Buber 7

 

If my photograph of Eucalyptus is abstract, then who am I to Eucalyptus? Two-dimensional woman with blue-framed glasses and a flat dog, caught in the act of trying to take a photograph? The sublime melancholy of our lot [is] that every You must become an It in our world. But the tree takes my melancholy and absorbs it into its bark, its colors, its substance, which are not abstract. Because I cannot see far up the tree, my photos are of a narrow band near earth. Does the tree’s curvature make it less abstract? The photograph seems to make it more present to me, as I carry it home, stare at it on my screens. Presence isn’t reality, but the object in relation to the space it’s in. But this is to get too abstract: what I love are the reds and greens, the gaps, the way the tree seems to open mouths (at all angles) into which I can look. Some sap drips look like tongues. `Ahuimanu Bronx cheers. I gave up metaphor for prose, but now it’s back. The It is the chrysalis, the You the butterfly.

I: What do these colors allow you to do that plain bark would not?

Eucalyptus:

I: Do you get lonely standing up all the time?

Eucalyptus:

I: Do you resent the reputation you have of not casting any shade?

Eucalyptus:

I: With what other beings do your roots communicate?

Eucalyptus:

I: Do you find me and my dog half as fascinating as I do you?

Eucalyptus:

I: I don’t resent your silences. They cushion me against paving equipment, the guy who doesn’t want me taking a picture of his truck, a dog behind the nearby fence.

Eucalyptus:

I: Yours is not a silence that fills in, but one that lives beside the noise.

Eucalyptus:

I: Your sticky black sap clings to my dog’s red leash. I'll up the contrast later.