Entelechy - A Contemplation on Self and Soul

Tree soul - Entelechy  

A Contemplation on Self and Soul

by James Saalfield

July 2017, Harvard MA.

Early in life I concluded that the day I was born was the day I had fallen from heaven. I was sure I had been in heaven only because I was named after an Uncle who had been lost in action in the war with the Japanese having been shot down over Borneo. My christening had been held at my Uncle’s eventual memorial service.  

I figured that maybe because of my Uncle the gods had given me every break and advantage so I must have been thrown out of heaven for having done something terribly wrong.  I was sure that I would never be allowed back. It wasn’t a temporary demotion for some slight if persistent offence.  In any case, I wasn't on earth by choice.

The memory I am about to relate was triggered over sixty years later when I found a photograph of myself as a preschooler, with finger raised, lecturing my mother as she sat there with a awkward, irritated  smile on her face.  Having no hope for redemption personally made me an arrogant moralist early in life, it appeared.  I spent a lot of time alone, maybe as a result.

In those days a large elm tree shaded my parents’ house until the moldering, late summer sun had set.  The shade’s coolness often drew me off the baked suburban yard onto the swing that hung from one of the tree’s branches.

Even now I have clear memories of looking up into the crown of the tree from the swing. I saw that there was a leaf to meet almost every ray of light and there was light enough for each leaf.  The swaying canopy colored the heavens a dark green as if the tree were painting the inside of a blue eye.  The branches each moved in their own marked domain like dancers on a stage.  The crown’s reach to the sun had an intention in the efficiency of its form and function.   The tree’s roots flared into the ground at the same angle as the branches grew from the trunk suggesting that if the whole tree were laid sideways its roots would balance the canopy – a horizontal symmetry to compliment the vertical.  The tree’s complexity was bounded by these symmetries.  Its enormous strength and presence flowed through them.  What sculpted these forms? Only the tree itself could have choreographed the shape of its movement to the lyrics and tune of the storms it endured; the winds it survived, and rains which sustained it - with the orchestration from the sun.  

When I was digging in the dirt under the tree I had the impression that the world below ground was teeming with small hostile creatures. The body of a recently deceased grandfather was bound in the closely packed earth unable to escape animals such as those I had found under the tree.  The tree was immobile too and I had wondered how it protected itself.  How were its roots shielded from burrowing creatures that would consume it and plants that competed with it for moisture and food?

As the summer aged, caterpillars dropped into view from the tree’s crown above.  Leaves they had chewed fell to the ground before their time.  The nightlong racket coming from the canopy stopped as cicadas abandoned their ghostly skins.  Amber exoskeletons appeared clinging tenaciously to the tree trunk soon after their occupants escaped from the nursery of the boughs. Squirrels twitched then startled into knotholes.  The trunk’s deeply troughed bark served as sunken paths for lines of ants transporting supplies to nests somewhere above.  Birds perched observantly nearby.

Autumn came.  After the first freezing nights some creatures retreated below the frost line and the communities of the canopy departed.  The leaves started to change color.  As an old man I feel my child self could have been forgiven for thinking that trees shed leaves like tears as a kind of prophylactic keening, hoping crying might stave off the coming of winter, or at least help brace him against the anticipation of it.

The winter I turned four was cold. One sleeting, corpse grey day  I sat in my older brother’s warm second story bedroom looking out at the tree.  It seemed unlikely to me then that the tree was comfortable or even safe.  How could it could draw warmth from its roots below the frost line when there wasn’t any warmth to be had?  Maybe it survived simply by being stolid.  So in solidarity,  I decided to make the tree a gift of the most valuable thing I could think of – a much loved baseball glove.  

I found the glove at the top of a bookcase in my older brother’s room, a baseball in its grip, and a new jar of Neat’s Foot Oil on the shelf beside it.  I took a small step ladder from the garage and carried the glove out to the yard where I placed it beside the tree.  I stretched as high as I could and lay the glove in the crook of the only branch I could reach.  The value of the gift, the location of the placement and the risk I took to place it there were gestures I would have the tree accept as a token of my appreciation. 

As the winter stretched on, the days got longer and temperatures rose but I noticed neither change.  The elm was my only barometer of seasonal change.  What stimulated the tree to begin to bud seemed to me to be triggered more by an internal clock than any external stimuli – like waking up at the appointed time in the dark without an alarm.

It was when my brother was home on break from boarding school, anticipating baseball season, that he found his now much weathered glove in the tree - after much searching.  Once confronted, my explanation was not well articulated.  Even if it had been, it certainly wouldn’t have carried the day.  But I had no regrets. The tree had deserved the best I could offer. The best I could offer was the glove.

My brother pressed the point that the glove was not mine to give. The argument didn’t impress me.  Ownership should have been moot.  The tree was so deserving, who owned the glove was irrelevant.  If my brother didn’t appreciate the tree’s majesty the problem was with him, not the decision to gift the glove. It was a case I wasn't able to present well verbally despite how adamant I felt.  He continued emphatically to point out that “it wasn’t yours to give”, and his point had its effect. For me the implication went beyond simply accepting that you just couldn’t take something you wanted without giving something in return.  What you were to give in payment had to be agreed upon beforehand. In fact you freely couldn’t give or receive anything, really – there was always a balancing entry.  “That is why money exists, didn’t you know?”

This concept – the concept of money - spread through me like ice crystals spreading through water.  Despite the graceless grasping inherent in the whole construct my brother offered, I had to begin to accept the chasm between people money symbolized and, more generally, that living things welcome the distance between them. They preserve boundaries rigorously and the chasm grows.  They negotiate at those boundaries to insure their integrity even as the boundaries reinforce their alienation.  The boundaries are central to their sense of self and to their survival - to the tree's survival - and it marked the end of my childish empathy.   

Often in the summers, now as an old man, when I have finished mowing I rest under a grand, lone, 23 year old oak in my field. The tree was a volunteer - what a forester might call a wolf tree -  because it has grown up on its own, outside of the protection and companionship of the forest. The oak had volunteered around the same year my younger son was born. I had taken care to mow the field around it since it first appeared.  One evening when my son and the tree were four years old there was a warm rain as the sun began to go down. There appeared a double rainbow in the east.  I ran to the house to get my son and a camera.  My son stood by the tree, the two being the same height, with the rainbows behind them in the shot.

The camera turned out to have black and white film in it but, none the less it remains my favorite photo.  Some day someone might make the effort to discover how to tease the rainbows from the photo if they were given the faith that rainbows are there to be seen even as I hope my descendants may find redemption, solace and forgiveness from the empathy they feel toward their fellow travelers in life who also struggle mightily to survive and thrive.