Say Once there was a crape myrtle tree … and right off it’s a tale and it moves toward an end.
I know there are other ways of saying, like:
“What the hell happened at that moment …?”
“Please let me never …”
“Still Life with Thing Indifferent to Me.”
“To You Who Do Not Need My Eye to Complete You.”
I’ve racked up here, as approaches go: inquiry, petition, title, dedication.
A simple letter, though, might be best, a form that both wanders and leads, weighs and allows for thoughts-come-upon. In the receptivity it assumes—a reader, you, settled into a comfortable chair, unsealing the envelope, unfolding the pages—a letter’s a space where presence extends.
Dear,
A few weeks ago, on the way home with my dog, I took the street off to the side of the college. And there in the yard of the corner house was a spectacular crape myrtle. (The spelling varies: you’ll see “crape” and “crepe”—though either way, the flowers aren’t crinkly or ribbon-like.) A crape myrtle’s deep-pink, hardy blossoms cluster up like fat bunches of grapes. Maybe you know that sketch by Picasso, Hands Holding Flowers, popular in the ’60s as an emblem of peace?—that bouquet-in-a-fist shows exactly the blooms’ angle of flare. The trunk’s as smooth as the arms of a girl, sleeveless in summer. But none of these images came to me then—and none of this chatter.
Just, there it was.
And what filled that very long moment unfolding?
I should’ve been able to think something—to say what a beauty or stopping short, at least give an Oh of surprise. But it would not come forth as a specimen. “It” isn’t right at all—and there was the immediate problem: the tree would not be called anything. Not “crape myrtle.” Not even “tree.” The simplest, singular names weren’t working. When I stopped and looked, I heard just my own breathing. And being reduced to standing and breathing produced a wave of something fearsome. Cliffs rose, the air sharpened and chilled between us. In the steepness, I was unshimmed, root-cut, all pith. The tree sealed itself up with—what? Solitude? A presence so insistently here, it was ungrazed, unsnared, stripped clean—while I really wasn’t anywhere.
The tree in its quiet unspecialized me.
To have been pinned and bored into, gnawed back to a core, to have felt myself splintering, or sharp-edged, would’ve helped. But there was the tree. And there I was not. Not at the fringes. Not in a web. Slipped from sight and in nothing’s arms.
I hadn’t expected this at all. I hadn’t expected anything. Certainly not to be dissolved by a tree. I was just out for a walk with my dog.
Yesterday, nearly a month later, I took down from my shelf Martin Buber’s I and Thou, and when I opened the book (I haven’t since college, the pages were dry and I had to endure my marginalia) it was to a highlighted sentence so absurdly exact—“I contemplate a tree”—that I laughed out loud.
Buber writes that while he could have, he did not “assign to it a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life.” He did not overcome its “uniqueness and form so rigorously that [he recognized] it only as an expression of the law.” He did not “dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it.” The crape myrtle was, as he says of his tree, “no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood”—and then, yes, “it confronts me bodily.” Certain modes of apprehending, seeing, or contemplating (the taxonomizing of forms, for example), aren’t wrong, Buber says—just not necessary, in order to be in relation to a tree. It’s that relation is something different—a commodious state, disordered even.
And there was this, too: I felt if I didn’t make something of the moment—the sight of the tree, what it did in me—the fearsomeness would evaporate (though I didn’t exactly want to stay close to the not-being the tree kindled up). My desire to respond was powerful—and that desire, fully resisted. A gap opened up—as quick and sharp as a safety pin sprung. And my seeing-and-making was not sufficient. Not adequate-to. A puny gesture. Wind force–wise, I was a gnat in a Beaufort 8, where, the chart reads, “edges of crests break into spindrift, foam is blown in well-marked streaks”—walking against wind becomes very difficult. That’s what it’s been, these past months whenever I recall the scene.
How accustomed I am to being emplaced. To fashioning a place in words.
The height of the tree was not imposing. Nothing about its blossoms was weird, like flushed, pouty orchids beckoning come, enter me here. To have felt a part-of would’ve helped—to be the aphid that lives at the heart of those purple blossoms, a thing suited to its singular task, and built to participate in the mechanism of crape myrtle. But I was outside the composition. I had nothing to offer the closed system that was the tree. I remained unniched.
Recently I received a postcard from a friend (and just as I’ve been wrangling with making things—but I am growing more comfortable with extended forms of conversation with those I cannot see). He wrote: I could spend my life making stuff no one cares about, not even me, really—except that I like making things. And going down to the hardware store, I was thinking how much I really liked that—just walking, being in the sun, alone. Just being in the sun alone. You know? How nice that is? How you can feel that’s the whole reason to live. And it’s enough.
I know what he means—so often just to see a thing is steadying; to look on it is precisely enough: Rome, Via Appia, those dusty, resinous pine nuts on cobbles, and dew drying in chariot ruts; while ironing, the wrinkle in the landscape of a sleeve lying down like a time-lapse geological event; a just-picked fig, warm in the hand, heavy as an egg, with a sweet milky bead at the stem-tip. That day, though, when I angled toward home, when I turned and stopped looking, I could sense the tree going on being. And that made my seeing equal to ceasing, and the tree so much more than my speaking of it. Before this encounter, in another life, the moment might have been directly received; oh, beautiful tree! as sustaining and proper.
The emptying out of the form I knew as myself, the bright indifference of the tree, was shattering—but let me say (and how good it is that you’re there on the other end), this impulse to make something of it all reconstitutes as I write to you.
I’ll get to work, then, on a word for “the shattering calm that formlessness brings.” For “the fear that accompanies invisibility.” Or “a recognition that causes one to slip while standing still.” “The bright air of ceasing, its watery savor,” which if I had to name more precisely (I may have to write to you again on this) was something like a vein of iron, one I felt deep in me, as if banded in rock once lodged at the bottom of the sea, formed back at the beginning of the world as we know it—and which tastes (when swallowing hard, as one does when frightened or moved) uncorrupted, raw, free.