HOW ROOTED IS THE TREE​
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Mathilde Fasciana
image from here
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The Punk Movement
The Punk music was born in New York and arrived in Europe during the 70s. The term means "ugly", "which is worth nothing". Originally, in the mid-1960s, it was used to denote noisy, amateur rock groups, who rehearse in garages (hence the designation "garage rock" that was also used), such as the American groups The Shadows of Knight, The Sonics, or The Remains. The name reappeared in 1970 in the United States to designate wild formations and primary music, whose themes revolve around life sickness, drugs and sex: MC5, Iggy Pop & The Stooges, and The New York Dolls. The manager of these last groups, a Londoner by the name of Malcom McLaren, will export this term and this concept in the British capital, to market it literally by launching a group he created, The Sex Pistols. With great provocations and sarcastic texts, advocating anarchy, scandal and the total lack of instrumental technique, the Sex Pistols opened a breach in which rushed a multitude of artists eager for scandal, eager to break with the "pretension" that had settled in rock in the 1970s.
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It became then a Movement and started as a response to the alienation of society, social hierarchies, as well as restrictions linked to the presence of an authoritarian, retrograde and destructive power. It appeared in a context of crisis due to the oil shock of 1973 that lead to de-industrialization, currency devaluation, unemployment, inflation and poor social conditions. The punk movement then expressed the revolt of a whole youth who discovered the economic crisis. It created a subculture, even a counter-culture, which was aiming to destroy the current society in order to create a future. “It is a refusal claiming that everything is possible” Greil Marcus (American author, music journalist and cultural critic).
The actors of this movement wanted to propose an alternative to existing systems, build a new way of life, free and self-managed. It was mainly based upon anarchism and the DIY (Do It Yourself). Both of these principles states that:
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human being is capable of changes, and is not greedy, selfish, and anxious by nature
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there is hope for the society
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they need a liberation from authority and rules
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solidarity and self-responsibility can build a strong micro-society
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art outweighs money and labor, it can generate actions and movements of populations that can destabilize politics
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This culture developed a remarkable style of music and clothing, but what interests us here is this idea of choosing their own group, their own family, and the idea of the Do It Yourself (which is also linked to their way of creating music and clothes). DIY implies different aspects. First of all, it is a way to attest of you own independence: you don’t need anyone, you don’t need the system, to do anything. Only your own willingness is necessary to reach your goals. Second of all, it states that each and everyone have a potential, to create. All that you need already exists, is in you. Third of all, creating doesn’t necessarily mean creating something new. You can create something new from something old. Everything can be transformed, reshaped, used differently.
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From this analysis, we can realize that Punks were looking for their own way to address the Modern Mind. It is also interesting to see how it is always necessary to adjust our way to address the mind, and more especially the Modern Mind, according to the constant evolution of the present and the unpredictability/uncertainty of the reality. We could relate two elements to the notion of archive: the Punk family as an independent micro-society; the willingness to create a new way of life according to different principles, a new (ideal) society, hoping to reach their own paradise on Earth.
Families’ History:
In the Greco-Latin civilization there was a cult of genealogy: in large houses, ancestors were represented in hierarchical portraits on the walls, or in family trees (found written in books) called the stemmata.
Regarding the Christianism, the graphic representation of family relations during the Middle-Ages was done according to the biblical model of the Tree of Jesse. This tree appeared in the 12th century and translated the genealogy of Jesus into images as given by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. It is representing Jesse, seating, or lying, carrying a tree stuck on his back, with his descendants including King David and Jesus of Nazareth. Other drawings show Jesse with the tree emerging from his belly. Jesse being the ascendant, Jesus the descending son, is located at the very top of the tree.
The presentation of the ancestors can also be done in a circular or semicircular form. The root member is then in the middle and the ancestors placed in layers around him. We can see in this representation, an image of families as a system, like the solar system, where each person exists in orbit regarding his ancestors.
​The image of the tree shows that each member of the family is linked, and that the family is growing and shaping itself through time. The family would be a way to exist in a line of history that resists death.
Is there a determination due to our family heritage and ancestors? Is history repeating itself until someone breaks the wheel?
Is there something in our genes that influences our life?
Is there something in our education that influences our decisions? Are parents putting a weight on us? Is it the behavior they have regarding us? Is it the feelings they are transmitting us?
Is it us, by imitation, that are reproducing what we saw, what we were taught?
Is it conscious?
Is it shaping the perception we have of ourselves? of our own consciousness?
Through these questions, we are wondering if there is a real continuity in the family tree. How much rooted is the tree? We can indeed notice that each family is carrying a history that is, most of the time, defining it.
It seems that every new member is bringing his heritage to a new context. Then this heritage can be transformed, it can evolve, it can be solved, continued differently, or not.
In other words, how do we deal with heritage? (Consciously or not)
In order to tackle these questions, we can dig into psychogenealogy. It is a clinical practice developed in the 1970s by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, according to which the events, traumas, secrets and conflicts experienced by the acestors of a person, condition his constitutional weaknesses, his psychological disorders, his illnesses, even his strange or inexplicable behavior. She was based on her own observations and also on concepts from psychoanalysis, psychology, psychotherapy and systems. Psychogenealogy shows that we are objects of projections. Projections can come from our parents, grand-parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters… They see in us a potential that they couldn’t develop themselves, or they project something that they lived, or a treatment they received, or a behavior they witnessed. While growing up, we are defined, compared, oriented: the possible consequences can reveal themselves on an emotional level, but also on our decisions, our experiences, or even on our bodies, our physical appearance.
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We can also notice that we often identify with a member of our family. According to our family history, we tend to repeat the same scenario, or build a counter-scenario (which is also depending on the original scenario), in the big themes of our lives, such as: love, profession, friendships, children…, and even in our everyday life. Most of the time, this is happening unconsciously. Some observations revealed that being named after one of our ancestor can also link us to him with some of his character traits and story, like a ghost solving his own issues through us.
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This study states that there is often “unsaid” or family secrets that are conditioning our life. Therefore, we take a role, reproduce situations, take the same path, surround ourselves with the same kind of people… Or not, or we can also tend to the opposite. There is a psychological heritage, often unconscious, and a psychogenealogical patrimony. In fact there is an importance of the country we are born in, the culture, the customs, the time period, our education… All these factors contribute to our development, and are part of our patrimony. Moreover, there are some family mechanisms, the heritage, that are somehow part of us. The family is living in us, through us.
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We can also think about the idea of family as an entity and as a symbol.
Families always existed in history. They present themselves as a micro-society, a society within the society; or even an example of the society that will shape the actual society we live in.
We even recognize in the family the diagram of authority, where the father owns the power, in most cultures. This is then mirrored in societies, where men are given responsibilities, power, leaderships… Families have often been used to control and put pressure on populations. For instance, in France, the civil code states that every person has to assist his parents and children. We can also take the example of Iran, when the leader of the revolution has forbidden, in January 2014, to every person, to chat with someone external to his family.
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The term Family comes from the Latin familia, famille, famulus, that means servant. Among the Romans, it was used to name a group of servants belonging to a person, or attached to a public service. Later on, it was used for all the people, parents or not, masters or servants, living under the same roof; and then to all people of the same blood. This explanation enlightens the parallel that can be made between family and community. Hence, every family has to be governed on the same model as the one that includes all of them: the society. Therefore, the whole society evolves according to the education received in families. Moreover, there is a political construction of the family where every place has an essential role. There is a structure that enables it to sustain by itself. The family is looking for continuity, subsistence and the increase of its patrimony. Therefore, it answers to economical and management criteria. In order to promote its stability, it is involving rituals, rules, laws, etc., mirroring the elaboration of a society, aiming to build a political order. This conception bringing consequently the cultural need of customs, implicit rules, etc., is also the origin of restrictions, confinements, suffocations. Thus, there is a dialogue between biological, economical, and ethical rules and the reaction to it, by tensions, betrayals, plots, and even murders. Family, despite all that is implemented, is not a stable reality.
More generally, a family represents a group that is linked by a characteristic feature. Hence, a family can be given, chosen, attributed, and the heritage that comes with it is not necessarily transmitted through the blood and genes. In a way, it is also reflecting the fact that identity cannot be thought without otherness, there is something from the other inside of us; therefore, there is a need to go to the other, and make a union.
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Paradise:
In the first Paradise was a family. The family appears to be necessary to the creation, like a base. In order to grow, each species needs to procreate and with this comes the structure of a family. It also gives a balance in the creation, like a harmony within the energies (masculine and feminine).
The Paradise described in the Bible reflects a kind of perfection: at the confluence of four rivers, with animals, flowers, branches and trees. The Garden of Eden represents the universe where life appears. God planted there many trees, two from which are more special. They are called the "Tree of Life" and the "Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil". The “Tree of Life” symbolizes immortality. The “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” refers to total knowledge, a perfect mastery of the mysteries of life. So the two trees represent the characteristics of God: immortality and unlimited knowledge. The four rivers start from the center of Paradise, which is at the root of the “Tree of Life”, and go in the direction of the four cardinal points. These rivers, that can be related to the four elements, the four states of life, have then the same source. Thus, the tree symbolizes not only the very principle of life but also all that regenerates it, heals it. It is generally depicted with two intertwined trunks that can refer to the spiral of the human DNA or to the oriental Kundalini. It regenerates itself endlessly, as a victory against death, and its fruit is carrying Life.
Unfortunately, the doors of this Paradise have been closed. However, it is interesting to see how much we tried to reproduce it. As if we decided that we should be happy here and now. Being blessed shouldn’t necessarily imply death.
Are we building our lives, our environment, according to the idea we have of Paradise? Or do we think of Paradise according to the reality of the world?
Is the idea of Paradise depending on fear? on the fear of death?
Could The Eden Garden simply be Earth? and Paradise and Hell two different ways to apprehend the reality of life and of the world?
In the common mind Paradise comes as a reward, it is only accessible after a well lived life, following the rules and principles of wellbeing. Thus it is linked to a judgment, like a counting of all the good and bad actions, decisions, behaviors, or even thoughts that we had during our whole life. It is then conditioning life, reducing freedom, and putting a burden on the conscience. Moreover, it is uncertain, not tangible, and relying on a hope, a wish for a future that there is no way to prove real. But, still, it is putting us in a situation where we are the only actor of our destiny, we can decide it and it is only depending on us. However, do reality gives us the possibility to always follow the conditions of this judgment?
Paradise, as it is an ideal, can be everything; everyone can imagine it and shape it following his own dreams and wonders. It is attached to an idea of freedom, hope, perfection, abundance, infinity, pleasure… However, too much of every of these criteria would lead to chaos and then Hell. Therefore, there is a correlation between Paradise and Hell. But what is Paradise if we can’t enjoy its pleasures? How can they be differentiated? You could be surrounded by abundance but not be able to enjoy it. For example, be given your favorite cake for eternity, but how would you know it’s your favorite if you can’t taste others? Abundance needs a balance to be harmonious: measure.
We always had some original paradises to relate to: the Walhalla for the Germans, the Elysium or the Elysian Fields for the Greeks, the Green pastures for the Christians, the Houris for the Muslims, the Nirvanas for the Indians… and other Eden. But they were always unreachable. Therefore came the idea of creating our own paradises on Earth.
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Hippodamos de Millet, Aristotle, Platon, Campanella, More (Cf picture of his Utopia), Fourier, Williams, Cabet imagined and worked on the creation of perfect cities. They would follow an organization where everyone would be equal and where the idea of death would be less horrible. A lot of different kinds of paradises were then invented, from the Abbaye of Theleme, to the Phalensthere or the Club Med.
Philosophers, poets, writers, painters, and architects took part to the movement, with islands of love and freedom, colorful worlds, sky, gardens, but also castles, whorehouses, prisons…
Paradises became then present in different dimensions of our lives. Some are moving, ephemeral, like Circus; others are figurative, like in theaters, the paradise includes the most elevated seats.
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It is also interesting to think about a more intimate relation that one can have with this notion. Everyone can tend to create an inner paradise, in his home, in his mind…
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Tempo:
When realizing the chaos of societies during History, men started to imagine and to create ideal cities, perfectly organized, peaceful and without inequalities. We can take here the example of factories, working-class cities, and monasteries. These calculated lives and monotonous cities, have been freed from time. The clock, invented during the Middle Age, appears as a way to catch time, put it in a cage; a way to give it limits. Then it is always equal, it has a measure and it cannot get damaged. Time has been saved from time, time has been killed.
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It is just so happen that the clock has been invented in a convent, by a monk, somewhere in Germany between the 11th and 13th century. The model of the monastery as the perfect paradise, with regulate prayers, times to get up, to eat, to go to sleep… There is an indifference to seasons, time is cut in the same rigorous way as the clocks. There is no surprise, no sickness, no desire; every day is its eve and its tomorrow. Hence, communities of the convent are perfect, isolated from the sufferings of History, disinfected from the fury of psychology. Monks left their identity at the door, they swore chastity, and gave up on passions. Therefore, they broke themselves away from the chain of generations, from Memory, from hope, from time; time has no longer an existence. If we open the case of a watch and observe the regular, impassive, fatal movement of the cogs, resorts and hammers, anchors and needles, we would see a miniature of paradise. No mystery and no wear; time, father of sorrows and diseases, father of death, time is dead. No more suffering and no more injustice, no more death.
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The clock thus represents the paradox of time, frozen in constant movement: time as a way to set and organize, time as a way to control and regulate, time as an illusion of security. But time is not tangible, it cannot be touched or caught; it is floating, passing by. Every second is making us older than the second before, but we can only notice it years after.
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Trees are a very tangible representation of time, stuck on one spot, limited by their environment. But, unlike the monasteries, by studying a tree, one can easily see how it is letting time affecting itself. Because it cannot escape, it cannot move away from its environment, it is constantly adapting to the always evolving conditions around itself. When growing up, it dances with its surrounding, moving and shaping the wood, like a muscle. Therefore, its shape mirrors everything it lived. As a matter of fact, by looking inside a trunk we can count the patterns of its rings and estimate its age. The rings are going from the outside to the inside of the trunk, from the youngest to the oldest; until it fossilizes. So the tree is indeed building itself around its history, it is constantly regenerating itself, keeping its dead inside, as a memory. Through this memory, it learns, adapt, and communicate. Like a society, a whole network is being built thank to the tree, there is a symbiosis system between beings (animals and vegetals, such as mushrooms). The tree is affecting the environment much further away than its own limits. Therefore, there is a parallel functioning of its interactions, it is not relying on one resource in particular but it is taking advantage on what is around it, and giving back reusable material. In order to do so, it has very precise knowledges and sensations of its surrounding; so it can exchange information and even create unions, families, network.
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But all this work takes time. One can hardly compare a human life with a tree life. The tree’s temporality is much larger, it takes decades to grow, to build leafs, to build roots, to learn how to resist wind, to connect with neighbors... Should we invent a clock dedicated to trees? For which one day for us would equal one tree’s second? How can we enclose time if the very notion of it is not the same for all of us? According to Einstein, time is an individual experience, and everyone has a different perception of it. In fact, there is a connection between space and time, so the movement in space affects the passage of time. Moreover, he demonstrated that gravity can modify time and slow it down. The stronger the gravitational pull, the more time slows down. So, temporality might have more aspects than we think.
If we get back to the definition of the Universe, it stands that it is all that exists and is governed by a number of laws. Cosmology seeks to understand the Universe from a scientific point of view, like all of the matter distributed in space and time. So it is a question of organization, balancing in space and time. Therefore, every different combination, even with the same matter, makes a different result.
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Scientists in the Antarctic have been analyzing data collected by a giant balloon, carrying a collection of antennas that floats high above the ice, looking for evidence of high-energy particles arriving from space. They recognized signals that first appeared to be noise, but could come from a high energy particle. Surprisingly, instead of coming from the sky and going down, this particle seemed to be exploding out of the ground. “Explaining this signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same big bang as our own and existing in parallel with it. In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards.” Moreover, the researched showed that this particle has a mass of one million billionth of a gram, which corresponds to the missing mass of the universe, the dark matter. Using deductions from the physic principles of symmetry, scientists suggest that during the Big Bang two parallel Universes were created: one with all the matter, ours, and the other with the antimatter, where everything is reversed. This anti-Universe would evolve back in time towards the Big Bang, instead of expanding away from it.
Are trees growing up or growing down? Is memory part of the past or maintaining the future?
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Einstein wrote that “the distinction between the past, the present, and the future is only an illusion, though persistent”. The past hasn’t disappeared and the future is not none existent. The past, the present and the future are all existing exactly in the same way. As we think of all the space existing somewhere, all the time (past, present, future) is also existing somewhere. Hence, all the moments of time already exist. However, our apprehension of time is entirely in the present. Then our impression of the passing of the time would be an illusion! If time doesn’t pass and is contained somewhere, would it be possible to travel through the past or the future?
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Here is an exploration of a body of questions and memory in motion. It is a journey, my journey, of questioning heritage, time passing through us, as a continuity to build history but also to enclose ideas, identity, and to condition existence. Heritage as a gift, forced to be taken? Then what is left to hope for?
Can we then set the value of our time? How to free the mind to think outside? What is outside? Out of what? Out of the clock, out of the metronome of society, out of the order that synchronizes activity? The organization of society implies to be part of the whole; just by the fact of living, we take part in it: so it affects us and we affect it. When staying out of this network, we don’t meet anything or anyone, there’s no chance for exchanges or experiences, and there is no confrontation, no change, no time. It seems that there is a balance to find between interior and exterior rhythm. The rhythm would be a balance between in and out. Like a conversation, there is no fight; each part has to exist in order to enlighten its differences with the other one, and maybe its strength; each one is feeding the other one.
Freeing the mind to think outside:
Do we deal with heritage through continuity? By connecting the past to the present, and the future? Heritage would be what connects and gives a logical continuation to History; heritage as a piece of history that continues to live and develop in time and creates a kind of intergenerational communication. There is neither a beginning nor an end to time; it is there, open. Hence heritage, once acknowledged and understood, can be addressed to the modern mind; to remind us how we got there and what brought us. It is then to be taken in account in order to reflect it, to (re)shape it, or to break it. Then it is interesting to notice that it means we evolve only from the past to the future, but if there is no change and no event, we are not even conscious of time. We tend to think of time in a unidirectional dimension and that the arrow of time can only travel towards the future. This would come from a natural momentum (or “élan”) that started at the Big Bang and that goes from the order to the disorder. It is called the entropy phenomena, and explains the constant expansion of the Universe. All the changes that we observe are epiphenomena that are surfing on the wave of the growing disorder of the Universe that is defining the difference between past and future.
But then, how deeply are we defined? How free are we, if our existence is the result of a causality chain? Are we freer when we know this chain? Do we need to know? Is there an unconscious common memory that is anchored inside of us and influences us whether we are aware of it or not? If we think again of the Punk movement, and what it wanted to demonstrate, we can say that the context of existence doesn’t necessarily imply a defined identity; as living/leaving also means to be free of choosing to detach from it. As the tree doesn’t escape from its environment, this process of freeing would more likely mean to grow awareness of the strings of heritage and make our own connections and alliances, or separate from them.
This process could take the shape of a cycle, circling it could unable to heal it and get to another one.
Can we then set the value of our time? How to free the mind to think outside? What is outside? Out of what? Out of the clock, out of the metronome of society, out of the order that synchronizes activity? The organization of society implies to be part of the whole; just by the fact of living, we take part in it: so it affects us and we affect it. When staying out of this network, we don’t meet anything or anyone, there’s no chance for exchanges or experiences, and there is no confrontation, no change, no time. It seems that there is a balance to find between interior and exterior rhythm. The rhythm would be a balance between in and out. Like a conversation, there is no fight; each part has to exist in order to enlighten its differences with the other one, and maybe its strength; each one is feeding the other one.
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The Punks denunciated what was not working in the system they were experiencing, but they didn’t aim to give a solution. They opened a process with the purpose of producing mutations in the consciences, to open new dispositions, and create new collective experiences by gathering the common resources and promoting independence at the origin of the action. This means that each one remains free to decide for himself. Then it becomes more of a negotiation of how can we stay true to the self and still manage to tune with the group, with society.
It seems that there is a natural flow to find, which doesn’t belong to anything or anyone, which cannot be put in a box, nor to be defined; a simple coordination of the oscillation of time with the crackling of the cogs and the rocking of the matters.
