by Fraser Hibbitt for the Carl Kruse Blog
There is no life in them. I have a pile of these dead leaves in my garden, accumulated over the winter, dashed off from the trees that surround and overhang; silver birch, purple birch London plane, stand beyond the boundary, motionless, and all their leaves commingled in my garden, brown and sere, all so similar that only a close inspection of their form could tell the difference. All so ugly in this little plot at the back of my house with its concrete slabs. The trees themselves have that lovely austere winter beauty; gaunt tendrils of branch the light minds itself through. But there are always a few leaves left behind who somehow manage to hold on through the winter. Even the tree disagrees with this for clearly no energy is expended in maintaining that wispy thing that dies on the branch but disdains nature’s clear sign to fall and be consumed by the earth.
They’ve had their fill but cannot let go. Look how fragile they seem, but still the winter storms do not deter them; they hang on as a sick reminder, of a death that lingers and refuses to let go. ‘Follow Nature!’ enjoins both the Stoic and the Skeptic, but neither had these singular leaves in mind. Nature too has its imperfect processes, its wanton lot of outcasts that dither on the wrong side of the living. Who is this, hanging apart, calling the seasons into question? Again: a lifeless thing we can only call a leaf by its resemblance to one. As the falling leaves, so quintessential to Autumn, so too the bare trees are to Winter; both in the idea of the two, but I gaze out my window and this little leaf sings out a riddle to me.
Follow Nature? And if nature hasn’t a clue, either? No, most of the leaves are right where they should be, either succumbed to an indistinguishable mulch or hugged in piles waiting for the sweep. This we all comfortably know and gives a poetry of eventual death, a psychology of becoming by relinquishing our grip on fate; what will come to pass must, awkwardly lodged between two infinities as we are. We grasp with these ideations and they are just about aligned with what is the limitation of our thought. But again, when I think of the dead leaf on the branch…the pleasure of an unbounded fantasy unfurls.
The greatest explanation of entropy I have come across is a total loss of communication. I think it was the physicist Paul Davies who used the illustration of dye in water. If you spelt a message, a symbol of meaning, in the water with a dye, all the colour would eventually spread out across the water thereby creating no meaning, no message; let’s say it is a red dye: the whole tank of water is now permeated with this red and there is no message (asides from the red water). The communicative value is zero. When it is said that entropy always increases with time it means with time discernible meaning resolutely drops. Why am I thinking of entropy when I look at this dead leaf on the branch? Is it that despite the ‘message’ of this leaf, alive and well, has disappeared, that still imagination is not rendered impotent by entropy?
This old blot on the life of the tree which is guarding itself for spring stands to me as an indecipherable blot in my mind. It almost begs me to play these conceptual tricks in order to get closer to it. And I stand corrected in a once-held forced idealism of Nature. Looking closer at Nature reveals also that I am Nature and to talk as if there is a fundamental difference, despite what millennia of schism-philosophy has ingrained in us, seems absurd; or, rather, this is what makes us feel so absurd when in the middle of a walk, in the middle of any given day, one is delivered unto defamiliarization, of a separation so haunting that you feel there is not a branch to hold onto. Then comes the inevitable long road to recovery, of just feeling a self is enough, however it is justified.
But Nature hasn’t a clue? That is a very delightful thought. The dead leaf hanging on the branch refusing, refuting, everything we expect. What an admirable individual. Its courage, rather its mere fact for I doubt it chose itself worthy, only blind chance left it hanging there, produces a strange array of thought; not about “hanging in there” but of there not being such a strict regulation in life. Look at Nature, look at yourself, again. How much more interesting is this irregularity of winter; how nature and ourselves produce such things for our fancy. How the dead live on and bend our inward branches, however slightly.
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The Carl Kruse Blog homepage is at https://www.carlkruse.com
Contact: carl AT carlkruse DOT com
Other articles by Fraser include Doing Things of Utter Irrelevance, the Poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, and Retro Advertising.
Also find Carl Kruse over on his arts blog at Carl Kruse Arts.