A swirling mass of trash

Second stanza of Robert Bringhurst Poem “Uddalaka Aruni: A Song for the Weavers”

The sea has no end, in spite of its edges.
The seed is the tree’s thought. The seed
Is the speech of the tree. The seed is the tree
Thinking and speaking its knowledge of trees.

Every now and then I’ll pick up a book, turn to a random page, and see if there is anything illuminating, and this is the stanza I found, satisfying a previous post I made where I was ready for a fight with Cartesian determinism. Of course, I was ill prepared, because I only had a vague hint of something I had once read about an acorn possessing the knowledge of the oak that had gone before it. So, driving to southwestern Ontario today, staying at a friend’s house, and turning to a random page in Bringhurst’s collection of poems Pieces of Map, Pieces of Music (LINK), I found that indeed the sea has no end and that the seed is indeed speaking its knowledge of trees.

It was an interesting drive, as there is a certain point between Toronto and Windsor where you know you’re entering a new territory. There is a wall of trees, just as you enter Elgin county; walnut, butternut, oak and maple, it envelops you. But, just as you enter Elgin county, the one notable aberration is a large hill marking a landfill. It rises like the oak tree that is the axis mundi, it claims presence not just through the visible incline, but through the smell of rotting eggs.

This place is an interesting doorway for the region, as it demands the presence of those passing by, this is where you are, below the circling gulls and vultures. This place speaks its knowledge of us. Shrouded by the Carolinian growth, the place could easily become a sacred shrine of toxic tourism, the site that educates the many people who have absolutely no connection between the field that feeds the cow and the half eaten sirloin steak that is fed to the gull, to whom the smell of rotten eggs is a promise.

The demands placed on the participants of course would be quite anthropocentric. The Carolinian doorway opens, allowing the tourist to climb the axis mundi (from which a changed character descends), and once at the summit the site reveals its immensity, a vast pit of garbage. If centuries of litter teach us anything, it’s that garbage does not stay still. Garbage moves. In the case of the dump, this movement is the constant addition of new garbage, the picking through by hands, beaks and paws, as well as the terrestrial, aquatic and temporal morphology of space that shapes and reshapes everything. This, as the poet Wallace Stevens may suggest, speaks of much more than us.

All the dead warriors of old Whales were to be reborn in such a place. A place of equal industry and infinite cosmology, a place held within burning hot iron walls, guarded by a family of giants. They had been brought there by their king who had them thrown into a boiling cauldron, the giants stirred them round and round, and one by one the warriors were then pulled out. But of course there is always a catch.

How far should one dig beneath the garbage in search of the dump’s foundation? What if the dump has no foundation, but reveals more layers of garbage beneath more layers of garbage, with each layer more degraded the further down one digs? Could it be possible that the foundation is the garbage itself, centuries of garbage cast off centuries of seeds speaking trees, speaking leaves, speaking dirt? When the warriors were pulled out of the swirling mass they were deaf and could not speak ever again. They had witnessed things so fantastic they could never be described and they had witnessed nothing at all.

The mind is the white of the egg in its opening
Shell, the mind is the ripening
Meat of the seed. Out. In. Out. In. What is
is the weaving. We with our breathing

are working here, carding and spinning the air.

(Final stanza of Robert Bringhurst Poem “Uddalaka Aruni: A Song for the Weavers”)