I've never posted any of my writing here but here's something I wrote yesterday evening. I hope you enjoy it. A Dead Tree's Lesson There is a dead tree some distance away from my house, but still visible from my porch. I have observed it for at least a year, but it was only yesterday that Nature, once more acting as my greatest teacher, revealed to me an interesting take on life and death. For this tree stands out so much from the rest, even in winter when all trees seem dead. But while most trees have a certain "twigginess" to them, a delicate and fine branching, this dead tree seems less "twiggy" and more "branchy" or "trunkish," such that one cannot help but notice that it is not simply dormant from the winter, but is indeed dead. And life follows this same pattern. Indeed, all the beautiful living things in this world are such because of their "twigginess." The reverse is true as well; things are twiggy because they are alive and beautiful. The subtle way a bird flies, with all her tail flicks and feather flutters, and the bird flying up and down with the wind currents. The gentle rolling of grass in the wind, a million blades swaying to the same music. The beautiful complexity of a long, improvised instrumental jam, rather than a set verse-chorus-verse pattern. Life: not random chaos, nor rigid order, but organic ordered complexity. The twigs, the embellishments, these are the face of beauty. We know the fish wasn't two feet long but we love the story all the more for the fisherman's lie. Myths are the same on a grander scale, fantastic stories of superhuman people doing wonderous deeds, more amazing as time passes and the story grows. And mankind used to live in such a world of wonder. True, he made his own things, and with clear intention; his tools and homes were made with a purpose. But so too were they made of living materials like wood and bone, or, if made of stone, still ordered organically and in such a way that they did not seem out of place from the world. The old stone huts in Ireland look like they grew there. But a brief look around a modern city tells a different story entirely. Here there is no subtlety. Empty brick walls face the road, devoid of embellishment, or even of windows. Lines are all straight and angular and hard. Gardens are planted linearly, giving so obviously an artificial appearance of nature that it is a mockery. The few times there is embellishment and superfluity of design by a sensitive architect who wishes to soften his construction lines, it is out of place, an afterthought to the utilitarian design. The life of the tree has died, it puts out no new twigs, the flame burns low, down to coals that slowly and finally go cold; and a few ornaments hung on dead limbs does not a living tree make. We have built a world of death where people do not live, but are merely alive within. There are no windows on the brick wall because there is nothing worth looking out at. Sometimes I wonder if whoever it is who owns that dead tree will ever cut it down, but at times I think that it's better that they don't. We all need a reminder of how beautiful a living world is, and death can serve this purpose by its stark opposition to life. Death shows us that beauty is indeed found in the natural outpouring of elegent excess. Beauty is that which is unnecessary. Poetry, art, music, literature, friendship, love-- these things are not required for life, but they make life worth living. A world, a city, a life, without them is already dead, merely giving the appearance of living. But to understand and respect death is not to embrace it; to do so is to live lives or build cities not of vibrant life but of of living death. Unfortunately this is exactly what we have done. But hope always remains; there are always those few dead trees to show us the way of life.
A well written retort. It is perceptive and amiable. The only place you lost it for me was the use of inverted commas at the beginning to describe the tree. I wouldn't mention this if I didn't read the rest of your work, but I've noticed that you have a rich plethora of words and could have quite as easily found something to fit your description. Having said that, the rest is truly excellent. It is emotional without being over sentimental and you establish a fairly written and logical argument.
Inverted commas? What's that? I haven't been in an english class in years. you mean where i said things like "twiggy"? Yeah, I agree, I thought the same, and probably will change it.
I enjoyed it. Yes I noticed the extraneous punctuation at first, but the rumination and continuity of the first paragraph is what kept me absorbed to the story. And I'm glad it did. That was a very powerful observation by Trippin. Given a little grammatical repair I think it would be a literary tribute to all things rememberable as well as all things living today.
this excerpt is my fave part: "The beautiful complexity of a long, improvised instrumental jam, rather than a set verse-chorus-verse pattern." i liked this... keep posting!
