Oak Tree ~ © Eyvind Earle Publishing LLC
There can be few men who have seen what I have seen. The branch that has formed in the sleeve of my missing arm has brought me sustenance. It is as if the scratching sound that constituted my wretched life - the sound inside my head that had been there for so long that I had forgotten it were there -had suddenly been soothed with green sap. I am filled with the rapture of an ancient forest. The trees gaze back at my thoughts with something that resembles horror. New bark rubs coarse at my throat and speaks to me of time less frenetic, a journey less headlong, one that understands itself to be nothing more than the continuation of generations without self; without any need save to be; to most effectively reap the sunlight; to breathe the earth’s future through green lungs of benevolence.
Despite the eloquence of all my past petitions, the intricacy of moral justification for all my depravity; the trees do yet welcome me into their botanic realm. I am belittled; awed; a mere husk of man before the immense power of this ghostly forest.
‘Tis a small mercy, this loss of God, for the wood lives a far more brutal morality.
‘Tis a torment that carries no less powerlessness than mankind’s toil beneath an inscrutable god; to be rooted in the seething earth whose unseen horror centres upon water; to suffer the passage of fleeting life forms in the upper canopy, or tunnelling insect invasions to the bark and core.
Despite the eloquence of all my past petitions, the intricacy of moral justification for all my depravity; the trees do yet welcome me into their botanic realm. I am belittled; awed; a mere husk of man before the immense power of this ghostly forest.
‘Tis a small mercy, this loss of God, for the wood lives a far more brutal morality.
‘Tis a torment that carries no less powerlessness than mankind’s toil beneath an inscrutable god; to be rooted in the seething earth whose unseen horror centres upon water; to suffer the passage of fleeting life forms in the upper canopy, or tunnelling insect invasions to the bark and core.
And ‘tis a cruel morality that leaves us, stranded as we are ‘twixt elusive water and unattainable sun; to witness the activities of man from this futile eerie.
And tho’ we creak and twist in protest, he heeds us not, this thoughtless creature hell bent.
And thus we speak through this particular man; once so proud to be a pilgrim and a puritan; once so quick to deliver judgement; to further the aims of progress with gunpowder and empire; he has no need now for those ornaments of civilisation – those beads and baubles so greedily hoarded – that which defined him as, above all else, a good man – a man of God.
Aye, William Fevre: driftwood on the shores of one existence, petrified in another.
3 comments:
'Tis true the life of a tree is far more brutal...
…one that understands itself to be nothing more than the continuation of generations without self; without any need save to be; to most effectively reap the sunlight; to breathe the earth’s future through green lungs of benevolence.
Will and I found the same understanding from both sides of the eater/eaten slice of life.
I must stop with the superlatives and merely remark that you appear to be blossoming a wee bit yosef.
subby: brutal but simple
Yodood: thanks bud :)
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