It’s a tough factor, attaining perspective — onerous for the human animal, pinned as we every are to the dust-mote of spacetime we’ve been allotted, not certainly one of us having chosen the place or when to be born, not certainly one of us — not even probably the most lucky — destined to reside for greater than a blink of evolutionary time. It’s no marvel, then, that our lens so simply contracts to a pinhole by way of which the fleeting frights and urgencies of the current stream in to fill the chamber of our complicated consciousness with blinding totality.
Remembering that we solely have roughly 4 thousand hours helps. Taking the telescopic perspective helps. Timber, particularly, assist — for they treatment our lack of perspective as Earth’s personal telescopes of time and mortality, every of them a perpetual demise and but doubtlessly immortal, every a clockwork portal to the previous, every “just a little little bit of the longer term,” as Wangari Maathai exulted in her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech a blink earlier than she turned compost for future forests.
Charles Babbage, whereas dreaming up the world’s first laptop with Ada Lovelace, marveled at how tree rings encode details about the previous — dwelling logs as exact as digital information, as primal because the human heartbeat:
Each bathe that falls, each change of temperature that happens, and each wind that blows, leaves on the vegetable world the traces of its passage; slight, certainly, and imperceptible, maybe, to us, however not the much less completely recorded within the depths of these woody materials.
It’s also no marvel, then, that we see ourselves so readily in timber — not solely within the simple (and subsequently restricted) anthropomorphic sense of Western fairy tales and Jap folks myths which have accompanied our civilization, however within the deeper, extra poetic sense that reveals us to ourselves as imaginative creatures animated by a stressed craving to reconcile the ephemeral and the everlasting. That is the sense William Blake captured in his most lovely letter:
The tree which strikes some to tears of pleasure is within the eyes of others solely a inexperienced factor which stands in the way in which. As a person is, so he sees.
That is additionally the sense the younger Harlem Renaissance poet Helene Johnson (July 7, 1906–July 7, 1995) captured a century and a half after Blake, in a spare and beautiful poem written when she was solely eighteen: “Timber at Night time,” first revealed in 1925 — simply as the highschool dropout turned artist and activist Artwork Younger’s beloved graphic sequence by the identical title started showing within the Saturday Night Put up, Collier’s, and LIFE, probably inspiring the younger Johnson, whose precocious erudition and literary style should have feasted on the period’s hottest magazines.
Johnson’s poem initially appeared within the Might version of the Nationwide City League’s Alternative: A Journal of Negro Life, when a yr later, not but twenty, she received First Honorable Point out within the journal’s literary contest, judged by James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost. “Timber at Night time,” together with all of her surviving poems and a wealth of letters, was later included within the great posthumous quantity This Ready for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance (public library) by African American literature professor Verner D. Mitchell.
Though she revealed poetry for lower than a decade — a typical talent-corseting actuality of marriage for girls a mere century in the past, radiating from the title of Johnson’s final revealed poem, at age twenty-nine: “Let Me Sing My Tune” — she lived a protracted life, dying on her eighty-eighth birthday, having witnessed the triumph of the suffrage motion and the civilizational defeat of two World Wars, the horror of the Holocaust and the hard-won hope of Civil Rights, the invention of the double helix and the retroviral genocide of AIDS, the dehumanizing agony of the atomic bomb and the primary human footfall on the Moon. Hers was a real saeculum — that stunning Etruscan phrase I realized from Rebecca Solnit, denoting the time frame because the delivery of the oldest dwelling elder locally.
Naturally, it was Rebecca I invited to learn “Timber at Night time” on the 2022 Universe in Verse. (A free “retrostream” of the complete present is obtainable worldwide between 12PM EST on Might 21 and 4PM EST on Might 22). Being one of the crucial devoted local weather thinkers and activists of our time, she prefaced her studying with a hovering meditation on timber as an antidote to the erasures of human historical past and an ethical compass for our planetary future — the type of extemporaneous prose poem that may sprout from the lushest minds, subsequent to which Johnson’s lyric loveliness rises much more majestic:
TREES AT NIGHT
by Helene JohnsonSlim Sentinels
Stretching lacy arms
A couple of slumbrous moon;
Black quivering
Silhouettes,
Tremulous,
Stencilled on the petal
Of a bluebell;
Ink sputtered
On a robin’s breast;
The jagged lease
Of mountains
Mirrored in a
Stilly sleeping lake;
Fragile pinnacles
Of fairy castles;
Torn webs of shadows;
And
Printed ’gainst the sky —
The trembling magnificence
Of an pressing pine.
Complement with Ursula Okay. Le Guin’s love-poem to timber as a lens on life and demise, then step into Rebecca’s inspiriting new mission, Not Too Late — a welcoming portal into the local weather motion for newcomers and an arsenal of reinvigoration “for people who find themselves already engaged however weary.”