I cannot believe it took me three months to even begin writing this post. I’ve been on an activity, alternating with phases of exhaustion, bringing the project along, writing new proposals (this is academia for you, while I’m happily announcing that I can finally write, all I do is plot new funding opportunities…) and trying to get a grip on the daunting mountain that is my to-write-list. What I have been doing, in other words, is behaving so anti-tree-ish that it feels like I haven’t learned anything at all. Shouldn’t studying trees bring me closer to them? And doesn’t getting close to trees mean at least trying to become a bit more like a tree? Well, this is what I claimed “arboreal poetics” does, but I am no writer and scholars need to disattach to gain knowledge. Or do they?
While I have not been writing this post, I have been thinking about it constantly. I even wrote a paper that deals with sitting under trees – yet, what I found (and what I did not put in the paper, because, you know, I try to look like a serious scholar sometimes) is that thinking about sitting under trees makes me nervous. Sitting on a tree even more and sitting like a tree outright terrifies me. Why is that? What does sitting under/on/like a tree do (to me) that causes feelings at all? If we look beyond a fear of falling off a tree – which is not my problem, I’m not a great climber, so I don’t –, there are two things that connect sitting and trees in ways that are more than prepositional. Or rather, they reveal that prepositional relationships are more that “just” grammatical.
The Study Tree
Let’s look at people sitting in, on, with, under and (maybe) like trees (I’ll get back to my own terror and eventual delight later). When I sat under a tree on a hike and tried to come up with scenes from literature and pop culture, I remembered one from Gilmore Girls that I liked very much, when I first watched it (Season 4, Episode 6). Rory is in college (YALE!) and having a bad day. Nothing works out the way she wanted it, there’s no way to study in peace and – shock! – now, someone is sitting under “her” tree. The outrage!
Well, it’s easy to dismiss this as a spoilt girl’s tantrum, but let’s look a little closer. While, yes, it is a little weird that a student at an Ivy League School (consider the tuition) who frettet about libraries all her life, can now not under any circumstances study unless she sits under a tree. It’s a decorative shot, too, but the tree does something for Rory that other “places” don’t. 30 minutes into the episode she encounters a guy sitting under the tree and tries to convince him, to leave:
Rory: Excuse me, you’re sitting under my tree
Guy: What?
Rory: My study tree. This is my study tree.
Guy: What the hell is a study tree?
Fair question! Rory cannot impress the tree occupier with her living situation (“I have roommates…” “So do I!”) and she certainly doesn’t help her case by sneering at his reading material (a magazine); when even her passionate speech doesn’t help, she first has to give up and later resorts to paying him off. Her speech, however, is what interests me, because it insists on a relationship that makes ONE tree special to one human:
Rory: …but I finally found a great place to study and you’re sitting on it!
Guy: There’s a million trees on campus!
Rory: But this one fits my back perfectly, so I don’t get tired and the light is right and it’s just far enough away from anything busy. The noise level is perfect: it’s quiet but not Unabomber. And anyhow, I was just hoping that you would consider giving me back my tree!
Rory thinks her relationship to this tree – and it’s never mentioned what kind of tree it is – is so special that it simply must convince that guy to move. Well, it doesn’t and maybe it shouldn’t because this particular Goldilocks might be too used to everyone making room for her specific studying needs already. The reason this tree is special to her, though, makes it sound like office furniture: “this one fits my back perfectly, so I don’t get tired”. There you go, a tree aiding you in the neoliberal attempt to always be busy. But it’s also something about the light and the noise – the tiny world under the tree is different to the rest. (I resist going on about the Unabomber-Reference here – that leads into another forest on another day). Rory is on to something, but sadly she doesn’t leave the tree enough room to be more than a study tree. At least in her words she doesn’t. A part of me (the one that is immersed in the story, temporarily suspending disbelief and so on) wishes she would have put her book down and listened, or smelled or not do anything. Because with attention to the actual tree, she might have learned more about herself through the tree. I am speculating here, but the desire to be close to this tree might point to her own feeling of uprootedness – starting college, living apart from her mother, breaking up with her boyfriend – sitting with a tree might be a start. From this perspective, it does make very much sense, that she can study nowhere else…
If only she would study the tree…I will end here for now (realizing that I don’t have to write the whole thing all at once) and write more about people sitting on and under, even like trees another time. Not without telling you why it is, sometimes, terrifying for me to (have to) lean on a tree. It does take you out of (human) society and potentially makes you part of a different one. Not studying, not being “productive” in a human way – while it doesn’t make you go all “Unabomber” – isolates you from the ways of humans. It can help to concentrate, but it also changes the perspective on how life “usually” works. Most of all, it requires a kind of stillness, that makes me as nervous as it does Rory…
I’ll continue with Italo Calvino’s tree climber Cosimo to tell you why.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Solvejg Nitzke (June 22, 2021). Sitting like/on a Tree (Part I). Ecological Imaginaries. Retrieved December 8, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/o0ua