Hello
my dears. I am the Raven who speaks to you.
Today
I want to talk about trees, but not from a botanical and ecological
perspective. I would like to think of trees biographically and psychologically.
These two terms can already raise some questions: how to talk about trees if
not through biology? Well... taking into account the countless ways that trees
participate in human life and culture, let's say there are many other ways to
think and discuss about them. Trees play a fundamental role in our existence:
they produce the elemental air we breathe and filter all the dirt and
corruption that we cause in the ecosystem. It is a true horror to imagine what
life would be without them.
But
we can go beyond this observation. Trees not only produce a physiological
effect, but also fulfill as they have already fulfilled various psychological
roles in human life. Our relationship with them is much more than preservation
or stingy greed in wanting to extract them for economic interests. Trees have
the power to affect us on a symbolic level as well. The various personal and
collective meanings they can have, the individual and affective memories
related to them: there are countless examples that I can use to demonstrate how
trees also have a psychic influence on our lives. As much as this is not common
nowadays, as cities practically devastated rural areas and the urbanization
process brought with it the ruin of flora, allow me to remind you of the
playful role that trees once played in people's lives. And how the memories
they elicit make them a symbol of happy moments or a time when the relationship
with space was different. Many who listen to me may not realize it, but trees
were practically a toy in themselves, something natural, without the need for manufacturing.
Climb on them to pick fruits, to spend time leaning against the canopy. Or even build tree
houses using its branches as a base, creating real clubhouses or children's
shelters. Make a swing using ropes, boards or tires. And it's not just with
children that trees already had some symbolic value and psychic record. With
teenagers too. To this day, there are still couples who engrave their names on
tree trunks as a form of declaration and promise. If you have never seen a tree
with the initials of names inside a heart out there, my dears, you need to walk
around a little more in areas that are less gray and, preferably, without
concrete nearby.
Can
I talk about adults too? Of course I can. And this time I won't give too
flowery examples, as I did before.
I'll make it a little darker. Trees were also used for abominable things and
were, in various historical moments, symbols that caused fear and communicated
the most morbid. It was a daily occurrence in the Middle Ages to travel along
the roads and find bodies hanging from branches and duly guarded by vultures,
which in this horrible image had a source of sustenance for many days. And what
about the Romans? Anthropological studies show that the most cruel and
horrendous means of execution for the Caesars was crucifixion. But the Romans
were not sawing trees, grinding stems and making them symmetrical. Of course
not. A strong tree to support the weight of an adult body was more than enough
for the butcher soldiers. There are even studies that address how ancient
Jerusalem was full of olive trees and how these were used by the Romans for
this purpose.
These
historical elements are useful to reflect how trees can populate our
imagination, whether in a positive or negative way. Inspired by them it is possible
to enter the world of fantasy, but also to find the grotesque, the darkness.
And you must know very well that Lovecraft is much more interested in the
second part. Something I've always noticed watching movies, drawings and
paintings is how fertile the human imagination is in terms of transmitting an
anthropomorphic quality to trees. The shape of some large trees is not that far
removed from the shape of our bodies and bizarrely some can actually look
human. It's funny how trees can naturally acquire some traits on their surface
that make us see human faces. Several cartoons had them moving the branches to
use them as arms. Who doesn't remember the classic scene from the 1982 movie
Poltergeist?
What
I can still add to make your imagination even more fertile in this sense is the
fact that large trees are incredibly long-lived. They live much longer than us
and are capable of lasting centuries. If trees had eyes, how many lives have
they not seen begin and end? If they had ears, how many voices, whispers,
secrets would they not keep? Can you measure the amount of lives that have
already inhabited a tree, that were born, lived and also died there, with or
close to it? Given this longevity, trees are also great monuments. And it's not
hard to imagine why some cultures, the Celtic for example, had such deep
respect for them. Elder trees were treated as if they were an entity in their
own right and it is precisely this domain of the mind that I want to enter. I
believe Lovecraft manages to penetrate his common disconnections with reality
and continuous immersion in his mythological world. In his adventures in
moments of seclusion. The trees in this fantastic world cannot be explained by
physics or biology alone. They contain extraordinary, supernatural elements and
are full of symbolism and belief. So the trees become the entities I just
mentioned.
It
is interesting how the background of the short story “The Tree” is built with
pagan influences and passages that refer to gods that, even if they are of a
western nature, date from ancient eras. Humanity next to lovecraftian entities
always looks like a baby in chronological terms, when compared to the antiquity
of the creatures represented. A primordial aura inhabits the tale, not only
represented by the way the sculptor Kalos talks to the spirits he can hear near
a garden of olive trees, which are supposed to be fauns and dryads, beings who accompany and praise the profane
god Pan. But also like the whole lovecraftian description makes us feel like we
are in an environment that has had little or no human influence. In this sense,
the lovecraftian narrative structure points to something dark, incomprehensible
to the worldly mind, which is what manifests itself on Mount Maenalus and serves
as a source of inspiration for Kalos to sculpt fauns and dryads with astonishing precision, at the same time
it is something that generates a certain fascination in us, something of a
hypnotic nature. Lovecraft always works to reveal the existence of a desired
beyond. An unknown source of knowledge. And although the consequences are not
exactly those expected by the moral concept attributed by the human mind, a
type of psychic structure quite different from the nature spirits represented
here in the story, strangely humans still want to go down one more step, to go
deeper and deeper. We know that this does not usually end well in lovecraftian
writings, but I insist: it is important to note that this concept of “good” is
very human. It is a moral value that comes from our species (and has little to
do with lovecraftian beings). The other side, the beyond, the beings of nature
do not necessarily have the same understanding, the same judgment.
The
withering away of Kalos is concomitant with a kind of awakening to this other
consciousness. When he asks his great friend Musides to bury him next to an olive tree seedling deposited
near his head, Kalos does not appear to be insane, but just in another tune. It
is a fact that he was sick in body. The constant contact with the fauns and
dryads was apparently something that
drained him of life energy. But Kalos does not appear to be sick of mental
faculties, just inserted in a transitional process. In a kind of metamorphosis. It remains for our imagination to
consider what Kalos actually talked to the fauns and dryads he heard. But the fact is that the story enters
the domain of what I mentioned earlier as the anthropomorphism of trees, a
characteristic attributed by human culture. The people passing by Mount Maenalus,
now the tomb of Kalos and where the olive tree grew next to his body, is
something that causes horror and fascination. The moonlight, the huge roots
that broke through the tomb, the macabre aspect that constitutes the
environmental image of the place is a fertile scenario for the human mind and
that immortalizes Kalos and the tree, if we can separate one of the other at
the end of the tale.
The
fact that Kalos was buried with the olive tree and that it is described in the
tale as an abnormal tree, which grew frighteningly in comparison with all the others, suggests that it was nourished by his body.
But if we want to step into the realm of the supernatural, perhaps that could
also mean that the tree is a continuation of Kalos' own life essence. Something
that maybe he was fully aware that he would be, given his last moments and how
he spoke more about things from the other world than this. As if he were
immersed in the psychic reality of fauns and dryads,
like a cocoon ready to be reborn and
inhabit a completely different reality. It is interesting to see how the fate
of Kalos is not limited to the manichaeism represented by Heaven and Hell.
There remains the possibility of something beyond this duality, of another
dimension, something that escapes the possibilities proclaimed by the most
widespread beliefs in our culture. We enter the realm of mystery, but which is
bizarrely represented in this lovecraftian tale through a mixture of
incorporeal, spectral elements, with others of material, perfectly concrete
dimensions such as the silhouette of the tree and the aberratic aspect of its
roots. It is the presentation of speculative elements, but with enough impact
and influence in the real field. And, therefore, I believe that it is something
really plausible to think about the subjective, symbolic and fantastic
relationships that we have with real trees. Have you ever seen an old, human-looking
tree on a dark, moonlit night? Certainly not, but I'm sure it's something you
can perfectly imagine.
Corvid
greetings!
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