"Yes, you told me before," I said to the woman at the desk who only wants to live three more years. She's scared she'll live longer, because she's so healthy. Never had the flu, hadn't been sick in over 20 years. (But she needs new knees and had serious kidney stone surgery a few years back, remembers exactly how much it cost.) "It's so hard living in this body," she said, nodding at her walker. Her last roommate left such a mess that her friend's husband came over and cleaned the room out in two hours. It would have taken her days.
She did have two covid shots because she works here. "You know people spit on you when they talk," someone told her. Her face wrinkled. She believes in Jesus, in heaven and hell. Worries about her son, who does not. She prays for him. She left a small church (of 300) because they didn't do any social distancing. One woman died of covid. Now she's at Calvary, where the pastor preaches about the end times. 150,000 tune in on zoom to hear him.
The other year she stopped doing her Christmas tree; she'd collected ornaments for decades. She spread them out on the table, Macy's style, and gave them to her children and grandchildren so they could start their own Christmas rituals. One son is in his mid-50s.
Lilith and I moved out of the way of a woman with a large white flower display attached to a frame. There were lots of funerals today. Lilith and I wandered up hill. On our way down, we saw the man in black, showed him the photograph I'd taken of him, told him S was happy to hear about him, got a quick hug and hurried home in the hot sun. Lilith's on the couch now, nose on her blanket.
“Me and Eucalyptus” by Susan M. Schultz: the metaphysical relationship between man and nature in nature writing
There are books about trees that teach to
recognize species, others that tell the forests as places of salvation,
still others that transform the landscape into autobiography. Me and Eucalyptus by Susan M. Schultz belongs to a rarer category: that of books seeking a relationship.
In the great tradition of nature writing
— from Henry David Thoreau to Roger Deakin, to the most recent books
dedicated to trees as living, symbolic, almost interlocutory creatures —
Schultz chooses a very personal path. He doesn't cross woods, he
doesn't build a botanical atlas, he doesn't tell nature as a refuge. He
remains next to a single tree. A eucalyptus observed day after day,
photographed, interrogated, heard.
From this fidelity comes a surprising,
hybrid and luminous book, which continuously oscillates between poetry,
meditation, diary and philosophical reflection.
The author looks at the tree as you look
at a living being capable of presence. Not an object of the landscape,
but something that exists next to her, in the mystery of an impossible
yet real reciprocity:
“Eucalyptus and I cannot communicate, even if we are in communion.”
Perhaps this is the phrase that best
guards the heart of the book. Schultz knows that the tree will never
speak the human language, and yet he continues to turn to him. He
observes the bark, the resin, the colors, the wounds. He photographs it
obsessively, as if each image could bring it closer to something
essential.
And the images, in these pages, count as
much as the words. Photography is not just documentation: it is a way of
being in the world, of measuring the distance between what we see and
what really exists.
“Focus is presence.”
But the presence never coincides with
possession. Schultz understands it continuously: every attempt to
capture the tree risks turning it into an image, into an “object”, into
something separate. For this reason, the book dialogues underground with
the thought of Martin Buber and his distinction between “I-You” and
“I-It”. The eucalyptus always remains on the border: a real creature and
at the same time irreducible, near and far.
The writing proceeds by lightning,
fragments, intuitions. Schultz naturally passes from personal memory to
philosophy, from the contemplation of the tree to the violence of the
contemporary present. In the book enter the war, the media images, the
technology, the chatbots, the digital photography, the incessant noise
of the modern world. Yet the eucalyptus remains there, motionless,
almost to guard another temporality.
Some passages reach an extraordinary poetic intensity:
“Your silences don’t bother me. They protect me.”
or:
“The tree is broken (however it stands.”
In these sentences you can feel something
that goes beyond ecological discourse. The tree becomes a figure of
human vulnerability, of resistance, of memory that continues to live
despite the wounds.
Yet Eucalyptus and I never
indulge in easy sentimentality. Schultz does not idealize nature and
does not transform it into consolation. He knows that every look is
partial, that even photography can lie:
“To see is already to interpret, and to interpret is inevitably to lie.”
It is precisely this awareness that makes
the book so contemporary. The author does not seek absolute truths: she
seeks a form of attention. A chance to stay by the way without
dominating them.
As in Roger Deakin's most beautiful books,
here too the landscape becomes an inner experience; but Schultz is more
fragmentary, more philosophical, more restless. Where Deakin recounted
the cultural relationship between man and nature, Schultz stages an
almost metaphysical relationship, made of silences, images and
unanswered questions.
At the end of the book there remains the
feeling of having inhabited a space of rare contemplation in
contemporary literature. A place where a single tree still manages to
oppose the speed of the world, forcing us to look better.
And maybe that's what Susan M gives us. Schultz: not a lesson about nature, but an exercise in presence.
The frame shop on Sand Island is located in the grittiest (and that is kind) part of Honolulu. It puts the warehouse in warehouse district; the streets are flat and hot; battered mattresses and rusted metal, old buses and motorcycles seem flung down like dice. Go down an alley, ring a bell and you're ushered into a windowless space that's quiet except for the yapping of a small dog. It's like stepping into a bunker. One of two or three women give you a mask before you enter. There's a large table to the left where they measure photographs and paintings for frames. The last time I was there, the large table was nearly completely covered by a canvas that exploded into the dull room, awash in bright colors. "What's that?" I asked, startled. "That's a David Hockney; someone just bought the painting at an auction." RIP
The man in black--black baseball cap, black Raiders sweatshirt, black pants, black running shoes--usually runs down the other side of Kahekili from us, stopping occasionally to use the guard rail as his gym equipment. Other days he runs on our side up past the cemetery entrance, boxing with the flexible bollards. Thwack thwack go the bollards.
Daniel, for that is his name, is one of the very few people who remember mine, but not Lilith's. It's because his father had a girlfriend named Susan. I said she must have been born in the 1950s or 60s, before the name died out, and he nodded. We talked a bit about the cemetery, the cut trees, the cut employees, the cut community.
I asked him what he does when he's not out exercising. "I'm my dad's caretaker," he says. His father is 80 and has Alzheimer's. Daniel is his sole caregiver. It's hard when they don't recognize you. But he's a healthy man!
I tell him about my dementia books. He says how good it is to talk to other people who've had similar experiences. I take some pictures of him, his lined face, his big smile. He heads off to the district park, past the blue couch that was dumped there the other day. Lilith and I walk toward the cemetery, heading for the ritual grooming by O and H. Lilith is training the new guy to pet her, too.
"The bishop--he was one of a kind--," O said, when I asked after the Buddhist clergyman who used to work at the Temple. "He watched me and my sister grow up" (he held his hand out to the height of a child); "took my sister to McDonald's all the time. My mother worked in the gift shop; the whole family worked here." He remembers bon dances at the Temple.
In 2014, I read, the current management wanted to tear down the main building near Kahekili. Designed by a resort architect, George Pete Wimberley, whose work was "'exuberant and odd,'” says Mike Gushard, president of the Hawai‘i chapter of DoCoMoMo (Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement)." (I quote from _Honolulu Magazine_ from November, 2014, on-line.) It was slated to be replaced by a 30,000 square foot funeral home.
"When did the new owner buy the place?" I asked O. He didn't remember, though he did know that the previous owner also had a "Star" in the name. He thought it started with Red, but I find an abandoned web site for Right Star funeral home, with the VOT Kahekili address. The domain is possibly for sale. Their Hawai`i address (they still operate here in Nu`uanu, I find) contrasts with the current owner, whose corporate headquarters is located in Houston, Texas. Go to the corporate website and you find that "Empathy meets Opportunity." "A culture built around people." The photograph underneath these words is a view of Valley of the Temples "heart" feature at the top, close to the mountains, the place with good Feng Shui.
The leadership team on the website of the Houston business features 12 white faces, only one of which belongs to a woman. Closer to home, I find this notice of available jobs: "Current openings around Oahu include positions in Kaneohe, Waipahu, and Honolulu, with hourly rates ranging from $16 for reception/gift shop roles to over $28 for licensed embalmers." The CEO's salary is not listed publicly, but the corporation, I find, pulls in between $100 and $500 million a year. You try living on $16 an hour here.
On Indeed, I find the following 1 star review of the corporation. "What is the most stressful part about working at the company? Toxic work environment due to poor management What is the work environment and culture like at the company? Toxic because of egotistical managers. Management is to money focused What is a typical day like for you at the company? You help families and fight for your right with management"
Lilith and I walked in gentle--then less gentle--rain this morning. The mountains were out of scroll paintings; the place was quiet. It really did feel like a sanctuary (before opening time). We met a couple from Arkansas in the parking area. She was carefully examining plants. "Oh yes, she's VERY interested in them," opined her husband. They have a family cemetery in Camden, Arkansas, which they maintain themselves. I point out the ex-trees nearby. Ever the bearer of bad news am I. Last I saw them, they were climbing the stairs to the Cambodian/Chinese altar. Someone still puts incense and oranges there. Tinny music emerges from a small speaker.
Lilith and I took a shorter walk than is usual this morning; my knees and hips hurt last night. Lilith has been a bit stiff-legged of late, too. Yesterday at the cemetery I was hailed by a Cardinals fan and later by a couple who wanted to know if Lilith is a Swedish Vallhund. Humane society, more like, though the Vallhund does bear a resemblance to her, when I look later. Two people in recent days have reached out to Lilith because they miss their dogs at home (Orlando, Arizona). As a walker, I'm also a tourist, despite my "eh, Ola, get one pony tail?" at the top of the hill. Better put, I'm the liminal space between visitors and workers and other walkers, to whom I tell my stories. And, of course, the dead.
The Byodo-in Temple at the back of the cemetery used to provide a strong link to the local Japanese Buddhist community. An on-line guidebook, dated 2021 but undoubtedly written years earlier, reads: "Other ongoing events and activities offered at Byodo-In include cast paper sculpting each Tuesday, the art of making ribbon lei on Thursday, sumi-e or ink painting each Friday, and ikebana or Japanese flower arranging and tea ceremony on the second Saturday of the month. Visitors may also enjoy Jorei, a cleansing body and mind therapy, offered by practitioners who visit the temple regularly." The guide book tells us about "the wizened reverend of Byodo-in," Rev. Fukuhara, and the "events coordinator, Nancy Kreis." She was in charge of community engagement, I find, and also a "sales consultant," based on her referring some of her friends to the business (of "death care," as their website calls it).
Rev. Fukuhara died in 2019. Nancy Kreis is no longer associated with Valley of the Temples cemetery. They appear to have been the last links in a chain between the local community and the temple. Some days, most recently Memorial Day, the cemetery is full of local people, bringing flowers and plate lunches to their ancestors' graves. I talk to them when they--and their restless small children--notice Lilith. We chat over their small hands on Lilith's head. That this demographic is changing is clear from a new job ad at the cemetery for "bilingual" sales people. I doubt if that means they're looking for Ilocano speakers. Instead, I suspect that the monstrous Christian nationalist tomb at the top of the hill, developed by a Chinese man who wants his tomb bigger than that of the good general farther down the hill, presages what's to come. Ferdinand Marcos's ex-tomb seems modest, by comparison.
This place of "deep calm and peace" (see the website) now exists only in corporate language. It's now the land of huge tour buses, bright rental cars, and omnipresent orange cones. The woman who used to sell tickets to the temple quit, replaced by employees from the gift shop. The security guys are all gone, replaced by cameras on tall sticks, each with its own solar panel. The golden phoenixes on either side of the temple roof are better described, as one worker put it to me, as "fighting chickens." Money and death, as you like it. The Temple stands, empty of ritual, but full of visitors.
There's always a reason, often delivered by the workers. Increasingly, they speak softly, indirectly.
"The trees were cut because of the storms." All storms? The most recent storm? The storm of money to be made from newly cleared sight lines? Because the trees were less beautiful than the view of a new golden sign (with arrow pointing where to go to see more sites) on the new water feature?
"They have to bring in a lot of tourists to pay for upkeep of the temple." Wouldn't there be less required upkeep if they didn't have 300,000 people a year tromping through?
