L'arbre

Les noms des pommes et des poires ont ceci de commun avec ceux des vins qu'ils ne sont pas en soi une assurance de qualité.

Naming things is always implicitly categorizing and therefore collecting them, attempting to own them ; and because man is a highly acquisitive creature, brainwashed by most modern societies into believing that the act of acquisition is more enjoyable than the fact of having acquired, that getting beats having got, mere names and the object they are tied to soon become stale. There is a constant need, or compulsion, to seek new objects and names -- in the context of nature, new species and experiences. Everyday ones grow mute with familiarity, so known they become unknown.

We feel, or think we feel, nearest to a tree's essence when it changes to stand like us, in isolation, but evolution did not intend trees to grow singly.

Even the simplest knowledge of the names and habits of flowers or trees starts this distinguishing or individuating process, and removes us a step from total reality towards anthropocentrism, that is, it acts mentally as an equivalent of the camera view-finder.

No fruit for those who do not prune; no fruit for those who question knowledge; no fruit for those who hide in trees untouched by man; no fruit for traitors to the human cause.

The tree in fact has biochemical and light-sensitive systems to prevent this pointless and wasteful secondary invasion of one's branch's occupied space by another. The fact that the two branches grow in different directions and ways does not mean that they do not share a same mechanism of need, a same set of deeper rules.

Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation.

But tree warp time, or rather create a variety of times : here dense and abrupt, there calm and sinuous -- never plodging, mechanical, inescapably monotonous.