The Life of the Tree

The tree is a familiar subject but now I move beyond this familiar image and look at the untimeliness of the photograph’s formal strangeness; the twisting of the branches upon themselves and their embrace with the thick black edges of the photograph frame. The edges become the threshold of seeing and perceiving the photographer’s landscape. The four sides of the frame cut the bodies of the trees from all directions to establish- through a formal and virtual expression- a relationship between the visible space inside the photograph and the hidden space outside. The edges give a new face and meaning to a piece of reality. The edges through time have passed the rustling of the intertwined branches of the trees in the life-giving silence of their roots and have placed thousands of silences and solitude in the whiteness of the sky.

The logic of the photographer’s look has erased lines and shapes from the wide middle space of the photograph and has shifted most of the focus to the margins and edges. The edges of the photograph do not submit to the forward-looking and one-sided eye of any viewer and do not reveal any tree completely so that the viewer’s body may be placed between existence and the spirit of the tree. I think the edges have not only torn the tree’s body into pieces but also seem to desire to touch the deep roots and the lofty thoughts of the tree’s soul. A desire and pull of the kind found in the closeness of human lips and like a reverent kiss on the bark of a tree that alone has borne the burden of the sorrow of life’s history in the emptiness and whiteness of the sky.

Here and now, I cannot find the meaning of this always-empty and rainless sky. Has it been painted white so that our memories of warm summer days, cold winter nights, and entirely human times take on no color and become filled with the clamor of loneliness? I look again at the picture. When I look at each tree individually they resemble lonely people whose roots rest in infinity and who whisper to me with their unique faces and voices: their waiting is in vain and one day the rain will come and the sky’s color will turn blue and the depth of life’s eternity will give life a beautiful and watchable face and will bloom itself again; although the tree is not eternal.

The survival and demise of the tree remain in memories and resist oblivion, becoming a part of human cultural history. Like the remembrance of Rubashov’s memory in the novel Darkness at Noon when he was aimlessly pacing in his cell. From the window he saw a piece of pale blue sky that reminded him of the same blue sky he had seen in childhood; back when he lay on the grass in his father’s garden and watched the poplar branches slowly sway against the sky. This bodily look from the closed window of his cell at the pale blue sky above the machine-gun tower was enough for his soul’s eyes to live an open and boundless perspective on his childhood before he was taken to the basement and executed.