Jackson's Park, day the before Spring thaw

Mzin and I went for a walk in Jackson Park yesterday, for the first time in a couple months the temperatures were hovering a few degrees above freezing, so there was a noticeable change in the air as if everything was just on the verge of changing. For the past while the cedars have been creaking and popping as it gets well below freezing, but yesterday they were in a very silent anticipation. The bird,s however were another matter because they were all over the place, digging under the bark for the insects that were likely also emerging. It was quite cloudy and in some parts foggy, but I think the pictures turned out all right, we were checking out our new camera, a Canon something or other, A710is.






images by Rick Fehr, 2007 ©, Petrborough, Jackson's Park.

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”)

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.