Just a tree

“Your problem is, that you’re so sentimental,” he claimed. I raised an eyebrow quizzically, in a way that I hoped indicated mild scepticism.

“Well, all right, Romantic,” he sneered, managing to invest the adjective with a profoundly sneering quality.

To some extent mollified, I remained unprovoked, “Romantic” not being, in my lexicon, a term of abuse.

“Look, it’s just a tree”, he claimed, resorting to another strategy, sitting back in his chair and puffing his cheeks out with an air of insouciance, admiring the smoke rising from his argumentative shotgun and allowing the dust cloud to hang in the air momentarily, as he waited for a response. Sensing he’d finally piqued my irritation, he continued, in increasingly provocative mode, “and anyway, if someone cut down a pine tree in a forest, no one would make a fuss”.

I should explain that the tree under discussion in the stuffy little office I use at work, is now Britain’s most famous ex-tree, the sycamore that sprouted for over a century from the centre of a dip alongside Hadrian’s Wall. It constituted one of the more obviously aesthetic marriages of the man-made and the natural that any of us will ever see. And we need the past tense because- well, because, a couple of pleasure-starved blokes decided that the crowning point of their lives would be to chop it down, thinking it would be “a laugh”.

“Anyway, horrible as the story is, I’m not going to be drawn into an argument, because we both know what we really think, and we both know that you’re only adopting a deliberately provocative position in order to generate conversation because you’re bored- we’ve both seen the Monty Python argument clinic sketch.  So, sorry, I’m not going to oblige.”

And I returned to my coffee.

Yet I found myself ruminating on the subject, annoyed in spite of myself as much by the nature of his remarks than I was by the pathetic chainsaw wielding vandals themselves.

Why?

For one thing, I’m linguistically primed to resist, whenever the apparently harmless little adverb “just” finds itself conscripted into polemical or syntactic service. In its use as a permission word, it’s usually the hapless infantry sent into no-man’s-land ahead of the bombardment; just think of how, in the corporate world, the seemingly innocuous “can I just have a chat”, is the prelude to a dismissal.

“Just” is also the weapon of choice of the resentfully ignorant. Reductive and disparaging, it manages to imply that the speaker knows more about a subject they despise than those poor fools who find it interesting. To anyone tormented by the realisation that others find pleasure in something they can’t, “just” is a blessing, its single syllable air of reasonableness, and etymological link with justice making it invariably an argumentative race to the bottom. Football? Just a few blokes kicking a bag of wind about. Picasso’s Guernica? Just smudges on canvas. Beethoven’s Ninth? Just people sawing away on animal gut, blowing through reed and shouting. Hamlet? Words, words, words. Well, that last example was a trick of course, as this is Hamlet himself, in his antic disposition, satirically, puncturing Polonius’s appalling pomposity.

The other point about our slippery monosyllable is that it’s completely disingenuous. Nothing’s ever really just anything. Even my friend’s irritating “It’s just a tree” comment wasn’t just a foolish statement; it was a throwing down of a conversational gauntlet, an invitation to a duel, a stirring of the pond, an excuse for metaphor, and perhaps above all his attempt to oppose his Rationalism to my Romanticism and see who won.

And, if there was ever anything that wasn’t just, baldly, itself, then it’s surely a tree. Its biological complexity is mirrored by the web of cultural and personal contexts that gather around it.  I speak from experience. When I bought my house, I was charmed by the way a majestic cedar tree, framed the view, its boughs appearing to gesture out over the sweep of Mounts Bay towards St Michael’s Mount and Lizard Point. During Covid it became a starling hotel, and our melancholy, locked down afternoons were touched into daily beauty by the thrum of a thousand wings as the birds flocked over the roof, homing in on its welcoming boughs. Battered by a century’s easterly winds and fatally diseased, it began to shed its limbs, and was efficiently disposed of over Easter, with no prospect of resurrection. Since its departure there’s been something missing from my life. It’s worse on misty days, when the sea is invisible, but the mighty bulk of the tree would rear up in the foreground, providing depth to a perspective which is now blankly featureless, somehow dehumanised. 

Just a tree!

And then there’s the sophistry of one tree being much like another, and that claim that nobody would make a fuss if a tree in a forest was cut down. Well, some might argue differently- ask not for whom the chain saw cuts, it cuts for thee, after all. And it’s surely disingenuous to compare one tree amidst thousands with one standing so theatrically alone, although there’s a worrying implication that a tree, like a person, in a crowd, is somehow less valuable.

The wonderful Gerard Manley Hopkins, an underrated poet if ever there was one, certainly knew differently. Following the chopping down of some poplars in the village of Binsey near Oxford in 1879, Hopkins was grief stricken, lamenting the loss of “my aspens dear whose airy cages quelled, quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, all are felled, all felled”. For Hopkins, a living object like a tree, or a bird, had what he called inscape, meaning that its complexity reflected its deep individuality and whose contemplation could lead us to the divine.

Just a tree!

“Ok, I said, I’ll tell you why I think you’re wrong.”

“It was just a wind up”, he said, and fled.