playing catch up

 I helped to plant this tree in 1973 with my dad and my grandad and some other volunteers.  Dad said we were given an oak and a beech whip and were told to plant them alternately . I have watched them grow for nearly 50 years, they have never looked healthy.  The government initiative was  a response to a new strain of Dutch Elm disease that decimated elm trees to such an extent that you rarely see them today.  It was like Covid for trees.  

Christmas is nearly upon us and I'm feeling the urge to take a break.  I want to think about tinsel and food and family.  I'm enjoying this project and gradually I can feel something emerging that  feels a little like a place for me.  Somewhere between time and timbucku to reference Kurt Vonnegut. I am nestling into something.  My problem from the start is an issue with the potential futility of it all.  This goes back to a feeling I have about the scale of the problems we are facing and the scale of the response.  I ask myself the questions :-

Is it better to do something rather than nothing? even if the something has no effect on the problem it tries to address?

and

Can the something we do actually be counter productive if it distracts up from the real issue? keeps us entertained or at the very least alleviates our guilt?

and

If we can't actually do anything should we be content to do nothing?

These questions   have bothered me since the start of the treescapes project.  We are working with climate scientists and other specialists who know much more than me and can see immense value in the work  Many days I can just go along with things and not question the motives or potentials or the whys with a capitol W.  If some small areas of the urban landscape gets new trees. If young people from all sorts of places get opportunities to engage with, think and learn together, then this has to be of value on a micro scale which is where I like to work.

The scaling of the problem is at the heart of this project.  I sometimes think about Nero fiddling while Rome burns and wonder if the fire had got to a point where it just needed to burn itself out.  There was nothing at all he could do so he chose to play music.  If this was the case then perhaps he was just demonstrating an acceptance of the current state of things and recognizing the futility of any other action.  Why not play music then or make art as at least in confronting the inevitable we can demonstrate our humanity and subjectivity through a creative act

As Deleuze and Guattari point out in WIP

"The beautiful and the good continue to lead us back to transcendence. It is as if true opinion still demanded a knowledge that it had nevertheless deposed. "

Perhaps Nero  continued to play as there was nothing more constructive he could do.