Trees Dreaming of Songs: Writing Through Discord
I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord… — Rainer Maria Rilke
The sky and sea are always at odds. Fog rises and quietly declares balance between them, even if the Moon knows otherwise, since tides rise and fall through her will. Trees are crowning exclamations of the endless chatter below, while mushrooms flower in the dark, like riddles of the night. Daydreams exhaust owls out of sleep… Beneath an oak, a dog dreams of chasing squirrels, kicking sylvan inspiration into the writer dozing beside her, all while very real squirrels watch from a low-hanging branch, proving that dreaming and wakefulness are pages from the same book. Spiders weave trees together… Harmony is never the absence of discord, not when these opposing poles need each other to take shape, no different than the Earth rounding itself into tomorrow. Waves crash into sea foam, turning water inside out, only to give shelter to pockets of air, bubbling into being. A voice is silenced, before breaking through with Song…
Fiery pianos wash up on a foggy coast Squeaky old organs have given up the ghost… — PJ Harvey
Tradition rots from its core… Trees in a forest seem to have preternatural patience, but everything is always on the move, even when they’re dead. If you holler down a rotten trunk, termites take no notice, even if the hollow makes your voice resonate through the decay. A spruce rises for centuries, taking its needled place in the sun, before a fateful Winter’s wind sends it crashing down. Nature’s sigh brings a giant down… But it’s the struggling maple that takes its place, the child of a winged-seed, feeding from the cone-heavy dead. Every tree sprouts a rebel… Through a child’s eyes, the woods are eternal, complete, as if the overwhelming presence of this sylvan realm were static. Time passes… The woods begin to move, like a branch morphing into a cello, through a song dreamed by a tree… Turn away from anything and Time does its work, not unlike dreams watch our waking hours, anticipating the transfer of power, from This…to something else. Hollow traditions dissolve in the dreamer…
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream… — Jorge Luis Borges
Everything is always at stake… Choice is our everyday tragedy, since choosing anything forsakes all the others. We dream through the night, only to wake away the day, in a never ending compromise of entangled worlds. The Dreamer is called delusional, until success through another’s eyes turns those dreams to cold ambition, destroying what was becoming. Tradition tells us there’s no room for winged-thoughts, since the top is already taken. But dreams take root in thin-air, find nutrients through fire and famine, crawl through fences and uproot foundations. Dreams never seek a way up, only a way through, just as a tree alters its growth in pursuit of sunlight. Songs move as the ocean does, while the painter dapples her palette, just as bees bob from flower to flower, buzzing pollen-heavy notes through the morning. A writer writes, seeking silence in the noise, in a never ending to and fro amongst the shadows and half-light. Dreams remain the silence between notes…
Hayden Moore
