Forest Forays
Dreaming of trees - daily ink drawing from January 2024
“To live like a tree! What growth! What depth! What uprightness! What truth!” [1]
All this week I’ve been thinking about trees, their girth and uprightness, the vertical space they claim and inhabit, their leaves and roots. The science of trees interests me but I am more captivated by their poetic presence in a landscape. How trees en masse become forests, how these capture our imagination as both awesome and somewhat dangerous.
My favourite French philosopher is Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962). I discovered his works nearly ten years ago, intrigued by how he could explain scientific ideas through the words of poets. Who better to help me understand the majesty of forests. I googled what Monsieur Bachelard had to say about trees and was not disappointed.
In his book The Poetics of Space, Bachelard examines how we experience immensity within ourselves when we are alone and daydreaming, comparing this inner immensity to the immensity of forests. “We do not have to be long in the woods to experience the always rather anxious impression of "going deeper and deeper" into a limitless world. Soon, if we do not know where we are going, we no longer know where we are.”[2]
My own experience of this immensity was travelling to the Daintree Forest protest site in 1984, before the Bloomfield Road cut through it. The road stopped at the protest site. Beyond was the rainforest, towering, majestic, immense in its solitude. It was an overwhelming and unforgettable experience.
As I contemplate my imminent foray into the temperate rainforest of Takayna in Tasmania, my excitement is tempered with the knowledge that such forays into immensity can be life changing. Our ancient bond with trees is shadowed by the illicit lure of forests, going deeper into worlds no longer bound by human constraints. These are the archetypal stories from childhood, places in the imagination where witches and wolves dwell.
Yet these forests are also places of shelter and sanctuary. Our first houses may well have been built in trees, away from night prowling predators. Disney enchanted us with its idea of the Swiss Family Robinson treehouse with its interconnecting rooms tucked high in the tree’s branches.
Bachelard further brings the analogy of a house to a tree, connected to the elements.
“The well-rooted house likes to have a branch that is sensitive to the wind, or an attic that can hear the rustle of leaves.”[3]
It reminds me of the spot milled tree posts we used when building our house in the ‘bush’ of northeast Victoria. There was always a path between the trees, holes where wombats lived, nests for birds and sugar gliders. When I think of a treehouse, it is that earth and timber home, nestled in the eucalypt forest, snug in the snow and storm.
For this trip I have packed black ink and oil crayons, charcoal and water soluble pencils in my bulging rucksack. Travel to the forest is no longer a light baggage option with the necessity of tent, sleeping mat, sleeping bag and dry sack jammed with thermal underwear.
I plan to document my activities in the forest with the Bob Brown Foundation and hope to make a short film of this to highlight the need to protect these areas from logging and mining. There is an ache inside me for the future of these elemental beings who bridge earth and sky. Without forests we are the poorer.
It is up to us as artists and poets, scientists and philosophers to communicate the emotional and environmental importance of trees so they can be appreciated and preserved. Even if we never traverse the forest, it is comforting to know it is still standing, epic in its immense intensity.
[1] Bachelard, G. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. Spring Publications, Inc. Kindle Edition. 2014.
[2] Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space, translated from the French by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p185
[3] Ibid, p 52.
Detail of ink and pencil drawing of tree branches, 2024.
