Chapter 1 #3
“So right now,” I said, sipping the peppermint tea he’d brought during my rambles, “I guess I’m just looking for source materials.
Strange histories, odd treatises, obscure manifestos.
Any out-of-the-way stories or images about trees that might add something to the mix.
I thought you might be able to offer some guidance with that. ”
“That’s a fun assignment,” he said.
“I hope this isn’t too vague,” I said.
“No, no,” he said, “just vague enough.”
He tented his fingers and, for a moment, became almost performatively thoughtful. His thick eyebrows furrowed; his chin jutted. He nodded to himself a few times, parsing some initial ideas, discarding them, moving on.
Then he stood and drifted over to his bookshelf.
He began browsing the spines. He was a graceful, well-formed man, but something about his bearing also seemed to neutralize that impression.
It was the way he held himself, the excited foppishness of his gestures.
His posture seemed to say: This handsomeness, let’s not worry about it.
Let’s put it aside and talk like normal people do. Already, I was starting to like him.
“It sounds like what you’re talking about is a florilegium,” he said, caressing his chin.
“Am I?” I said.
“That’s a collection of flowers,” he said. “But also a collection of short writings around a given theme. The word ‘anthology’ comes from a similar root, anthos , or flower. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Flowers are somehow bound up with this kind of writing.”
“See, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for,” I said. “That’s already great. I might be able to use that.” I had him spell the word for me and wrote it down in my little notebook.
“I don’t have a ton to offer here in the office,” he said, head tilted.
“I have a lot more books at home. Mostly I keep the more nonscience stuff here. I try to impress these kids with the humanities angle. They’re so uptight about their science degrees, so practical.
I want to show them what the scope of environmental sciences can mean.
But there are a few things I can suggest off the bat. Let’s see, let’s see…”
He reached up to a high shelf and came away with a thick orange paperback.
“There’s always Yggdrasil,” he said, blowing some dust off the top, “the tree of Norse mythology. Yggdrasil, the tree of creation. It’s a cosmic ash holding nine worlds in its branches and roots.
There’s an eagle in it. And a dragon in the roots.
It connects you to Asian cosmologies and shamanic traditions.
There are a lot of ideas you can pull out of Yggdrasil. That’s a tree with a personality.”
“Interesting,” I said, though I wasn’t that interested. I knew Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil came up often in the current tree literature. It seemed a little played out.
“But maybe you don’t want to write a book report on world religions,” Phil said, detecting my lack of energy. He reshelved the book. “Or maybe you’re looking for less-trod ground.”
He went for another spine. “There’s the story of St. Brendan. He discovered a tree where a flock of birds sings the liturgical hours in harmony. That’s an interesting tree. But maybe too ecclesiastical for your purposes.”
“I’m not huge on the major monotheisms,” I said. “Unless it’s the more apocryphal traditions.”
“Ah, well, then this might be a good tree for you,” he said, pulling another title. “More esoteric. The ympe-tree. This is a place where the human and fairy worlds overlap.”
“Interesting,” I said, and this time I meant it.
“It’s the Eurydice story in Celtic drag,” he said, riffling through the pages.
“Orpheus becomes Orfeo. Hades becomes a fairy kingdom. In this telling, Heuodis—Eurydice—sleeps under an ‘ympe-tre,’ which is probably a cherry or apple tree. It’s grafted, which means partly human-engineered, which is kind of interesting.
The fairy king finds her lying there and drags her down to the fairy kingdom, where time stands still, and Orfeo has to descend and rescue her.
He finds her sleeping under another ympe-tree in the underworld.
So the ympe-tree is both the entrance into the fairy world and a tree inside the fairy world.
A very bizarre mirroring. You could possibly do something with that. ”
“I’ve been thinking I’d like to write something about fairies,” I said. “I’d love to read that book. What’s the title?”
“Take it,” he said, and handed me the book, Premodern Ecology . “I won’t be using it any time soon. I had a feeling you might like that one. I just finished reading your last book, so I had a little head start on what you might be wanting.”
It was always surprising when someone brought up one of my books, Earth’s Shadow most especially.
When they did, it was rarely in an unambiguously positive way.
There was almost always some hidden knife in people’s words.
“I loved the cover.” “The footnotes were quite well-done.” Immediately, I was girding myself for the faint praise.
“I thought it was fantastic,” he said without apparent guile. “I should’ve mentioned that as soon as you walked in, but I assume no one wants to hear a person’s opinion about their book the second they meet them.”
“If it’s a nice opinion, they do,” I said, which garnered another little chuckle from both of us.
“It was really fascinating,” he said, returning to his desk. “And gracefully written. I was genuinely impressed. Such a fascinating premise, too. Light through the ages. I thought about light differently after I read it.”
“That was the hope,” I said.
“And the part about light as a living creature,” he said. “What a beautiful thought. I hadn’t really heard that idea before.”
He was talking about the medieval chapter.
Whenever anyone said anything complimentary about the book, it was usually about the medieval chapter.
It turned out people loved the Middle Ages—anything involving secret illuminated manuscripts and flaming, stained glass, rosette windows, they ate up.
I’d promised myself I’d always include medieval sources going forward.
“It was a pretty common concept in the ninth, tenth centuries,” I said. “The solar mother, the solar nipple. Umbilical sunbeams. I mean, you know that; you read the book.”
“It really got me for a second,” he said.
“I had to think about it. Is light alive? I mean, it doesn’t excrete anything.
It doesn’t reproduce. And yet it gives life, so it must have some kind of life to give.
I love that reasoning. It’s very medieval, but it’s hard to think around.
I like to assign my classes Hildegard of Bingen every year.
They’re always amazed how relevant she is. ”
“Hildegard is great,” I said.
“They call them Dark Ages,” Phil said, “but they weren’t really so dark.”
“No darker than ours, I’d say.”
We talked for another hour about the Middle Ages.
It turned out Phil knew his Aquinas and his Augustine, his Scholasticism, and the full, wending path of the apophatic tradition.
He could weigh in on the debates between Suger and St. Bernard regarding the relative divinity or blasphemy of stained glass windows.
He wasn’t a fan of Jan van Ruysbroeck, though he loved the title of his main extant writing, The Sparkling Stone , as I did.
There weren’t many people who could discourse on this level, which was fun, and the fact that he’d isolated the ultimate kernel of the Light Book, the very idea that I’d fallen in love with, the idea of light as a kind of amniotic fluid flooding the cosmos, seemed like an incredibly good sign.
I’d stumbled on a certified forest ecologist who thought like a weirdo, mystical animist, like myself.
By the time his office hours ended, we’d agreed I’d come back for another visit.
He’d already sent me a syllabus and a link to a documentary I might enjoy.
We might have kept talking, but he had a faculty meeting to attend, and I accompanied him on the walk across campus.
The rain was cold and pelting, pooling on the lawns, spitting from the gutters, rattling our umbrellas.
As the administrative building approached, I started preparing to peel off and make myself dinner and possibly enjoy a celebratory bourbon with my night’s bath.
“Thank you for all your time today, Phil,” I said. “I usually wouldn’t talk about a project this early at all, so thanks for letting me stumble through it. I really appreciate your patience.”
“My pleasure,” he said. “I don’t get to talk about this stuff very often. And it’s a good idea. An important idea. It’s what everyone should be writing about all the time. Trees.”
“I think so,” I said.
“Actually, I have another little idea you can use,” he said, “if you want it, anyway. It just occurred to me.”
“Please,” I said. “Lay it on me.”
“I could never use this in an academic paper,” he said. “That’s the problem with peer-reviewed journals. All these ideas you can’t use because there’s no empirical evidence for them. So this is just a theory I have. It has to do with the lullaby ‘Rock-a-bye Baby.’?”
“Fantastic,” I said.
“No one knows where the lyrics of that song come from,” he said.
“The tune starts to show up in sheet music in the eighteenth century, or thereabouts, but no one has any idea about the origin of the words. Some people think the Pilgrims wrote them when they first saw Indians attaching birchbark baby cradles to the limbs of trees. Other people think Davy Crockett’s cousin Effie wrote them.
Some people say they go all the way back to ancient Egypt and the baby is the god Horus.
They can’t find the source, no matter how far back they go.
“So here’s my thought,” he said, slowing his pace so our final destination was timed with his words.
Up ahead, the safety lights of the main administration building blurred and spiked in the rainy gloaming.
“What if it goes even further than that? What if it goes all the way back to our days in the trees? ‘Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetops.’ We spent our first six million years in trees. Trees were our original home. I like to imagine that lullaby as a remnant of our prehuman era. A memory of our monkey mothers in the branches.”
“?‘Down will come baby…,’?” I said. “Kind of dark.”
“It’s all dark that far back,” he said.
“I love the thought,” I said. “I bet I can find a place for it somewhere. I’ll give you credit if I do.”
“It’s yours to have,” he said.
Moments later, we parted ways, but not before I met Sarah.
I barely remember the meeting, I was so blinded by my new source, so lost in thoughts about the Tree Book and all the hours of glorious labor ahead.
If I plumb my memory, I can turn up the vaguest image—a shadowy figure in a raincoat, narrow wrists extending from too-short sleeves—but the picture might be a fabrication of retrospect.
In any case, I’m told Sarah was standing at the door of the administration building, waiting for Phil.
She’d misplaced a house key and needed to borrow his.
They tell me that’s the moment I first encountered Phil’s wife.