Larkin’s ‘The Trees’: A Schism of Being and Becoming

An especial attraction, perhaps even virtue, of ‘The Trees’, is that certain of its purported themes – death, existence, becoming – may be seen in either secular or Christian terms, whether express nods to humanism and doctrine or simply chance echoes of the two. Whatever Larkin’s stylistic agenda here, ‘The Trees’, at the very least, meditates evocatively on growth, flourishing and mortality, be his intent philosophical or purely literary. If, though, ‘The Trees’ does intimate something conceptual as well as poetic, perhaps it is the collision of Nature’s unbounded metaphysics with Man’s limited experience. That conflict of timelessness and of our interim Being, though not implicit from the outset, emerges as the poem develops.

The poem’s opening, “The trees are coming into life/Like something almost said”, is a declaration of life, a natural process asserted rather than simply undergone. That initial richness, though, is tempered by the “grief” of the “greenness”, as if Nature is somehow conscious of its coming deterioration even amid that formative vitality, a melancholy recognition that abundance must submit to effect and change. Self-arbitrating Nature, and, in the second stanza, Man’s view of such phenomena – of Nature possessing motivation or intellect – shapes the “conflict” I described earlier. The opening stanza attributes agency as well as aesthetics to Nature, the impression that the trees can somehow emote at their lifespan, dwell on the prospect of fate.

Having, at the poem’s beginning, so lyrically sounded the birth pangs of the trees, Larkin seeks to objectify Man’s own view of them, imagining our resentment even when met with their colour and grace. Their annual conjuring feat of “looking new” affronts the reality that “we grow old”, as if their implacable beauty denotes some sleight of hand. It is to the trees that Larkin’s Christian motif “born again” is accorded, Nature enjoying perpetual renewal when Man, at best, is afforded ‘mere’ experience, and the innate transience it evokes. The doors of Man’s perception are purely ajar, whilst Nature’s verve is cyclical, recalling the peculiar dogma of Yeats’ “ever-singing leaves” that, like Larkin’s trees, are impervious to the laws of age and decay. The trees’ life and youth must be hard won if to be sanctioned, laboured if to be moral in the eyes of Man’s decline, rather than practice the nefariousness “trick” implies.

In the final stanza, the trees compound Larkin’s seeming exasperation at their resilience, as he describes the “threshing” of the “unresting castles”, Nature’s seamless fortress indomitable in its vigour and texture. If May is Larkin’s cruellest month, when the trees announce their own cessation, then their plight is only temporary, spurring themselves on to “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh”. Pervasive within ‘Trees’, if only tacitly, is an oddly Christian narrative of development, existence, passing away, and a metaphysics addressing new life. A paradox, though, is that it is Nature, rather than Man, which enjoys this rebirth, whilst we are to accept mortality. For all our instinctual adulation of Nature – Larkin recognising Nature’s self-expression at the moment of regeneration – there is an almost pained observation of its revival, its rallying cry somehow at the expense of our death. The “trick” seems to us a dubious metaphysics, Nature’s assured self-sufficiency attesting to a mysterious resolve that lies beyond our apprehension, an energy we cannot rationalise and which “appears” underhand. Whilst the trees “die too”, they, in contrast to Man, persist, enjoying as much an aesthetic as an existential renaissance, that rebirth almost as wilful as it is natural. Nature’s metaphysics is the envy of Man, its “restless castles” the sublime guarantor of rebirth.

For us, the Christian promise of renewal is an enchanted hypothesis, and yet, for Nature, an immutable given. If that is so, the poem evinces a reluctant rather than willing humanism, casting the eternal not as a gift but the atemporal as a cold intellectualism. Man is everywhere governed by the strictures of experience when Nature’s resurrection is confirmed, Larkin’s trees teasing and inexorable, the exquisite both an instrument of mockery and an object of awe.

Bejeweled Evolution

Once a contention, now a proverb, “…endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”, Darwin’s epochal observation at the close of The Origin of Species (1859) might aptly describe Katie Paterson’s theme and agenda in her latest exhibition, at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. In appointing Man’s place on Earth as her subject, Paterson explores not simply our adaptation to the natural world, but also related issues of social space, our functioning therein, and how evolution conveys as much an aesthetic as a developmental narrative. The centrepiece, ‘Fossil Necklace’, charts the unfolding of life over 3.5 billion years.

On show in the first room, ‘As the World Turns’ (2010) features a rotating turntable playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. At one revolution every twenty-four hours, it is in tandem with the motion of the Earth. That the record, if performed from beginning to end, would run for four years, reflects gradual evolution rather than design in Nature. The movement of the record is almost invisible to the naked eye, and the sound barely audible, mirroring time’s innate rather than humanistically-conceived quality. However defined our impressions may seem, it is the inherent rather than the empirical in Nature which prevails. 

As remarkable for its orchestration as for its production is the black and white photograph ‘Inside the desert lies the tiniest grain of sand’ (2010). To create the image, Paterson worked with nanotechnology experts to take a grain of sand and carve it to just 0.00005mm across, which she then buried deep within the Sahara. The photograph, showing Paterson standing amongst the dunes of the Desert, echoes Hamlet’s dictum that “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space”. Hand outstretched, Paterson seemingly arbitrates her surroundings, as if passing a decree on Nature. It is precisely the illusion of her creative sovereignty, though, that is revealed by the curious modesty of Paterson’s presence in the shot – rather than assume centre stage, she is content to be Camus’ Absurd Man, “…who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal”. However inquisitive the mind, we must accept its limitations, exempt from any role in the atemporal, subject rather than impervious to the Phenomenal.

Exhibited in St Peter’s Church, close to the Gallery, is ‘Fossil Necklace’, the product of Paterson’s residency at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. A set of 170 beads on a string, each piece represents a chapter in life’s evolution, merging notions of time and beauty. Encompassing everything from a Thai mollusc to a seed fern from New South Wales, the necklace illustrates the Tree of Life, connecting each extinct and living species. Paterson condenses billions of years into something aesthetic as well as historically reflective, the passage of time constitutive of visual resonance as well as pure linearity. Within the church setting, the necklace accrues material and metaphysical depth, fusing humanism and the spiritual to show how the natural world has sustained Man’s drive to create, appealing to Nature in expressing our most direct feelings and to conjure our most nuanced musings on the sublime.

Exposing the entrenched "morality" of the past

Australia's leader frank about a lamentably recent social ill

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored"
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Proper Studies (1927)

ON March 8th, Australian PM Julia Gillard delivered a remarkable address as part of International Women's Day. Earlier this week, Australian women - and women everywhere - were again her audience. Her theme was forced adoption, and the "moral" conservatism that mandated, with quite breathtaking hypocrisy, the removal of babies from their natural mothers, on the grounds of their being too young, or unmarried, and other "shameful" pretexts. Speaking to over eight hundred people, gathered in the Great Hall of Parliament House, Canberra, she set the record straight, pulling the facts from beneath the veil of outright double standards practised between the Fifties and the Seventies. With rhetoric as impassioned as it was objective, her address eloquently but uncompromisingly exposed this social atrocity, and outlined the emerging policies that will prevent such tragic history being repeated.

This, surely, is one of the things that social justice is all about - not insisting that each person play by a given set of rules or risk stigmatisation, but be recognised and valued as a human being regardless of their lifestyle and whether it tallies with prescribed "norms". It is not when we are cajoled into being the same that progress is made, but when our lifestyle choices are acknowledged and respected in individual rather than collective terms. Indeed, it is precisely the freedom to be true to ourselves, rather than abiding by given opinion or social "ideals", that enables the expression of human dignity at all. Liberty is indivisible, and diversity must always prevail, each voice listened to, not merely heard.

As little as forty years ago, the women in that room were told they were "bad", "unfit for motherhood", bemoaned by an outlook that appointed social conservatism the official disguise of bigotry, "tradition" the aesthetic term for a formal policy of oppression. History will record their victimisation by a "system" that stressed "propriety" over love, as if intolerance were preferable to compassion, but also their unswerving thoughts of the children they left behind, their innate decency and sense of duty to those absent sons and daughters wholly unshaken by the passage of time.

Amalia Pica in Oxford: Or, a Satire on Vanity

Mollifying Inherited Pretensions

Amalia Pica’s striking For Shower Singers exhibits a number of works in the UK for the first time. Amid the seductively disparate themes and images that abound in the Argentinian-born artist’s latest offering, mockery of institutions and the otherwise earnest ambitions of the individual might be identified as her principal concerns here. Spanning various genres, from wall displays to installations, London-based Pica satirises our cautious preservation of traditional and proverbial status, implying that we construe anachronisms for legitimate emblems, historicism as a worthy arbitrator of would-be social and creative enterprises.

Red Carpet (2010), duct tape on cardboard, traverses a wooden floor in straight and curved forms. How much Pica echoes the incorrigible celebrity culture in which we are saturated, a breathless and peculiarly Western desire for fame mirrored, here, in a suitably contorted rather than logical presentation. Soberingly, Pica leaves us wondering whether hierarchic structures, aside from their Hollywood superficiality, possess any more virtue as social constructs or as instinctive moral and artistic categories. 

If contemporary art is sometimes accused of intellectualising the everyday, of imposing nuance on the manifest, then Sorry for the Metaphor #5 (2010) offers an “apology” for this, only to objectively mimic the ground for that criticism. A figure stands by a reservoir, holding a notice. A signifier has been uprooted, an instruction ignored, prescribed clarity “burdened” with ambiguity. The scene is composed of 128 A3 photocopies. Pica, purportedly sympathetic to decried meditations on the implicit, wills that our appreciation of the world is as natural and imperfect as that realm itself, not defined or governed on our behalf. She prompts those cynical about aesthetic complexity to contemplate whether they would ordinarily tolerate a primitive, ordained configuration of their own experiences, or whether we would sooner intuit, cultivate and interpret those fragmented impressions for ourselves.

Number 1 (2012), a plinth daubed in turquoise paint, attests to a disparaged classicism, the archaic, however affectionate our popular view of it, here portrayed in the most embarrassed light. A foundation has been defaced, material and principle alike defamed. Here, as elsewhere in For Shower Singers, Pica simulates a deft collision of the precious and the anarchic, questioning whether the axiomatic significance accorded to rank and to established values carries a rational or supposed wisdom.  

For Shower Singers
Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street
December 14th, 2012 – February 10th, 2013.