Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
Preventing the world from destroying itself….
And I even think that we should understand – without ceasing to fight it – the error of those who in an excess of despair have asserted their right to dishonour and have rushed into the nihilism of the era. But the fact remains that most of us, in my country and in Europe, have refused this nihilism and have engaged upon a quest for legitimacy. They have had to forge for themselves an art of living in times of catastrophe in order to be born a second time and to fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.
Albert Camus, 1957 Nobel Speech
(I encourage you to read the whole thing. Moving, insightful, mournful.)
Getting out
I just lost a post due to computer virus… so instead i give you the list it was based on. Make of this what you will.
Bookshed: Seeing Trees
Seeing Trees
By Nancy Ross Hugo and Robert Llewellyn
Timber Press, 2011
As you might judge from the video above, this is no ordinary botanical book – but a work of real beauty – a hyper-glimpse into the world of the plants which surround us. Created by two “tree-watchers”, Seeing Trees offers the reader new insights into the tree lifecycle and growth stages – using an innovative form of photography developed by Robert Llewellyn.
First on the photography – Llewellyn has created a rig that allows him to take macro photography of ever square inch of plant or plant-part which he then merges together using software. The result is a series of high-definition of photographs that seem to hang in 3-D on the page. This book is rich on the full-colour visuals, inviting both meditation and exploration on the pieces which make up these living giants in our yards and forests. Everything is included here: leaf varieties, tree buds and scars, bark patterns, seed pods, tree fruit and pollen grains. The photography is a reminder of what the naked eye just doesn’t pick up on, or in some cases can’t really see. The section of the book which goes in depth into ten different tree species is titled “Intimate Views” – which sums up perfectly the level of closeness with which you can *see* the tree parts in these photos.
Alongside this evocative photography, Nancy Ross-Hugo pairs her descriptive text of each species, inviting the reader to explore further what is going on behind the visual. She shares notes from her tree-watching journal, anecdotes from other tree-lovers she has known, as well as pointers on what to look for at each stage of the annual cycle. While Llewellyn gives us the incredibly detailed picture, Ross-Hugo tells us what exactly it is we are looking at – with a trained and loving eye.
The only unfortunate thing (to me) is that the focus of the book is on eastern varieties, for that is where this work was conceived and created. While Ross-Hugo notes this, she also explains their attempt to choose species that hide a wide range in North America – so we do get a Red Cedar, though it’s the Eastern Red Cedar. Pine and Oak trees are also found here, but different varieties than our western Canada natives. I would love to see a book like this focused on the Pacific Northwest – and more than trees too! But whether that happens or not, Seeing Trees definitely achieves the objective of giving the reader a new way of looking at and understanding the natural world. This book is inspiring and beautifully presented, making a good gift or just a treasure for the nature-lover’s own bookshelf.
Not writing.
I tell myself all the time that I don’t have time to write. That I don’t have space. That I don’t have enough unbroken minutes and silences to sit down and really work. Which is somewhat true. But what’s also true is that I feel foolish about writing. Really. Foolish. Because the voice inside me, the same one that says that I must find meaning, says this is meaningless because isn’t the whole human project meaningless anyway? And so I am silenced by an inability to take myself seriously in the face of the death-reality of human life. What a thing to face mortality every time I sit down to write!
Silencing that part of myself seems nigh impossible – especially these days with all the philosophy-reading and life introspection my grad program requires. Rather than turning off the questions, I feel like the universal taps have been left wide open and I am being flooded with rivers of why and how, and not that! Not quite drowning, though drinking enough in to get water poisoning overtime. I suppose that one way to get through it is to create characters who ask these questions and beat themselves up – therefore at least getting something productive out of my self-questioning. Making poetry out of existentialism though? I don’t know how to do that without sounding pretentious.
I suppose another problem is that I’ve fallen into the distraction trap of the Internet and writing means removing myself from some other pastime that I think I’d rather do. But like my channel-surfing teenage self, I don’t really want to spend my time in the zone of random information and video – and when I’ve spent an hour or two at it I really feel like I’m letting my life drip away, no matter how current or important what I’ve been looking at seems to be. When I putter in the garden for two hours, when I spend an hour organizing the kitchen, when I go to a coffeeshop and write pressingly into my notebook – I don’t feel like that. So what makes the Internet (or television for that matter) so compelling? I don’t think the answer is laziness but something else. Something related to my first point above and also to the fact that life (and all of these activities I just listed) requires a lot of work to make a go of anything. And also, it takes a long time to get really good at things. So rather than laziness, I think it’s more like inertia that keeps me glued to the Internet over living my real life. And once you get over that hurdle, the part that keeps one stuck down and unchanging, one is really over halfway to the point of producing. Bodies in motion stay in motion and all that.
Like right now, I was just sitting on the couch, vacillating between reading a really good book of current philosophical thinking on what makes us human, looking through some old journals and surfing the Internet. A part of me lately has been yearning to write, not necessarily even creative writing, but something that will give me an outlet for synthesis as I rack up ideas, images, arguments and (yes, even) self-doubts. The fact that I wasn’t settling on any one of the above things (reading, surfing, annotating past thoughts) tipped me off to the fact that I really wanted to be doing something else which felt more meaningful than any of those things. I could, of course, easily subsume that feeling into another round of Internet meandering, but instead I decided that although we have to go out shortly, and I don’t feel like installing myself in the silent studio at the moment – I could just sit up on the couch and write whatever came to mind. Which was this. Because I am attempting to figure out not only why I don’t write (and by that I mean – seriously, off the blog, developing narrative or at least lyric), but also why I am in a loop of procrastination in my life generally. It’s not making me happy – at work, or in my creative life – and yet there I find myself dog-paddling towards forty and trying not to have the predictable midlife crisis about it all.
Ultimately I think it’s about habits, and I’ve fallen into some rather insidious habits that allow me to stay in a mode of procrastination rather than moving out of it. I’m not really in the mood to make grand promises or pronouncements about how I’m going to fix myself (it is Saturday morning after all) – but I am simply making an attempt here to focus my own awareness on something that’s been eating at me lately. I need to write, I want to write, and yet I’m not doing it. And I’m not doing it because of existential issues, negative self-talk, and the lure of other things that involve a lot less effort from me. So there. That’s why I’m not writing, or at least part of the reason for it. Something that I would like to change about myself anyhow.
Red Cedar 