No Tree
"No tree grows all the way to heaven,"
a darling end to a bible story
or Lenten play beginning
you might say;
a betrayal of trust
one way or another
in the power of God
to make anything beyond
what it is, whole, small or big,
seemingly nailed in place
and solid on the terrain.
"No tree grows all the way to heaven;"
Jung took off with this simple
everyman's bow to limitations
on human aspiration,
tagging this old saw
with his own Manichaean profundity.
"No tree grows all the way to heaven
unless its roots reach all the way to hell,"
which Jung borrowed, embroidered
and belted with layers of meaning,
turning a simple saying
to a metaphor of symmetry
to adorn, to address
the brutal best and worst in us,
a tree beyond Yggdrasil
with its wandering roots,
a tree rooted in the darkness of Hades
and blooming in the glades of heaven;
how sententious, how apt,
how symmetrical is that?
Is it well to strive upward?
Is it well to rive below?
Draw eternal damnation or bliss
down to the daily bread
of our lives, the sins of others,
the sins of us all,
seamy mud and blood,
skin of the teeth escapes
from mortal fall and disaster
or peeping from a cloud
of charity and grace,
turn the other cheek
for an infinite reward?
How many levels do we need?
How many stops on the way?
Dante's Commedia,
a trinitarian journey,
Goethe's Faust condenses
the same three realms;
heaven, man, earth,
the Dao's three-linked treasures.
Jung dreamt his house, went
through the portal of the dream,
landing on the top floor,
explores the rooms, the floors,
finding himself finally
opening that heavy door,
descending the cellar's stone stairs;
deep down he already knows
where and how it ends.
Down, down the stone stairs;
the cellar a vaulted room
ancient as Rome,
the floor stone slabs and
pulling a ring in a slab
open sesame and
narrow stone steps
leading down and
down he goes to a low cave
cut from the rock; layers of
dust, fragments of pottery,
wrecks of human skulls.
The dream ends there,
but we know what was below,
what was really
the dream's core
and so does he.
This final low cave holds
the roots of his tree,
the tree itself,
top to bottom,
in every sense in Jung's head,
a phantom, an ingenious fetch,
nothing more, nothing less;
the tree goes no deeper, no higher;
the tree goes nowhere.
We knew that before
and the rest of it as well;
the wages of sin,
the gages of lust and folly,
life, death, dust,
old empty rooms,
bones on the floor,
tenants long gone.
Let's get out of this,
this deathly place;
get out of here,
away from these worn images
of bounded levels,
petrified perished forms;
return above
to the simple holy air
of mother earth,
find those few lonely trees
we know are there;
those chosen trees
that grow and grow
from thin air, on their own,
rootless and unbound,
ascending like the angels
all the way to heaven.
© Jack D. Harvey
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| Jack D. Harvey |
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and has been published in a few anthologies over the years.
