Tree Erections

Just an excerpt from something I've been working on ...

-darcy

K---, my friend, had just flown in to Toronto for the weekend to go to the British embassy and receive his British citizenship. We met up at a bar near my house. He slapped me on the back and I thought of the time when I had stepped off a train in Delhi and, as I was trying to fend off an aggressive vendor, he had jumped up behind me and grabbed onto my back. He swung around me and I almost fell over. The vendor, typically aggressive, seeing now that I was no longer alone, had thankfully given up and was gone. I had seen K--- since then, but this is the incident that always comes to mind when we are reunited after a long absence, as though it had become my person symbol for reunion itself. At the time, I had flown from Japan to India to visit K---, and his partner, Z---, who were spending half a year traveling across the country, staying in Buddhist monasteries, working on farms, and writing lots of poetry. K--- was always the free spirit, more courageous than I. I was making a decent teacher’s salary in Japan off the government’s dollar, working ten hours a day, whereas he was scraping by on his own in Halifax by publishing his poetry, catering, waiting tables, and, when weather permitted, teaching sailing with his partner at a sea school. Circumstances such as his allowed for a type of contemplation that I, a constant slave to small children, marking, and paper work, had no privilege to entertain. India had enabled for K--- such insights as

Ultimately, we all

have to wander a cold city

looking for a place

to piss.

Whereas I would piss everyday but think nothing of it. Piss was to me no different than that tree stump in front of the school, which, each early morning I would ride my bike by but, apparently, never really see. More than a year after I started teaching, I asked a student, half-interested, about the photograph of a tree that was hanging in the school hallway beside all the cubby holes. Apparently it had been cut down several years earlier, but the stump was still there.

--- “You know the stump in front of the school?” No, I didn’t, I don’t think so. Wait, maybe? I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it ...

For Marcel, trees, extending far beyond the reach of his short, and, much like Proust’s, sickly life, reminded him of his mortality; and in doing so they reminded him of the urgency of his task. They urged him to get to work: “When I reflected that their trees -- pear-trees, apple-trees, tamarisks -- would outlive me, I seemed to be receiving from them a silent counsel to set myself to work at last, before the hour of eternal rest had yet struck” (IV 560).

Was I, too, procrastinating, yet oblivious to my procrastination? Certainly, it seemed like I was doing a lot of work. But the days, they would blend together. There really is no difference between tedious work and absolute idleness. In both, time becomes empty. “Homogenous”, even, to quote Benjamin. As an aside, I remember in grade school that a sex education teacher who was teaching us about erections once told the class that ‘erections could happen any time, any place. You could even get an erection just by staring at a tree.’ The whole class was chuckling, the story became legend. Tree erections. Yet this is so Proustian, is it not? The tree that for no apparent reason arouses intense pleasure. I could imagine Proust for hours trying to decipher the reason why a tree gave him an erection, just as he tried to understand the pleasure aroused from his cup of tea. He would walk up to the tree again and again, or turn away and, trying to trick himself into repeating the experience again for the first time, whip back around, but the feeling he had before would not come back.