What the Wood Remembers

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House, Houston, Texas: photo by John Vachon, May 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

What words would the wood remember, if the wood could remember words? Would the wood remember what was said in this old house of words forever lost, where I wanted to live, in the immaterial wood of the mind, when immobilized, remembering the picture without having it before me, but recalling it to the mind's eye, as a kind of meditation, lying on the metal table, under the bright light, in the passage over the bridge between worlds, the ruinous world to come and the world already ruined and left behind, those fossil worlds, those petrified woods, those stone worlds made of dead wood and dried blood and the ruins of historical time -- these pitiful reminders of mind, these unintelligible echoes of words, these woods of inarticulate echoes, in which everything is heard twice, and then again heard, for a third time? Who is that third who walks beside? Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together, but when I look ahead up the white road there is always another one walking beside you, gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman, but who is that on the other side of you? Would the wood open itself and remember the words it kept close through all that long unremembered time, hidden in the rings of its growth, if the light grew bright enough to finally blind, past returning, and there were no one left to walk beside, only the one, the one walking over the bridge between the worlds that are no longer real, in the dark wood, under the bright light of the black world in which there are no words left to be said, no words to be heard, only the noise of the technicians busying themselves with inconsequential things, the low hum of the machine passing over the body, capturing axial slices like tree rings, from the Greek tomos slice and graphein to write, images of materials simulated on a transverse plane, things which if they were ever real are real no longer, matters which if they were ever material are now as immaterial as mind, in the bright black blinding irradiated world of words which now no longer matter?

Virgin redwood, 864 years old: photo by John Vachon, 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

A Giant Sequoia log, Generals Highway, Three Rivers, Tulare County, California: photographer unknown, no date (Library of Congress)

Polished slice of petrified tree from Arizona, containing homesteads and remains of living things from Late Triassic (c. 230 million years ago): photo by Michael Gäbler, 2009

Petrified tree in Petrified Forest National Park: photo by Daniel Schwen, 4 September 2004

Bole of a freshly felled cultivated Sequoiadendron giganteum (aka Redwood or Giant Sequoia) about 100 years old, Auvergne, France: photo by Jastrow, 1 November 2005

Dendrochronological sample from a beam in Gödenroth Rathaus: photo by Stefan Kühn, 9 September 2004

Oak (Quercus robur) cross section: photo by Sten Porse, 2005



Diagonal section through the trunk of a Cork Oak (Quercus suber): photo by Plantsurfer, 23 July 2007

Willow wood cross section: photo by Karelj, February 2008

Fraxinus excelsior cross section, including sapwood: photo by Beentree, February 2006

A cross-section of a 5 year-old green ash stem: photo by Minnecologies, 26 February 2008

Robinia pseudoacacia cross section: photo by Luigi Chiesa, 12 March 2006

Yew wood (Taxus baccata) showing 27 annual growth rings, pale sapwood and dark heartwood, and pith (centre dark spot); the dark radial lines are small knots: photo by MPF, before 5 November 2004

Stump of Sambucus nigra: photo by Krzysztof Ziarnek, 24 October 2011

Weathered growth rings in a horizontal cross section cut through an tree felled around AD 1111 used for the western building complex at Aztec Ruins National Monument, San Juan County, New Mexico: photo by Michael Gäbler, August 1978

The growth rings of an unknown tree species, at Bristol Zoo, Bristol: photo by Adrian Pingstone, September 2005

Rings of a tree stump, Corrèze: photo by Nicholas Mahey, winter 2007

Stand of virgin Ponderosa pine, Malheur National Forest, Grant County, Oregon: photo by Russell Lee, July 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)