Black Ficus #3, 2007
Ficus
There is a legend that, one day, while Buddha was deep in meditation beneath a small tree, a violent rainstorm broke out. His followers urged him to take shelter, but Buddha gave no answer, remaining immobile in a state of perfect inner serenity. Seeing this, the creatures that lived in the tree’s branches took pity on him, and prayed to the tree asking it to extend its branches so that they would provide shelter for Buddha. This is said to be the origin of the majestic Ficus magnoliodes. What makes these trees so enormous and also somehow so moving is their system of aerial roots: these descend from the branches and take root in the soil, becoming secondary trunks which contribute to supporting the weight of the foliage canopy above. Thanks to this system, exemplars of the species can grow to extraordinary sizes, spreading out to cover an area of dozens of square metres. By looking at the tree in section, a miracle of biological engineering is revealed: hundreds of lymphatic ducts run through each of the aerial roots that have become tree trunks.
If we consider this from a more abstract perspective, we can appreciate how this ficus becomes emblematic of the whole question of rootedness… in other words, not roots in themselves, which are a necessary part of every tree, but the will to connect what is above with what is below. This is the key to the tree’s solidity. The leaves and roots are mutually dependent: if either were missing, the other would die. Above and below are inextricably interlinked. In order for these complementary roles to work, they must be linked efficiently: otherwise, the lymph of life would be unable to rise upwards, while the energy synthesised from the sun by the leaves would be unable to reach the roots under the ground.
Hence the role played by the tree in the symbolism of many religions, often in the form of a double tree, with the celestial tree placed above like a mirror image of the upside-down earthly tree below. Both symbolise the connection between the higher and lower dimensions. In Sanskrit, two terms are used to refer to The Tree of the World, and one of these is nyagrodha, which literally means “that which grows downwards”. A similar image recurs in the Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance), the collection of texts gathered by the Jewish mystic Moses de León in the 13th century which was a founding element of mediaeval cabalism. It is interesting to note that in the Zohar the Tree of Life, which grows downwards from top to bottom, is called a Tree of Light. The same image is used in the Koran, in the en-Nûr section, where an olive tree symbolises Allah’s light. The Avesta, the collection of Zoroastrian sacred texts, refers to the celestial or paradisiacal tree and the terrestrial tree. The former, known as Haoma, is white in colour.
In the Beginning
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light': and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night.” Thus begins the first book of the Pentateuch, the book that Christians call Genesis and Jews call Bere’shît, which means ‘in the beginning’. A little further on the text continues: “And God said 'Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear', and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called the Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
Commentators of the Holy Scriptures explain how God did not limit himself to separating the earth from the sea but also gave them names. And they also point to the connection between the beginning of Genesis and the opening verses of the Gospel according to St. John: “In the beginning was the Word.” Bere’shît, in other words, in the beginning is the breath of God that creates life, but there is also thought, speech, names. This is the Logos, the Word that heralds and presupposes awareness.
Many cultures offer examples of mythologies where the earth emerges from the depths of the ocean. It has often been observed that this recurring image of coming up to the surface is not so much a description of the birth of the cosmos in an objective sense – or as we would say today, a scientific sense – as of the unconscious and preconscious processes of man’s awareness of the cosmos. Creation myths, in other words, being a representation of the image of the world gradually becoming conscious. This observation applies equally to the study of primitive mankind and the primordial phases of its psychic development as it does to the psychic life of a contemporary individual. In dream analysis, for instance, creation myths recur whenever the unconscious is preparing for a new leap forward in consciousness.
Every cosmogony is therefore an enquiry into awareness. When it makes itself felt it is expressing a need for regeneration: it heralds a reawakening, an illumination.
A Journey to Sicily
“The purity of the sky, the breath of the sea, the haze that made the mountains seem part of the same element as the sea and the sky, all this nourished my projects... Convinced that there could be no better comment on the Odyssey than the nature around me, I got hold of a copy which I read in a state of unbelievable rapture. But very soon I felt myself moved to produce something of my own and, strange as this was at the beginning, it became increasingly important to me... ” Reclining on the bough of an orange tree near a beach below Taormina, Johann Wolfgang Goethe meditated on the plan of his Nausicaa, a “dramatised synopsis” – as he described it – of the Odyssey.
The entire diary of Goethe’s journey to Sicily – the most significant section of the Italienische Reise – revolves around the identification between the writer and Ulysses: “I too a pilgrim. I too in danger of awakening certain inclinations, not of such a nature as to finish in tragedy, but sufficient to take on a painful and damaging dimension. I too, far from my homeland and in a condition to paint the events of my life – faraway things, a traveller’s adventures – with the boldest colours, for the entertainment of my friends. And to be considered an idol by the young and a show-off by the old. Obtaining more than one undeserved favour, and colliding with more than one unforeseen obstacle. All this had made me so enamoured of my plan, my proposal, that I spent my whole time in Palermo and most of my journey in Sicily dreaming about it.”
Cyclops, 2005
It was in Sicily that Goethe developed the idea that myth lives on inside nature. Friedrich Schelling would later extend this idea by affirming that myth is the expression of a divine revelation in nature. “There was nothing,” writes Goethe, “that I would have been unable to portray by portraying nature.” For many years I have travelled and photographed, carrying this phrase with me. I have gone back to familiar places, looking for traces of ancestral memories: the same cliffs and bays that the Greeks must have passed when reaching the island in ancient times. I have pushed myself back through time, as far back as the landscape would allow me.
What was the Earth like when the Titans reigned? What did the mountains look like? And the coasts, and the valleys where now stand the cities that we live in, when the Lestrigonians described by Homer and Thucydides took their flocks to graze and the Cyclops presented the lightning bolt to Zeus on the slopes of Mount Etna? When fire and incandescent magma raged furiously within the abyss of chaos, the primordial chasm?
I cannot say what the results are like. For me it would suffice to know that I succeeded in communicating the profound emotion that I experienced looking at certain landscapes. “If I didn’t much feel the discomforts of my pilgrimage,” I borrow another passage from Italienische Reise, “it must have been because I felt so poetically inspired in this supremely classical land that it allowed me to turn everything into a treasure, to safeguard inside me as though inside an urn of joy the things I felt, the things I saw, the things that happened to me.”
Alcantara #1, 2005