Alan Rayner

Dept of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of modern culture is the way that so many of us feel compelled to sever the connections between our thinking and our feeling - between ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’.

As a result of this severance, we often find ourselves caught up in the crossfire of all kinds of internal and external conflicts. Especially in our working lives we often feel such conflict in the need to detach what we expect - or feel is culturally expected - of ourselves, from our personal human needs, experience and values. We struggle to be ‘rational’ and ‘objective’ and aspire to ‘peak performance’ and ‘success’, whilst every intuitive sense in our body may be screaming ‘violation’, if not ‘blue murder’. And the social, psychological and environmental damage that results from such violation can be nothing short of catastrophic. Yet we seem powerless to do anything about it, let alone understand its origins in our ways of viewing nature and our subjective relation with it. We carry on regardless, comforting ourselves with paradoxical notions like ‘being cruel to be kind’ and ‘the end justifies the means’.

I suspect this conflict is nowhere more keenly felt than by those of us who work with trees. In so many ways, trees epitomize our ambivalent relationship with the ‘otherness’ of nature - part fearful, part loving; part utilitarian, part aesthetic.

When we look at a tree, what are we looking for? And how are we looking?

Do we look lovingly, feeling ourselves entering into some kind of deep relationship, finding comfort, shelter and beauty in the infinitely scaled natural, fractal geometry of the tree’s twists, turns and branches? Do we look fearfully, belittled and vulnerable besides the tree’s natural scale, disturbed and threatened by the unpredictable complexity of its dynamic form and destructive potential, and searching for ways to control it? Do we look practically at the tree as a provider of resources or amenity, or as an obstacle to our agricultural and constructive ambitions?

And, how, by the same token, do we view those many other life forms that live within and around the tree’s boundaries - are they ‘rotters’ or ‘friends of the earth’?

In this talk, I want to examine this ambivalent relationship we have with trees as symbolic of our more general relationships with one another and nature. I want to reflect on how the tendency for this relationship to be superficial and abusive can be transformed into something altogether deeper, richer and more empathic by what I call an ‘Inclusional’, as opposed to ‘Rational’ view. This inclusional view leads to the bringing together in reciprocal dynamic partnership, rather than severance, of thinking and feeling, art and science, aesthetic and practical, male (assertive) and female (inductive). Essentially, it enables us to see all things, including trees and ourselves, not as isolated, independent bodies but rather as ‘dynamic inclusions’ - interdependent embodiments - that both include and are included in the continuum of space that connects inner and outer domains across all scales from sub-atomic to universal. By the same token, it enables us to see ‘boundaries’ not as the fixed limits of discrete objects or ‘entities’, but rather as places of dynamic relationship that give ‘identity’ to ‘one another’, rendering them distinct - recognizable - but not discrete - alone.

To develop this inclusional view, it is necessary both to acknowledge and bring into connective rapport, two distinctive ways of seeing - detached and immersed. The immersed way of seeing makes no separation between our inner and outer selves. We are absorbed and involved - and inclined to lose our sense of control and where we are - in what we see around us in our horizontal field as a rich, never-ending tapestry of space and features that moves reciprocally around us as we move through it. The detached view distinguishes our inner selves as ‘subjects’ from what we regard as ‘objects’ in our external surroundings. We gain a sense of independence, control and certainty about where we are in relation to these objects, but lose all sense of the interdependent relationship between our movements and theirs, between our own influence and their influence mediated through our common space.

We are all equipped with both these ways of seeing. However, we tend to reverse and even abandon the natural primacy of the immersed perspective in favour of the detached as we emerge through childhood and adjust to the survival needs of our terrestrial existence. Here, air seems like a separating ‘nothingness’ and ground is what we stand abstracted from at right angles. In fact, I sometimes reflect that if we were aquatic mammals, how different might our relationships with one another and our common space be.

Our dry abstraction of spatial context out of material content has, moreover, been enormously reinforced by rationalistic western philosophies that surfaced with the likes of Aristotle and Parmenides and culminated in the ‘Enlightenment’ of Bacon and Descartes and the ‘clockwork’ universe of Newtonian mechanics. To this day, these philosophies in their turn are deeply embedded in our mathematical and scientific practices, from the space-excluding geometry of Euclid and discrete, so-called ‘natural numbers’ to notions of objective reality and falsifiability.

I unconsciously represented my personal feelings about the eclipse of the immersed by the detached view around 30 years ago in two paintings:

Slide: ‘Arid Confrontation’

So, how can we transform the deserted perspective of our rationalistic detached way of seeing and bring it back into inclusional co-relation with our immersed perspective? And what has this got to do with our view of trees?

I expect you’ve already guessed the answer - just add water!

For me, rivers have always been a wonderful metaphor - in fact more than a metaphor, actually an inclusional description, of the way life diversifies into its myriad of dynamic forms. As it erodes rock and deposits sediment, a river both shapes and is shaped by the landscape it flows through, both creating and following paths of least resistance - opening up and closing down spatial possibility for movement. This shaping occurs at the river’s banks, its dynamic informational boundaries, which mediate the reciprocally changing relation between inseparable stream and catchment - content and context.

And just the same kind of shaping occurs in all organic forms of life as we know them here on earth, as embodied water flows:

Not least in trees:

For, most fundamentally, from an inclusional view, a tree is an embodied water flow in living space: a solar-powered fountain whose sprays are supplied from soil by wood-lined conduits, sealed in by bark until their outburst of leaves into air.

And this living space is not and cannot be hermetically sealed off within itself, but is, rather, a ‘breathing space’, maintaining an ongoing dialogue between its inside and outside through holes in its boundaries - something I always feel most aware of in springtime:

And this living, breathing space is an entertaining host for all kinds of residents and passers by within and upon its holey surfaces, which augment and enrich its many-faceted life story.

Below ground, roots make contact with MYCORRHIZAL FUNGI that enhance uptake of water and mineral nutrients, impede ingress by toxic metals and parasites, alter soil aeration and link up with other roots to form a COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK - the hidden TRUE UNDERSTORY of the forest.

Within the holey, water-channelling space of wood, many microbes may be distributed though the sap stream, living quietly as oxygen-starved ENDOPHYTES until air gets into the pipes, sometimes with a bang of cavitation, to unleash a new lease of life in the gaseous phase:

Out on the leaves, microbial biofilms of bacteria, yeasts and moulds may spread over the surfaces, whilst other fungi may penetrate the interior - sometimes through the stomatal breathing pores - to grow either BIOTROPHICALLY or NECROTROPHICALLY, respectively from living or dying plant cells:

Once their photosynthetic function is exhausted, the leaves fall to the ground where their remains are digested or decomposed by animals and microbes, which release the stored carbon to air as carbon dioxide and minerals to soil, where they may be reabsorbed by mycorrhizal fungi.

And not only leaves, but also fruits, twigs and even large branches and trunks may fall to be recycled in this way. Because the tree of life is necessarily simultaneously

Death is manifestly a way of life for trees. The formation of wood and bark, and of heartwood and reaction zones that seal off dysfunctional from functional tissues, all depend on oxygen-induced, oxygen-incorporating, so-called ‘secondary metabolic processes’ in dying cells. Only a tiny proportion of the branches produced during a tree’s life span are retained. The remainder is abscised - imagine what the tree would look like as a cluttered up thicket if they weren’t.

Meanwhile, the tree is subject to all sorts of incursions from outside, which open up its interior holey space. Removal of bark cover due to injury or disease allows air into the water-conducting passageways, and subsequent activation of wood-decomposing organisms and processes that destroy sapwood and hollow out heartwood to leave a living shell that may yet provide home for many life forms.

I like to think of these incursions as ‘exformational’, releasing the space previously incorporated or embodied ‘informationally’ within the tree in the course of its growth. The exformational and informational processes work in reciprocal partnership in the sculpting of the tree’s dynamic, shape-shifting form, the one destructively opening up, the other constructively closing down spatial possibility. This idea is represented in the following painting:

But one tree, as you might say, doesn’t make a forest. What happens when you put all these opening endings together? I tried to express this in the following painting, which I gave to the British Mycological Society in 1998, as part of my Presidential Address:

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My Hope: To help develop a more empathic, more fulfilling way of thinking/feeling about relationships amongst ourselves, other organisms and our living space, which acknowledges the fact that the boundaries we inhabit are not absolute and fixed but rather inform dynamic, interactive domains that allow a rich variety of patterns to emerge and transform our lives

A D M Rayner