8 Old and New Attitude to Trees
This wood had been neglected so long that I came upon great waste of potential timber. Here and there a full-grown tree had evidently crashed down upon surrounding shoots. I occasionally found a trunk or a big branch lying right across a stool from which ten shoots were growing. All would be twisted, none worth keeping there. Many of these young ash trees had thereby assumed the strangest shapes, for they had had to twist themselves as if they were made of rubber. Sometimes they looked like the neck plus the head of a swan, and I saw one that reminded me of that queer flamingo that Alice used as a croquet-mallet in Wonderland. Some had twisted their way up snake-wise in order to pass the obstructions. Some were linked in close embrace and one had grown in such an extraordinary way that it now ran through a larger stem. I could do nothing in such places but get rid of all the twisters and leave an open space.
At other times I came upon three or four excellent trees, all straight, all doing well, all big and high. But since they were too near to one another, only one could be left standing, and I had to select the best. I was often in a real quandary in deciding which was the best, for just as at one place I would find three to five twisters closer together, at another I would find an equal number of champions.
When it was thus necessary to axe a beautiful ash tree for no better reason than that it was too close to another one, I felt extremely apologetic. For trees do exert a strong personality. It is said that in certain parts of Austria there are still to be found peasants who beg the pardon of a tree before felling it. Sir James Frazer told how the inhabitants of Sumatra used to lay the blame at the door of the Dutch authorities. A native would go to a tree which he had to cut down in order to make a road, and would pretend to pick up a letter which he then read aloud to the effect that the Dutch authorities enjoined him to fell the trees . . . ‘You hear that, Spirits,’ he would cry, ‘I must begin clearing at once, or I shall be hanged.’ The seriousness of tree-worship in ancient Germany brought ferocious penalties upon anyone who peeled the bark of a standing tree: his navel was cut and nailed to the tree, and he was driven round and round it until his guts were twisted about the trunk. Plutarch relates how the withering of a sacred fig-tree in Athens or Rome was regarded with consternation; while if a tree was observed by someone to be drooping, a hue and cry was set up and people rushed to its assistance with buckets of water as if to put out a fire. At many times and places it was considered essential to make sacrifices to trees sometimes with fowls, and sometimes with human beings. If we bear in mind the many beneficent qualities ascribed to trees in the past, it is easy to understand why a custom like the May tree or the May-pole prevailed. In spring a tree was brought into the village amidst applause and rejoicing, the intention being to bring home to the village and to each house the blessings which the tree-spirit had the power to bestow.
Mankind dominates the world today. It is certain that trees once did so. It is not possible for us even to imagine the immense forests that existed at the dawn of history – when clearings were but tiny islands in the atlantic stretches of wood. In the first century the Hercynian Forest stretched eastward from the Rhine farther than any man knew: men, questioned by Caesar, had travelled for two months without reaching the end. I like to think how the Weald of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex are remnants of the great forest of Anderida that once clothed the whole of the south-eastern portion of the island, joining another (older than the Chase or father of it) from Hampshire to Devon – and how in the reign of Henry II the citizens of London hunted the wild boar and bull in the woods of Hampstead.
However, since the days of tree-domination and tree-worship we have progressed so much that we now can see them in terms of £.s.d. When I cut down a tree I had levelled a piece of ‘timber’ valued at so much a foot. During many a five minutes I have knocked out about a shilling’s worth a minute. I stacked the poles neatly in piles of a hundred – (my own pay being so much a ‘lug’). One day a timber-merchant came to the woods to decide what he wanted to buy. He was accompanied by the foreman of the estate. Together they arrived at the just price. Then the timber-merchant inspected a portion of the wood not yet tackled by me, marking specially straight trees that he fancied. I said in an aside to the foreman that not all the ones the man was marking could rightly come down, and the foreman said to the merchant at intervals – ‘But we must look after our own interests.’ The man took no notice and continued marking trees while we looked on disapprovingly, the foreman repeating – ‘Of course we must look after our own interests.’
When the timber-merchant had gone, the foreman, an unexuberant personality, looked round at the wood, appraising it. ‘There baint nothing in trees,’ he said. I made some kind of commercial remark. He looked round at the wood again and finally dismissed the whole prospect with two weighty words – ‘It’s dead money,’ he said. Having brought forth this gem of ages-old wisdom he gazed over the wood sourly and mournfully as if filled with sorrow at the sight of so much dead money.
9 Clothes and Sanity
It was not until the bracken had started to appear that the roof was put on the wood. Since the ash does not send out its branches till near the top, we do get this effect of a roof in any reasonable ash wood. Visualize a larch, a chestnut tree, and many a beech and oak, and then remember the tall, bare trunks of the ash branching only at their crowns, and you will grant that it is indeed the placing on of a high roofing that we witness in May and June. It was pleasant to look through an acreage of bare trunks that I had disentangled from the press of competition, and then up at the intermingling greenery enlightened by the sun. You can seldom get this effect from other trees growing together. The chestnut branches out very low, and while beeches do often present a high, lone stem they often do not, and you see beautiful leafy branches sweeping the ground; while the oak, though also capable of the long clean trunk, goes in for great thick limbs sprawling out parallel with the ground or twisting upwards from a low fork. However, I must not run my image of columns upholding a roof too far in connection with my ash, for there were many gaps of course between the crowns, and also a number of blanks owing to lack of trees.
I welcomed these gaps and blanks, for otherwise I had to work in the shade far too often. And when the sun is shining I do not take kindly to working in the shade. Give me heat every time, I do not mind how much. I can do twice the amount of work in the sun than when away from it, or clothed off from it. This is partly due to my attitude towards clothes. I like to wear the right thing in the right place, and am no advocate of unconventional attire. But the right thing, at certain times, in certain places for many people, is often a pair of shorts and nothing more except for the feet. For many agricultural jobs that is not the right thing at all, but for some it is. As for axe-work in the summer, and bill-hook work while cleaning your fallen tree, it certainly is right when the weather is hot or muggy or showery. Thus unencumbered I can do, and like doing, a week’s work in two days. The hotter I get the harder I work, perspiration making me almost cold and the sun not hot enough to make me even feel its heat then. The sheer freedom of the limbs with the breeze on the body gives a pleasure not easily excelled; one could justifiably enthuse about it; I content myself with saying that though this is not the only way of feeling happy and alive, it is one way. To use the mind at full concentration is one of the most manly things we can do, since this capacity happens to be the special gift of man; but we are also animals, and we experience great joy when, in primitive surroundings, we are not dolled up and tied down with artificial skins. Thus with me anyway; I cannot exaggerate the satisfaction I get from becoming a ‘savage’ – even in colour. And I fear that many a Lancashire young man – need I say ‘lad’? – having come home from the Far East, will miss, at intervals throughout his life, sometimes quite savagely, his shirtless army days in the jungle.
There exists a strange crowd of people called Nudists. It might be thought that here we have sane people in an over-civilized world. B
ut this is not so. They are misled. They imagine that by simply taking off their clothes they can side-step the sophistications of metropolitanism. Yet of course they can do nothing of the sort, they merely become unclothed and in their wrong minds. Once I turned off a main street in London, and having paid a fee of two shillings, was admitted into a large house in which a nudist gathering was in progress. When standing in the porch and glancing round at the pavemented vistas of the metropolis, I felt surprise at the assumption that inside this house it would be possible to ‘return to nature’ by the mere removal of clothes. And having entered I did not find the scene or the proceedings in any degree inspiring. There was one room reserved for games, though no particular games were being played and people were wandering about in it aimlessly since there was no possibility of exercise of an exacting sort. Most of the members were in the next room – having tea and cakes. No one wore anything. This looked incongruous in the electric-lit room with its tea and cakes and the people sitting in rows – idiotic might be a better word. And should anyone have come along, I reflected, with an erotic arrière pensée, he or she would quickly have found that nudism is the enemy of eroticism (though possibly not if everyone wore a mask). As I had entered fairly unnoticed it was easy to slip away without offence, and I was glad indeed to regain the comparative sanity of the city streets.
The point is that these nudists run a principle – no clothes: (and this insistence upon none at all is an indignity). It is just a thoughtless principle with no sense in it, seen in practice to be far the most unnatural and unsane affair in the whole city – a sort of climax of absurdity. The more reasonable, open-air nudists do at least enjoy the sun. Unfortunately they sun-bathe. That is to say they lie about doing nothing. In moderation that is all right, of course, but done in company and as a great thing in itself, it is pretty miserable. The whole thing is done too seriously and too thoroughly. One should avoid thoroughness in such fields. My own principle concerning the whole matter is simply this – that the way to enjoy the sun is through working in it or playing a game in it, and that there should never be the raising of an eyelid if a shirt is removed in any congruous setting. But today we still have crazy people who think nothing of a bather approaching the sea in bathing-shorts, but would stare at a cyclist going up a steep hill on a hot day in shorts only. And then over against this we have the lunacy of a whole-hogging nakedness carried even into a city mansion during a winter evening!
In my wood it was unnecessary to consider the existence of either sort of person. I could do the natural thing without the slightest botheration. Much of the work was really strenuous. There were trees to cut down large enough to merit two men with a saw; and when I had axed them down, and cleaned them up, and then chopped them into poles short enough to load on a lorry, I arranged them in piles of a hundred. All this was wonderful exercise, the axing and the hauling about requiring full strength, while the branch-clearing with the bill-book as I held up the heavier branch with one hand, engaged every muscle in the body. It gave me unbounded pleasure to go at this furiously for hours on end if the sun was blazing down on me. It didn’t matter how hot it was, the hotter the better, for then I became very wet with perspiration and needed the warmth of the sun as one coming out of water, while if it rained the drops melted at once. Thus dressed I often felt that I could go on all day without exhaustion, whereas in the winter I couldn’t do a third of the work in the time. I used to smile sometimes at the thought that I was being paid to enjoy myself thus, in a world where a boss who says – ‘I’m not paying you to enjoy yourself, my boy!’ is considered a particularly reasonable and high-minded pillar of society.
10 The Garden of Eden
That was one peak of pleasure. But I got as much out of sitting down for my breaks. To be tired enough to make the act of sitting down a sensation of real relief is a pleasure which has much to be said for it. And provided that you are not over-exhausted but just physically in need of a rest – then the mind often functions at its very best. After some food, hot tea from the thermos, and a cigarette, it is quite remarkable how freely the brain can move, and how favourable the conditions are for unpremeditated meditation.
There is one more proviso for me – the perfect seat in a sunny spot: or in a shady spot at those hours on certain summer days when the sun is actually too hot to sit in. I was expert at finding such places. I kept finding new ones, thinking each better than the last. By a perfect place I mean a tree which I could lean against comfortably and which was so situated that other trees would not block the sun at those times when I would be sitting down. As I say, I found several, and shall remember them all my life because of the happiness I found there and the glory that shone round me. There was one outstanding tree at the foot of which I took up my position very often. I did not cut my way towards it for some time, but when I had discovered it I made it my headquarters for meditation. Trees are particularly conducive to meditation: no doubt that famous Bo-tree did much to prepare Gautama for his hour of enlightenment.
This particular tree was not an ash, it was a fine old oak. Its trunk had considerable girth – three men holding hands could hardly surround it. At about three feet up it leant out and forked into such large branches that it was a question which might claim to be the trunk. At this fork, and for some distance along one of the branches, a fern garden was flourishing. (This arboreal garden was very delightful to contemplate in the summer. A maple-tree, not far off, had a mistletoe growing on one of its branches, and on my way to Blandford I used to stop and look at another maple where to my amazement I saw a young silver birch growing healthily in a moist niche high up.) The arrangement of branches was such that no great limb immediately roofed me blocking out the sun, but at a suitable height the leafage was so plentiful that as a shelter from rain this was perhaps the best tree I have ever known. That leafage, combined with the trunk which gently sloped outwards over me, prevented a drop of water from falling on me for quite a long time even when it was raining heavily outside. I say outside because on such occasions I could sit as if I were indoors without the slightest necessity to put on a coat. It was curious to see the rain pouring down while I, though out-of-doors, was really in-doors. It would be half an hour before the roof would begin to leak a bit.
The situation was not altogether perfect with regard to the sunshine, for after ten o’clock in the morning a big tree intervened. But up till then it was the best place in the wood, and during really hot weather it was superb for thoughtful shade. If there was wind at other places there was no wind here, for I placed ‘drifts’ either of hazel or of branches cut from my ash-poles, at each side. And finally, it was easy to lean against: the earth was soft and no roots stuck out; instead there was a sort of alcove into which I could fit and lean back so as to be comfortably upright.
I mention all these particulars because the reader will then recognize that since I also got a long view, a long sloping-down view of the wood and further woods beyond, seeing nothing but trees, and having behind me and at each side nothing but trees, I was in a highly favourable position, indeed a position in which not only happy hours but inspired and fruitful hours might be spent.
During the late spring and summer the sun fell upon this spot between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. And as this was between six and eight normal time, the temperature of the sunlight could not have been improved upon. Since my job was being done on the basis of piece-work I was in command of my own time. On beautiful mornings my ideal was to do early work on the wood and sit down here for breakfast at eight when the sun had reached the oak. I took up my position carefully, back upright, head against trunk, legs straight out, with half-empty haversack under the knees, and a dry coat or sack to sit on, arms folded or hands clasped between knees. Then I immediately forgot my body, abandoned it – and became all spirit or soul or mind or whatever it is that sits inside us looking out of our two windows.
And now, at this point – to justify the foregoing details – I would gladly tell you what then I k
new, what then I grasped. Ah, could I but do so, then would I have the power to bless and to save, even as I was saved and blessed! But I did not quite grasp it, I did not understand the Knowledge that seemed mine. As I strove, and strove again to penetrate the meaning of the glory and the promise in the scene around, and to frame into a conception something that I seemed to know – it eluded me, it always just drew back. Sometimes it came very close, as if it were about three feet above my head, at times almost brushing my forehead – but not coming in, and soon fading far away again. This experience of the Undeclared Announcement trembling on the verge of utterance, was imaged by Thoreau in terms of an eagle – ‘an eagle that suddenly comes into the field of view, suggesting great things and thrilling the beholder, as if it were bound hitherward with a message for me; but it comes no nearer, but circles and soars away growing dimmer, disappointing me, till it is lost behind a cliff or a cloud’.
Yet something was clear to me, and I will set down here one note which I took as the nearest I could get to my finding – I turn off the road, enter the wood, and sit down under the tree. The sun gleams upon everything, there is glittering and shining everywhere. A green caterpillar is lowered down by an invisible thread in front of me, and as it swings about, the sun shines through its transparency. A little distance off a spider mounts upwards on another unseen rope, as if slowly falling upwards by inverse gravitation or being drawn up by an invisible crane, while another calmly walks on the air, and yet another takes a seat upon nothing. A bush over there is glittering with rain-drops, little white lanterns fastened to the lower side of twigs; but if I swing my head slightly to one side, some of those lights turn colour, becoming red and purple. A creature alights on the back of my hand: its body being in the shape of a tiny solid canoe, which has one high brown sail rather out of proportion to the boat; suddenly the sail opens into two sails using the body at the base as a hinge, and the whole thing flies away – a butterfly, like a flying flower. Then there is the ground I sit on, the tree behind me, and the trees around me, and the flowers, and the thing I can’t see, the air, yet stronger as a substance than, say, an aeroplane or a liner. A general voice is given to the whole thing by the birds. Most of this is incomprehensible to me, and even if a learned man describes what is going on and how it is all done, he will not be explaining it for me And the interesting thing about it is that it works. Here we have nothing but a series of the most curious kind of miraculous activities and queer appearances and extravagant shapes, but it all works in concert. One might suppose that it could possibly work for a month or so or even a year – but it does it every year, it goes on working without mishap and without running down. This in itself fills me with a great deal of confidence and some comfort. Added to this there is the general look of the place and the spirit in the atmosphere. Indeed we have all been so struck with its aspect that we have invented a word for it – beauty. I am surrounded here with law, order, and beauty, and am myself absolutely happy here. There is nothing to make me unhappy. No evil thing meets my eye, there is nothing bad here. I begin to grasp the obvious fact that this place is – perfect. And suddenly I realize where I am! I am in the Garden of Eden. I had heard about it always as a definite place in the past. There was no error in speaking of the Garden as existing, but the mistake lay in tying it down in time and place. For it still exists – all we need is the key of the gate. The first two persons in history dwelt in the Garden, it is said. But they ate of the Tree of Knowledge and had to go. That must be the truth: at the birth of consciousness we became onlookers and were separated from Nature, and left the Garden to create a world of our own apart from Nature. Our next step is a further extension of consciousness when we shall realize the unity of life on a higher plane of understanding. Having tasted of that tree of knowledge we shall enter the Garden of Eden once more, and Paradise shall be regained.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 33
