The Palm Tree

Actually contemplating nature, from close up (as I am doing now on a Florida vacation), challenges the “model” I use for characterizing “life.” The unbelievably large numbers of so many different forms, all of which share a single purpose, produce an odd unease. The fundamentals are the same. Those forms—why most have lifting structures to hold up sun-capturing mechanisms. Their fruit production is aimed at reproduction. The to us observable aesthetic effect appears on sober study to be an altogether secondary by-product of functionality. The bright red blooms of a little tree near where I write this are there to attract insets. The color coordination pleases the human eye but is intended merely to attract the insects that seem to know that sugar is on offer. Trees cannot see—anything, including themselves. In them the agency is hidden. Individuality seems also motivated by survival; it ensures that while the individual may perish, the “category” will survive. In us the individual is paramount because we experience it directly, and while we obey the collective rule as well (one death is not the species’ death) we have no experience of a living species of which we’re just a part; the whole seems meaningless except as a collective, thus as something oddly inferior to the individual. But if plants, animals are individuals, thus if they too have an inner self, where are they? Where do they go when that palm-tree finally succumbs to storm or age?

Our imagination can’t produce a model for the ecology as a whole unless we imagine it made up of individuals like us. And to picture a palm tree as having meaning, we must project a self-aware identity inside it complete with memory and, indeed, as having a future beyond its years-long rootedness in some highly localized tropical environment.

The thing here is that simple being—experienced being—is altogether insufficient as a source of meaning without a timeless future existence. If all that I have seen, felt, learned is lost at my life’s end, the very seeing, feeling, learning seems utterly pointless precisely because I do not really live in the moment. I live toward another state which gives this moment, retrospectively, its justification. That after my passage others will experience similar thoughts and feelings in no way justifies lives long ago completed, or my life, or future lives. And what is true of me is true for the palm tree too.

Nor is a mere continuation of this process—life as we experience it, as the palm experiences its existence—a satisfactory solution. Here I’m thinking of reincarnation. If I’ve lived like, say, a hundred lives before—even if I remembered each such life—the totality of that memory would have no value at all except, perhaps, to give current history more detail. Those lives, like this one, would be overwhelmingly the same old round, for me—and for the palm tree too. As Huxley, if I recall correctly, said a while ago: Time must have a stop. It may well be that once we reach that happy future, when time for us at last comes to a stop—something we cannot now imagine—a great relief, a flood of memory, will cause us to realize that, finally, the trip is over and we are home again. And then it may suddenly make sense, all this: we’d realize that we had lived in a very odd state of compression, in a kind of unnatural groove—of time. And falling into conversation with a fellow soul, we might note that we’d both once lived “down there.” “So what were you when you were incarnated,” I ask my new companion. “A palm three,” he or she might answer. And then we could have a conversation about the differences…