Notes on What a Tree Might Be

She pictures a very large toothpick, and I rush to elaborate the fundamentals of a tree. Of arboreal anatomy. The xylem and the phloem, the medullary ray. And the great cascades of foliage that swarm the tree trunk like electron fields.

She pictures a tower of wicker, and I struggle to explain that a tree is not composed of the by-product that survives it. Just as we are not quantities of dead hair and fingernail clippings, of the dead skin we slough off and the cells we leave behind.

She pictures a pile of coats—stole, mink, ermine. The mustelids have long gone extinct with their habitat, but their furs have been hoarded in luxury bunkers. I slip into a long, rambling tangent on the confounding nature of the homonym, how “fur” and “fir” are not the same.

A great pillar of incineration whose ashes scatter lightly in the wind—but no, this is not what we mean when we refer to an ash tree. The word is derived from the Proto-Indo-European word for spear, I explain, but the Latin name Fraxinus just refers to a subgenus of the family Oleaceae. Oleaceae, you know, like an olive tree.

Her eyes glaze over. She begins to fidget. I have the nervous tendency to overexplain when I feel the reins of my uncertain pedagogy slipping, a habit that is alienating to my young pupil, squirming in her seat beneath the skylight. The haze shines weakly through the scuffed plexiglass. Above the doorway, a digital clock counts down the minutes of our session. We sit hunched over desks in a room that is small, antiseptic, and gray.

The girl squints her eyes. She can picture a flower. She has sketched one on her tablet, like the girls in my youth used to scribble in the margins of looseleaf. Stem, leaf, blossom with its delicate petals lilting gently toward the sun.

“This is a useful corollary,” I say. “The tree is like a flower, on a much larger scale.”

“Trees are big flowers,” she pronounces like a revelation.

“Yes, well, not really. Flowers were parts of trees,” I say. “Some trees would flower. Some would even fruit.”

The girl nods in recognition. Like flowers, all the fruits have been cultured in labs. Pitless and seedless, they are losing their colors. They are losing their shapes, amorphous and dull simulacra of the things we called berries. The idea of an orchard strains credulity.

She is picturing long rows of giant apples, cherries, peaches, as though their ripened bodies sprang clean from the earth. As though they were mushrooms. “Trees are not fungi,” I hurry to clarify, but the girl might not have heard me. The screen that renders her neural activity is blossoming, bursting with imagining spectra of colors.

In a half-hearted bid for her attention, I slip into a monologue on mycelial networks, on the way that fungi facilitate forest health through rhizomatic pathways deep beneath the ground. The way that they allow trees, ostensibly alinguistic, to communicate.

“Wood comes from trees,” she interjects.

“It did, yes. Paper came from trees,” I add quickly. “Have you ever seen paper?”

The girl’s eyes flicker. The patterns on the screen falter. She shakes her head no. In one quick motion I dip my hand into my pocket and slip her a piece of paper, folded. She crunches the paper in her palm and tucks it into her bag, some instinct pressing the need for secrecy.

I know that surveillance has picked up this gesture. Inevitably, their unseen eyes record our movements. They have been tracking me, likely, since my first impulsive mention of a tree.

“Let’s review what we learned today,” I offer, glancing at the final minute counting down above the doorway. “A tree is a column of wood. As it grows, the wood bifurcates infinitely, like tiny arms whose fingers clutch tiny green flags. Little green tissues like scarves.”

“Little green fingers,” she whispers, incredulous.

“When autumn comes, the leaves turn red, and they fall to the ground.”

“In fall, the trees bleed.”

“No, not bleed. They just shed.”

“They turn red. So, they could be bleeding.”

“The trees don’t bleed, no. They don’t circulate.”

“You said they have a flow, though.”

“I said they have a phloem.”

“But something flowed through them? A life force?”

Despite the need for urgency, I pause to appreciate the question.

“Some cultures, some religions certainly believed that trees were animated by the spirit of a life force. Wood nymphs were spirits of the trees in antiquity. And clear into the European Middle Ages, most societies attributed some pre-Christian totemistic powers to the tree. In the Baltic, when mission priests razed the forest dedicated to the pagan god Tharapita, the locals were amazed that the trees didn’t bleed like human beings.”

The girl blinks at me. I have used too many words. Too many names and concepts that share no commonality with the treeless and unstoried world she inhabits.  

“Seeds are little babies,” I say. “They grow in the tummy of the ground.” I am hoping that this over-simplification will suffice. To inspire her to action. She is a smart girl, far advanced beyond the other students I tutor. Rare glimpses of empathy and understanding animate the monitor, illuminate her eyes.

The clock above the door hits zero. I am swept by an automated voice into the hallway. I bid my student farewell. She smiles weakly and the screen behind her sends out a series of missives, inscrutable.

Weeks pass and I am no longer summoned to tutor. This does not surprise me. I have taken too many risks, expended too much precious oxygen in circuitous explanations of things I was meant to keep silent.

Nor am I surprised when an investigator is dispatched to my cell. She faces me in the dim light of the single bulb that hangs above my cot and asks for my identification. 

“Is this regarding my lesson on trees?”

The inspector remains silent. She looks intelligent, conservative of oxygen. She is absorbed in recording my data on her tablet.

“It was an exercise. We were monitoring her neural activity. I wanted to see…”

The inspector looks up at me ironically, dares me to continue speaking.

“Nothing in particular. What would happen if she thought of a tree.”

In the green light of her tablet, the inspector makes notes.

“It seems like her neural pathways flared. When she began to picture a tree, its structure.

“Of course, I am familiar with the series of by-laws that govern the mention of photoautotrophs. And photoautotrophism.

“I know that the conditions of my employment forbade me from mentioning them. But I needed to see.

“It’s almost as if the perception of a tree—their patterns of arborescence—might facilitate the cognitive process. Somehow. As if its image played some role the development of consciousness. In the articulation of language. For the individual, for the way she links ideas and communicates. But maybe for the species, too.

“Maybe we evolved to think alongside trees. It is no coincidence that our neurons have structures called dendrites. From the Greek, dendron, for tree.

“The seeds, they were Oleaceae. You know, like an olive tree.

“I suppose you’re wondering where I found them.”

The inspector looks up from her tablet. She struggles to conceal that her interest has been piqued.

“I suppose you’re wondering what kinds of networks operate. What other seeds might circulate, unknown to you.

“Sometimes, there are networks you can’t see. They operate beneath the ground.”

The inspector closes her tablet. She turns to exit. I continue to speak to the back of her silhouette, illuminated in the doorway.

“Why did we eliminate the idea of a tree? Why did we scrub it from our collective memory, when things like birds survive?

“Was it too powerful a symbol of an organic network? Or did it mirror too closely the way our thoughts form when our neurons fire? The way that our thoughts connect when they move beyond simple concepts, to webs of ideas.

“Maybe it isn’t a coincidence. These things go hand in hand. The destruction of our habitat, and the end of the way we think.”

I am waiting for the investigator to turn around, to admonish me for passing the seeds to my pupil. I am waiting for her to tell me that the girl was eliminated because of me, that my recklessness was responsible for the taking of a young life. And that my seeds were duds, that nothing could ever hope to root in the fields of arid soil that stretch beyond the biodome. But she doesn’t say anything.

“In the absence of the thought of a tree,” I say to the door as it closes, “we cannot think of anything more complex than straight lines and right angles. Rectangular arrays. Matrices that stretch into towers that flatten our minds.”

I know that I will not be tried, sentenced, formally punished. It would be a waste of time to expend that kind of procedure on me. The oxygen to my cell will simply be cut, at some undetermined point in the future, after the investigator bothers submitting her report. And I will suffocate in silence, unseen.

The interesting thing about oxygen deprivation is that its early stages are accompanied by dreamlike hallucinations. Vibrant pictures dancing on the insides of your eyelids, passing visions that alight on your mind in the moments before your lungs fail and your heart stops. They say that you relive your entire life in the instant of death, but my mind is too weak to reach back before the catastrophe.

I lay on the bed in my cell, my head heavy, my breathing shallow, and I begin to picture a tree.

I picture a toothpick that spins into a redwood—an army of toothpicks spinning until they rise into an old-growth forest of Sequoia sempervirens, towering, fireproof, defying their endangerment, standing like skinny arms against the coast of the Pacific.

I picture an auditorium of wicker chairs. They sprout into willows at the edges of a pond. Mournful and heavy, their branches caress the reflections of their own leaves in the water.

I picture some species of the subtribe of Oleaceae. The tree of sorrows in its final flowering. Its tiny white flowers with petals like pinwheels. Their bright saffron pistils that watch me like eyes. The last tree standing in the middle of an empty plain. The final neuron firing in the moment before the screen goes dark and the white lines drop off to nothing.

Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Return.Life, Minor Lits, La Piccioletta Barca, and on her substack, cristinapolitano.substack.com. She can be found on X/Twitter and Instagram @monalisavitti.

Published July 15 2024