, “Meet the Joneses” – then you know I know a thing or two about kicking addictions. And remember, I love film and video and the motion imagery media in general, including gaming (that perhaps to a fault, fucking treasure chests), and I’d like nothing more than to be able to indulge in them with a modicum of moderate moderation, or some mode like that. I’d like to be able to have a few hours a week set aside to sit down and be taken away by sound and vision, as a certain singer once put it. (I’m not so sure about the treasure chests, though I sure would miss them. And maybe that’s inevitable.) But I also know what I really like, which is to dive right into the dopamine pool for a nice long, long, long soak. And historically I’ve never been able to go back to any of those pleasure zones with any viable temperance. Just a few puffs, it’ll be okay, I won’t even like it – and twenty packs later I’m headed for the store. Just one line, sounds like fun and it’s been a long time – and three days later I’m scheduling my next binge. MAAAAYBE white sugar, but even that’s a slippery sluice. Because we forget, we forget what it does, we forget and forget and forget because addiction is traumatic and that’s what we do. [CRITICAL VOICE: I don’t…]  I said we.

So earlier this week, amidst evaluating where I’m at with all this and considering next steps and what to write for this episode, I found myself thinking, Ooo, October’s almost over, meaning that the strict movie ban, that ban of chastisement I clamped upon myself a couple of eps ago toward the start of the month, was about to end, and I compulsively started looking through Fandango to see what movies would be in theaters next week. And I thought, Whoa, you’re planning to see a double feature as soon as you can, aren’t you? Just one long puff, right? Just one drag on that tinfoil pipe? That oughta get you well. Then I thought, Nah, don’t need it. Not gonna keep the total ban in effect, but I’m feeling okay. Got me a taste of that detox – not the crookneck shiverspine shimmy-jimmies but a touch of the clean, a veinful of rainwater and I kinda like it. Feels kinda good.

So then I’m thinking, Okay, what do I need now? Cause you gotta read it if you wanna feed it. Some kind of grounding would be nice, I think. But I always think that. So maybe I always need it. So I switch lanes to, What do I need to write about for the podcast? Maybe that’ll tell me. And one word comes to mind: mandala. Mandala? Yes. You know, those geometric configurations of symbols in Eastern spiritual stuff. I know, but why? I’m pretty sure I don’t need to do a meditation on impermanence, at least not right now. Yeah, but there are vast numbers of mandalas for vast and minute purposes. They go back millennia, rooted in Vedic traditions, Brahmin, Jain, Hindu, Buddhist, and I’m not any of those (or so it would seem, haha). The closest I generally get to that is sipping an occasional cup of tao.

So what is it about mandalas? It can’t be the symmetry, I decide. Symmetry kinda freaks me out. (Yeah, I know that’s weird.) It’s like how certain kinds of pop music get on my nerves when I know what I’m going to be hearing five measures ahead – the whole comfort in predictability thing makes me uncomfortable. For sure some good old three-chord punk can lift my spirits, lots of traditional blues-structure sounds can, and jazz ye-ah, but the fluffier, bubble-gummier stuff can send me out the door. Symmetry is just so unnatural – it doesn’t exist in the natural world, not true symmetry anyway. But our minds make symmetry all the time: geometry, architecture, furniture, all kinds of design, that pop music – so it does exist in nature because we put it there. We’re drawn to it. Hell, it’s been noted that the Western ideal of “beauty” is rooted in symmetry – the more symmetrical your face, the more celeb you are. Then there are some who see geometry and symmetry as keys to preternatural truths, mystical epiphanies, the hidden form of the cosmos. There again: mandalas. Me I tend to dwell in asymmetry, in motion, on less stable ground than most, in change – except dealing with difficult change is getting harder with age (surprise!). Yes it is. Still I sometimes have the abhorrent tendency to view the human penchant for symmetry and balance as enactments of deep insecurity on the order of I’m so small and scared, please give me something to hold onto, anything to grip, please please please… What a condescending putz. Yet here I am, proud owner of vicissitude, looking for grounding. Sheesh.

Mandalas are by the way not really symmetrical, as you may well know. They might appear to be at first glance, because they use symmetrical structures to contain chaos, the unstatic world. At least that’s one way to describe them. In detail they’re often filled with figures – Buddhas, deities, varieties of wack forces and beings often portrayed as hominid figures in stance or in motion – but rarely balanced or in symmetry unto themselves. Sly devils! – biding as they do within all those geometric and concentric areas. Compositionally that dissonance is meant to help focus one’s meditation, which sounds a lot like grounding to me. (What do I hear in the distance? A rumbling chorus of disagreement and disapproval by initiates? That’s okay. I’m going on anyway.) A mandala is in one sense a map or rubric of the universe, or life, or layers of reality and irreality, and so on, meant to be gazed upon until every detail is planted in mind and can be summoned at any time as a sort of conceptual overlay on the world about you. That might be useful, I thought, a way to impose a specific perspective whenever I might need it. (Wait, don’t we already do that? Shhhhhhh.) And so, in turn, I thought, Maybe I should make a mandala.

Next thought, of course: What should I put in it? I decided to choose images of central importance to me, which would stand askew, asymmetrical, or in motion toward the center of the piece, on which I could “meditate” (or whatever). Then I’d design some symmetry around them. So I thought again, What should I put there? What’s important to me? And I thought, A tree. Okay, that’s definitely a crucial part of my existence. I love trees – a lot. I get along with and feel comfortable around them. In fact the earliest poem I wrote that I still think is good, when I was nineteen or so, is about wanting to become a tree. It’s called “I Daphne May”, referencing Daphne of Greek myth (guess what happened to her) and I still know it by heart. Here it is.

I DAPHNE MAY

I’d have my mind the breeze,

My body wood.  Fail,

Agility that restricts my

Knowing the moon without thought,

Let me be still free.

I’d have sap my senses,

Fluttering leaves my heart for the air.

So, tree, good start. Then I thought, What else belongs in the mandala? A tree. Yeah, you just said that. What else is important to me? A tree. Okay then, a tree. I could see it, an old live oak. Odd thing was, I wasn’t seeing it in the center ring or area of the mandala, where it (technically) should be. Rather it appeared to be rooted in the center almost like on a little planet, with the trunk and crown sticking up through the rim of the circle and into the upper realm. Wait a minute, I said, you can’t do that, forgetting for a moment that I can do whatever I damn well please. Until finally I thought, I don’t need a mandala. I need a tree. I bet you saw that coming.

I know what you’re thinking – it’s that freakin’ book. What book? That novel you mentioned (I mentioned) a couple episodes ago, the one about the trees. Oh, you mean The Overstory by Richard Powers. Yeah, that was terrific, actually one of the best books I’ve read in a while – so good, in fact, that I was sad when it ended. That kind of good. It’s one of those books you read and say, I’m so glad someone wrote this. I went into it thinking it would be about how trees communicate, which I’d read somewhere, and I was curious as to how Powers would construct a novel about that (without anthropomorphism). And he did and pulled it off splendidly. But it’s also about various people who get swept up in, or drawn to eco activism, with some culmination in the late 1980s, when it did in fact garner a little more notice (though sadly not enough). Turns out this guy is a really good writer. The characters are finely drawn, which is one of the reasons it’s 500 pages, because he doesn’t compromise on that. Plus he’s a master of scenario. For instance (minor spoiler, sorry), we follow two characters as they end up living for months on a platform 200 feet up in a sequoia by the Oregon Coast, along with everything else that lives there – i.e., an entire ecosystem. And the botanical heart of the tale – holy shit does Powers bring that across, relying on a lot of actual (though generally ignored) scientific studies. He does this partially by combining a lot of the studies in the work of one character. Check this part out. As a girl, she and her father plant the sprout of a beechnut tree in a deep tub of soil in the backyard. Eight years later,

She spends an entire July afternoon freeing the tree from the soil and crumbling every thimble of dirt from its roots. Then she weighs both the plant and the earth it fed on. The fraction of an ounce of beechnut now weighs more than she does. But the soil weighs just what it did, minus an ounce or two. There’s no other explanation: almost all the tree’s mass has come from the very air. Her father knew this. Now she does, too.

Here's a more substantial quote. I’m going to read you a chunk about this character’s studies as she’s trying to write a book. It’s interesting stuff.

All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life’s work and the discoveries that have solidified in a few short years: how trees talk to one another, over the air and underground. How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil. How they build immune systems as wide as a forest. She spends a chapter detailing how a dead log gives life to countless other species. Remove the snag and kill the woodpecker who keeps in check the weevils that would kill the other trees. …. She lays out how fungal hyphae—countless miles of filaments folded up in every spoon of soil—coax open tree roots and tap into them. How the wired-up fungi feed the tree minerals. How the tree pays for these nutrients with sugars, which the fungi can’t make. Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just learning how to see. Mats of mycorrhizal cabling link trees into gigantic, smart communities spread across hundreds of acres. Together, they form vast trading networks of goods, services, and information. . . .  There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer. . . .  In the great forests of the East, oaks and hickories synchronize their nut production to baffle the animals that feed on them. Word goes out, and the trees of a given species—whether they stand in sun or shade, wet or dry—bear heavily or not at all, together, as a community. . . .  Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within. Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees. 

I love that – Super Tree! And one more bit, not as big, as a cap:

Love for trees pours out of her—the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the microclimate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intention. Forest. A threatened creature.

Now ain’t that something. And that’s just a speck, a seed of what Powers relays about the global culture of flora. And don’t worry, there’s plenty of action too. I’d feel just fine calling this a wonderful book, meaning that through all the human foibles and conflicts and what comes close to eco-horror, the author somehow manages to maintain a sense of wonder pretty much throughout, which is not something I can always tolerate in high doses. Here, it was welcome. Let me say this in a different way, a little more stridently. Remember the famous scene at the beginning of Dune in which Paul is tested with the pain box by the Bene Gesserit, to determine whether he is human? (Apologies to the six people on the planet who are unfamiliar.) Well, I see this book as working in a similar fashion (er, without the excruciating pain). If you like The Overstory, then there’s a good chance that you’re human. If not, well, sorry. LOL. I guess that’s my blurb for the book right there.

OMG, you’re totally indoctrinated! Hahaha, seriously? Have you met me? Okay, maybe you haven’t, but as I suggested earlier, I’ve been writing about this for decades, which means it’s been on my mind. Frequently. And as much as I’ve been an urban dweller for many years, maybe for far too long, an urbavore you might say, I’m not an urbaphile. I used to spend much, much more time in the woods and I miss them. For most of my adult life I’ve dreamed of living in a shack, okay let’s say it, a cabin in the woods with a dog who owns the land, and to become the crazy old coot on the mountain who yells and throws shit at anyone who comes near – rather than, say, the crazy old coot who lives on the top floor and, well, you get the idea. To further illustrate, I enter into evidence Exhibit Two, a prose piece that I wrote several years before publication of The Overstory, called “Earth Punk”.

EARTH PUNK

Call me Earth Punk and step away if you don’t. I’m not here for the fashion. I’m not here for the hair. I’m not here for the scene or the being seen. I’m here for the passion. I’m here for the song. I’m here for the truth and noise and anger and politics. I’m here for the dirt. For digging in dirt. For the politics of dirt. Digging the loam, the must, the marrow, digging the mirror of the mind, the unkempt world, digging the space between molecules, the space between us, the lines and lack of lines, the borderless, the endless flow and interchange, the pulsing skinless fallacy of I. 

I’m here for the digging. I’m here for the roots and air, the striving outward, the grappling. I’m here for the suck of wind, the information of sun, for the finding of the dew. I’m here for the rain. For the sheer cleansing drench of rain. For the pounding soaking rain that drums away difference, that drains away spite. That deionizes the sky and land. That deionizes us, turns friction into grass, melts conflict into luscious soil, feeds life. I’m here for the taste of it, the taste of earth in my cells, the scent of lightning, the hair-raising audacity of trees. The resoluteness of trees. Got conflict? Got oppression? Got strife? Yes! Lie face down between old roots and take a deep draught. Then decide a course of action. 

The politics of earth are no different than the human melee. Yes, we love each other, and yes, we fuck each other up, always have and always will just like moon ocean rock leaf ice flame rain dust. But unlike our muddled monkey-thoughts, the ideology of soil is relatively pure – live and rot, become, transmit, transform. Sure, you can cage life, sell the air, pretend to own the sun, rip and tear and die writhing in inexorable need, or you can be the vine that twines and stays. Eat dirt, sisterbrothers. Drink sky, my friends. Wrap yourselves in lakes and stone. These are not commands. I’m Earth Punk. I don’t command. I don’t even ask. These are what you do every day. These are what you are. Dig?

As you might get from that, and all of this, really, I’m a bit of a Post-Humanist, or more than a bit – and I don’t use that term as some do to refer to what’s also known as transhumanism, meaning that we’ll merge our bodies with machines to become part cyber. No Thank You. I’m referring to the current school of thought that rejects the precepts of the Enlightenment Humanism of Spinosa, Kant, et. al., you know, that ludicrous “man above nature” thing and the worship of the individual, those artificial hierarchies that pretty much trampled any notion of the interconnectedness of life and, well, everything. And I gotta say, people who poo-poo that idea and champion the “progress” of “humanity” above all else, to me give off a strong scent of massive buried insecurity, the kind that needs to yell, “We’re Number One! We’re Number One!” at the top of their lungs, because otherwise they might feel small and scared with nothing to hold onto. Like I said, I’m a jerk sometimes. And who isn’t?

So good luck trying to convince me that I’m not connected to trees, because I know I am. I relate to them. In fact I often like plants more than I do people (which isn’t very hard, I know). I feel intimate with them. (No, not that way, though in a novel I conceived as an undergrad, long before I had the discipline to write longer-form, there was a character who was to have an affair with a magnolia tree.) I talk to them and sing to them. Do they talk and sing back? Richard Powers would say so; for my part I’ll just say that I’ve had conversations with my houseplants for decades – I’ve been living with one of them for 27 years. That’s Edgar the Peace Lily, whom I brought home from a supermarket in Texas as a sprout with a couple of leaves, and who is now huge and flourishing, with countless petioles (leaf stalks) and has practically become their own ecosystem. Go Edgar! Oh, Edgar says hi, by the way. Back to my point, way back in fact, plants and trees are practically the definition of “grounding”. That’s what they do. They ground. So in some ways I can’t think of a better focus for meditation on grounding, and interconnectedness, and, what the hell, the cosmos, than the image or idea of a tree, and maybe even an actual tree, a great live oak, say…

…as you lie before it and place your face downward between two old roots, and relax into it, breathe deep and slow and smell the soil, its many compounds and chemicals, bitter, sweet, musky, mineral, mixing, swirling, eddying at earth’s pace slow and familiar, you know these scents, breathe them in and be there, the soil so soft against your form, your skin, your face and closed lids, luxuriate a moment, the dark is comfortable, the soil lush and scented of memory, almost silken now as you sift into it, softening, sinking a bit and it’s okay, your material is loose and you sink into the loam where you are fine, you are welcome here, you move freely but for a moment just be still, feel the lightness, hover in the loam and take it in, so many particles, old wood cells, hints of vegetation, tiny pebbles, grains, organics transitioning, and minerals and water, which is good because you are water and can move with it, seeping, seeking, drawn by the looming roots serene and thirsty and you will enter one, a little trepidation here, the entrance is miniscule but you are mostly immaterial, and here are tendrils soft and sturdy, filaments sure and activated and they will take you, they take you, water and mineral you’ve always been and you’re in, you rise through the root, you are safe here, then into the core, into the lift of xylem, magnificent chambers of sap between heartwood and new wood and you rise, you feel the pull certain and steady, transpiration of sky sucking water from leaves far above as you marvel the heartwood, the true core beside you, apotheosis of old cells into this resiny tower and storehouse, strong and flexile, around which new life thrives, and you turn toward that life, new cells birthed and pulsing, pushing inward to sapwood and outward to…to…well go see, you enter a ray, radiate vessel that pushes you outward to phloem – living canyon far as you can sense coursing with sugars and nutrients in every direction, downward, upward, inward, embraced by bark, most alive, most vibrant, and here you should dwell, hang out a while, relax and drift and heal, bask in the nectar that feeds life, original sucrose from which all vitality springs, soak it in, bathe in it, this is where you are from, bide here and grow, grow strong… vital… vivid… via…vis… vvvvvvvvvvvvv… you’ll know when to move, to move on, as you must, because everything moves, you came here to move and you have, now kick off, upward again with new vigor, new agency, circumspection, back on your path to the source, upward, you pulse back to xylem and convey your water again, your element, lifted strongly now, forcefully, the vacuum is nearer and needs to be filled, rushing upward, branching off, narrowing, finding track through twig and stem and here you are, at the source, in leaf with the red-blue engines that mingle you, mingle your water with carbon dioxide and light and make, make us all, mingle and make, keep sugars and release oxygen, keep and give, the first wonder, the mainspring, the gift, millions of engines in this tender structure, this leaf, high above, higher, reaching, reaching, reaching……..release.

SUN SONNET

A naked tree can tell us everything:

chained to the earth, grappling with sky,

we flaunt our imperfections in the rain

as budding eyes.  Craven and verklempt, 

it’s all we can to writhe, stolidly, fatefully

arching vesicles toward luscious liquid,

saturated air, toward instant light. 

And in the wind, twisting, clattering arms,

we find the flexibility of heart

to wind us for the true imbroglio,

the quickening.  Oh yes, you know you know:

what roots you have, not disparate, reclaim

the mortal trunk we have and have again,

pulled upward, out, beyond our living ken.

So yeah, I think that meditation on being a tree wasn’t a bad idea. And you know, it kind of turned out like a mandala painted with words, didn’t it. Now to do it without words.

And that’s the episode. I hope you’ll pardon my indulgence, if that’s what this was, but I try to figure out where I need to go with each of these, and I needed to go there. How was it for you?

Speaking of indulgence, November is my birth month, and it’s going to be a busy one. I’m still job hunting, and unless this podcast starts to pay my rent (that’s a joke), I need to keep that up and vigorously. (This does though seem like a good time to say that I remain grateful to my ten subscribers, whose donations pay for the podcast itself and put about $40 in my pocket each month. Thank you again so much, I bow to you.) Plus I need time to enact some of these changes, becoming a tree for instance, and my mom (speaking of being born) will be in town for ten days. All this to say that I’ll be dropping just one more episode this month instead of two – though a special one, I promise you. That will be on Friday, November 22, which is my birthday, and which is also, by chance, the 61st anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Now there’s a nice prime number for you.

In the meantime, let me know if you’re still finding this interesting, and if you are, please consider letting friends know who might enjoy as well. 

This has been Episode 17, covering Weeks 21 and 22, of My 12-Month Video Fast.

Thank you for listening, and for breathing, and for being asymmetrical.