"Ive had a love of trees all my life. Throughout high school, I lived in a house
in the woods in Massachusetts, and even on the darker mornings of winter what
kept me from being frightened was the trees themselves mostly scrub pines, as we
called them there, with struggling oaks scattered among them. Unlike the kids at
school, the trees remained silent as I passed, and I took this as a sign of
acceptance. Irrational, sure but in my feeling so unlike everyone else at
school, in my confused wrestling with what I felt was real but I couldn't name
precisely, why not take silence for acceptance? Among the trees loneliness could
be itself, in the open so could strangeness even as both remained hidden from
the rest of the world for the time it took me to pass through the woods to the
bus stop. As I walked, I'd sing to the trees, loudly at first, then more and
more softly the closer I got to where the woods gave out, until all I could hear
was whatever wind there was through the leaves and needles.
A sound like the trees unable to sing back, but trying to."In this extended
meditation on the relationship between place and intimacy, the body and the
word, Carl Phillips walks among trees to explore what can and cannot be known.
