Exploring Language-Nature Relationship: Acknowledging Non-Human Dignity, Lecture notes of Art

Download Exploring Language-Nature Relationship: Acknowledging Non-Human Dignity and more Lecture notes Art in PDF only on Docsity! All the Roses and None of Them ELFI SEIDEL As all life is one, what need is there for words? Yet I have just said all life is one, so I have already spoken, haven’t I? Chuang Tzu, The Tao of Nature Contents Prologue—That Which We Call a Rose 9 A Poem Lovely as a Tree 17 Blank Pages 35 Impossible Necessities 56 Epilogue—Two Missed Chances 67 Bibliography 71 10 the sliding movement he made with his right hand as he slowly recited Elllllfiii, like a conductor reading a score and conjuring up the sound that the inscrip- tion could bring about if unlocked by instruments. ‘But all my friends have names that are recognisable as names,’ I insisted. One of the changes brought about by my leaving Germany, aged nineteen, was a drastic shift in the perception of my name. How liberating, how delightful to introduce myself without the previously familiar hassle of asserting that yes, that is my real name and no, it is not an abbreviation for something like ‘Elfriede’. Instead, people whose mother tongue was not German were enchanted by the name’s briefness and beauty, or—when encountering it in written form—occasionally by the way it withheld immediate clues as to the gender or home country of the name bearer. My father’s prediction that I would come to appreciate my name as an adult has proven to be correct. More than twenty years after our conversa- tion, I did start to like everything that my name was not: tied to a meaning, indebted to the symbolism of a saint or to the pre-empted imperative of wisdom, a reference to some great aunt or grandmother, the name of anyone else in my immediate surroundings. The absence of all of this allows for the name’s pure tonality and visuality to come to the fore instead of these features being secondary to an imposed meaning. How freeing not to have been imbued with meaning already at birth! The functions that names can assume show a 11 certain kinship with the way words are said to work in general: phonetic, typographic or hand-written shells that function as pointers to some actual thing. Inscriptions and utterances work in tandem with what they refer to. A forest’s name on a map, for instance, is a verbal reference, but isn’t it only when the majestic abundance of trees unfolds around us that the letters are lent their relevance? Sometimes, however, there may not be a direct equivalent in the landscape of semantic meaning. This, according to the Russian linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson, is where poetry begins: when as much attention is given to the sensuousness of language as to its sense, when the sound of a word unfolds a meaning that exists independently of its semantic meaning. 1 In his 1975 manifesto The New Art of Making Books, the Mexican artist, writer and publisher Ulises Carrión posited that ‘the word “rose” is neither the rose that I see nor the rose that a more or less fictional character claims to see. In the abstract language of the new art the word “rose” is the word “rose”. It means all the roses and it means none of them.’ Carrión asks: ‘How to succeed in making a rose that is not my rose, nor his rose, but everybody’s rose, i.e. nobody’s rose?’ and answers ‘By placing it within a sequential structure (for example a book), so that it momentarily ceases being a rose and becomes essentially an element of the structure.’ 2 It is conceivable that Carrión was making some reference to Shakespeare’s famous line from Romeo and Juliet: 12 ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.’ 3 Imagine that every image or object could poten- tially become an element of a structure as described by Carrión, a specimen within a larger system that, when singled out, may have a distinct awkward beauty of its own, something that may or may not be deciphered. Perhaps the fondness of an unclaimed language is something that runs in my family, a profound appreciation for the fact that meaning is but one of many features that make language what it is. What a delight to think of a rose that is neither ‘my rose’ nor ‘his rose’, essentially ‘everybody’s rose’, and, even more beautiful, ‘nobody’s rose.’ What propels my writing is a frustration with our human impetus to claim the surrounding world by naming it; our obsessive urge to know what things mean. It seems that we can’t stand it when something refuses to make sense and remains abstract, remains itself. Everything ‘other’ that is entailed in the vast word ‘nature’ might be said to elude us in this way, having existed since before language came along to try and define it. In All the Roses and None of Them, I explore some of the ways in which the human sense- making reflex clashes with the elusiveness of these non-human others. The essays included as part of this paper spec- ulate on how disruptions of the functionality of human language can lead to encounters with the world that transcend national and linguistic borders. Considering a number of case studies from the fields 15 meanings. When the distinction between the familiar and the mystical, between the physical manifestation of words and their immaterial meaning becomes uncertain and the still commonly assumed dualism between them dubious, something more holistic can emerge: a language that sometimes resists and sometimes surrenders, existing alongside—but independently of—our human urge to understand, a translation from utility to an array of autonomies. The language I envision is, like nature, a vacant space, a space for all the meanings and none of them. 1 Gerold, Roman. ‘‘Mehr als nur Worte’: Wo die Sprache sich verspricht.’ Der Standard, March 27, 2017, derstandard.at/ story/2000054919823/mehr-als-nur-wortewo-die-sprache-sich- verspricht?. Accessed February 28, 2020. 2 Carrión, Ulises. ‘The New Art of Making Books.’ Kontexts, no. 6–7, 1975, p. 5. 3 Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet, Philipp Reclam jun., 1994, p. 52. 17 A Poem Lovely as a Tree ‘I’ve become so accustomed to not reading that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes,’ a character named Irnerio reveals to the puzzled protagonist of Italo Calvino’s famous meta-novel If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller from 1979. ‘It’s not easy,’ Irnerio candidly continues. ‘[…] they teach us to read as children and for the rest of our lives, we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us.’ 1 Laconically having introduced himself as an artist turning books into ‘statues, pictures, whatever you want to call them,’ 2 he eventually concedes: ‘I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn to not read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at written words; on the contrary: you must look at them intensely, until they disappear.’ 3 If we go with the proposition by the Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure, written words hinge on an interplay of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. 4 An arbitrary sequence of letters like t–r–e–e (the signifier) conjures up an image of a trunk, branches and leaves (the signified) in the mind of their reader. This double-edged nature of language is visualised in Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics with the help of a bubble that contains both the letters t–r–e–e as well as a tiny drawing of a tree. Since written language is a material reality that doesn’t disappear just because it is not being read, Calvino supposedly meant something else by 20 example Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, roughly translated as ‘workshop of potential liter- ature’): founded in 1960, the movement’s members placed ‘artificial’ constraints on their writing process—like avoiding the letter E throughout an entire novel—in the hope that this handicap would replace the authors’ suppressed subjectivity with something higher. Or consider the Surrealists’ fondness for games—games whose rules aimed at reaching a point where art belonged to humankind rather than to the genius of one particular human. Taking a look at yet another approach, something that emerged within Dadaism was the attempt to let poetry write itself by pulling words at random from a hat. This conceptually beautiful ambition was somehow doomed by the fact that the method remained an exquisitely human affair (it was, after all, a human hand, controlled by a human brain, doing the picking). Dada’s fondness for chance- based verbal constellations was later echoed in the Cut-up technique embraced by William Burroughs. Attempts at circumventing authorial responsibility were also undertaken by some of the artists oper- ating under the umbrella term ‘Conceptual Art’ in the 1960s: their alphabetised lists and otherwise standardised or chance-based arrangements aimed for manifestations of words that were deliberately bereft of meaning in a conventional sense. To some extent, it seems to me that those attempts to let language hover above the swamp of human subjec- tivity reveal the impossibility of their ambition. Anything created by humans—ideas, objects, move- 21 ments—will not only always bear traces of human subjectivity, but will also be accessed by others through another layer of subjectivity. Contemporary cognitive science postulates the same thing that was voiced by Vivekananda, namely that perception is action, ‘something we productively do.’ 7 Interestingly, the vocabulary used to refer to the limits of linguistic expression and the slipping away of language’s functionality frequently includes images from the natural world, such as Saussure’s example mentioned earlier: the abstract phenom- enon that is a tree and its awkwardly human semantic rendering on the page. In 1913, the American poet Joyce Kilmer published a bucolic poem titled ‘Trees’. 8 In six short stanzas, his deep reverence for nature is balanced with his acknowledgement of the inadequacy of human language to approximate this very nature. The sublimity of a tree and a language that will never even faintly resemble it form the boundaries between which the two opposed forces bounce; nature too grand to fit into language, language—the only tool available in poetry—cheerfully pointing out its own limitations while continuing to send pious greetings to the forest. The poem’s first two verses frankly reveal Kilmer’s firm belief in the insufficiency of language when faced with the beauty inherent to trees: ‘I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree.’ 22 The eight verses that follow praise a tree’s distinctive beauty in different seasons and weather conditions: ‘A tree whose hungry mouth is prest / Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast; // A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray; // A tree that may in Summer wear / A nest of robins in her hair; // Upon whose bosom snow has lain; / Who intimately lives with rain.’ In the final stanza, Kilmer, the poet, humbly concludes: ‘Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.’ Using the indefinite article—a tree, rather than the tree—was a deliberate choice by the poet: ‘Although several communities across the United States claim to have inspired “Trees”, nothing can be established specifically regarding Kilmer’s inspiration except that he wrote the poem while residing in Mahwah [in the U.S. state of New Jersey, A/N]. Both Kilmer’s widow, Aline, and his son, Kenton, refuted these claims […].’ 9 Kenton Kilmer recounted that ‘Mother and I agreed […] that Dad never meant his poem to apply to one particular tree, or to the trees of any special region. Just any trees or all trees that might be rained on or snowed on, and that would be suit- able nesting places for robins. I guess they’d have to have upward-reaching branches, too, for the line about ‘lifting leafy arms to pray.’ Rule out weeping willows.’ 10 Somewhat ironically, Kilmer’s reluctance to claim any particular tree—his loving dedication to 25 expression beyond meaning, expression which is more than meaning, yet expression which functions only in tension with meaning—it needs a signifier as the limit to transcend and to reveal its beyond.’ 13 Dada’s poetry was, among other things, a persis- tent effort to resist the corrupting influence of fascist ideologies on language. The brutality and senselessness of the First World War that formed its historical backdrop led the movement to strive for a language that would transcend national borders rather than reinforcing them. Another core ambi- tion was its reorientation with regards to the artistic use of language—its treatment as a material. In an exasperated and yet somehow touching tone, Ball eventually put forwards the question: ‘Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining?’ The proposition of a language that changes when the weather changes could be read as an actualization of Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the bond between an actual tree and its random rendering as t–r–e–e. According to Ball’s vision, language is not a static and somehow inadequate—although reli- ably functional—system, but part of a living reality, affected by rain as is the tree itself. If one part of the Dada Manifesto were to be chosen as an elegant summary of its entirety, to me it would be Ball’s quintessential conviction that ‘A line of poetry is a chance to get rid of all the filth that clings to this accursed language […].’ The use of the word 26 ‘filth’ is reminiscent of the dirt- (or cleaning, respec- tively) related vocabulary often invoked when it comes to the idea that language needs to be protected against exploitation by those with ulterior motives: ‘We must sweep and clean,’ 14 proclaimed fellow Dadaist Tristan Tzara, referring to the necessity of resisting the contemporary political situation. In his 1945 essay ‘Poetry and Knowledge’, the Martinican author Aimé Césaire expressed that poetic language ‘returns language to its purity’. 15 Susan Sontag, in her—still relevant—essay Against Interpretation from 1966 linked this concern for purity to the budding topic of environmentalism: ‘Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities.’ She warned: ‘In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.’ 16 Sontag’s aversion towards the compulsive urge to ‘make sense’ of art is picked up by the contemporary poet and scholar Ann Lauterbach, who idealistically asserts that ‘Poetry resists false linkages … Both conventional narrative strategies and the mimesis of visual description are inadequate to the demands 27 of contemporary experience … Resisting false link- ages while discovering, recovering, uncovering new ones, poets might help sweep the linguistic path of its polluting and coercive narratives, helping us to re-perceive our world and each other with efficacy, compassion, humor, and mutual regard.’ 17 When words are called empty, it usually refers to something like the disappointment or anger about a broken promise, rather than being meant as a compliment on the poetic purity of someone’s manner of expression. I’d like to propose that a reduction of the content hosted within words, first to lower dosages, perhaps at times to near-complete emptiness, could also be something valuable. In her 1990 story Summer Rain, the French writer Margue- rite Duras muses: ‘Words don’t change their shape, they change their meaning, their function … They don’t have a meaning of their own any more, they refer to other words that you don’t know, that you’ve never heard or read … you’ve never seen their shape, but you feel… you suspect… they correspond to… an empty space inside you… or in the universe…’ 18 I rarely come across empty spaces in the universe, or—despite a continuous engagement with medita- tion—inside myself; it therefore seems all the more worthwhile to me to preserve the tiny reserves that have not been colonised by the human urge to infil- trate them with meaning. 30 cerobadadrada gragluda gligloda glodasch gluglamen gloglada gleroda glandridi elomen elomen lefitalominal wolminuscalo baumbala bunga acycam glastala feirofim blisti elominuscula pluplusch rallabataio When read out loud, there is an undeniably attractive rhythm to the poem. However, when Ball performed pieces like this one at Cabaret Voltaire, most likely the audience was not able to link their immediate acoustic experience to any discernible meaning. However, it was not just a matter of being exposed to a language one did not understand: the words did not belong to any particular language. Nonetheless, I would propose, they were at home in more than one of them, or at least in the spaces in between one nation’s vocabulary and another’s. Apart from two trees—one of them being rained on— appearing amidst this letter tangle, I am blissfully unaware of what ‘Wolken’ might ultimately be about. The letters become their content, we are offered a way out of the binary between form and content, ‘the very distinction […] which is, ultimately, an illu- sion.’ 21 While still inescapably human, this language has been catapulted from being secondary—a tool, a servant, at worst serving a fascist master—to the 31 role of the central character, a character playing itself. The title ‘Wolken’, the German word for cloud, is the only one of the poem’s forty three words that gives a clue as to the mother tongue of the poet. The remaining words sit in the spaces in between fenced-off linguistic communities. As Zadie Smith, among many others, has pointed out, we live in an era where the rise of nationalism, among other destructive tendencies, is accompanied by an acrid quest for verbal unambiguity, where questions on identity and belonging are expressed in linguistic debates that tend to take on a matter- of-life-and-death urgency. Those concerned with the protection of borders also seem to be the ones who are the least willing to put up with a language of ambiguity. In the light of these contemporary tendencies and retrogressions, I find it deeply insightful to be able to quote a poem which was not written in any particular language, but has happily existed in a linguistic intermediate space for the one hundred and three years since its publication, without the need for translation. A poetic-subver- sive gesture whose visionary scope seems to be in fullest bloom in times of political upheaval, Dada’s rejection of drawers was an act of resistance whose strength remains unwavering. Having considered two ways of poetically approximating—or failing to approximate—the natural world, I’d like to point towards one last tree poem. ‘Listen to what the White Pine sayeth,’ wrote the American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. 22 Those seven words are all there is, there 32 is no second or third stanza, no ‘writing around the actual point’. Emerson acknowledges the limits of his language and lets something—someone?—else speak. His one line of poetry—curiously reminis- cent of instruction pieces from the 1960s by artists like Yoko Ono—does seem to get rid of all the filth clinging to ‘this accursed language’. It directs our attention towards the immediate physical surround- ings, paradoxically, away from his words. The poem has been there all along, Emerson seems to imply, we just need to look up from our books for once. The White Pine, here, is the piece, Emerson’s poem but a pious gloss. 35 Blank Pages ‘Wie man in den Wald hineinruft, so schallt es heraus’ is a German saying that translates to something like ‘Whichever way you shout into the forest, that is the echo that will return.’ The proverb has approximately the same meaning as the English ‘What goes around comes around’, ‘You reap what you sow’, and—very broadly—the spiritual concept of karma. For now, however, something else intrigues me more than the proverb’s meaning: the way that the phrase treats the forest as a resonance chamber. Intrinsically mute, it is portrayed as offering nothing but an echo of what- ever humans decide to ‘shout into it’. This chapter explores what forests might have to say in those instances when humans restrain themselves from constantly shouting things into them. It reflects on the world being meaningful on its own, beyond human reasoning, and advocates a non-hierarchical coexistence of different modes of being, without the need to decipher everything. This thought is developed alongside art works that address—more or less critically—the relationship between humans, trees and narrative. Among the many things that books can be, they are always at least two things: content and some kind of material container. Walden; or, Life in the Woods is a literary account of a good two years that its author, the American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, spent in a hut built ‘by the labor of [his] hands only’ 1 by Walden Pond, Massachusetts. As 36 recounted in Walden—a curious mix of transcenden- talism, social criticism and spirituality, interspersed with detailed descriptions of birds as well as practical advice on housekeeping—Thoreau sought a way to return to himself as well as to nature, an antidote to the fast-paced life in quickly industrialising cities. The field between the supposedly immaterial content of the book and the book itself, the object, epitomises an interesting field of tension. Thoreau’s experiment of temporarily detaching himself from civilized society, countered by the subsequent writing of Walden, entails a contradiction, I find, albeit a productive one. Thoreau submerged himself in the forest seeking less; writing a book about this search, however, is bound to add more material— thought and paper—to the world (a paradox that would pertain even if he had ‘just’ written a poem). Strictly speaking, Thoreau’s somewhat monastic ambition of reducing life to what truly matters is undermined by the writing of the very book that admittedly enables people like me to still learn of his experiment today. I do not mean to say that reaching out to one’s fellow humans for validation—or some kind of response, at the very least—is condemnable: in fact, it is an innate human need. A contemporary version of this primal need might be the photos of remote natural sites found on social media, testifying to the unresolved human battle between solitude and connection: the wish to detach oneself from social fabrics while simultaneously not wanting to give up some kind of reassuring link. Coming back to Thoreau, an author’s praise of nature’s blissful 37 silence can easily become a disturbance of someone else’s silence. Be that as it may, Thoreau—in his typical limbo between deriding society and happily assuming the role of a cultural pundit within it—grandiloquently declared: ‘To be a philosopher is […] to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.’ 2 Considering the two-edged form in which we are likely to encounter Walden—the verbal praising of trees on paper, a material traditionally made from trees—makes the relationship between the practical and the theoretical rather complex. Walden was first published in 1854. Count- less reprints that have appeared since have seen Thoreau’s iconic narrative contained in glaring paperbacks printed on demand on bleached office paper, in precious antique books with enchanting woodcuts, in tiny hardcover editions reminiscent of holy scriptures, as part of commercial anthologies in vast fields such as ‘nature’ or ‘spirituality’, and everything in between. In spite of their disparate materialities, there is something that these books share; the dutiful protection and silent carrying of Thoreau’s iconic words. Spread out on the table around me are blank pages of varying sizes and hues of white, torn out of some twenty different copies of Walden that I started to collect throughout the past year. The 40 ‘perhaps’ to it. Various strands of contemporary research show that trees communicate across large areas of land by means of the underground fungal connection between their roots and while this field of research is gaining momentum (the university of Halle, Germany recently set up a post graduate program in biodiversity research dedicated to the ‘cooperation between trees’), it remains likely that the proposition of an enchanted world still evokes some rather condescending smiles across Western academia. Unwaveringly, Kohn asserts: ‘What I mean is that the world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans.’ 7 I would like to take a closer look at the notion of the world beyond the human being meaningful— regardless of human intervention. In the 2003 book Strangely like War. The Global Assault on Forests by the American environmental activists Derrick Jensen and George Draffan, the Canadian writer and poet Margaret Atwood is quoted as saying: ‘We would never buy paper made from dead bears, otter, salmon and birds, from ruined native cultures, from destroyed species and destroyed lives, from ancient forests reduced to stumps and mud; but that’s what we’re buying when we buy paper made from old growth clear-cut trees.’ 8 41 In the light of the author’s general concern for ecology and specific statements like this one, it comes as a surprise that Atwood has not only taken part in, but assumed an explicit advocate role in an art project making the logging of rather a large quan- tity of trees (though quite the opposite of old-growth) a central element. Future Library, a long-term project by the Scottish artist Katie Paterson, has been growing since 2014, in the form of one thousand spruces in a forest bordering the outskirts of Oslo, Norway. The project envisions the logging of the trees in 2114, a hundred years after their planting. Subsequently, the wood from the trees will be turned into paper to be used for an edition of one thousand books, each containing contributions by a hundred writers. While the unknowing spruces grow towards their destiny of being turned into something else, one hundred eminent writers such as Atwood—having kicked off the project in 2014—contribute one hundred manu- scripts. Certificates entitling their buyers (or likely their grandchildren) to one of the one thousand books are available via Paterson’s galleries. ‘This is probably not the trees’ idea of what to do in life, but that’s how it is,’ as the Canadian-American writer Annie Proulx once laconically remarked while looking at price-labelled planks in a timber store. 9 I particularly like the speculative aura of the word ‘probably’ here. Future Library—probably—didn’t place the consideration of what the trees might have wanted to do in life at its conceptual centre. ‘A forest in Norway is growing,’ announces the 42 website accompanying the project. As simple a state- ment as it is, it is not exactly true, as natural forests are characterised by being ‘layered, with multiple cano- pies, small openings where the sun shines through, and darkened hollows where it does not.’ 10 The spruce monoculture growing as per Paterson’s order might be more accurately described as ‘a single-age, single-height, […] single-species plantation.’ 11 In the German folk tale Hansel and Gretel, a brother and his younger sister are lured into a candy house by a witch, where the boy is thrown into a cage and force-fed in order to be turned into a roast. Since the witch is blind, she is unable to see the effect of the force-feeding and instead makes him stick out his finger from between the bars every day, so that she can—based on the finger’s felt circumference—esti- mate the time until her feast. 12 So-called ‘handover ceremonies’, in which the Future Library writers hand over their—sealed—manuscripts, take place in the forest where the spruces grow every spring. The role played by the delicate spruce saplings during these annual festivities, year by year, reminds me of the procedure of checking Hansel’s finger width, day by day—a thought which provokes some within me. It might appear a bit far-fetched, but there even seems to be a link—a quality of poking around in the dark—between the blindness of the witch and the sealedness of the manuscripts. In the spring of 2014, Margaret Atwood handed over a box containing a text titled Scribbler Moon. Since Paterson’s project entails the requirement of utter discretion (the authors sign contracts not to reveal any of the content 45 a side note, it is not only the one thousand spruces that fall prey to Future Library. Prior to beginning the project, the patch of forest where the spruces now grow, was ‘emptied’ of all existing trees. Their wood was used for a ‘Silent Room’ in the ‘New Deichmanske Bibliotek’ in Oslo, where the growing number of sealed manuscripts can be viewed. Ironically, the room is said to have a pleasant forest smell about it. Apart from the idea that trees possess a dignity that shouldn’t be defined in terms of usefulness, there are benefits to them—the purification of water and air, the storing of carbon, the providing of shade, clean air and habitats for animals and people—that make their preservation and, ideally, proliferation urgent. ‘While […] there are many selfish reasons to stop cutting down forests, we don’t want to empha- size them, because ultimately—and even in the short run—we don’t think that particularly helps. It doesn’t challenge the grotesquely narcissistic and inhuman utilitarian perspective that is our world view and underlies our attempts to dominate the world,’ as phrased in Strangely like War. The Global Assault on Forests. 14 Against this background, the symbolism built into a project like Future Library gives evidence of the privileged human vision that is at its core; at a time of climatic disaster, the logging of trees for the printing of stories seems like a clash of currencies; symbolic ones and real ones. Atwood’s commitment to Future Library strikes me as particularly bewildering, as her writing elegantly addresses questions of human mortality and insignificance: 46 ‘Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves? Even while we’re still alive. We wish to assert our existence, like dogs peeing on fire hydrants. […] We monogram our linen, we carve our names on trees, we scrawl them on washroom walls. […] We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent finally, like a radio running down.’ 15 In 2015, then, Atwood recounted that she was intrigued by the idea of the time capsule entailed in Future Library. Something about the project reminded her of her childhood, of putting things in little boxes, burying them or putting them into streams or rivers, in the hope of someone else receiving the sealed message at another point in time. Atwood also revealed that she chose an archive paper to print her contribution on, doing what she can to make sure the people whose job it is to turn the trees into books will find a manuscript, and not merely dust, inside the archive box labelled ‘Margaret Atwood. Scribbler Moon, 2014’. I think a box bearing a title and a handful of dust could also be seen as an extended concept of writing, or at least of leaving traces, which arguably is, what most writing sets out to do. The act of taking part in the project—the drive to memorialize themselves—might reveal more about the human condition than the contents of the manu- scripts. Submitting the sealed texts speaks loudly enough. Even a hundred contributions consisting of dust or empty pages would make it clear how ‘badly we want to memorialize ourselves’. 47 A forest, this sublimely non-linguistic array of possibilities can be understood by anyone, regard- less of their mother tongue or language skills. The contemporary artist and poet Hanne Lippard asks and answers in one of her pieces: ‘Do you speak English? No, I still only speak language.’ 16 Having authors come up with texts, inevitably subjective in one way or another, narrows down the forest’s potentiality: from an infinity of meanings— and, importantly, the possibility of no meaning—to particular meanings intended by particular writers. Whatever messages are transported into the future will only be understood by people who happen to read English (or other languages featured in the project, such as the Icelandic contained in the 2016 contribution by the novelist Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson, better known as Sjón, who was worried that his native language, today spoken by about 314.000 people, might be extinct in a hundred years’ time). A number of trees are—by means of the grotesque logistic effort of tearing down one set of trees only to erect another that will only be logged again—turned into a translation of themselves, something based on intellect rather than mere presence. In her eminent 1966 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag wrote: ‘The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experi- ence more immediately what we have’ 17 —a thought 50 future in her Writings: ‘[…] you can’t make promises. The future’s a blank page.’ Planting a set quantity of trees is a gesture with a number of more or less known artistic precur- sors. One of them is Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule—11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years. Initi- ated by the Hungarian-American artist Agnes Denes, Tree Mountain involved 11,000 pines planted atop a former gravel pit near the town of Ylöjärvi in South- west Finland. Denes, considering that it would take at least four centuries for the ecosystem to establish itself, made the protection of the pines for at least this time span a legal requirement of her piece, which is sponsored by the United Nations Envi- ronment Program and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment. In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the project was presented as ‘Finland’s contribution to help alleviate the world’s ecological stress.’ Aira Kalela from the Finnish Ministry of the Environment declared Tree Mountain to be ‘the largest monument on earth […] not dedicated to the human ego, but to benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy. […] It is designed to unite the human intellect with the majesty of nature.’ 23 Another particularly well-known example is 7000 Eichen—Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung (7000 Oaks—City Forestation Instead of City Admin- istration) presented by Joseph Beuys at documenta VII in Kassel, Germany. On March 16, 1982 Beuys planted an oak in front of the museum Frideri- cianum, arguably the main documenta venue. In the following years, another six thousand nine hundred 51 and ninety-nine trees would be planted throughout the city of Kassel with the help of numerous volun- teers. The ambition towards which this and other Beuysian tree projects aspired was a ‘perpetual tree endeavour, covering the Earth in trees and ideas.’ 24 Alongside this Sisyphosian task, Beuys (co-founder of the German Green Party) tirelessly disseminated his ideas on green futures, direct democracy and— perhaps most importantly—his ‘extended concept of art’, a concept accommodating enough to grant tree-planting a place at an art event like documenta. Although 7000 Oaks is not tied to narrative in the way Future Library is, Beuys’ project was also entangled with narratives of sorts. One of the core concerns that kept coming up in response to the planting was the question whether the project was meant to solve ‘the German question’. 25 In the Third Reich, namely, the oak had been misused as a sylvan embodiment of the endurance and hardness that the Nazis had a fondness for, a claimed natural entity without the means to speak up against being turned into a German hero. Beuys, however, did not see the erasure of meanings that he had not brought into the world as his mission. It is also noteworthy, particularly juxtaposed to Paterson’s project, that he reasoned about his choice of tree in terms of the longevity of the oak—he deliberately chose a type of tree that would only unfold its full seventhou- sand-fold beauty centuries after being planted. The highly methodical set-up of 7000 Oaks was upended by life itself; Beuys passed away before all of the trees had been planted. On July 12, 1987, just over 52 a year after his father’s death, Wenzel Beuys planted the seven thousandth tree, next to the first one. Today, those two and the majority of the other trees are still around. They are art in public space, but also ‘regular’ urban trees (as if trees become better—more meaningful, relevant, beautiful—by being declared art). They will provide shade and clean air for you regardless of whether you worship them from a Nazi or pacifist point of view, as an art object, a ‘sacred mother’, or a weapon against global warming. They will even do so if you don’t worship them at all. What sets Beuys’ trees apart from any other— author-less, non-art—tree in Kassel is the fact that every one of ‘his’ trees is accompanied by a basalt stele, demarcating it as a member of the Beuys club. Today, thirty eight years after their planting, the trees have outgrown the stones by far, turning them into mere footnotes. The hierarchy between the living, growing organism of the tree and its static human annotation has been reversed. Beuys stated: ‘I, as a person, have no significance at all. […] Should I have one, however, I would like this significance to be removed.’ 26 And yet, despite those claims, I am left feeling somewhat uneasy considering this question of ‘personal significance’. Seven thousand may be a vast quantity, but it is still a finite number. Something about the diffusion of this limited tree edition—signed and numbered by means of basalt steles– throughout 18 Ibid., p. 8. 19 Ibid., p. 10. 20 Ibid., p. 14. 21 Martin, Agnes. Writings/Schriften. Edited by Dieter Schwarz, Kunstmuseum Winterthur/Edition Cantz, 2005, p. 39. 22 Clairvaux, Saint Bernard de. The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux. Translated by Bruno Scott James, AMS Press, 1953, p. 156. 23 Kalela, Aira. ‘Tree Mountain—A Living Time Capsule—11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years.’ Agnes Denes, www. agnesdenesstudio.com/works4.html. Accessed February 25, 2020. 24 Beuys, Joseph and Blume, Bernhard and Rappmann, Rainer. Gespräche über Bäume. FIU-Verlag, 2006, p. 8 (my translation). 25 Ibid., p. 22 (my translation). 26 Ibid., p. 83 (my translation). 27 Beuys. Directed by Andres Veiel, zero one film, 2017. 28 Beuys, Joseph and Blume, Bernhard and Rappmann, Rainer. 2006, p. 114 (see note 24). 56 Impossible Necessities Throughout this paper, fleeting alignments of what we call ‘language’ with what we call ‘nature’ have alternated with sudden discords, confusing gaps and surprising continuities between the two. The language involved in the discussed poems and artworks has praised and imitated the natural world, it has stepped back in order to try and let nature speak for itself, it has usurped nature, clashed with and worshipped it. Joyce Kilmer’s Trees, Hugo Ball’s Wolken and Emerson’s invocation to listen to a white pine share an awareness of the ‘insufficiency’ of human language. Rather than lamenting this insufficiency, the three poets have found modes of using this imperfection of human alphabetic language in what they see as poetically productive ways. Kilmer considers language from two seemingly contradictory perspectives: while embracing a relatively conventional use of it, he simultaneously recognises this language to be hopelessly restricted, allowing, if anything, only superficial views of the world, faint allusions to what lies beyond the words. Why does he hold on to a language whose imperfec- tion he is so perfectly aware of? This seeming paradox also features in No Representation without Colonisation? Or, Nature Repre- sents Itself by Astrida Neimanis, lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. In this 2015 essay, 57 Neimanis elaborates on the problem of a ‘can’t-but- must’ condition engrained in the task of representing non-human others—its equally pressing impos- sibility and necessity. While in the case of Kilmer, ‘can’t-but-must’ remains a primarily philosophical problem, Neimanis considers it in terms of the ethical challenges we ought to be aware of when speaking of—or, particularly riskily, for—nature. Two roads that are commonly taken are representationalism and post-positivism, she expounds. Both positions (the representationalist one stating that there are representations on the one hand, and ontologically separate entities on the other, the post-positivist one stating that any attempt at representation constructs, rather than merely mirrors the real) perpetuate an ontological gap between word and world. This gap, according to Neimanis, is at the core of the problem of representation, reinforcing hierarchies between word and world rather than helping overcome them. She offers ‘agential realism’ (a term coined by the American feminist theorist Karen Barad) as a way out: a philosophical concept that postulates that all entities have ontological significance of their own and that they coexist in non-hierarchical ways. The agential realism sought by Neimanis is a concep- tion where entities and representations, nature and culture cease to be conceived of as antitheses. Interestingly, Hugo Ball also negotiated the idea of language and reality as ontologically distinct entities and, to some extent, rejected it. When the poet urges us to consider ‘Why can’t a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining?’, he proposes 60 I feel that the way Emerson builds the utter- ances—or silences—of the white pine into ‘his’ poem eschews this difference of the Self and the World most elegantly. Without humanness being abandoned, an element of something else starts to seep in. Neimanis, referencing the scholar Catriona Sandilands, also asserts: ‘There is an ‘Other-wordliness and a ‘wildness’ in nature […] that is unspeakable by us.’ 5 I feel that Emerson’s poem, not quite wanting to belong to the ‘strictly human’ field, is a rather radiant poetic acceptance of this unspeakable other-wordliness. In line with Césaire’s conception of a blurred line between Self and World, Phil Baber writes: ‘When we lament the ineffable what we are really lamenting is our inability to dominate and possess the world. But when we recognise that word and world participate in the same flux and vibration of being—are literally contained one within the other—the writer’s ‘task’ becomes at once simpler and more profound: the radical reorientation, through language, of the self toward the other […].’ 6 In stark contrast to this, Katie Paterson’s Future Library reduces non-human others to a purely func- tional material—establishing hierarchies which render any meaningful continuity between self and 61 other impossible. Agnes Denes took a step back, reclining as far as possible from artistic authorship while in fact still being Tree Mountain’s author. Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks attempted to circumvent narrative altogether. However, while he arguably took a valid step towards a more ‘pure’ use of trees, ultimately we are still dealing with a case of using trees—a some- what hegemonic human element remains. Beuys’ wish to make animals and plants capable of holding rights, by contrast, shows direct links to the concerns that Neimanis’ essay revolves around, extending the set of problems that come with speaking of and for nature into the realm of law: ‘The complexity of representing non-human natures as a form of advocacy is further underlined if we turn to a legal context. Even here […] the distinction between ‘nature in the active voice’ and well-meaning human advocates is not easily parsed,’ 7 she writes. An interesting example of the role that nature can assume in a legal context is brought up in Forest Law—Selva Jurídica, a collaborative piece by the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann and the Brazilian architect, researcher and writer Paulo Tavares. Forest Law concerns itself with an artistic mapping of legal trials in the Ecuadorian Amazon in which ‘a series of landmark legal battles have unfolded in the past years, where nature has been declared a subject of rights.’ 8 This reframing of nature as a subject of rights opposes the one proposed by modern consi- tutionalism, enclosing ‘nature within the category of object/property’. 9 Neimanis cautions her readers to consider whether approaches like this one are not 62 ‘simply cases of humans extending human language to non-human natures, or presuming to know what these natures would want, or say, in just another act of colonization?’ 10 While she answers with a laconic ‘Perhaps’, I feel compelled to reply to the question with a firm ‘no’, because it supposes a split between humans and nature that is absent in the case discussed by Biemann and Tavares: the Sarayaku people opposing the exploitation of their land by, for instance, multinational oil companies, conceive themselves as part of the surrounding world. Any attempt at drawing a clear line between the people and the land would, as far as I am concerned, rein- force the binary that was originally disputed by Neimanis herself. Another instance of a sincere attempt to work with nature that finds a legal expression is the artistic practice of the ‘pioneers of the eco-art move- ment’ 11 Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison. Their work—involving, among other things, endangered meadows, portable orchards and disappearing rain forests—always takes the form of site-specific commissions. A ‘detail’ that aims to preclude any potential human hegemony towards the natural world is the fact that they will only accept a proposal for a commission on the condition of ‘a general agreement that their actual client is the environment itself [my italics].’ 12 After a complex journey through the simultaneous necessity and risk entailed in the task of speaking of, for and with nature, Neimanis concludes her astute essay with the proposal of ‘imagining what we 1 Baber, Phil. ‘We Shall Have Worked.’ The Last Books, Spring 2017, p. 2, thelastbooks.org/pdfs/WeShallHaveWorked.pdf. Accessed on February 18, 2020. 2 Ibid., p. 3. 3 Neimanis, Astrida. ‘No Representation without Colonisation? (Or, Nature Represents Itself).’ Somatechnics. Missing Links and Non/Human Queerings, guest edited by Line Henriksen, Marietta Radomska and Margrit Shildrick, volume 5, issue 2, September, 2015, p. 136. 4 Césaire, Aimé. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry. 1946-82. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, University Press of Virginia, 1990, p. xlix. 5 Neimanis, Astrida. 2015, p. 139 (see note 3). 6 Baber, Phil. 2017 (see note 1). 7 Neimanis, Astrida. 2015, p. 140 (see note 3). 8 Biemann, Ursula and Tavares Paulo. Forest Law–Selva Jurídica. Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, 2014, p. 7. 9 Ibid, p. 19. 10 Neimanis, Astrida. 2015, p. 142 (see note 3). 11 Harrison, Helen Mayer and Harrison, Newton. ‘Helen & Newton.’ The Harrison Studio. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison Environmental & Ecological Artists, theharrisonstudio.net. Accessed February 25, 2020. 12 Ibid. 13 Neimanis, Astrida. 2015, p. 146 (see note 3). 14 Ibid., p. 149. 15 Ibid., p. 147. 16 Nemerofsky Ramsay, Benny. Trees are Fags. www.trees-are- fags.eu. Accessed February 25, 2020. 67 Epilogue Two Missed Chances Being aware of a topic’s complexity does not mean that one is safe from getting entangled in the struc- tures one seeks to avoid. As I tried to navigate the intricacies between nature and language, I found that establishing modes of thinking beyond—or at least alongside—my innate human sense-making-re- flex remained difficult. Last year in October, I was involved in the planting of two apple trees. It should not matter at all, but the trees were part of a project titled Apple. An introduction. Over and over and once again by Antje Majewski and Pawel Freisler, envisioning the planting of one thousand and one apple trees throughout urban spaces. 1 As my boyfriend and I began digging a hole amidst the bushes in front of our house, a thought occurred to me: if this tree is a symbol for biodi- versity, as intended by the project, a monument to the loss of species, a critique of global capitalism, wouldn’t it be useful to have a plaque somewhere near it, letting passers-by know all this? As I shared these thoughts, I learned that Majewski had taken a deliberate stance against burdening the trees with her name or any text. The artist had not wanted to claim the trees. The next morning, as we were busy planting the second tree, an enthusiastic passer-by got intrigued by what we were doing. A conversation unfolded 71 Bibliography Books and journals Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. Anchor, 2001 Ball, Hugo. Gesammelte Gedichte. Arche, 1963 Beuys, Joseph and Blume, Bernhard and Rappmann, Rainer. Gespräche über Bäume. FIU-Verlag, 2006 Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Translated by William Weaver, Random House, 1998 Carrión, Ulises. ‘The New Art of Making Books.’ Kontexts, no. 6–7, 1975 Césaire, Aimé. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry. 1946-82. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, University Press of Virginia, 1990 Clairvaux, Saint Bernard de. The Letters of St Bernard of Clairvaux. Translated by Bruno Scott James, AMS Press, 1953 Dolar, Mladen. 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