Seeing an Unseen Isle

Our contemporary ability to record audio and visual can easily make us think of memories as being like a video recording, perhaps with sound.  The manner in which our brains remember is, however, more complex and more subtle than that.  I think the early 19th-century writer Johann Goethe was perceptive in concluding that our memories coalesce around particular events and places.  Many poets have taken advantage of their own feelings that coalesce around a particular place in Nature they experienced.

William Butler Yeats

One of the most popular of such poems has been "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).  The short twelve-line poem begins simply enough with the poet seemingly saying he will be taking a trip to an island on a lake:

"I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree..."

There follows a short, picturesque description of the place it seems Yeats will be going to.  However, as the poem comes to an end, we realize that Yeats is only going to the island in his memory as a way of getting relief from the unappealing city he is now in:

"I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core."

Yeats confirmed this interpretation of his poem many years later when he replied to a letter from schoolgirls.  He explained that he wrote the poem when he was "very homesick in London."  His poetic evocation of a place he remembered resonated with readers who had never even seen Yeats beloved isle.  There was appeal in such lines as:

"And I shall have some peace there,
 for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning
 to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer,
 and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings."

In English, the word "remember" suggests a type of restoring, a type of being re-joined with something larger that a person is a part of:  We re-member.  As we recollect, we re-collect the broken parts of ourselves, bringing that collection of pieces back together.  To remember can be a way of putting together the pieces of our spirits, our best selves.  Yeats's remembering an isle was to him restorative.

Interestingly, on another occasion Yeats explained that his yearning for such a place began when he was young and his father read him Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's description of the place where he lived near Walden pond appealed to the young Yeats.

Thus we have a second kind of coalescence:  We have a network tying together Thoreau's evocative  description of Walden, Yeats's yearning, Yeats's coalesced memory, and the reader's own evoked imagination.  And that coalescence is expanded every time new readers are moved by "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," feeling themselves being made whole again as a place they have never seen emerges in their own imaginations.

~~~

Is there a place you were once at that you can remember in a restorative way?

(The quote from Yeats's letter, dated 30 Nov. 1922, is taken from

A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats by A. Norman Jeffares, © 1968.  p. 33.)
(The portrait of Yeats by Sargent is in the  public domain, the copyright term being the life of the artist plus 80 years.) 

(Yeats's poem can be read in its entirety at this external link:  "The Lake Isle of Innisfree.")

Touched by Turtles

In the first part of a longer essay, the science writer Loren Eiseley tells a touching story about when he was a child.  He and a friend of his own age were walking across a high railroad trestle, something they were forbidden to do lest a train come when they were on the bridge.

As Eiseley described the experience, "One could look fearfully down... at the shallows and ripples in the shining water some 50 feet below.... From the abutment of the bridge we gazed down upon the water and saw among the pebbles the shape of an animal we knew only from picture books -- a turtle...."

I was a bit surprised by the next event:  "We scrambled down..."   When I began that sentence, I thought the boys' guilt at being on the forbidden trestle had overtaken them.  The remainder of the sentence, however, revealed that was not the reason:  "We scrambled down the embankment to observe [the turtle] more closely."  At this point, I was touched because it seemed that the boys' delight in another living being had been strong enough to overcome the adventure of trestle crossing.  That was true in a way, but the following sentence brought a darker atmosphere to Eiseley 's story:  "I saw that the turtle, whose beautiful markings shown in the afternoon sun, was not alive.... The reason for his death was plain.  [S]omeone engaged in idle practice with a repeating rifle had stitched a row of bullet holes across the turtle's carapace."

Reading this account, my emotions shifting, I was carried on a sequence from childhood adventure, to feeling the attraction of life, to a sobering realization of the potential dangerousness of humankind.  I felt as if I had been carried on a journey somewhat paralleling the course of U.S. attitudes toward turtles in my own lifetime.

The first turtle I saw as a child was one of the small turtles (only 2 to 3 inches in diameter) once frequently sold in pet stores.  They are less common now because we have learned that they are vulnerable to disease as pets, and thus do not live long.  Today, TV is educating people about the need to protect sea turtles' nesting grounds.  Those campaigns draw upon our human ability to be touched by the cuteness of newly-hatched baby turtles racing to the sea.  People even assist turtle infants in the race.

In many cultures, turtles have frequently represented stability, wisdom (because of the longevity of some species), and patience.  It is that last quality -- especially in the form of dogged persistence -- that shows up in the many variations of Aesop's fable "The Tortoise and the Hare." That fable teaches us that if we persist at working toward a goal, we can "win the race," as long as we don't get cocky like the hare.

In the final part of Loren Eiseley's childhood recollection,  he tells how his father guided him toward a more mature thinking that could incorporate an awareness of human destructiveness. Today in the U.S., we can wonder if our now greater concern for the environment and our growing love for Nature will be dogged enough to catch up with the destructiveness of our previous habits.  Or will the "hare" instead win because it had a head start?

~~~

Have you seen turtles or tortoises in the wild?  Where?  What were they like to you?

(The Eiseley quote is from "The Cosmic Orphan" by Loren Eiseley,

in the Propaedia to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, © 1977.  p. 206)

Lively Trees

One memorable scene in the movie Wizard of Oz comes fairly early in the story, when Dorothy has met only one of her road companions on the yellow brick road.  Being hungry, she tries to eat an apple from a tree beside the road, only to have the trees take revenge for the seeming theft.  Although the trees remain planted in place like real trees, their gnarled barks become faces, just like a person's, angrily shouting insults. And their branches turn into arms that hurl apples at Dorothy and the scarecrow.

I recalled this scene when I read some religious texts celebrating the totally opposite spirit of real tress -- their graciousness toward humankind.  As the 9th-century Srimad Bhagavatam puts it:  "The whole life of these trees are spent in service.  With their leaves, fruits, flowers, branches, roots, fragrance, sap, bark, wood, and finally even their ashes as coal, they exist purely for others."

tree of life
in church in Sweden

All of the world's major faith-traditions have employed the tree as a symbol in some fashion, recognizing how important trees are to humans.  In Christianity, the "tree of life" has symbolized both the source of life (such as in Genesis 2:9) and the network of living relationships that cover the Earth.  However, I have encountered the most poetic expressions of gratitude for the practical benefits of trees in writings of Hinduism.

We humans are able to verbally communicate gratitude to another human being in ways we cannot to other species.  And so some Hindu writings personify trees as a way of expressing their goodness.  For example, the Vikrama Charitram says:  "Trees are like good people who care for others."  The contemporary writer Kamala Vasudevan interprets this verse, explaining why trees can be pictured as being altruistic.  He writes:  "They have to keep standing in the sun but they give shade to others.  Whatever fruits they bear, they do not eat themselves, but give it to others.  So kind they are."

It is not only humans who are served by trees.  Our contemporary knowledge from the science of ecology has shown how intricate are the multiple interrelationships in the "tree of life."  One poetic way such interrelationships have been traditionally symbolized in India has been through the Neem tree, which is depicted as being a mother to the "daughter" sparrows who grow up with mother's support before flying off to new homes.  One lovely tribute to trees using that symbol is a traditional "swing song," a song that can be sung to the rhythm of a swing hung in a tree.  Part of it goes this way:

Bengali quilt

"Father, never cut this Neem tree,

The Neem offers rest to sparrows,

Father, never trouble your daughters [or else]

All the sparrows will fly away,

The Neem will feel so lonely."

Imagining this song in a movie scene, I picture a girl swinging in a homemade swing while singing the song.  It would be a scene to enjoy.  Hopefully it might inspire gratitude in me as well, because I wouldn't want trees throwing their apples at me!

~~~

Do you remember any trees you have benefited from in tangible or intangible ways?

(The quote by Vasudevan is from "The Great 'Tree' of Human Life"

in the Deccan Herald, Sunday June 6, 2004, ©.)

(The stained glass photo is by Håkan Svensson, and is used under a

 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)