Lately

Lately I have been thinking about trees. Lately I have been thinking about the way the wind makes them dance around the edges of a darkening park, as the quasi-medieval glow of a well known city unfolds at the base of a hill, and two figures embrace in the wind, limbs chattering with their legs entwined on a cold, damp, bench.

Lately I have been thinking about leaves unfolding like hands do. Two leaves falling or flying on late november gusts, crisp and brittle and fragile. A bid for the ground or the sky, a fledgling flight.

In ‘Having a Coke with You’, Frank O’Hara talks about the movement between him and the poem’s subject as ‘drifting back and forth/ between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles.’ It made me wonder if trees could read, what they might be reading, but then I’m not sure if that’s the kind of spectacle he’s talking about. I wonder if it’s a spectacle as in a moment or a scene that has such impact that you can’t help to stop and look at it. Like watching two people fall in love in a busy pub, or seeing someone fall over outside the chippy, or seeing someone with no coat or umbrella get unexpectedly caught in a downpour.

It’s the ‘drifting back and forth between each other’ that captivates me. Trees do that. When a tree in a forest is in trouble, the other trees send it nutrients to make it better. Trees, if they could think, would think collectively. The older, taller trees provide nourishment for saplings too small to break the canopy and photosynthesise. They will even, once a tree has been felled, continue to send the decapitated trunk everything it needs to regrow long after it has begun to die. They never leave a comrade in the field. Communication, then, in an arboreal sense, is all about ‘drifting back and forth’. What’s mine is yours.

This kind of drifting is what I think happens when people make connections out there in the world. We’re always dancing around each other. Brief encounters happening all the time, washing up on unexpected shores to find that once you’re there, the tide turns and pulls you out to sea again. It’s this kind of drifting that happens when two people lie very close together sharing body heat, and breath, and ideas.

Plus when I think about a drift, and I mean really think about it, it’s not just about the slow movement from once thing into another, it’s also about accumulation. To drift between each other might be to accumulate feeling between you, like snowdrifts rising out of an otherwise unmarked landscape. It’s also an idea, too, right? Like.. to catch one’s drift is to understand a thought – to drift between each other, then, might be to allow yourselves to be uncaught. But then, thinking about it, that might be too clumsy to capture what I’m trying to say.

Plus, I’ve been thinking about drifting almost in the same way you might think about a dérive – which in a psychogeographic sense is to move aimlessly through space. Or, perhaps better put by Guy Debord who came with the whole thing, ‘a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.’ To drop all the normal things that dictate your movement through space, and allow yourself to ‘be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters [you] find there.’

He goes on to say that ‘the spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state.’ Suffice to say, then, that lately I’ve been thinking that the goal of this ‘drifting between each other’ is to study the terrain of ‘between eachother’, and is disorienting in its very nature. How do you define the spaces in between things? How do you explore them? I think in order to do it you have be both inside and outside of the self.

To truly drift in that sense kind of requires you to loosen the strings that keep us tethered, and allow all your frayed edges to rippled outwards. In doing so I think you collect things and bring them into the space you’re holding. Like if you were to imagine it physically, think of two people standing an arms length from eachother, making a circle of their arms. That could be one way to think of the ‘space between’. Every time you say anything or go anywhere, you put things into that little space between you. It builds up like snowdrifts do – collections of experience that you carry around with you, and that forms the intricate patterns of your connection.

Suddenly the space ‘between each other’ in which we are all drifting comes to include physical spaces. Park benches, pub gardens, streets strung with christmas lights, and darkened back streets awash with the deep orange glow of whatever it is they make old street lamps from. The space between each other is made up of wind and rain, cold fingers against the warm nape of a neck, tucked into the collar of a wool coat, or folded into someone else’s palm on the inside of a pocket.

It is nice, sometimes, to drift. To move without objective, the strike off and think of nothing but continuing to move through space that is as yet unstriated. And yet, it is only really nice to do this kind of drifting with someone else. You know? Debord talks about this a lot, actually. About how the solo Dérive isn’t really in the spirit of the thing. That the best way to do it is in small groups of people who have come to know each other so well that they don’t need to discuss direction; the drift simply happens naturally. I think this might be the only way to really move through a space. To strike off together, untethered to the surface but not unconnected to each other somehow. You can’t singularly explore the space in between you either. You have to kind of do that together too.

Anyway. Lately I have been thinking about trees. I think that if they could walk they would drift, intertwining their bare limbs in the cold dark of winter – empty staves against a mercurial sky. If trees could drift, then I think they would aim to move to different ambiences – the ripple of branches silhouetted against monuments. If trees could drift I think they might dance. If they had cheeks I’d imagine them pressing them against each other, caught in high winds trying not to freewheel, scant leaves detaching; not falling but flying.