Looking Up to Trees

Down the block from the house where my wife grew up, there is a modest but nice park.  There is only a little bit of playground equipment.  Instead the park is mostly a place for kids to run and adults to walk beneath the tall, very old trees.

One evening near sunset, I strolled alone into the park, and found myself for some reason pausing before one of the trees.  With no one else around to make me feel embarrassed, I felt a desire to unhurriedly contemplate the tree.  At first I saw up close the rough texture of its bark and the pockmarks from where life's diseases had left scars.  Despite those signs of the tree's vulnerability, I was next struck by the tree's massiveness.  It's height and solidity.  I thought about how the tree had endured countless nights, standing there unattended through wind, rain, and dangerous lightning.

I found myself not only looking up at the tree in its immense height, but also looking up to the tree for its virtues.

To some people, it might seem strange to turn to trees to look for virtues to inspire.  But Tennessee Williams, in his play The Night of the Iguana, turned to a tree for guidance on the distinctly human challenge of facing one's mortality.  In that play (superbly adapted into a movie), a middle-aged spinster artist is traveling through Mexico with her 97-year old grandfather, who is a poet.  The two are broke, trying to hang on by her drawing portraits of tourists and by his recitation of poems for tips.

Intermittently throughout the play, the now nearly deaf and nearly blind grandfather repeats the opening lines of a poem he has been working on but has been unable to complete:

"How calmly does the orange branch

Observe the sky begin to blanch..."

The play's climax is expressed poetically through the grandfather finally having completed his
poem mentally, which he then recites while his granddaughter transcribes it.  The completed poem expresses how the tree, even though it lives "without a prayer" (unlike humans), nonetheless shows "no betrayal of despair" in the face of its future:

grandfather reciting poem
in The Night of the Iguana

"Sometime while night obscures the tree...

A second history will commence.

...the broken stem

The plummeting to earth...."

This return to the earth is:

"An intercourse not well designed

For beings of a golden kind."

It is instead " [a] bargaining with mist and mould."

And yet, despite that altered future, the living tree still holds its head high.  So much so that the soon-to-die grandfather looks up to the tree, expressing in the final stanza of the poem his desire to live like it:

"O Courage, could you not as well

Select a second place to dwell,

Not only in that golden tree

But in the frightened heart of me?"

~~~

Are there any qualities of trees that you would like to share in?

(The poem quoted is recited by Nonno in The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams, © 1961.  Act. 3.)

(The movie-still from The Night of the Iguana [1964], directed by John Huston, is used under Fair Use.)

(The full poem by Tennessee Williams, in print and read by a different actor, is at this external link:  "How calmly does....")

A Flow that Courses Beneath Our Lives

Rivers.  Every continent on this planet has at least one major river that forms a backbone of life. There is the Nile of ancient Egypt.  The Mesopotamian Tigris and Euphrates of Biblical proportions.  The Mississippi.  Not to mention the Ganges, considered sacred, so important is it to India.

I remember once in my very early adulthood looking out a railway-car window at night as the train I was on crossed over the Mississippi River.  Even though I had read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn growing up in school, only then, as I saw that river's serpentine twists in the moonlight, was I able to truly understand how Huck and Jim were able to experience that river as both a source of safe places to hide and as a treacherous place for navigating in the fog.

celebrating the Festival of Lights
by floating lamps on the Ganges

Obviously, rivers are composed of water, and as such participate in all the symbolic meanings of water, no matter which shape the river takes.  However, because rivers are massive and flowing, they have carried additional layers of symbolism -- ones that draw upon the aspects of depth and of time.  (As the early 20th-century author Thomas Wolfe knew when he titled one of his novels Of Time and the River.)

The story of humankind has been filled with tragedy and comedy, mischief and virtue, chaos and order.  Through it all, rivers have been not only a physical means for life-support, but also a way for faith-traditions and writers to find a way of supporting the fragile boats that our lives sometimes become.  Rivers have thus served as symbols that penetrate into the often hidden continuity of our existence amid all of life's flux.  Amid all the twists and turns of life.

contemporary ferryman in India

I do not know of any novel where this layer of
symbolism is used to better effect than in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha (1922), in which the author fuses Eastern Buddhist thought and Western psychological insights.  That book follows the life-course of a man from early adolescence through his middle years and into his later years -- as he struggles to find an integrity and meaning for his life.  Both as a young man and as old man, he crosses the same river, while that ever-flowing body of water and the ferryman provide a continuity. During one of their encounters later in life, the ferryman guides him with this lesson:  "The river has taught me to listen; you will learn from it, too.  The river knows everything; one can learn everything from it.  You have already learned from the river that it is good to strive downwards, to sink, to seek the depths."

The 14th century Christian mystic theologian Meister Eckhart had a gift for spiritual teaching. Part of that gift lay in his ability to speak of the Eternal in ways that helped his students discern God not as an abstract concept but as a Force underlying their own ordinary lives.  Eckhart drew upon many metaphors to do that.  Once he wrote:

"God is a great underground river

 that no one can dam up  and no one can stop"

~~~

Have you found a continuity in your life that helps sustain you?  What is it?

(The Hesse quote is from Siddhartha [1922], trans. by Hilda Rosner, © 1951.  p. 86.)

(The Eckhart quote is taken from Wrestling with the Prophets by Matthew Fox, © 1995.  p. 13.)

(The first photo is by User:Pradeep211, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The second photo is by Steffi, upload by Herrick, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

Much Missed about Mary’s Monster

Despite all the new movie characters you will see portrayed by children in costume come Halloween, you might still spot that perennial favorite Frankenstein.  Usually that depiction will be modeled on Boris Karloff's makeup in the 1931 movie (perhaps all the way down to the lug-bolts on each side of the monster's head, an indication that he was put together from parts).  That movie has also been the primary vehicle through which people have learned a Frankenstein story.  But that movie diverged in significant ways from the original British novel by Mary Shelley.  And what was left out may tell us something significant about life, and even other species.

Mary Shelley

The 1818 original novel was inspired partly by Mary Shelley (wife of poet Percy Shelley) having heard about experiments in which scientists were beginning to discover physical connections between electricity, chemistry and biology.  For example, the severed legs of a frog would "kick" when an electrical current was applied.  Some scientists wondered if electricity could somehow bring a whole dead animal back to life.  Mary's imagination took the matter one step further by having her fictional young scientist use electricity to bring life to a being assembled from parts of human corpses.

So far, novel and movie are roughly the same.  The critical question is:  How will complications appear?  What matters has the scientist overlooked that will lead to difficulties (something any good plot needs, horror story or otherwise)?  In the movie, an explanation for the damage that will ensue is provided by the scientist's assistant unwisely having substituted a criminal's brain for a normal person's brain.  But Mary's book provided no such easy out.

In the movie, the monster was mute and slow-witted (probably because of that inadequate brain). In quite a contrast, the book's newly created living being is precocious, and quickly learns to talk quite well.  He even learns to read, and becomes quite erudite.  How could anything go wrong?

And yet, there are problems from the start, and they have to do as much with the scientist as with the monster.  The new being, desiring contact, reaches his hand out to the scientist's, but the scientist pulls back, avoiding touch.  That will be the key to the problems that continue to develop as the new being seeks companionship but cannot get it, and also seeks a mate but cannot find one.  For, after all, this new being is the only one of its kind.  Like all living beings on this planet, he needs others of the same species.  It is as if he were the last of a virtually extinct species the moment he was "born."

To put it in a nutshell, to me, Mary Shelley's monster story suggests not just the danger of arrogant science, but the even greater problems of living and of loving.  If social species such as mammals and birds could watch movies, they might also identify with the "monster."

~~~

Have you ever identified with a monster in a movie, or thought about why we sometimes can?

(The drawing of Frankenstein is by André Koehne 

and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

(The portrait of Shelley is in the Public Domain because its copyright has expired.)

Ex Libris Nature

People don't use them much anymore.  Bookplates, that is.  (In case you're not familiar with their name, bookplates are those rectangular labels, about 3 in. x 4 in., that can be glued into the inside of the front cover of a book to identify the book's owner.  Sometimes the label bears the phrase "Ex Libris" or "From the Library of," ready to be filled in.)  I've been able to notice the decline in their use from having been a volunteer church librarian for almost three decades, and so having sorted through thousands of donated books whose owners have spanned several generations.

A first thought might be that paper bookplates have declined with the rise of electronic books. But the strong sales through Amazon show that physical books made of paper remain popular. (Did book-owners place bookplates in their books more often when, unlike today, a plethora of books could not be so quickly and easily purchased -- thus perhaps making them seem more precious?)

What interests me more about bookplates, however, particularly those from half-a-century to a century ago, are the designs of the artwork that adorn them.  Especially the way Nature so lovingly appears in the bookplates dating from about 1900 to 1950.

I know about them from owning two books published by Dover containing hundreds of samples from that pre-World War II era. There are bookplate illustrations with the lacy filigree of Art Nouveau, and bookplate illustrations with the streamlined polish of Art Deco.

Whatever the style or era, what I notice is the ways Nature appears in the art.  In a fair number of instances, the artwork portrays a person reading outdoors.  (Do people read outdoors much anymore?)  Even if the artwork portrays an inviting reading nook in the corner of a house, there will be a window there with a garden view for the imaginary reader to delight in when they look up from their book.

My hunch is that there is an unconscious symbolic connection between books and Nature.  When we read, and thus connect our minds and hearts with another living person, something living within us grows -- just like those living plants so frequently drawn by Art Nouveau bookplate artists. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. spoke to this enlivening quality of reading by making a comparison to the stimulating effect of music.  He wrote:

"The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts."

~~~

If you had only three books to keep forever (and adorn with bookplates), what would those three books be?

An Easy Way for Evaluating People?

Oh, if we could only know what is going on in another person's head!  Not everything (that would be a nightmare), but enough to protect ourselves against danger that might be coming from someone else.  How can we know through observation whether another person can be relied upon or not?  Interestingly, one formula that has sometimes been given in literature is to watch how that person treats animals.

Just to give some examples from Western literature:  Charlotte Brontë, in her lesser-known novel Shirley, wrote of one character, "we watch him, and see him kind to animals."  That character turns out to be kind also "to little children, to poor people."  In Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, the body language and speech of the gardener Ben makes him forbidding; but then his deeper character is revealed through his affection for a robin.  In one of Victor Hugo's most famous novels, that kind of contrast is emphasized by a caring for birds being displayed by the hideous-looking hunchback.  In this case, the action toward animals not only reveals character, but also belies Quasimodo's ugly physical appearance.

poem
"Kindness to Animals"
by Jane Taylor (1783-1824)

There are so many examples like these that we might think that with them we have gotten the animal-human connection figured out.  But the matter is more complex.  Setting aside the problem of trying to catch a glimpse of a person mistreating an animal in advance of injuring a person, there is the question of whether treatment of animals is really a sure-fire indicator.  Part of the complexity here is that literature is not neutral, objective observation.  Literature develops familiar patterns to suit particular audiences.  Thus, these recurring scenes of good treatment of animals by reliable people could simply be an easy device for the author to reveal what is within a character's head without using a stream-of-consciousness technique.

Moreover, sometimes literary themes develop in order to teach moral lessons.  English literature, especially in the 1800's, was frequently considered to be a vehicle for teaching children.  That role of stories means that animal-treatment scenes may have been designed to teach good behavior, not as a claim about predicting a person's future behavior.

Nonetheless, recent scientific research indicates that our human brains are indeed inclined to prefer a person who is kinder over a person who is not.  Researchers at Yale had babies only five months old watch two stuffed animals (manipulated like puppets) behave differently toward a third stuffed animal.  After watching one stuffed animal be helpful and another animal be unhelpful toward a third animal, the babies were then offered the two main puppets.  Which would they prefer to have?  The babies reached out their arms for the stuffed animal that had been "nice" 75 % of the time.

That's a pretty good predictor.  Nonetheless, we have to admit that in 25 % of the cases, the babies did not choose the "nice" puppet.  It seems that just as with adults, we cannot always be able to predict how a baby is going to behave.

~~~

Do you remember any story you read as a child in which animals were treated kindly?

(The Brontë quotes are Shirley's words to Charlotte in Chap.12 of Shirley by Charlotte Brontë [1840].)

(The novel by Victor Hugo mentioned is The Hunchback of Notre Dame [1831].)