Poisoning poets and shredding books of verse ~ Malinda Words

Pic courtesy www.sierraclub.com

During a rare but typical gathering of siblings, the eldest, in the thick of a relationship conundrum, declared, ‘I just want these people out of my hair so I can sit under a tree and meditate.’

His brother said wryly, ‘you need to get out of your hair.’ And the sister added (or was it the brother?) a few moments later, ‘a tree is a metaphor, it could be right here in this garage (which he had converted into a room).’

I got to thinking about trees after coming across a quote by Kahlil Gibran, ‘Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky; we fell them down and turn them into paper [so] that we may record our emptiness.’

Trees are not felled just to turn them into paper, of course. It’s an e-world we live in or rather an e-world we are moving towards. Paper-free one day and until then recycled paper to the extent possible. Doesn't mean that trees aren’t being felled. Doesn’t mean that trees aren’t being planted. Doesn’t mean that the planting equals or exceeds felling. Doesn't mean that this e-business, taken in totality, is paper-free either.

It is estimated that the net annual forest loss on forest cover globally since 2010 is approximately 4.7 million hectares. That is a territory close to the size of Sri Lanka. That is a lot of emptiness we, as a species, are creating.

Interestingly, it has been argued that net forest loss is typical in low-income countries whereas there’s actually a net gain in richer nations. It is not a coincidence, also, that industries that make for forest-loss and general pollution have been deliberately relocated in the poorer nations, not to save trees but because labour is cheaper and draconian labour laws more easily enacted and enforced. And we know where the profits go.

All in the name of development, friends. All in the name of progress. All in the name of pursuing modernity. Some crumbs tossed out marked ‘we are concerned,’ but by and large, things that give us shade, nutrition, medicine, oxygen etc., are being destroyed.

And under trees called progress, at your fingertips, creature comforts, point and click, palmtop ease, better-than-before and so on, we are free to meditate on emptiness, solitude, meaninglessness and tomorrows we are reluctant to worry about. We don’t need paper for any of this.

There are trees being felled as I write. There are manuscripts of poetry that are being burnt. There are voices being silenced. There are self righteous calls to arms. There’s unabashed drives to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction. There’s mass destruction happening without weapons, fiercely defended on the basis of economic theories that have ‘ANTI-INTELLECTUAL’ stamped all over them in BIG, BOLD, LETTERS, so big, so bold and so over-decorated with glitter that we are too blinded to read them.

Somewhere, though, someone is meditating. Someone is deciding, ‘I will be conscious of my carbon footprint.’ Someone is teaching someone that rivers have sources and trees have roots, that we have all drunk from other’s wells and sat under the shade of trees planted by people whose name we don’t know. Somewhere, someone is treading softly on the grass. Someone, somewhere, is planting verse-seeds in the most unforgiving terrain and watering these future-notes with love. Someone, somewhere gives and shares without thinking of return. Someone, somewhere is noting calloused hands and telling others, ‘this is wrong; this can be stopped.’

Someone’s in our hair. All the time. We are in someone else’s hair. All the time. We all need to sit under a tree and meditate. Now and then.

At some point, maybe, some of us will realise that we need to get out of our own hair first. We need to consider the possibility that there is poetry that the earth writes upon the sky and although the sky writes enough poetry with wind, cloud and sun as ink, there are poetic greens that the sky alone can never compose. The earth has to do it. If we allow the earth to write. Right now, as a species, we are destroying the ink and the paper. We are poisoning the poet and shredding the manuscripts of poetry that provide life breath and keep our hearts beating.

We are getting to the point that we will not be able to get out of our hair, never mind sitting under a tree and meditating, on emptiness or anything else for that matter.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

25 July 2023

Poisoning poets and shredding books of verse

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