Concluding Reflections

Summary

Uton gan on þysne weald innan, on þisses holtes hleo.

Let us go into this forest, into the shelter of this wood.

Genesis 840–1

IN THE SPIRIT of the forest and the arboreal metaphors that inspire and shape our thoughts, the final remarks in this book are open-ended. This is no point of conclusion, rather, these ideas seed a wider consciousness. As leaves on a tree and trees in the forest, as parts of a greater whole, the words in this book are intended to spark new growth. In the final chapter we saw how the Universal Tree spoke to Ibn ʿArabī, telling him that its fruits ‘contain more sciences and knowledge than sound intellects and subtle hearts can bear’. Like the trees of the sun and the moon in Alexander's Letter to Aristotle, or the dream tree in The Dream of the Rood, trees like the Universal Tree can speak directly, revealing hidden wonders (and horrors). Equally, like Nebuchadnezzar's dream tree in the Book of Daniel, they can serve more obliquely as signs of things to come. The language of arboreal signs and our metaphorical use of them is what drives the collective thought presented in this book. In much the same manner that forests, trees and their wood provided the material for new human-made realities on an altogether different plane, in the world of language a metaphor provides the path to new meaning: ‘It is the in-between-languages workshop where new semantic categories are first intuited and forged’. Juxtaposing two separate ideas, a ‘metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’, according to Aristotle. To understand it, one has to seek correspondence in difference – ‘to see the like is to see the same in spite of, and through, the different’. Indeed, a metaphor deals in similarities and differences. It forces a language to grow. Just as the metaphor has a privileged meaning-creating role, so too, at a material level, does the forest and its trees. Far beyond the visual, in their thoughts humans can see themselves connected to trees on deeper structural and linguistic levels.