Today I drove down to photograph the tree. Usually I walk, but today we were setting off shopping and to see an exhibition of paintings. When I stopped and got out of the car I heard a lot of whistling. "Gosh those buzzards are making a noise," I thought. There are a couple of buzzards living near the tree and they mew to each other a lot.
As I walked nearer the buzzards didn't stop and I realised it was a local burglar alarm. "Damn" I thought "another broken alarm." It most likely was but then I thought there is no use having alarms if everyone ignores them, so I reported it to the police.
The police were unmoved, as, of course, was the tree. I've known this tree for about 40 years now and not far from it have been all sorts of human dramas. And through all of them the tree has sat there, and inside the tree thousands of insects are living their improbable lives, as unaware of us as we are of them. I know it's all obvious, but it still seems strange.
All are but parts of one mysterious whole,
Whose body nature is and God the soul.
Said somebody. (I'll look it up and give you a link at the bottom.) It feels this way when you look at a beautiful tree like this. It feels there is some kind of understanding between you and the tree. But sometimes it seems completely untrue. Damn it all the tree should care about us!
Googling for it I find the quote comes from Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle I. You can read it here:
http://poetry.eserver.org/essay-on-man/epistle-i.txt
The gist of this part of the poem is a bit like Job, that we can't hope to understand the mind of God he says. "Can a part contain the whole?", Pope rhetorically asks. Well, in a way, "yes" is the answer and to be fair Pope seems to give some credence to this. You can "see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour" as Blake said in Auguries of Innocence. Actually Pope's poem is a lot better than I remember it and I'll have to re-read it over the next few days. However the poem ends in a couplet that always annoys me:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, 'Whatever is, is right.'
Not to me it ain't clear, not to me it ain't right! I confess though it does give one answer to the problem of a wicked world and a loving God. To see my contribution to the debate, you can look at Christianity the Frequently Avoided Questions. A bit of a let down after Pope and Blake but it does have more laughs.
To get back to the burglar alarm I started with - if it was a burglary, I will let you know. But more likely it was just the rain getting into the burglar alarm. Enough. Time to end with a nice pic! Here's one of moss and fungus on a dead tree all quite oblivious of any human dramas or intellectual debates that happen nearby.
P.S The art show was interesting by a woman called Harriet Green lots of metallic leaf textures. Here's a link.
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