a row of trees attempts to loosen the bounds between disciplines, and is committed to publishing new works across a variety of fields, backgrounds and mediums.
What is more intimate than water?
In Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which I first read over water, travelling by ferry to Dublin) there’a chapter titled Intricacy, where Dillard, whose work for me exemplifies a propinquity of balance and participation, visits a store called Wet Pets to purchase a goldfish. The beating heart of this animal leads her to experience, as an example of equilibrium that cost twenty-five cents, an eyeful of fish-scale and star.
A creature called elodea accompanies the purchase of the goldfish. Elodea is a plant that introduces Dillard to the streaming of chloroplasts, the red-green world of photosynthesis, where a surrounding river of cytoplasm acts as a kind of space-time in which chloroplasts have their tiny being. Elodea, a plant dreaming of being a tree (echoing an arboreal intimacy that opens this volume) pours through and returns to the vegetative walls of the world, where lunar sap flows through a row of trees in much the same way as blood flows around a quincunx of bodies.
Intimacy stems in part from intimaire, or impress. An impression is a groove, and we are bodies waiting to be heard, trying to keep open such tiny universes of plasma that William James warned would otherwise prematurely close. As Dillard contemplates red blood cells whipping through capillaries in the transparent tail of a goldfish, she considers nature as churning out the intricate texture of least works with an extravagance of care. It is, she says, a small world there in the goldfish bowl, and a very large one. When you move in, you try to learn the neighbourhood, cultivating intimate immensity that may or may not, at some point, help to see what else resides on the edges of our being, on the fluctuating peripheries of that dubious and extracted term, human, so removed and yet held in humus.
We live in impressions of water observing itself. Great grandmother, coming from earth, from stars, from asteroids. We appear to stars as much as they appear to us, the waters, formulating the shapes of the field as subtle topologies of vaporous merging and tethers of electrical charge. Impression is like a confluence, words as organs suspended in a matrix of mythopoetic imagination, a river bed filled with light encrusted fractals. The depths of our projections and partial perspectives unfold in transitory subsistence where every cell we are is also in the world.
If we are walking minerals, as Vladimir Vernadsky says, then we are also the stories that minerals tell, and to paraphrase Keith Waldrop, whatever we see can only be what there is to see… and we too, by the same token, must need everything we are seen by.
