I don’t know if it is Alicia Gómez-Navarro’s idea, but the Student Residence has invited us to this beautiful paradox: “Plant a book, write a tree.” And we see that the word “tree” entails an origin, it carries a root related to genealogy, … science, life, that is, “desires” the page.
Right there, in the Residence, we heard Francisco Jarautawhose head, it would be said, a “tree of science”, all science. And the question arises: is science accurate? For Adorno: “even the tree that blossoms lies in the instant in which its blossoming is perceived without the shadow of terror.”
True, the word already spoken is defined, but in itself it preserves what unites it to the whole, it discovers links, as does the family tree, linked to the Tree of Life which, for ‘Coomaraswamy’, “it sprouts, flourishes, or hangs in space from its root”. Does it refer to the ‘asvattha’, of which the ‘Katha Upanisad’ tells us: “With the roots upward, with the branches downward, such is the eternal ‘asvattha’. That really is the pure thing. That is the ‘brahman’, which they call the immortal. In him rest all the worlds”? It would, therefore, be a metaphor for “the totality of manifestation”, rooted in the supreme being, located “above”, on a higher plane.
The word “tree” is encompassing in various cultures. Qara Ibn Arabí —author of ‘The Tree and the Four Birds’—, is a symbol of man, “essential vertical axis, bringing together all the states of being.” The aforementioned work includes the “Discourse on the universal tree of identity”, where we read: “I am the music of wisdom, which dissipates worries through its melodic rhythm” – by the way, in Soria, in the Alameda de Cervantes, there was the so-called “Music Tree”: enormous elm, planted, apparently, in the 16th century.
And that one truly converted into music, andl “Rain Tree” by Toru Takemitsu?
The word begins to get restless: there are many turns it takes: “masts” refers both to a forest and to the set of “trees” – masts – and yards of a ship, from which it derives that “the trees” are put in a vessel, and that “dismast” is also interpreted in this sense, as “dismast.” From there it goes to the sea; whose waves grow, curl.
The “tree” even wants to be linked to the military sphere: it raises, raises, waves, “flies” a flag. It is also said of a horse with the meaning of rearing up, facing up, lunging.
‘The Lost Grove’, Alberti titled his memoirs, and Octavio Paz ‘Tree inside’, his latest poems. But where various trees are written is in the Irish ‘Song of Amergin’ which, through the mouth of God, makes us know the tree of each month.
