“they grazed the sky and sounded the underworld”

John Berger:

Even when working in the forest alone, one has an elusive sense of company. A flat field, a bare hillside, or the steppe are not the same. The trees constitute a presence. They maintain—each according to its species—an extraordinary balance between movement and stillness, between action and passivity. And in this balance, all the while being regulated, their presence is palpable. That they held up the roofs of houses for so long is not surprising. They offer company. But company of a discretion which is indistinguishable from indifference. They roofed not only houses but also courts, tax-collector’s offices, prisons, armouries.

Their presence, if it offers a kind of company, is earlier than justice or the notion of indifference. The company they offer is spatial, and it is a way of measuring, of counting. Long before any numerals or mathematics, when human language was first naming the world, trees offered their measures— of distance, of height, of diameter, of space. They were taller than anything else alive, their roots went deeper than any creature; they grazed the sky and sounded the underworld. From them was born the idea of the pillar, the column. Trees offered man the measure of his upright space, and in this offer—mysteriously still present today as I fill up the chain saw with petrol—there is the discreetest assurance in the world, that we have never been utterly alone.

Each pine at dusk
lodges the bird
of its voice
perpendicular and still
the forest
indifferent to history
tearless as stone
repeats
in tremulous excitement
the ancient story
of the sun going down

At the end of the day when they come out of the forest, their limbs scarcely any longer obedient to their instructions, carrying their chain saws and bottles, the unfiltered light and the panorama dazzle their eyes. Each time they are astounded and, somewhere in the heavy oppressive fatigue of their bodies, there is almost a smile, as if in response to a wink. After hours of the forest, what is winking at them is the space of the valleys below and the unimpeded sky. Each pursues his own path down the slope, led by the weakness of his knees or by his boots that feel their way through the grass without him. Each is going to his own rest. But they are all returning to the world, and its first gift is its space; later, its second gift will be a flat table and a bed. For the most fortunate the bed is shared.

Even after the great separation we shall return to you at the end of the day, out of the unimpeded sky, and you will recognize us by our fatigue and by the heaviness of our heads on your bodies, of which we had such need.