back yard | Richard Nilsen

Now that it is well into spring, I like to sit in the back yard and just soak up the experience. On a chair on the patio, I can sit for a half-hour or so and just listen to what is going on around me. Often, I just close my eyes and enjoy the bird calls, the distant lawnmower, the occasional and distant roar of a passing jet high in the air. It is my form of meditation.

It affords me great pleasure to hear all the sounds, and more, to hear them all at once, piled up in counterpoint, like so many voices in a Bach fugue. Indeed, I try with the same effort to be able to hear all the parts simultaneously. It is great training to hear the more traditional music of the concert hall.

For, in any decent music, there are many things going on at the same time. Not only in dense Baroque counterpoint, but in all music. There is melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, texture — to say nothing about a bass line. If you listen only for the tune, you miss so much else.

And so, in the concert hall, I often close my eyes and concentrate on taking in all the bits. It takes some practice, but it is possible to hear multiple lines of melody at the same time. At the very basic, to hear the tune on top and the bass line at the bottom playing off one another.

In my back yard, I enjoy the stereo effects of a cardinal squawking to my right, while a chickadee yawps to the left, while the mower sounds two blocks away and a dog barks somewhere behind me, down the hill. There is always traffic on the main road, about a quarter-mile up the hill, and the breeze shuffles the leaves on the trees that ring my yard in an aleatory rhythm that serves as bass line to the rest. The mockingbird has his repetitive medley of greatest hits. You can’t fool me. I know it is you.

Listening to it all tells me the world is alive. It is animated and bustling, and it sings an earthy chant.

I am reminded of John Cage’s infamous 4’33’’ — the piece where the pianist sits in front of his keyboard for that amount of time and plays nothing at all. Often seen as a hoax by those unwilling to take Cage at his word, and feeling they are being cheated, such a listener misses the point. The composer intends for his audience to actually hear the sounds of the hall — the rustling of programs, the passing truck outside, the AC unit clicking on, the throat clearing and feet shuffling — and appreciate them as a kind of music of their own.

It is one of the primary functions of art, and music included, to wake you up to the world, to see what is usually ignored, to hear what surrounds you, to feel what is churning inside. It all boils down to paying attention.

The world is full of miraculous sound. I remember Kathy Elks, from eastern North Carolina, telling us of when she was an infant, just after World War II, and would hear the propeller sounds of an airplane too high in the sky to see, and how she always thought that buzz was “just the sound the sky makes.”

Or Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” Or the “good grey poet,” Walt Whitman: “Now I will do nothing but listen,/ To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it./ I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat, gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals…”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the Ancient Mariner: “A noise like of a hidden brook/ In the leafy month of June,/ That to the sleeping woods all night/ Singeth a quiet tune.”

“Listen to them. Children of the night. What myoosik they make,” says Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931).

Beethoven included a quail, nightingale and cuckoo in the slow movement of his Pastoral symphony. Messiaen wrote whole symphonies built from transcribed birdcalls. Charles Ives built the sounds of his Connecticut village into his music. Rautavaara’s Concerto for birdsong and orchestra. Vivaldi imitates birds in his Spring concerto. Alan Hovhaness And God Created Great Whales, with its whalesong sounds buried in orchestral texture.

Gustav Mahler said the symphony must embrace the world, and he included cowbells, hammer blows, distant military bands, bird calls, the memory of the postillion’s watery horn call, and even begins his first symphony with seven-octaves of unison A-naturals, almost a tinnitus of the universe — the music of the spheres — interrupted by a cuckoo in the woods. His own defective heartbeat was the opening of his final completed symphony.

Bedrich Smetana wrote his tinnitus into his first string quartet, “From My Life,” in the form of a long-held high “E.”

The same world of sound that fills all this music waits outside my back door, waiting to be organized into coherence. The first step is paying attention. Engagement is the secret to unlocking the world. The ear is a gate to paradise.

Some years ago, when I was still regularly penning verse, I wrote about this:

I wanted to write something about the tree in my back yard.

It is a big red oak, growing on the hill that rises at the back of our house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. It is an old tree, with wide-spreading branches that swoop out over us like wooden contrails against the sky. It is a sky tree, high up over us, elevated by hill and by tree trunk.

Its bark is shingled and cracked. Its leaves in summer are insect-eaten, dry and leathery. Moss grows on the north side of its lower stories.

It dominates the small hill like “Charlemagne among his peers.” All lesser vegetation remain vassals, and the lawn mere peonage.

One sees on its trunk the evidence of cities of insects, largely black ants, which use its bark for highways. At night in June, fireflies act as streetlamps.

One could look at the tree and think it is just an old-growth oak. There are many such trees in the mountains. They grew back after the farms that covered the area fell into disuse decades or centuries ago. Now that old growth has been parted again for housing developments, but my one old tree survives. It is hard not to think of it as an individual and not merely a Quercus rubra, something from a page in a Peterson Guide.

It seems to be a kind of spiritual umbrella, protecting this house from whatever ashfall of misfortune may drop from the heavens.

The back yard is full of vegetative growth, each shoot contending with the rest for sunlight and water. Grandfather oak watches over the welter.

It is a mythic tree.

The world is filled with such mythic trees, from Yggdrasil, the Viking “World Ash Tree” to the Boddhi tree of the Buddha. Most fall into one of two varieties of tree in myth: the fruit tree of paradise or the druidic oak that marks the axis of the world.

Of the first, the best known is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from the Bible, although only close readers of Genesis may notice there is yet another fruit tree there, the tree of eternal life, which the god does not forbid Adam and Eve, although they never get to test it.

Such trees of fertility include the vines that Bacchus makes grow on the pirate ship and the trees of life in Mexican folk art.

But my tree is the other kind, like an Ent from Tolkein, or the so-called “Lawrence Tree” in New Mexico, painted by Georgia O’Keeffe.

This is not a tree of beginnings, not a tree of new fruit, but the kind of tree that functions as a “witness.” It sees all that happens. It cannot change what happens; it cannot interact. But it knows. What it knows, we mere humans can never fully know, but myth tells us over and over, it is not necessarily a happy knowledge. The Garden of Eden may have contained the tree of immortality, but my tree tells me of a longer time, when everything passes. It is a tree of the knowledge of death.

What makes such a tree notable is that it does not comment on this fact: It just is. That is its role as witness. It sees the suffering and knows it cannot be otherwise. It sees the long time, when whole empires are born and vanish. Perhaps even the time when the cosmos explodes into existence and then fades like a dying ember into a wash of undifferentiated particles, the ash of the burned out universe.

This is why that Odin chose Yggdrasil as the tree on which to hang himself as a sacrifice to himself, to gain wisdom. And it is perhaps why Odin is not portrayed as a happy god.

That is my tree in the back yard, today dripping with the sweat of rain in the summer heat, in a humidity so thick it is almost a mist.

As you read this, you think, but it’s just a tree. And so it is. All mythology comes not from the things themselves, but from our investing them with significance. They seem to have meaning.

It can be like a dream, which, when we wake we remember and feel was trying to tell us something important. We don’t know what, but we felt its meaning.

And myth is that state, in waking life. Things are what they are, but they are also what else they are.

This may be something like a schizoid state, but it is where art comes from, and after art, where myth, and later religion comes from. Myth is our sense of the importance of things. Not important, like the paying of monthly bills, or remembering a wedding anniversary, but important in and of itself. It is significance.

You can see it in the utter care and utter frenzy of the paintings and drawings of Vincent Van Gogh. (Really, in every artist, whether Titian or Joseph Beuys). Look at those lines of energy as Vincent draws cypress trees.

This is his recognition that every bush is the burning bush.

—Richard Nilsen

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