Plant Matter
They speak to us, you know, the trees? There are voices in their cones and leaves, and the way their needles splay out, set against the sky. And in their color, silvery green and long, bare black stems, reaching far above, with dried branches like bristles, broken, silhouetted.
They aren’t speaking with words. Not voices you can hear. The voices are sentences you see above you, that tell you where you are. Where you are in the world.
Their dialects and phrasing changes. They tell you different things, the places you go. With powder white trunks, or dense canopies, the spacing between them, or the withered, craggy nature of their growth.
Their words are in their body language, and when it is its most eloquent you can hardly see it, and when it’s harsh, it’s all you see. Beautiful and wily, dark black, curling upward in a slow struggle for light. The way life always is when it balances on something so thin it’s almost imagined.
And yet, as ornate as they are, their words are only for us. The sentences, only for animals that read them. Alone in growth. As much meaning as mountain, or river-round stone.
Those words are silent unless we translate them. Their living, dying, breathing words are transparent, careless, useless unless they are used.
We give them words and we give those words meaning. Without us the trees are only themselves, elemental buttresses, holding up only themselves.
As it is supposed to be, we think.
But without us they will remain. Fecund. Stretching into sky. Still speaking, but in new languages, for other creatures to hear.
They will grow without us. Without an echo of all the proof they always offered: nothing was made, nothing was intended, there is no such thing as god.
They aren’t speaking with words. Not voices you can hear. The voices are sentences you see above you, that tell you where you are. Where you are in the world.
Their dialects and phrasing changes. They tell you different things, the places you go. With powder white trunks, or dense canopies, the spacing between them, or the withered, craggy nature of their growth.
Their words are in their body language, and when it is its most eloquent you can hardly see it, and when it’s harsh, it’s all you see. Beautiful and wily, dark black, curling upward in a slow struggle for light. The way life always is when it balances on something so thin it’s almost imagined.
And yet, as ornate as they are, their words are only for us. The sentences, only for animals that read them. Alone in growth. As much meaning as mountain, or river-round stone.
Those words are silent unless we translate them. Their living, dying, breathing words are transparent, careless, useless unless they are used.
We give them words and we give those words meaning. Without us the trees are only themselves, elemental buttresses, holding up only themselves.
As it is supposed to be, we think.
But without us they will remain. Fecund. Stretching into sky. Still speaking, but in new languages, for other creatures to hear.
They will grow without us. Without an echo of all the proof they always offered: nothing was made, nothing was intended, there is no such thing as god.
posted by sean_garmire at 6:37 PM
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