Arboreal Influences
Consciousness diffused abroad
Related posts:
I stay with Robert Louis Stevenson and material from his book An Inland Voyage for a few posts. This is because he proves to have much psychological insight, as well as being an interesting and entertaining writer, and I'd like in this post to look at some things he said about trees. For instance:
There is nothing so much alive, and yet so quiet, as a woodland…
And surely of all smells in the world, the smell of many trees is the sweetest and most fortifying.1
Stevenson obviously greatly appreciated trees, and amusingly, after having told of an episode where a passing stranger had asked about his journey (in a canoe) and who then ridiculed his plans, said:
I was so astounded at the man's malice, that I could only stare at him in silence. A tree would never have spoken to me like this.2
He also mused on how it would be to be buried in a woodland, as the German writer Heinrich Heine had said he wished, "to lie like Merlin under the oaks of Broceliande."34 Stevenson describes how he wouldn't be satisfied to be under just one oak tree, but if the trees grew all together like a banyan grove, he would be under the "the tap-root of the whole," and,
…my parts should circulate from oak to oak; and my consciousness should be diffused abroad in all the forest, and give a common heart to that assembly of green spires, so that it also might rejoice in its own loveliness and dignity.5
Fanciful thoughts, you might say? But translate this into walking in a quiet woodland, inhaling the fragrance from the trees, one's breath intermingling with the respirations or gaseous exchange of the trees and the atmosphere, and the blending of one's being, as it were, with the being of the trees . . . would that not have some great reciprocal and helpful influence, fanciful or not?
It's interesting that Stevenson specially emphasises the scents of the forest, and that most neglected of human senses, the one that seems most linked with our emotional life and associations. Even to devote a few minutes to recalling or imagining the smells of a woodland, perhaps with a background of picturing and birdsong, wafts of air on the face, the texture of bark under one's hands, and so on, can change the breath and the state to something more expansive and alive.
I finish with some further words from Stevenson, to assist in such an exercise for the imagination, the nose, and the feeling state:
…a whole forest, healthy and beautiful, giving colour to the light, giving perfume to the air: what is this but the most imposing piece in nature's repertory?6
R.L. Stevenson - An Inland Voyage, C. Kegan Paul & Co. (London), 1878, p.75.
Ibid., p.79.
Ibid., p.77.
Here is the Heine extract that Stevenson is referring to:
…mein Bett mahnt mich an das tönende Grab des Zauberers Merlinus, welches sich im Walde Brozeliand in der Bretagne befindet, unter hohen Eichen, deren Wipfel wie grüne Flammen gen Himmel lodern. Ach, um diese Bäume und ihr frisches Wehen beneide ich dich, College Merlinus, denn kein grünes Blatt rauscht herein in meine Matratzengruft zu Paris…
…my bed reminds me of the resounding tomb of the magician Merlin, which is in the Brocéliande forest in Brittany, beneath tall oaks whose tops blaze toward the sky like green flames. Ah, I envy you these trees and their fresh breath, colleague Merlin, for not a green leaf rustles into my mattress-grave in Paris…
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) - Romanzero, Hoffman und Camper (Hamburg), 1851, Nachwort (Epilogue), p.251-2.
Stevenson - An Inland Voyage, p.77.
Ibid., p.77.