Under The Elm Tree

You’re not a lost soul, you were born into a soulless world and you’re searching for a soul, that’s a whole different thing

Credit: Jonathan Foster

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1.

I found myself in a foreign city, penniless and alone with no idea what to do next, which wasn’t surprising because my life had always played out as a story with one chapter abruptly collapsing before the next slowly began.

I was always braced for some trap door to open through which I might, without warning, plummet, or for some sudden uncontrollable event to inevitably explode everything around me. I assumed it was my childhood that caused me to unconsciously seek out insecurity in adulthood, better the devil you know.

I always felt as if fate was the real protagonist in my life. I was always more slumberer than lucid dreamer. Whatever the case I lived in the mental equivalent of Pompeii on a sunny afternoon just before the eruption. And here I was again lost in Barcelona, the previous chapter buried under a pyroclastic flow as I slept-walked toward the next.

This familiarity with oncoming chaos gave me a certain poise. Not of a prey animal, not nervous or skittish like a deer, more calm and watchful like a lynx. I had the aura of an unexploded bomb in a serene forest glade, I was tranquility at boiling point.

I spent my afternoons sipping strong tea from a flask in the Plaza de Vicenç Martorell, doing nothing in particular except languishing in the liminal space between life’s chapters ignoring my predicament and waiting for fate to find me.

The Mediterranean sea breeze didn’t penetrate the narrow streets of La Raval, but even though the midday sun was bearable under the shade of an elm tree, it was still hot enough to melt the veneer of time and reveal the peace of eternity. Life seemed to pause just enough for the ancestors to awake and whisper it’s ok, just relax, breathe, pay attention. Besides, never having been one to mistake hustle for living I happily bowed to the ancestors on those scorching afternoons and let my tension defuse as the heat embraced me.

It was on the seventh day when fate finally arrived to deliver you to me, or me to you, I’m not sure which, and everything changed.

To be clear, I had never believed in divinity. I still don’t. There are no gods. Life is an ever weaving pattern of chaos that we try, and fail, to untangle and explain through our endless stories. Gods and spirits and the supernatural are merely the why’s and wherefores that rise in our minds to wrestle our extraordinary confusion and resolve our absurd predicament. This I know.

So it was utterly confounding to see you standing on the other side of the plaza, standing there in broad daylight, your great black raven wings shimmering like petroleum, watching me with your head tilted bird-like to one side, then the to other, in curious contemplation.

I was even more startled and shaken when with one mighty beat of your wings you rose as lightly as a dandelion pappus on a breeze and then glided across the square to gently touch down beside me and take a closer look, as if you thought you recognised me, and I stayed as still as I could, hoping like a fool that you could not see me, and there we were both seemingly taking a quiet moment to rest from the relentless nature of time and fate.

And I thought, “What the fuck, I’m hallucinating”, and as this thought struck it was you who gaily laughed, ha ha ha ha ha, and you said with your raspy crackling voice, “This is no dream my friend.”

2.

When I think of it now, that astonishing meeting, I realise I was someone else back then, a stranger in some essential way, a stranger that changed because of a pivotal moment and now lived an entirely different life.

You sat down on the bench and folded away your great iridescent black feathered wings and smiled and I remember I was utterly terrified and confused as those few people at cafes and benches or pushing prams went about their business as if you were nothing at all.

A kind of mortal fear winded me and gasping for air I said “What are you?” and you smiled and said, “Don’t you recognise me? Maybe I’m an angel”, then you laughed and said, “Don’t worry, I’m no angel,” and I could feel my heart thrashing like an eel in a bucket as you said, “but if I were an angel you’d know”, and again I said, “What are you?”, and you leaned toward me and pinned me with your piercing brown eyes and said, “Stop asking that, enjoy a little mystery in this slumberous life of yours”, and again like a fading echo I said, “What are you?” and you held me in your mesmeric gaze and smiled and leaned back and said, “You know, people give up on their dreams, don’t they, when they get old, when they get tired, when they get bitter, they turn their back on their dreams, I understand, I’m used to that, I’ve seen it a million times, but this,” and you gestured with your wing at the little plaza where people sat at tables and drank cold beers and ate lunches under the arches sheltering from the midday sun, “this is something else”. I looked around and you started laughing and said, “Not just this, I mean everything, all of it,” and what struck me, besides the insanity of you being some kind of a supernatural-bird-human, sitting beside me in broad daylight, was how weary you seemed, how worn out and drained, almost fleeting, and the thought struck me you might be dying, and you said “Not dying exactly, more like I’ve been very slowly put to death,” then you sat up straight and looked at me and said, “but I won’t be destroyed so easily, I won’t let you get away with it.”

3.

It’s strange how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary, how simply the universe will expand to include the previously impossible, how effortlessly a seemingly supernatural creature with beautiful black iridescent wings can become just another aspect of life. Even there on the bench under the elm tree where you radiated strangeness like some kind of demon my mind was trying to adjust to your existence.

With a blank face and your eyebrows raised you looked at me as I trembled with fear, and you sighed, and stood up, and then you leant down and pulled me into your arms and I could smell the odour of wood and lemon and salt and for a moment I felt a kind of solace and reassurance and felt myself shifting toward feeling ease.

And then I realised you had taken flight with me enfolded in your arms and we were both heading straight upwards toward the infinite blue like you were a great bird grasping a mouse in its talons.

At first I was frozen in panic as the city shrank into a toy town far below, but very quickly I felt, as strange as it might sound, an assurance that calmed my fear when you whispered “You’re safe in my arms my dear friend,” I felt that ancient surrender, that child-like experience of pleasurable yielding to the governance of another, that healing abdication of the self in a soothing mini-expiration that seemed to offer an immunity from everything. It was a feeling of trust and I hadn’t felt it in years.

You flew up to the mountains that surrounded the city, high above the huge granite outcrops until a mighty tree of the kind I had never seen before appeared far below and you spiralled down like a raven tumbling toward earth and landed on a magnificent platform of bark and wood and moss. I was trembling and fell to my hands and knees and you ruffled your great iridescent black feathered wings and put one finger to your lips and pointed far below with the other.

Along the forest floor there was a man and a dog, wandering along the dusty paths woven through the monumental Junipers and archaic Stone Pines and the noble Black Pines, the two of them seemingly laughing at some private joke, and you came and sat beside me, your legs dangling from the platform and said, “Pay him no mind, he’s just The Dreamer, you’re in his head, ignore him he’s a fool,” which made no sense at all and I heard myself saying, “Are you then not also in his head?” and you smiled and said, “No, not me, I’m an archetype, I’m in the everyone’s head, dreamt up from the beginning of time,” and then you sighed and slumped a little and said, “I’m being unremembered though, abandoned by this so-called rational modernity, consigned to oblivion and slowly forgotten, people have turned their backs and given themselves over to the Great Collapse,” and I had no idea what you were talking about. Not then. Not when I myself had collapsed onto my own hands and knees upon that mighty platform in a huge tree on the forested slopes of the towering mountains that surrounded the city. “It’s all a story, it’s all just a story,” you whispered and again I had no idea what you meant. But I do know now. Now I know.

4.

When you appeared in that quiet little square in Barcelona I was a living ghost floating about looking in at my life from the outside. I knew life was fleeting but I behaved as if I would live forever. And then you appeared out of nowhere with your great black and beautiful wings and came to me. I don’t know why, perhaps you saw my vulnerability? Perhaps you saw I was weaved into the fragility and delicacy of existence? Perhaps you saw I was both utterly helpless and yet all powerful? Perhaps it was just another fold in the pattern of chaos? It doesn’t really matter why, I suppose, but you appeared out of nowhere and changed everything.

The Dreamer and his dog had vanished into the forest and I sat trembling and exhausted beside you on the platform looking out at the expansive vista, and there on the horizon I saw a great black murmuration morphing and rolling toward us, a commonwealth of flowing swirling energy darkening the sky. And you smiled and said nothing and as this rolling wave got closer I saw there were hundreds of creatures all flapping their great black iridescent wings and each one carried a terrified person toward the tree which seemed to grow to accommodate them all. I was transfixed and utterly disorientated as the winged ones funnelled downwards like a hurricane and gracefully landed in the branches all around filling the tree with other people that looked as bewildered and astonished and terrified as I.

In the ever collapsing chapters of my life it was always other people that most exhausted me. I had made peace with the idea of people, but the actual living individuals I met were so often appalling in such varied ways. Their thoughtless petty fears and their contemptible behaviours and their selfishness and the way their basic humanity had so easily been torn to pieces by the prosaic and indulgent narratives of our time, and how they had given themselves over to the shallowest whims of the human psyche. I had long felt abandoned by humanity and I’d somehow allowed myself to believe that in some essential way I was no longer one of them. I knew people would eventually destroy the world. So I spent my time passively awaiting this inevitable fate.

But these terrified people being delivered into this great tree high up on the mountain by winged creatures stirred a long repressed kindred spirit deep in my soul. I felt an awakening of sorts, a compassion for those incarcerated by the dehumanising social machine, no longer swaying in the rhythms of life but functioning only to do the machine’s bidding, and I felt a strange wave of clemency surging through me as we all hung together so precariously in the branches of this strange tree.

And I realised I had always felt a deep loneliness echoing through my soul from the loss of meaning that had once thrived in the spaces beyond explanation.

And I saw you smiling at me.

“What did you expect?”, you said, “You feel the loneliness because you’ve turned your backs on the sacred and imagine yourselves to be gods, but there are no gods, you’ve turned yourselves into a story, a story told with the mouth and not the heart, and stories that bypass the heart build a world of loneliness”, and then you continued, “You tell only a story of being gods in a world of machines and you can’t even imagine another,” and you turned to me with your piercing brown eyes and I saw tears forming and you said, “You tell of your own collapse. Why can’t you understand that the great secret of the world is it is something that you make, and you could just as easily make it differently?”

And I looked around at the people landing in the tree and I saw they were all depressed poets and anxious writers and lonely dreamers and unrequited lovers and pained artists and those cast aside by the machine and those who dared imagine another story, all of the faces looking expectantly toward me as if I had an answer. Me, a lost soul in a world of hungry ghosts. What the hell did I know? What the hell did any of us know?

“You’re not a lost soul,” you said, “You were born into a soulless world and you’re searching for a soul, that’s a whole different thing.”

And the faces came ever closer, listening, peering, searching.

5.

It is in the smallest things that true power lies. The universe is held together by nothings. Our entire lives are a stream of negligible, fleeting moments filled with passing smiles and unrequited kindnesses, kept promises and quiet loyalties, the lightest kisses and gentlest touches. Love and Destiny are a tapestry of tightly woven bare-faced honesties, a stream of inconsequential nothings that weave themselves into everything. It’s beautiful really. So beautiful.

When I first saw your iridescent black wings shimmering like petroleum in the sunlight in the Plaza de Vicenç Martorell you held my attention with your deep brown eyes and you said you were slowly being put to death, and I knew that was true because I felt the same way. But I was scared, even I, even a seasoned seeker of insecurity, a resident of a mental Pompeii was afraid to look inside myself and confront the world. But you embraced me and carried me away in your arms and because you knew taking action would lift me out of my fear. Doesn’t it always? Doesn’t doing always supersede dreaming?

And then you flew me out of the city up to the mountains and into the tree with all those others and I realised that in the porous boundaries of the ever weaving pattern of chaos in which we live I did not know where you all ended and I began.

And as you finally died, there in the tree, exhausted and forgotten, ignored and ostracised, we all perished together as one and our souls rose up from the tree like a great dark flickering flame that blotted out the sun and there was nothing in the darkness but new souls laughing into the infinite, each of us nose to nose with the darkness within us, each of us daring to face the fear and holding the universe together with our laughter and our Love, until the sun reappeared and each of us was there with newly formed beautiful black raven wings shimmering in the light that came from I know not where.

And I flew back to the city and high above the Plaza de Vicenç Martorell there I saw myself wasting away on a bench in the heat and I descended to land across the plaza and when I, the me on the bench, saw I, the me with the wings I looked terrified so I took pity on myself and reached down and embraced myself and together we flew into the ever weaving pattern of chaos, quietly and gently like bird released from captivity.

And then, in a kind of mini birth I felt the sun on face and an elm tree at my back and the smell of strong tea spilled from a flask beside me as the dog leant against me and I was awoken from my slumber by some small iridescent bird that flew around the lower branches of the elm tree with the remnants of some strange dream still gripping my chest.

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