Angry Winds and Watchful Trees
Why do we imagine trees with a different kind of sentience? Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Uprooted — these forests are all connected communicators, a hive mind of sorts. In Narnia, they are spies; in LOR, they are lurers; in Avatar, they are a database; in Uprooted, they are angry and vengeful, formerly persecuted peoples turned into trees. They are mostly malevolent. In Narnia, sentient trees invoke the horror of the Panopticon, as our protagonists fear being watched from everywhere at all times. Their imagined sentience emerges from an anthropocentric confusion over what sentience is. How would we think about trees if we could recognize their anger?
Why do we call the wind angry, occasionally sorrowful? A common phrase, “the angry wind” graces a number of pages and screens. These media make her howl or shriek. They hand her intent and aim it at themselves and the roofs of the houses they have built in a different season. They blame the fallen shingles on the anger they have given her. They gender her. They make her the origin of a lineage of angry women. I could tell them that the wind does not cry in anger or sorrow, but what would that do? “Hear the wind in love,” I could say and change her malice into passion. “She only wants to reach you.” Would you accept it, if only to spare yourself the unpoetic truth that you do not matter to the wind? The wind’s violent effects are not the result of anger. The wind is only doing as winds do.
As I write this, I am listening to Tamino’s “A Drop of Blood.” Tamino has said of the song:
“I remember writing the first verses on a stormy day looking out my window, seeing the trees in my street sway to the wind. To me one of the main themes of the lyrics is violence, or more specifically the relation between purposeful, perhaps even beautiful violence which we often see in nature and the completely unnecessary, awful violence which we mainly see humans act out to others.”
What does it mean to take being, consciousness, emotion, and such and turn them into metaphors to anthropomorphize the trees and the wind? To call them violent? To gender them? Are they “she” only because all of nature seems to be assigned the role of “mother”? If the Earth is your mother, then what does this say about your relationship to mothers?
