If a You Fell in the World Would You Make a Sound? a Semester with a Tree

If a You Fell in the World

Would You Make a Sound?

A Semester with a Tree

-Created By Michael Lees in the Linear Year of 2013-

Welcome to your tree journal. Over the duration of the semester, you will find and meet a tree in a space and place on campus of your choosing.

This tree journal will involve inner and outer perceptions, reflections, and contemplations relating to class dynamics as well as your own life happenings.

The tree journal is a time for you to reflect upon and share with someone else, a someone else whom just so happens to be a tree. So meet and greet your tree, listen to your tree’s voice and listen to what that tree may share with you.

The question reflections for each of the journal entries serve as a guide for your thoughts and ideas. Use the questions found in each section as a tool to work with. You are not limited to only those questions, as you may want to add your own ideas as well.

If you want to respond to the questions in the form of a poem, writing, sketch, work of art, or a song feel free! You may also choose or feel inspired to respond to the numerous voices found throughout this booklet as a way to work with your entries as well.

These entries will be a part of the final project and supplement your main journal for this course so make sure to keep up with the journal and most of all have fun befriending a tree!

Tree Journal Entry One – Week One …What relations can hold between the real world and fictional worlds? Can real people interact with fictional characters? We are likely to feel that fictional worlds are insulated or isolated, in some peculiar way, from the real world, that there is a logical or metaphysical barrier between them. That, indeed, is why we call them different “worlds”. – Kendall L. Walton

Voices: #56 – Jack Kerouac Imaginary judgments about things, in this Nothing-Ever-Happened wonderful Void, you don’t even have to reject them, let alone accept them. “That looks like a tree, let’s call it a tree,” said Coyote to Earthmaker at the beginning, and they walked around the rootdrinker patting their bellies.

Question Reflections for Journal Entry:

 Find a tree on campus that you would like to spend the semester hanging out with, introduce yourself, and draw a picture of this newfound tree friend for next class.

 What is your tree friend’s name?

 How did your tree friend get here?

 What is your tree friend’s background, life story?

 What does your tree friend have to do? Tree Journal Two – Week 3

Voices: Changing – Barbara Meyn

It happens quietly. A maple seed blown here by a sudden random wind sprouts beneath the bedroom wall, grows before I quite know how it grew, tops the eaves, seeking afternoon as well as morning sun, and fills my life. Leaves unfold like ragged green umbrellas waiting for an April rain. I tell myself it’s just another tree that could have been dug up when it was small and planted farther from the house. If I don’t cut it soon, if I keep on watching while it reaches for the sky, delighting in its gray, sinewy trunk, the soft touch of leaves when I walk by, the way it gathers light on winter days and pours it generously through the glass, it won’t be long until it moves my house off its foundation. The room is full of curious, precious things, skin of mole, hawk feathers, moth cocoons, deer’s-foot rattle, dry seed pods of zygadene, racemes of saxifrage. And now across the walls maple leaves sign to me in shadows. Though the tree is not yet in the room, in the dark I hear it whisper, I know it’s coming in.

Question Reflections for Journal Entry

 What does your tree friend like to do?

 What is your tree friend’s attitude towards life?

 What is your tree friend’s philosophy on life? Tree Journal Three – Week 5

Voices: Breaklight – Lucille Clifton Light keeps on breaking. i keep knowing the language of other nations. i keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean. and light just keeps breaking. last night the fears of my mother came knocking and when i opened the door they tried to explain themselves and i understood everything they said.

Voices: Time and Motion and Space – Simon Ortiz Time and motion and space: pine and fir, the wind, lichen on sunwarm flat rock, a road below in the valley, voices of friends, ourselves. “Pine song,” she said. Butterfly comes by. And then Bee all dressed in bright yellow and black. “This is the way it is.” “I’m not just making it up.”

Voices: How Much Coyote Remembered – Simon Ortiz O, not too much. And a whole lot. Enough. Voices: Some Trees – John Ashbery There are amazing: each joining a neighbor, as though speech were a still performance. Arranging by chance to meet as far this morning from the world as agreeing with it, you and I are suddenly what the trees try to tell us we are: That their merely being there means something; that soon we may touch, love, explain. And glad not to have invented such comeliness, we are surrounded: A silence already filled with noises, a canvas on which emerges a chorus of smiles, a winter morning. Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, our days put on such reticence these accents seem their own defense.

Question Reflections for Journal Entry

 How does your tree friend think about other beings? People?

 Does your tree friend have a lot of friends or just some friends? Why?

 Does your tree friend trust the world surrounding it? Why or Why Not?

 Does your tree friend enjoy the companionship of a loved one? Friends? Family? Or does your tree friend like to be alone?

Tree Journal Entry Four – Week Seven

Voices: ‘the universe is part of ourselves’ – Robin Blaser we have been everywhere, suddenly, and twisted the clarities into bottles and casements it was the lintel concerned us we walked through and wondered above us the larks of heaven perch and nothing over the walls, the vision gossips like rivers, and wishes, marvelous, perishes we have been everywhere, suddenly, glorious texture the chorus added eagerness, swiftness intellect whispers, meanders, softly landed remarkable pons and cattails the ferns dream as they return to green the efformation, the dis-creation, the kindness of fragments the larks of heaven perch and nothing – for bp Nichol

Voices: Interlunar Thoughts – Robin Blaser ‘Advertising tells us who we are’ and ‘presents a completely integrated culture’ in the interval between the old moon and the new when the moon is invisible, one hopes the moon will show up: capitalism, racism, consumerism, homophobia, sexism- all of them systems of signifiers detached from spirit so the governing soul goes numb (a voice on CBC set alongside John Wilkinson on John Wieners)

Voices: Sitting Under Tree Number Two – Jack Kerouac But the undrawables, the single musical harp rainbow’s blue green shimmer of a cobweb – the line of thread swimming in the wind, blue & silver at intervals that appear & disappear- 7 song along the rim tying to the plant as birds twurdle over those massy fort trees populous with song – imaginary blossoms in my eye moving across the page with definite oily rainbow water holes & rims of beaten gold, with toads of old silver. Golden fast ant back in the hay now fromming its feelers thru the thicket of time then darting across mud looking for more trees – A little ant bit my ass & I said Eesh with my wad of gum – I itch & pain all over with hate of time & tedium Save me! Kill me!

Voices: Kopis’Taya (A Gathering of Spirits) – Paula Gunn Allen Because we live in the browning season the heavy air blocking our breath, and in this time when living is only survival, we doubt the voices that come shadowed on the air, that weave within our brains certain thoughts, a motion that is soft, imperceptible, a twilight rain, soft feather’s fall, a small body dropping into its nest, rustling, murmuring, settling in for the night. Because we live in the hard-edged season, where plastic brittle and gleaming shines and in this space that is cornered and angled, we do not notice wet, moist, the significant drops falling in perfect spheres, that are the certain measures of our minds; almost invisible, those tears, soft as dew, fragile, that cling to leaves, petals, roots, gentle and sure, every morning. We are the women of daylight; of clocks and steel foundries, of drugstores and streetlights, of superhighways that slice our days in two. Wrapped around in glass and steel we ride our lives; behind dark glasses we hide our eyes, our thoughts, shaded, seem obscure, smoke fills our minds, whisky husks our songs, polyester cuts our bodies from our breath, our feet from the welcoming stones of earth. Our dreams are pale memories of themselves, and nagging doubt is the false measure of our days. Even so, the spirit voices are singing, their thoughts are dancing in the dirty air. Their feet touch the cement, the asphalt delighting, still they weave dreams upon our shadowed skulls, if we could listen. If we could hear. Let’s go then. Let’s find them. Let’s listen for the water, the careful gleaming drops that glisten on the leaves, the flowers. Let’s ride the midnight, the early dawn. Feel the wind striding through our hair. Let’s dance the dance of feathers, the dance of birds.

Question Reflections for Journal Entry

 Does your tree friend have a religious, spiritual, atheistic view in relationship to the world-at-large?

 What is your tree friend’s ideal vision of a relationship to self and others?

 If your tree friend could create the ideal world…what would that world look like?

 Does your tree friend believe in a sense of order as it pertains to relationships, life, and living, or does your tree friend just work with life as it comes? Tree Journal Entry Five – Week Nine

Are “real objects and events changed by our perception of them? Is there a neutral world independent of human perception? Ralph Barton Perry, a twentieth-century American philosopher, posed the following puzzle. To know the world is to perceive the world. To know whether an object is real or not, we must perceive it. We can never observe the world, however, in its original state. If this is so, we can never know if our perception of the world changes it. According to the ego-centric predicament, we are inextricably involved in an unsolvable puzzle. We are trapped in our egos without access to a neutral perspective to verify whether or not our ideas correspond to reality. – Richard C. Loofburrow

Our ideas can enslave or liberate us. Some people never do make the transition and remain resident in the old world view: their ideological comfort zone. In human life, there is always something new, because creativity is part of what it is to be human. – Ken Robinson

Voices: On Top – Gary Snyder All this new stuff goes on top turn it over turn it over wait and water down. From the dark bottom turn it inside out let it spread through, sift down, even. Watch it sprout. A mind like compost.

Voices: From “Leaves of Grass – Songs of Myself” – Walt Whitman I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars…

The Earth moved slowly in its diurnal course…A sudden silence hit the Earth. If anything it was worse than the noise…The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth…Before the Earth passed away it was going to be treated to the very ultimate in sound reproduction, the greatest public address system ever built… “People of Earth, your attention please…This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council…As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less than two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.” – Douglas Adams

Question Reflections for Journal Entry

 How does your tree friend feel about change? Does your tree friend feel like the world is changing all of the time?

 How does your tree friend think about itself in relationship to the space, place, and life on the planet?

 How does your tree friend think about itself in relationship to living on a planet that is part of universe?

 Does your tree friend believe that there is other life in the universe?

Tree Journal Entry Six – Week 11

Voices: Turning the Garden in Middle Age – Maxine Kumin They have lain a long time, these two: parsnip with his beard on his foot, pudding stone with fool’s gold in her ear until, under the thrust of my fork earthlock lets go. Mineral and marrow are flung loose in May still clinging together as if they had intended this embrace. I think then of skulls picked clean underground, and the long bones of animals overturned in the woods and the gorgeous insurgency of these smart green weeds erect now in every furrow that lure me once more to set seeds in the loam.

Voices: From the Ninth Elegy – Rainer Maria Rilke Since this short span might well be lived as lives the laurel, deeper in its green than all other green surrounding, leaves, edged by wavelets, smiling like the breeze – then why, destiny overcome, must we still be human and long for further fate? Here is the home and the time of the tellable! Speak out and testify. This time is the time when the things we love are dying the things we do not love are rushing to replace them, shadows cast by shadows: things willingly restrained by temporary confines but ready to spew forth as outer change of form decrees. Between the hammer blows the heart survives – as does, between the teeth, the tongue: in spite of all, the fount of praise.

Voices: # 26 – Jack Kerouac All these selflessness have already vanished. Einstein measured that this present universe is an expanding bubble, and you know what that means.

Don Quixote’s epitaph: Here lies the noble fearless knight, whose valour rose to such a height; when Death at last had struck him down, his was the victory and renown. He reck’d the world of little prize, and was a bugbear in men’s eyes; but had the fortune in his age to live a fool and die a sage. – Cervantes

Question Reflections for Journal Entry  How does your tree friend feel about death and dying?

 Does your tree friend believe in life after death?

 How does your tree friend work with the idea of, “Always expect the unexpected.”

 How would your tree friend feel if you were gone?

 How would you feel if you went to visit your tree friend tomorrow and your tree friend was gone?

Tree Journal Entry Seven – Week 13

Voices: Crazy Weather – John Ashbery It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having: Falling forward one minute, lying down the next among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers. People have been making a garment out of it, stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning at some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls to the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray of morning corrects itself as you stand up. You are wearing a text. The lines droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need any other literature than this poetry of mud and ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily through the then woods and ploughed the fields and had a simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody will inspect where some late sample of the rare, uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know.

Voices: The Uses of Light – Gary Snyder It warms my bones say the stones I take it into me and grow say the trees leaves above roots below A vast vague white draws me out of the night says the moth in his flight- some things I smell some things I hear and I see things move says the deer- a high tower on a wide plain. If you climb up one floor you’ll see a thousand miles more.

Voices: From “The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi” – Susan Ichi Su Moon Dear Tofu Roshi: Why is there something rather than nothing? – Auntie Matter Dear Auntie Matter: You have probably heard the wise old saying: “Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.” Similarly, something manifests in order to keep nothing from taking up all the space. In this matter which you present, nothing could be more material to our understanding what is than what is not. We must learn to see things as they are and to see nothing as it isn’t. In substance, nothing matters.

Question Reflections for Journal Entry

 How was spending a semester with your tree friend?

 What did your tree friend teach you and what did you teach your tree friend about life?

 Do you plan to ever visit your tree friend again after this course comes to an end?

 If you and the tree fell in the world would you make a sound? Sources Adams, D. (1979). The hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy. New York, NY: Pocket Books.

Anderson, L. (1991). Sisters of the earth. New York, NY: Vintage.

Ashbery, J. (1985). John Ashberry: Selected poems. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Blaser, R. (1993). The holy forest. Toronto, CA: Coach House Press.

Cervantes, M. (1605/1957). Don Quixote. New York, NY: Mentor Books.

French, P. A., & Brown, C. (1987). Puzzles paradoxes and problems: A reader for introductory philosophy. New York, NY: St. Martins Press.

Kerouac, J. (1960). The scripture of the golden eternity. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

Kerouac, J. (1971). Jack Kerouac: Scattered poems. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books.

Loofburrow, R. C. (1999). Puzzles principles & philosophers. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

Moon, S. I. S. (1988). The life and letters of Tofu Roshi. Boston, MA: Shambhala Books.

Ortiz, S. J. (1992). Woven stone. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Rilke, M. R. (1987). Duino elegies. Eugene, OR: A Yew Book.

Robinson, K. (2011). Out of our minds: Learning to be creative. Westford, MA: Capstone.

Snyder, G. (1964). Turtle island. New York, NY: New Directions Paperbook.

Snyder, G. (1983). Axe handles. San Francisco, CA: North Point Press.

Whitman, W. (1959). Leaves of grass. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

-Created By Michael Lees in the Linear Year of 2013-