You Are a Tree

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"'Oh, all big things are reposeful,' said Gilda, 'look at the beech trees.'

Joyce conjoins sociopolitical history and natural history in a fantastical tree wedding ceremony. Humans and trees entwine and merge to celebrate the marriage of Miss Fir Conifer of Pine Valley and Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters. The wedding guests are human-tree hybrids. (The confetti—“hazlenuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod, hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs, and quicken shoots”—inspires the punctuation of my tree alphabets.) This human-tree entwinement offers the possibility for a symbiotic relationship with the land.1 We are both ourselves and the trees.

This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans.

And the essential step toward silencing nonhuman voices was imagining that only humans were capable of telling stories ... what is at stake is not so much storytelling itself but, rather, who can make meaning, and that we’ve put the ability to make meaning purely within the human realm.

"The planet will never come alive for you unless your songs and stories give life to all the beings seen and unseen that inhabit a living Earth."

... I was so shaken that I groaned. It is the only time in my life that I have ever said anything out loud.

Eternity is none of my business. I am an oak, no more, no less. I have my duty, and I do it; I have my pleasures, and enjoy them, though they are fewer, since the birds are fewer, and the wind’s foul. But, long-lived though I may be, impermanence is my right. Mortality is my privilege. And it has been taken from me.

I am thankful that I am an oak, and that though I may be wind-broken or uprooted, hewn or sawn, at least I cannot, under any circumstances, be squashed.

Next month, however — September it was, for the swallows had left a few days earlier — another of the machines appeared, a new one, suddenly dragging me and the road and our hill, the orchard, the fields, the farmhouse roof, all jigging and jouncing and racketing along from East to West; I went faster than a gallop, faster than I had ever gone before. I had scarcely time to loom, before I had to shrink right down again.

They did not use to be so demanding. They never hurried us into anything more than a gallop, and that was rare; most of the time it was just a jigjog foot-pace. And when one of them was on his own feet, it was a real pleasure to approach him. There was time to accomplish the entire act with style. There he’d be, working his legs and arms the way they do, usually looking at the road, but often aside at the fields, or straight at me: and I’d approach him steadily but quite slowly, growing larger all the time, synchronizing the rate of approach and the rate of growth perfectly, so that at the very moment that I’d finished enlarging from a tiny speck to my full size — sixty feet in those days — I was abreast of him and hung above him, loomed, towered, overshadowed him. Yet he would show no fear.