Trees: Reflections and Poems
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts… . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
— Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte by Hermann Hesse, originally published in 1984. (Public library)
(via yama-bato)
Sorge 1, 2011. Oil on canvas, 40 x 35 cm.
Um Die Ecke, 2009. Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm.
See, 2011. Oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm.
A surreal walk through the clouds. Installation by artist Fujiko Nakaya in Linz, Austria.
(via shinyslingback)
Damien Hirst - Medicine Cabinets (1988-94)
1. Installation view
2. Nothing to Fear
3. My Way
4. Bodies
5. Enemy (detail)
6. Sinner (detail)
“Hirst started his series of ‘Medicine Cabinets’ whilst in his second year at Goldsmiths. In their arrangement of objects the cabinets link Hirst’s earlier collages to his later work. The used packages that fill the cabinets, described by Hirst as ‘empty fucking vessels’, were originally arranged as if the cabinet were itself a body, with each item positioned according to the organs it medically related to. However, this system did not last and the ‘minimalist delicious colours’ of the designs swiftly became the most important criterion for their arrangement within each cabinet. The works explore the distinction between life and death, myth and medicine.
Sinner is Hirst’s portrait of his grandmother, Eileen Brennan, taken through the drug packaging she left to him, on his request, on her death.
Eileen played an important role in Hirst’s upbringing. He recalls: ‘She’d tell me that Father Christmas didn’t exist when I was really young, and was really kind of logical with me […] She promised that if ghosts exist she’d come back and haunt me. So I thought, after she died of lung cancer, obviously they don’t. And then, recently, I kind of thought, well, maybe they do, and she came back in a way that I don’t quite understand.’”
