The Force that through the Green Fuse
Seeing the Forest and the Trees
Do women have a special affinity for trees? It's tempting
to say yes, of course, trees being such obvious phallic presences. What do women want, Freud
famously asked, even as he lay them down one by one on his analyst's couch and listened to
accounts of dreams, fantasies, fears, unfulfilled desires, his masculine intellect failing to
grasp the significance of what he heard, seeking to understand and by understanding
to dismiss once and for all the mystery. A tree may well be governed by a certain logic, but
a forest is wildness rampant. It may be that human (whether masculine or feminine) vision
can't take it all in. We can only catch glimpses before it turns, a play of light and dark, its fire ever
flickering inward, before we return to the world of shadows.
(photograph
taken in July, 2003)
|Same Summer Musings, Part 7|
