Marina Abramovic is an internationally known performance artist. She teaches her fans “art pieces that experiment with time, metaphysics and the human body.” These creative exercises, which are instructions in “endurance, concentration, self-control and willpower” are intended to “reboot your life” (Guardian Weekly, 18 February, 2022). In 2020, she convinced a group of volunteers to try tree-hugging as an antidote to the isolation caused by the Covid pandemic.
This was a five-hour exercise for a Sky Arts television program. Although it seemed like a “mockmentary”, the experience was transformative for those who participated. “It was amazing,” Abramovic said, “how people got emotional. How much they kept inside, and how talking to a tree [was] a kind of release.” But hugging a tree might have wider uses.
Consider what the experience might do to anyone who approaches a tree with a chainsaw. Even a few moments of physical contact and thoughtful communion with the tree might have an “amazing” effect. Sharing a longer silence together, before the chainsaw begins its angry scream, might be enough of a pause to at least inspire an apology. Talking to the tree would be a considerate gesture that could lead to a deeper level of communication, and the discovery that living trees have many experiences in common with living humans—death being one, although we don’t really know how a tree dies and how long it takes to do so.
Because we don’t usually give enough thought to understanding trees, the human gesture of hugging something so tall, patient and old could be a life-altering experience for us. The tree, after all, is a living embodiment of Abramovic’s practice of cultivating such admirable attributes as “endurance, concentration, self-control and willpower”. Consider the commendable attributes that trees share with our better aspirations.
For “endurance”, trees can live for centuries. Even the ones that loggers routinely chainsaw as “merchantable” are likely their seniors by many years. Some are older than the histories of their families, or the country in which they live, or the hungry maw of capitalism into which the log of the tree will be fed. Some trees are older than the discovery of North America by Europeans. A rare few, such as a nearly 5,000 year-old bristlecone pine called “Methuselah”, are almost as old as human civilization itself. The most ancient of the enduring tree species is the Wollemia pine in Australia, at 200 million years. This compares to our 3 million years as primitive hominids and 200,000 as modern Homo sapiens.
“Endurance” also brings to mind the 500-million years in which trees have existed as a distinct species. In those early tree years, when soil was sparse, they developed a co-operative relationship with fungi, a trading system in which the tree exchanged essential sugars for vital minerals. Beneath the trunk of the tree and the logger’s boots is the same network of intelligent communication and mutual assistance that is a sociological and biological wonder—not very different from the co-operation used by humans to build their civilizations. Trees also developed inter-individual awareness through a “wood wide web”, and by using airborne pheromones, another sophistication that might make us wonder why we would treat them as objects.
Additionally, “endurance” requires “concentration”. Trees live in a slow time that is not available to our failed imagination. A pathological anthropocentricity doesn’t allow us to experience the short life of the fruit fly or the longevity of the tree. Maybe wrapping our arms around the coarse bark of a big conifer would offer a partial remedy to this defect in our character.
Trees have more “self-control” than we do. They know what they are and they don’t try to be something different. They don’t suffer an existential crisis about what they will be when they grow up, so have no need to go on protracted journeys in search of themselves. Like all enlightened beings, they have an indisputable presence of authenticity.
“Willpower” is another attribute Abramovic is trying to cultivate in her performance art. So you might have noticed that trees grow where their seed has landed, regardless of the circumstances. This requires a resilience and determination that could be a sagely model for each of us as we strive to be who we are in the conditions in which we find ourselves. Soil or rock, wet or dry, flat or steep, trees heroically struggle to be themselves in the conditions that life has set for them. If we were to judge them as humans, we would call this a dignified and stoical nobility.
One of the first of many insights we could garner from hugging trees would come from breaking the physical distance between them and us. Things don’t have to be warm and cuddly to be loved. Isn’t love letting things be themselves? We might then realize that we are part of the same interconnected fabric of extraordinary relationships required to make all life possible and fulfilling. We couldn’t live without trees. Unfortunately, however, they are having difficulty living with us, a rather unfair and unjust arrangement given our propensity for causing ecological mayhem wherever we have planted ourselves.
The performance art of Abramovic does get us thinking, which is precisely her intention. To address anger, she suggests, first “notice the moment of anger, then stop it” by holding your breath for as long as possible. Repeat as necessary until the anger subsides.
We could use the same practice when we choose to cut down a tree. So give it a long, lingering hug. Feel its coarse bark against your cheek, smell its musty age, and sense the solid weight of its presence. Then hold your breath for as long as possible. Repeat as necessary. Try counting the tree’s branches and estimating the number of its needles or leaves. Give some thought to what you are intending to do, and why you are doing it. Think of the tree’s patience, perseverance, dignity, and the intricacies of its relationships. Consider that it must have some form of consciousness, otherwise it couldn’t become the being that it is. Ponder the mystery of life that is shared by all living things. Isn’t all life a magic to be honoured?
Ray Grigg for Sierra Quadra
Grandfather and granddaughter tree hugging – Photo by Amy Forest
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