1/13/95 The southernmost Sycamore to the East of the HRC On Campus:

1. First impression: Someone near me mentioned the lack of leaves on this tree compared to the rest of the plants here -- the hedges and live oak. The southernmost Sycamore has a few green leaves left, far out at the eastern ends of a few branches. Shakespeare’s sonnet pops into my head, as it did later too when I hugged the tree and looked up and saw a bird’s nest in it:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all the rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As on the deathbed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

2. Second impression: awed by the sheer size of these trees. From my angle on the concrete bench, the trees seemed as high as the HRC which is 7 or 8 stories high. I had to bend my head back to see all of the trees. 3. A leaf scuttling along. The word "scuttling" popped into my mind because of the line "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas" from T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I wonder how I compare to him. I think I used to be more like him than I am now. "And yet there will be time ... for a hundred visions and revisions" he says, but he won’t experience them. Nor have I, yet? Will there be time for me to do so? Or have I "seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid." I already have "bald spot in the middle of my hair -- / (They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)." I too am often shy and diffident around women when my self-esteem is low and I am easily put down by them. On the other hand, I have not "measured out my life with coffee spoons," at times I have had "the strength to force the moment to its crisis." I do "dare / Disturb the universe," The leaf is dead, an unburied corpse hopping along the concrete, then stopping, then ... all depending on the wind Shelley’s "Ode to the West Wind" pops into my head, and its comparison of tree leaves and leaves of paper with writing on them: "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, / Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead / Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.... If I were a dead leaf though mightest bear.... Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! / And by the incantation of this verse, / Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks, my works among mankind!" My leaves, the pages I have written, sent out on the winds;, published, hundreds of them who knows where they went, who they passed by closely, there they came to rest at last. In any case, like all leaves eventually they will decay and become food for new leaves. The southern Sycamore not only still has a few completely green leaves, but also some just now turning brown at the edges. I don’t know how consistently they do it this way, but the few I see follow this pattern: dying, first at the edges like we do, less and less blood pumped to the extremes as we too die, feet and hands getting cold first, here less and less sap pumped along the veins of the leaf?

4. Striking bark: mostly smooth and white like bones but darker at the base of the trunk and on the underside of some of the branches. Now that the leaves are falling we see the bones better, a perfect memento mori a la Hopins’s "Spring and Fall." How old is the tree? Probably as old as I am. As I wrote that first "o" I felt fear, fear of decline, mutability, old age, mortality death. I feel old and depressed.

5. I hug the tree, can’t get my arms around it, it is so big. I am pleased to discover the four lights placed around its base to illuminate it at night. There is a pen laying near the base of the tree surrounded by piles of dead leaves, the ones that did not "escape."

6. When I sit down on the marble a leaf scuttles up to me, stops, comes closer, and then suddenly flies off to my left, off the patio altogether. Here at this level I am more conscious of how imprisoned? guarded? the tree is, surrounded by hedges, making it hard to get close to it, especially the northernmost one. There is an unusually large space of ground given to the Sycamores compared to the other trees planted in concrete on campus, but still the space is not as great as that made by the branches and supposedly the roots go out as far as the branches and thus the ends of the roots are buried under concrete, away from the rain. The word "hedge" reminds me of Forster’s "The Hedge" in which people are racing around on a race track with a hedge on the inside. Every now and then one of them drops out of the race and crawls through the hedge -- to discover heaven, right there, on the inside of the track. Here, we race by, but maybe if we stop, crawl through the hedge, and get close to the tree, get in touch with nature, get in touch with our true nature, we too will discover that "the kingdom of heaven is within you" along with the kingdom of hell -- the choice is ours.

To discover heaven in the present moment, to discover the whole in the fragment, eternity in a grain of sand [Blake?], beginning with that which connects the trees: a unifying force creating the similarities between the two trees, both sets of branches making hemispheres (though their lowest branches reach in opposite directions, looking for the sun), both members of the same species. so different from the oaks though all are trees. The great tree as Darwin’s primary metaphor. To discover heaven in the present moment, becoming aware of that which connects the trees to me. "I am a part of all that I meet" pops into my head. [Whitman?], but especially Thomas: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer. / And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose / My youth is bent by the same wintry fever....’ The tree as my protector, my mother. Swinburne’s description of Yggdrasil, the world-tree linking together heaven, earth, and hell comes to mind: "The tree many-rooted / That swells to the sky / With frondage red-fruited/ The life-tree am I; In the buds of your lives is the sap of my leaves: ye shall live and not die.... Such sap is this tree’s, / Which hath in it all sounds and all secrets of infinite lands and of seas....One topmost blossom / That scales the sky; / Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man that is I" ["Hertha"].

Is God in the tree? Yes if I refer to the God of life as in Hopkins’s "send my roots rain." The God of life is in me as well as in the tree, in the fast moving [animals] as well as the slow moving forms of life [plants]. I have lost leaves -- hairs -- but I feel more alive than ever, especially in the last two years. I too am standing tall, mature, strong.

"This instant is the only time there is and it is heaven." Here I am in heaven, with; all these nice young people, circling a tree, preparing words/leaves to reach out to others, sharing thoughts. 7. Now I am collecting their leaves, thinking about how to make them do an electronic dance on our computers, electrons connecting like those in our neurons, connecting us all together.