Games, Performance, and The Juniper Tree - M&A book club resumes
Juniper Trees
On my first day of herbalism school, the teacher gave us each a juniper berry to eat. The juniper berry makes us feel alert and invigorated.
The juniper berry is not really a berry but a seed cone — and the Juniper tree is an evergreen tree — a cypress to be exact.
I am fascinated by the leaves of cypress trees — they are not needles but not leaves. What a strange evolutionary path! I first noticed it among Arbor Vitae trees (Thuja occidentalis).
Branching leaves, branching paths, branching paths in a story or a game.
Performance and Action
How do these stories fit in with games, plays, rituals, and the stories they are? In Performance (1977), Richard Schechner describes what constitutes an action: a process, something with consequences, a contest, something that changes the status of the participant, and that space is an intrinsic part.
These all describe what happens in many of the Grimm’s fairy tales not just the Juniper tree. But, what sticks out for me is this idea of space, or the environment.
The Juniper Tree
In this story a son is murdered by an evil step mother and fed to the bumbling (pure?) after. His sister thinks that she was the real murderess and is the engine behind his eventual rebirth. She collects his bones and buries them under the Juniper Tree — after which he is reborn as a bird (perhaps a phoenix), sings songs, receives gifts, and eventually kills his step mother and returns to his original position as a boy with his father and sister.
What sort of Triangle is this?
I have been obsessed with Deleuze this year and the idea of the family. The family is the original engine of civilization: father, mother, and child: the triangle. The nuclear family is how the West reproduces humans (procreating) and society (habits/mores). So many of the Grimm's stories play with this structure; rarely is there a family triangle, so instead, there must be some other way of reproducing oneself and society. Through songs, through gifts, through actions. It is all performance.
Word to Aya
It took me a long time to write this after I read the story, and I waited until I wrote to read Aya’s post. https://www.technekai.com/blog/2024/05/28/them-bones/. Aya notes that the only person in the story that has a name is Marleen, the daughter — and the meaning of this word. I refer you to Aya’s post, but I think about the status of Marleen, and wonder who is transformed the most the Boy or Marleen.
Herbal Addendum
I was Wolf Storl’s book Untold History of Herbalism, and he fully recounts this particular story in the first few chapters.
I appreciated the synchronicity.
