Failure (of a tree)

'If I say 'tree' you think of branches, leaves and perhaps, the things which might pause upon a branch or pass through the leaves like pigeons or a torch beam or the breeze and then you might imagine the surface of the trees, their skin, which is normally mutilated by men, with woodsmen, those people that tear open a wolf's stomach in your childhood, cutting cavities into the tree's side or children carving messages with little knives, as if the trees were writing to each other, saying I adore you, I fuck you, you hurt me, and you imagine all the sounds which have drifted through the tree and coiled around each branch- all the sirens, all the shouts, all the sad songs of the rooftop wires and the sobs of the distant ships- and all the animals which bristled against the bark- the stray cats, starving foxes, soaking, startled dogs- and all the trees constructed from the fabric of sleep which contain dead children or strange voices, or aren't trees at all but only smoke, only light, only something slowly exploding, coming out as rain, emerging as a star, emitted as a thought, as a spike, a strike against the black, shutdown sleeping surface of your eyeball, before I mention their territorial purpose, their transformation into fire and their gradual manipulation into a material, like fur or straw, for housing, and ask what voice would a tree have and how its speech would begin and question what exactly it would mean to have roots, what exactly it would mean to have no voice at all. And you might think of night in the space of imaginary trees, our arboretum bordering the city park, stained with light, the sky swollen with smoke, and everyone all around, following the falling sound of the television, hunting through the feverish dark, monitored by owls, fleeing the fire. Nothing at all is lost, trudging through paths and hollows and patches where the branches conduct voices like there is a choir, half-asleep, and as if every branch and voice there were only part of a phone-call, occurring each cold and lonely night.'

What I would call a failure, others never even described.

Beautiful Sheffield by Tacita Dean. No copyright infringement intended.