The Earthly Magic of Wood

Cross Fertilization I

An olive tree outside the Orangerie at Jardin du Luxembourg bears little brown tags on which people have written their truths (Love is Pain!) and their wonders (I love that you survive on broccoli and water!) as well as wishes (Wish for love and happiness!).

Trees of Calistoga

There are three such trees in sweet, lazy Calistoga, California: one for wishes, one for secrets, and a third for--is it dreams? Like the dreams of nutty Sam Brannan who founded Calistoga, Mormon visionary, raving alcoholic, daring businessman who imported 10,000 French mountain sheep, whom the locals drove off cliffs, and thousands of silkworms, all of whom died. But Calistoga's dream life lives on, a stage set of Americana.

Trees can take our secrets and dreams. They take our carbon dioxide and they take our human frailties-- in a new book, Blinded by Science, Matthew Silverstone writes that trees can cure mental illness, ADHD, depression, alleviate headaches, and improve reaction time and concentration levels. Hugging a tree realigns your vibrational frequency in a self-healing pattern, like tai chi.

Similarly, the earth can take our pain. That was what we said, in the days when I used to run hundreds and hundreds of miles, 20 years ago---give it to the earth, give your pain to the earth. In the book Born to Run, Bruce McCullough keeps that tradition alive in the same mystical fashion. Our feet know how to run, give them up to the earth. Give up the Nikes, the "baskets" as they say here in France, just slap those bare feet on the ground and run. My old boss at the Population Council, as McCullough mentions, was one of those Japanese masters of stoicism who trained by mowing the lawn, simply staying on his feet for 10 hours at a time. The great Yiannis Kouros, who ran day and night without stopping till a doctor put him on his back because his temperature was too high, said that when his feet got tired, he ran with his arms, when his arms got tired, he ran with his heart, when his heart got tired he ran with his back. We mere mortals ran in segments. I did 20 miles in the morning, and 20 miles in the afternoon, and 20 miles in the magical night under a gleaming 700 ton steel globe that watched, in the half darkness, over our wandererings. Nowadays, remembering that old identity of mine, the long distance runner, has given me more strength than I had forgotten about.

Cross-Fertilization II

Our own bocio

A stunning exhibition at the Cartier Foundation on voodoo, or Vaudou, brings the tremulous, tragic, tempestuous faces of the bocio, rough little dolls lost in a world of pain, bound with coarse rope or pierced with old nails or trapped in ancient fishing nets. Stark figures of rough, bitter materials, the healing dolls of the slave culture of West Africa were meant to protect and cure relentless ills. A sign over the stairs reads:

Salut a lui qui vient de dénouer l'énigme des enlacements.  Chaque fois qu'on défait un noeud, on sort un Dieu.
Greetings to the one who has just unraveled the enigma of the intertwinings.  Every time a knot is undone, a god is released.
The collection had been gathered by a cowboy hippy explorer (Jacques Kerchache) who is praised by Malraux, but in video footage seems callous, bragging of his own achievement in wresting these objects away from the deepest wombs of villages. He sat with the long-suffering villagers and learned their magic but he does not betray any respect for them. The little figures, bound in twine, pierced with awls, many of them double-headed or double-bodied (as all-seeing protective spirits), have faces of suffering without social masks. Their miserable faces speak not of salvation but of a rough magic of blood and sacrifice. There is a certain code: a figure bound in ropes is fighting servitude and anger, one pierced is trying to penetrate a mystery (or carries a voodoo curse for the intended victim), the small shells decorating some totems signify desire. Alienated from their native purpose these lost voodoo gods stare, disoriented, at the Parisians wandering in their midst.

Our house spirits

I am not unfamiliar with such faces--at home we have plenty of masks that were meant for powerful magic, but that Jacques hangs on the walls perhaps to exorcise domestic demons.

Parc des Arts, Moscow

There is a similarity to a sculpture exhibit that took place in early spring at Jardin du Luxembourg of wooden logs decorated with faces, as plain and crude as the faces on snowmen. It is deeply elemental, the way wood becomes flesh, even when you look at an old likeness of St. Dominic, created in his own lifetime. But these bocio remind me most of tragic scupltures hidden away in the Parc des Arts in Moscow, the graveyard for memorials to the age of Stalin.

Parc des Arts

Parc des Arts

St. Dominic, 13th c.