In Relation to The Trees

Early on, Sheila sighs Come get me in a hundred years.
And then - they grow roots.

How long was I with The Trees? 105 minutes. Seven years. 
The play ended, softly, the lights turning on. I walked into the bright lights of Times Square and thought I would sit for a few more hours. 

I want you to know that I can handle it. One hundred years. 

I want to see everything play out. 
I want you to know that I am here for you, for it, for everyone. I want you to know that I’m working on it. I’m trying. Honing my stamina through meditation, dark rooms, experimental film, duration. Sitting in discomfort with myself, probing conflict, being curious about my own bodily reactions. What my body is, what it can hold, how it keens with my attention.
Films are a series of moments, David reminds us, somewhat saltily. 
You know when I first started watching long films I most felt my own anger bubbling up, most of all? How dare someone ask me to attend here? I had better things to do. 
It gets existential, what happens with sustained attention. 
It’s a gift, time. 
I’m not willing to give it to everything.
We’re not living in an age that encourages sustained attention. Or choice. Or freedom.

I chose to be here. We all did. Must have. That’s a start. And if you didn’t choose to be here - remember you can always leave. 

And so I want you to know that I am willing to give my time to this. One hundred years. How many hours is that? Literally. Metaphorically. 

I’m writing in the territory where those boundaries blur.

Here, I address you Agnes and all that you’ve created and all who you’ve created with. Here I address The Trees itself, themselves. I’ll feed you all back your own words: I think there’s a certain threshold of love one needs to feel in one’s life. And if you never meet the threshold you continue to be filled with longing. You can keep on – but you’re hungry. And that is me. Slightly hungry. To the bitter end. I’ve consumed them and I’m longing. You gave them to me, to do what I will with. What I will is to ask for the more that I know is there, beyond the limits of these containers. 

Let me consider that bitter end, those hundred years, of which I have only witnessed the moments of seven. Gifts. I offer you seven in return. 

7 MOMENTS TO SUSTAIN 100 YEARS

1/

Consider: do you really believe in magic? Or is magic a style, a flush of whimsy against a white amphitheater. The bright lights of the mall display. The trees poking through the skylight at the center of the Apple store. An interruption in an ongoing schedule of certainties. A distraction piercing the veil of grief and ambition. Or is this act of being here together, looking, reading, rehearsing, performing, sacred, a miracle. We somehow arrived, alive, to listen to the same thing, at the same time. Here. In that room. On this page. A petition for the future shaped by the quality of being simply present. There is no one answer to this question. Responses are not mutually exclusive.

2/

Let me tell you about the material of my viewing glasses. 
I go into the theater with the world on my mind. Ongoing fascist backlashes, violence towards trans and queer people, towards Black and Indigenous people across the Americas fanning out from the beliefs and wounds of its colonizers, hatred of the poor, the denial of attempted genocide, bodily autonomy, climate crisis. Hatred of the poor, life itself. Fear of change. The glorification of violence. Numbing. A fascination with entertainment. Viewing things from a safe distance. 

My politics always enters my viewing and my reading. But I’m also suspended for a moment from space and time as I watch, some strange arena of letting myself be present in a space of strangers that is an intense luxury. 

There is no looming dread in the play - not in the sense that something violent is going to happen. This allows me to suspend the tension I already live with for a moment to enter into the question of the play. 

How are they going to live now?

I think about the polyvagal response of freezing as a response to threat. How our stress responses mark how we learnt to react to solitude, to being stressed and without a system of care to help manage that stress. Flight, fight, freeze, fawn, dissociate. To run, to assert, to stay still, to soothe, to stay busy, to imagine otherwise. I think about how the first response to stress or trauma is to look for support. And how it’s in the absence of support, that we learn these ways of dealing. Of coping with isolation. 

That these ways of adapting become a habit. And habits become hard to break, places that represent the point from which change may pivot. I suppose I’m thinking about these places in our bodies as landscapes, as places where things happen, are attracted, live, grow and come into relation with ourselves and others. 

It also follows that we need each other to heal. Healing has so much baggage attached to it these days. Much like love. I don’t mean love as a kind of dissociated ideal, or as a word that stands in for ‘Don’t worry. There’s a solution. It’s love. Love conquers all.’ Healing can hold this connotation too, a way to say, “hurry up and stop behaving in a way counter to what is desired right now. Don’t cry too loud. Don’t scream. Heal.”

Let me say instead - we need each other to change. To help each other let change happen. To drive it. We need to be open to change happening beyond what we can imagine. Because it’s already happening, isn’t it? The great sliding of the world that Saul, a rabbi in the play, feels. The world sliding into somewhere…dark and ugly and dead. We need each other to transform into something other than what first threatened to take us out. And continues to threaten.

3/

Some questions about the characteristics of a human who has grown roots. How long do they live, really? How much will they see fall away? How many times will they lose what they love? How many times will they create, grow, rebuild? How many times will these siblings, so different, see each other transform? How many times can they come to know each other? 

One hundred years is longer than I can imagine and also - sometimes the length of a human life. How old is Grandmother? What has she seen, what has she known, what has she endured? What does she already know about this business of becoming a tree? (If she was once a bird, how many times has she transformed, traveled, there and back again?)

4/

I’m thinking about grief. Grief and love as arms of each other. But also witness and growth as arms of grief. My own grief. My own impulses. Love and fear.

I’m thinking about David and Sheila, two siblings who are rooted to the spot. 
I’m thinking of their differences. 

Consider:

DAVID
(quietly)

My life is in that house.

SHEILA
(gentle)
Your life used to be in that house.

David spends the duration of the play in a kind of anguish. He wants to preserve, to hold on. It makes sense to me that David is a film-maker. And that films exist at the periphery of this ecosystem. A filmmaker who is called - caused to be the ultimate witness. He is fixed to the spot that he watches. He is the holder of moments.

Sheila is in a kind of... relief. She is allowed to be still. Satisfied. Satisfiable. Where David laments and struggles to hold onto what he cannot hold on to - things keep changing. Life keeps happening. Outside of the house where he thinks it is. Or was. From this position a witness. 

They may live for as long as they won’t be cut down. Seven years pass. That too, is a kind of love and loving. What happens in time and out of it. To feel and know and remember the inevitability of everything going away and changing. Listening and receiving that, and its grief. Understanding that there is no ending to it, necessarily. Just... moments, perhaps, that look like a break for air. (I imagine Sheila answering to this, “and look how I have come to know the capacity of my lungs!”)

I wonder about their early lives. Things I will never know. That’s how it is, with people. Even those I have known for so long remind me of their own mystery. 

I wonder what first made them freeze. Root. I think about the fact that Sheila returns to her home from somewhere else; I think about the fact that David had never gone so far away to begin with. I wonder about what this means about their early lives, their differences. It’s so strange that two people growing up in the same house can have such different childhoods. Lives. But I don’t know about age, or time, or childhoods. I just know: something happened. 

I know : something is happening now. 

I wonder at the ways that their rooting takes care of them.
Current society demeans survival. And life. This goes without having to say.
But in every person’s response to pain and suffering, there is the will to live, to keep going. Unless there isn’t. Unless we stop. And there is a lesson in that too.
‘People’ demonize strange ways of reacting. See: our hospitals, locked wards, prisons. But storytelling often focuses on individual responses, putting them against the backdrop of ‘the normal’.
Fear and awe go together don’t they?

Saul, within the play, embodies awe. And listening. And Saul - first totally external to the lives of the siblings, coming from quite far away (Ohio!)  to the park, by following his sense of wonder, becomes essential to the system. He becomes central to the change that is happening and has occurred. 

In many ways he is the first person to truly listen to what is happening here, and to respond fully, with his whole self. 

Rather than witness or ally - may we consider the listener. The lover.

I mean love in a full body, love makes you crazy way, follow it all the way to where it destroys you and changes you completely way. Not in a “this might be good for me” way. Love to the point where you need to start thinking about harm reduction for its aftermath, love to the point where we don’t glamorize its addictive qualities and simply think about impulse and pleasure as part of what it means to be alive, and start thinking instead about the distribution of risk in the process of changing, of loving, of being alive. If I shift the frame of what I’m looking at to understand that what we call love is everywhere, then the question is never “Is this love that I’m feeling?” The answer is always yes. The question becomes “How am I feeling this right now, today, here?” Our histories inform how we receive life and ability to live in the present. What we can bear and sustain.

I’m thinking Norman when he delivers this not quite non- sequitur:

I slept with a boy once who lived behind a couch. The couch was too short so he lived on the floor. He’d just unroll his little sleeping bag every night, right behind that couch, and turn out the lights. And at a certain point that was just too much for me. And I had to stop calling that boy. But maybe he was just in love with that floor, you know? Maybe he was just in love with that little bit of floor. It’s a funny thing about places and people. Maybe places fall in love with people, too.

I am thinking about the agency of landscape. A place loving people. I think this is a human frame, that love is a choice. Nature doesn’t think. 

There are far more interesting questions (here I mean interesting to say questions that I’m willing to give my time). (I’ve bored of so many of those distracting questions. Haven’t you?) Assume it’s love. Let’s talk about respect.

One loves the boy, but not the floor he loved. That was just too much for me.

One respects the floor, and the boy, and so we adapt our ways of living so that we can all continue to live. One respects the boy and what he loves. I don’t change the boy, and I don’t assume I know what’s going on here. I do not claim to love what I do not. I only know - that’s too much for me. No threat - just negotiation. Tension.

5/

How will the landscape shift over time?
I’d like to map the forces that threaten the landscape.
No, the influences that invite change. 
Sometimes, every change feels like a threat. 
The aftermath of violence lingers. Very Holocaust, as Cheryl exclaims. You know?
How do we understand change in the aftermath of a genocide?
In the context of multiple ongoing attempted genocides?
This place, the place being both the play, the park, the bodies of the characters, the bodies of the actors, the bodies of the audience, the bodies of the crew, kept at a gentle, even keel, how does it understand itself? How does this container allow us to try to understand what on earth we have become? 
How might it reckon within itself within the boundaries that allow violence for a moment, to be kept at bay?

Let me ask a question in a different way.
Within the fiction of the play, if violence and its threat is kept out, if we are allowed for a moment to imagine that, if everyone is safe enough, what is at tension here? What drives change?
A fundamental premise of somatic healing is - if one is safe enough, one may begin to heal.
What does that look like, healing? Not as a piece of rhetoric, not as an invitation to be quiet and take it, but as an exploration of life and its capacities?
What does it look like for a place to heal?

I am a place, a landscape. You are too. This piece. This space. This play, That tree. This park. The theater. The room. All of it.

What does it look like for us to heal?
To be not safe, but safe enough?
(Safe enough for what, exactly?)

6/
The lake, the bushes, the spiders, the wolves, the other trees. How much have they seen? What support do they extend, what knowing? What do they say to this saga? (How many times have they seen us unfold?) 

7/

I am asking you to think about magic, and reality, and fiction layered over each other, each shaping the other. Entangled, as we are, in time and space, in past and present and future. In each other, through violence and care, irrevocably.

What drew us all here?
Here I address the characters, the audience and all the company. All that we have known as what we call the form of personhood most often invited to be recognized as human.

Curiosity.
The promise of an opportunity. The possibility of an exchange. For money. For other forms of wealth we are now remembering to value.
An imperative to protect.
To transgress the definition of what we thought we were. 
The desire to be near. To be within a group. With others. To be within a scene. To be known.
Grief. Avoidance of pain. The need to withstand the discomfort of reality. Of aging. Of no longer being 23. The need to understand that one does not need to do anything to be love. The need to understand that witness, the place of the crone, is also love. 
We are teachers now. And always learning. Expanding into relation with that category of person that is not human.
Wonder.
Awe. 
Belief in a future and one’s tools to build it.
The discovery of something unknown. 

How will each shape each other?
Time stretching out…

Katherine Agard is the author of of colour (Essay Press, 2020). She writes within and across changing landscapes in whatever form careful and critical attention to place invites. You can learn more at kaa.fyi