Axis Mundi

I remember last winter, December 21st, to be exact (shortest day of the year), I had been visiting my family for Christmas, actually spending it away from Renee (something I will not repeat). This had been an interesting time because it was the first time I had been home for any extended period of time since the death of my good friend Dave, who was from the same town. We may have even missed each other if things had been different and he had been in town, and neither of us may have made the effort to visit, being busy with family etc... the fact is that this was my first extended visit to the place where we grew up since he died.

It was also during this extended visit that I really started to notice the trees for the first time, not for some particular attachment or memory to Dave, for there is none that I can specifically think of. The first thing that drew me to the trees was an effort undertaken by the museum to draw people’s attention to them for the fact that they are all endangered in southwestern Ontario. The specific species all belong to the Carolinian zone, of which southwestern Ontario is the northern most reach. The more common trees in question are the deciduous walnut, maple, ash, elm, and sycamore. Some of the uncommon ones are the butternut, the tulip tree, the Ohio buckeye and the Kentucky coffee tree.

Paying attention to the trees is also an exercise in paying attention to their histories. I believe it is only appropriate that they become designate "heritage" beings; after all, the only other route the town could have followed is their ultimate extirpation. I recall visiting one of the trees, a giant Swamp White Oak, with my Father, who told me there had been an Oak that was equal to if not larger than the one we were looking at. A friend of his bought the land the tree was on, and apparently the tree was in the way of where his shed was supposed to be, so up came the tree for the shed.

There is a sense of being occupied by the oak we had looked at, the one I first approached on December 21st of last year. This tree has sidewalks built around it. I took a couple photographs of it, noting when I uploaded them that the houses behind it appeared much smaller than they were in person. I nearly fell off my seat when I observed this because in person, the houses seemed larger, human size. I think the houses are the appropriate size; it is the tree that is so larger than life that the houses are transformed into specs. Those houses are the living spaces of the people who occupy them, but the tree in their front yard is of a whole other order, it is that ancient axis mundi, the pole that connects the sky to the ground, everything else rotates around its presence. This may or may not be the Sequoia that John Muir climbed in Hetch Hetchy during a thunderstorm. It could also be the sacred Ash in Der Ring Des Nibelungen, or the Maypole in Britain, the Oak in Math the Son of Mathonwy or many others. It is curious that I first came upon the oak after attending Catholic Mass with my Grandparents. They proceeded to the rectory and I walked down the block to the tree. The church has its steeple, demanding the attention of people who drive by, while the oak waits a block away, for people who notice it.

The axis mundi for Christians is inside the steeple, down the aisle, in the center, above the tabernacle; it is the crucifix that the Christian world gravitates around. The maypole, the ash and many others have fulfilled similar roles in many other places, so it is fitting to see an oak as large and ancient as this one a block away. I would think that this is fluke if the sidewalks weren't built around it, or if it did not have the plaque on it, placed discreetly for anyone curious enough to seek it out. Though the town, like the majority of the western world has substituted oak, ash and crucifixes with the north and south poles, the secular axis by which the world rotates, the memory is there.

The memory of the place it had occupied, at least in southwestern Ontario, is as troubled as the current threats the Carolinians face. I find myself referring to a section in nearby Essex County's website, in which the full force of Cartesian dualism and the new inquisition of the environment was acted out as wide scale land rape. The historical section of the site (LINK)
offer us this historical piece of trivia:

Did You Know...

The Loyalists who moved here had to chop through one of the thickest walls of forest in North America to reach the soil. The settlers developed a hatred for trees and they "killed" these natural enemies by setting fire to them or by cutting a deep gash through the bark right around the tree to stop the tree from being nourished; the tree gradually died. For fifty years the pioneers of Essex County competed in a race to destroy the dense forest that kept them from the fertile soil. Fire became a symbol of material progress. Citizens of Chicago, 300 miles away, admired the glow in the sky on several occasions when millions of cords of Essex County hardwood (oak and walnut) went up in smoke as the settlers struggled to clear at least five acres as stipulated for their first year improvement, and then to enlarge their farms as each year went by.

The claim for space here is no different than the butternut hickory I previously wrote about. Here there is an erasure not only of space, not only of sentient thought as exhibited by the natural world, but also of the very fabric that informs (or weaves?) the world. The space that replaced it is one defined by what Locke refers to as the mixing of ones labour with the earth by a way of ensuring ones freedom. So, humans obtain freedom by razing the earth? This seems entirely contrary to what the oak and ash, as the axis mundi would dictate. So now, instead of an ancient being as the center of the world, we have places so remote from our every day lives as to be in the north and south poles. But, we now know that even these poles of the axis mundi are being burnt down! This is just as tragic as the removal of the original poles that the world spins around. I believe the effort for some time has been to replace that numinous center with ourselves, the entirely anthropocentric desire to be the only things that matter. But I still think that when Adam was given the charge of naming everything, it may not have necessarily been to claim them for his project of patriarchal dominion. I think the responsibility with such a task may have been to humbly acknowledge their own presence, even the presence of the Apple Tree, not as an act of aggression against, but as an acknowledgement that there are things outside the purview of understanding and domination. I'm sure some theologians would disagree, and could very well prove that wrong, but I can't help but think of what this cultural path, joined with the centralizing authority of Cartesianism has resulted in.

Is the acknowledgment of the Swamp White Oak's presence a block away from the church make me a pagan? Or is there room for dialogue among the many religious, secular and poetic lines about the presence this tree demands of willing and humble observers? St. Francis, for one, might agree, and I know of many others from other faiths and traditions that would agree with him. But if it does make me a pagan, I'd have to say the oak has a certain pull to it that calls the world to follow a different path.

Butternut Hickory - A Glossary of ideas

(Image is from the Website "State of Eastern Ontario's Forests" LINK .)

Monuments: The creation of a sense of space that is defined against its environment. For Christianity, the greatest monument is the crucifix, a seemingly permanent sign of sacrifice and promise to anyone of the faith. To people of other faiths, it can be either a benign or malignant signpost on the path of history. To others it is not Christian, but an intersection of ideas, discourse and most importantly of the direction of the cosmos. The significant thing about monuments is the idea that they outlast the living, they are signs of humanity's strive for immortality. Don McKay writes in Deactivated West 100:,

"One of our strongest and most primitive claims on land is probably the gravesite, a piece of property devoted, presumably in perpetuity, to the memory of one person, and to that person's story; it becomes, literally, a plot."

Graves: A few years back James Lovelock pointed David Suzuki to a 19th century gravestone in Britain, and they meditated on the lichens that had consumed the story of the person whose name had been etched into the stone. Whose monument is it now? I found part of the top piece to an old headstone on the ground, by the boundary of the cemetary. It sat by the fence, the border between the monumentalization of space for the dead and the utilization of space for the living. I looked for it's bottom section but couldn't find it, is it on the other side of the fence? I thought, buried beneath the field?

Border: The line or intersection between two or more spaces that are divided. Sometimes the division is political, sometimes it is economic, and sometimes it is metaphysical, say in the division between a cemetary and a field. Sometimes the borders do not intersect, sometimes they are physically defined and sometimes they are imagined. Sometimes borders define the utilization of space, say between monumentalization and food production. Other times borders are drawn by hedgerows, fences, or trees. Other times borders are so valued over other spaces that the borders are flexed, not fixed. Other times they are arbitrarily erased as new lines are drawn because of differing value systems. At other times borders are fluid.

Trees: Monuments carried by seed through wind, wing and gravity define borders that exist beyond the purveiw of human instruction. Human necessity creates lines by border design, say in the case of a cemetary, when a fence is bent over a line of trees is planted to reinforce the monuments of humanity. Where the trees fail to articulate their presence to unnatentive humans, signs are placed on them, a monumentalization that memorializes not humanity, but the tree itself. The tree marked with the designation "Heritage," that act of cosmological wonder that defines who we are.

Heritage: A tradition, cultural trait, or way of being that is passed down for generations. Heritage may divide cultures or it may unite them. Heritage may not even belong as the sole possession of humanity, say in the case of the Butternut Hickory, in a cemetary, by a broken piece of tombstone, defining the border between monuments and production, with a sign with specificity for unnattentive mourners. A heritage onto its own, you might say, that dictates the terms of engagment to someone who can read the language of lichens and butternuts, say as the nearby squirells and jays.

Butternut: A sense of presence in a crowded space that seeks occupation of the earth both above and below. On the border it is a thing to be sought, something that will only make its presence known to those who seek it out. It defines the terms by which the earth and sky are both connected and divided, a border between ideas both terrestrial and celestial. When sought out, its width demands attention. While fences bend by wind and water, the Butternut is fed by these ideas. As a border it is also an intersection, say as in a crucifix, a temporal sign of both sacrifice and promise.

The Lion in the waves

I've wanted to write about the sea for some time now, not just as a narrative piece for this blog, but as a larger cathartic piece to exercise the ghosts of anxiety. I find there is something of a grander resonance when myth and contemporary life find a matching syncretic pattern, this to me is true serendipity. For me, at least, I find this in the motto of my Grandfather's home province of Zeeland, in the South of Holland. Zeeland, of course, translates as "Sea land," that land that has been precariously taken from the sea (or perhaps looking at it climatically, it vould be land the sea has willfully given up), and it is land precariously threatens to become the sea again.

The motto of Zeeland is "Luctor Et Emergo," in Dutch this translates to "Ik worstel en kom boven," and in English, "I struggle and I emerge." The crest of Zeeland:














The evocation of this image is one of the classical lion icon fighting like hell to stay above the water. An interesting representation of what is otherwise cast as a very powerful animal in practically every other crest it appears on in Western European iconography. Waves above, waves below and all around, even the crown that surrounds the lion is surrounded by waves. There is another representation of the logo that evokes an even greater sense of struggle, and this was from an early 20th century stamp:






















This second image considers not just the waves the lion is fighting against, but also the tangled mess of everything that threatens to pull it down. I am uncertain of the lion's representation in this context, but I know that in other Occidental myths it appears as the sun God. Without attempting to assign this designation to a lion that might just be a dutch fish monger, I think there could be some resonance with the mythic Occidental sun god as lion and the lion in this image. This is based solely on my wondering, but I often imagine (and we'll leave it at that... imagination) that the lion here is the sun, and it is fullfilling it's daily duty by looking to the west (it faces left) and is swallowed by the sea (which it would appear to do if you saw it from the banks of the North Sea on Walcheren or from Breskens). But, as the motto boldly declares "I EMERGE!" meaning it rises again in the morning, like the precariously positioned land itself, from the eastward flow that moves west.

So, is this some cleverly hidden gem of dutch traditional knowledge, encoding a lowland cosmology into a crest? If it is, I think there is a timeless quality to the story it speaks to Zeelanders, stating that we struggle to pull earth from the water so it can face the sun and we can live. It also speaks to the great anxiety faced by anyone living by a sea that threatens to swallow whole everything. To this I see characters like Beowulf, the northern cousin to some lost Dutch equivalent, after all, the epic does speak of wars against the Frisians. Beowulf possess that enigmatic quality of heros that are able to go into the sea, that place where no mortal dare. He is able to not only go into the sea, he is also quite able to wrestle with its beings, which he does so quite effectively, coming back to tell the tale over and over again, repeating the sacred repetition of myth. Beowulf, however, being written (and that is the key) at some point (was it 12th century?) suddenly becomes a story about how those undersea beings and the beings the woods lack the timeless presence of the sun, the sea, the earth. Suddenly, this cloak is given to the one celestial God and away from what would have been the timeless biological, terrestrial, aquatic, and celestial truth.

Could the lion in the waves be a remembrance of those timeless qualities, placed on a crest before they too were slain by a single and uniform cosmology? Who knows, all we have is our imagination to wonder.

Something about the way we fall.

An interesting article came my way this morning titled "Imagine the world without humans," from an internet friend I play video games with. Though I guess when we play video games we are occupying a world without humans, because the humans are in their escapist imaginations. Anyway, the article (read it HERE) was in yesterdays online edition of New Scientist, and reads as though it were a Romantic meditation on the sudden absence of humanity, asking the question, 'what would the world look like?' An interesting question, and one that has been asked many many times with many different answers.

There are a couple interesting things I found in the article. For starters, it really downplays the anticipated effects of nuclear radiation, something I was not expecting. The author draws us to look at how ecosystems rebounded following the Chernobyl disaster, both small and large animals (mice and wolves). It would only be speculative for me to to suggest otherwise, because I'm not an expert on nuclear radiation and its effects on ecosystems. Secondly, I found the author's comments on the durability of concrete rather interesting. A quote from a Chernobyl expert notes that the 'most pervasive thing about the structure is how plant life has found it's way through cracks,' further splitting buildings and turning the place into ruins.

I know that during the enlightenment a number of European philosophers (guys like Descartes and Hegel) saw ruined buildings, clogged cities, and what they deemed to be an entirely cluttered landscapes, and they were absolutely petrified. They believed that the mission they were on would prevent humanity from slipping into chaos, that they were literally crafting an accelerated path to progress. History was the space of darkness and ruination and the future was the place of light and reason. The past literally represented that chaotic zone that acted as a vaccuum for all the nations and peoples that got it wrong. I think this idea has a certain amount of hubris to it does not acknowledge what the earth actually does at the end of the day, and that is it reclaims us and everything. This is why I appreciated the author's description of how ecosystems would take on a rather interesting integrated form.

I do have to take a step back from the romantic sentiments of the article and the pull of deep ecology, because I do rather enjoy being alive. However, there is something valuable to consider when we think of what Robert Pogue Harrison meant when he wrote in Dominion of the Dead that built,
architecture actually creates the places where human time, in its historical and existential modes, takes place. Such places - be they homes, buildings, cities or landscapes - are recesses of mortal time in which we go about inhabiting the earth histrocially rather than merely naturally.

As a society, I think Westerners by and large do not meditate on the implications of geological time and what it really represents to humanity. Instead, we've undertaken a process of building as high and as wide as possible, but even Gilgamesh, that first conqueror striving for immortality, had been told that 'Man the highest cannot reach the stars, and man the widest cannot cover the earth.' Of course once he goes beyond the city walls and into the Underworld he realizes that this is true and decides to take a permanent vacation.

Donald Fixico wrote that 'The arms on the clock have a stranglehold on the Indian mind,' and Hakuin wrote that 'from the nothingness there is a path that leads away from the dust of the earth,' but then again Rilke had meditated on these things, "if the earthly has forgotten you, say to the still Earth: I flow. And tell the flowing stream: I am." As a process though, the linear progress of time, the built structures that are meant to eclipse the flow of geological time, in fact, to conquer our own mortality, are the only processes that Western civilization enshrines. The sight of Ruins, Harrison quite rightly notes, fills us with a reflexive and a figurative and literal unsettling experience.

I guess it is appropriate that this article is published in the autumn, maybe the author had an unintended resonance with the Earth's annual reclamation of everything green. After all, he does note how the green reclaims the grey. I took this photo of an Ash (Yellow) and Maple (Red) last weekend when Mzin and I were in Jackson Park.

Cosmic wonder and cosmic blunder

I once heard that is nothing more annoying than having to sit and listen to someone describe a movie you have not seen. Well, maybe that is an exageration, after all, if someone is very visual and can describe scenes in wonderful detail, then I often want to go out and watch the movie myself. I do think there is some truth to the sentiment, however, and know first hand how awkward it can be describing a movie to someone who has not seen it and probably has better things to do then listen to my half-baked description of it.

A couple weeks ago I was in my colloquium and felt myself drawn to a great discussion on the exploitation of nature for medicines, foods, etc... and vice versa the militant preservation of such areas that prohibit people the freedom to use the resources they may have previously enjoyed. Other issues such as bio-piracy and commodification were brought up as well. Many contributors to the discussion were bringing in excellent examples to help the student who initiated the discussion. Various sources and different ways to approach the subject were offered. Well, not wanting to be left out of the discussion (which I absolutely hate, and have to learn to temper myself), I proceed to take one of my points of reference to the discussion, a music video... not even a movie, and proceed to describe the video frame by frame to the class. A music video... When I finished I looked around to notice about a dozen silent faces staring my direction. Needless to say the conversation moved on to another subject. I normally am one who relishes these awkward moments, actually I think its funny even if you initiate awkward moments, its kind of like the temptation one feels as a kid when you have a stick in your hands and your friend rides by on a bicycle. One of those cause and effect situations that throws everything over the handle bars.

Regardless, no one went flying over the handle bars, only the conversation. So, in lieu of a conversation thrown over the handle bars a week and a half ago, I think this might be an appropriate place to offer the video, There There: The Boney King of Nowhere by Radiohead. I find myself often only able to relate to conversations in ways that draw me to story, and this is definately the case with the above conversation. I can think of examples that relate to the discussion, but if I have seen or read a story that has that lyrical and magnetic pull on me, I can only think in similar terms if a discussion develops. My first inclination in the above discussion was to talk about the Welsh stories of the Mabinogion in which similar protocols are offered. I can't recall precisely what story it is, but a King knows of a cosmic cauldron that is guarded over by three giants who sit around in an iron house stirring the pot, I assume looking very much the part of mystical hags and horrid trolls. The King wishes to have access to the cauldron so he can revive his army of 100 dead soldiers. He makes a request of the otherworldly beings, too which they all too happily oblige. Of course, you must thinking, 'there has to be a caveat,' well there always is, right? After being stirred in the massive cauldron, the soldiers are all plucked out one by one, fully alive and aware, but with no memory of their time in the underworld nor in the cauldron of cosmic stew. There is always a caveat... and for the King, he now has 100 soldiers who can neither hear nor speak. There be secrets in the otherworlds beyond our confines of home, family, mortality. But, I think the thing I wanted to get across to the colloguium, and Thom Yorke of Radiohead does this quite wonderfully through his storytelling, as well the Mabinogion and a million other myths articulate quite appropriately both the dangers and the protocols of going there and removing stuff out. Notice how Thom Yorke spies on all the animal families going about their daily business, and how he lurks around from home to home much like a thief, he's looking for something, I like to think he's looking for secret and arcane power. Now notice how when he stumbles across the golden shoes and lab coat, the paradigm suddenly shifts, and the animate world around him looks straight at him not as passive recipients of his gaze, but as 100% tooth and claw.

Li Po and Wallace Stevens

I came across this poem a few years ago, Alone Looking at the Mountain by the classical Chinese poet Li Po.

Alone Looking at the Mountain

All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I.

For some reason I find myself frequently going over it in my head, line by line. For me at least, its a four line meditation that I can't help but get sucked into. The first two lines quite nicely portray an occurence anyone can imagine, there go the birds, and there go the clouds, and then there is this moment in the last two lines that both defies and defines groundedness. I wonder if the mountain and Li Po are still looking at each other, they would have to be because they never tire. But of course we know that Li Po drowned trying to embrace the moon's reflection in the water. For me, at least, the resonance is the moment that is not now, back when, or yet to be, its just Li Po and the mountain.

I found a great website called poet seers that includes Li Po's poetry, and for those visual thinkers, photos that correspond. There was one for Alone Looking at the Mountain, but I'll leave it out, because I already had an idea of the mountain in my mind, as well as the moment when he may have written the poem.

Unfortunately I could not find Rilke on the page, but I did find Wallace Stevens, who I think is by far the best writer to have come from 20th Century America besides Kurt Vonnegut.



Like Li Po, he has a humble appreciation of a moment that both defies and defines what it means to be grounded. For Stevens, I imagine, he may have been looking out at a Pine in the middle of a January blizzard from his study window when he wrote Snow Man, another of those moments where there is a fluidity of being between humanity and the world.

Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.