When I lived in Los Angeles I often went running on the ridge above our neighborhood, and my route included a fire trail that faced west toward the sea. Some of the trees I used to pass on the fire trail came to feel like friends.
My thoughts turn often to those trees and others I used to see in LA. Lately I have come to feel that friend does not do justice to the relationship I had with them. The word that surfaces in my mind when I recall reaching up to touch the limb of a bishop pine as I went past, or smelling the peppery-sweet scent of gum oil and looking up to see a spotted gum looming above, is familiar. These trees were my familiars.
Perhaps one thing I mean by familiar is that, in regarding the gum at the western end of Sea View Lane Trail in Mount Washington, Los Angeles—it is possible I have transposed this gum, in memory, from some other location—I understood the two of us as playing coordinate roles in some common undertaking. I understood us as being parts of something.
Early on in my notes for what has become this project I wrote this:
By familiar I mean any presence that you experience as distinct from yourself and yet implicated in your own coming-to-be—a partner in self-making.
Now this feels wrong. For one thing, though I would hardly deny trees a presence-in-the-world, perhaps a presence-to-the-self, I don’t know that I could specify what self-making would mean for a tree (or vascular plants generally). There is an experiential gap here that I could only bridge, at present, by projection or pareidolia, and this is something I’d like to avoid. (Of course projection is something we cannot avoid, though we can learn to be more conscious of it, more conscientious in our practice of it.)
For sure, any thing we encounter that has for us the coherence and distinctness we associate with the term individual shapes us in an accretive way, inflects, as it were, our posturokinetic form. Do I adjust my posture, perhaps unawares, to match the shapes of the trees I see around me? Certainly those whose habit evokes in me a body-like expressiveness, a limbedness (I think of the sprawling, multistemmed habits of the Peppermint Tree and the Coast Live Oak at the Huntington Gardens, another favorite spot in LA). Perhaps this is all I’ve meant by familiar: something that evokes in us a bodily deformation, something that invites a response.
The draft where this definition appeared (*any presence that you experience …*) had the working title Ecology of the Self. This will give some indication how much defensiveness I’ve had to strip away: the self, as if selfhood were a unitary phenomenon. At the very least this should be open to determination.
Habit has a broad field of application. We can speak of the habit of making of a cup of tea first thing on getting up or the arboreal habit of certain birds or the habit of a vascular plant—its structural characteristics and form, be it herbaceous or woody, arborescent (tree-like) or suffrutescent (scrubby). The first usage refers to behavior that is learned, the second to behavior that is innate or at least characteristic, the third to a constellation of morphological properties partly innate, partly developmental.
The etymology and semantic field of habit and its cognates suggest to me a people fixated on covering the body. Then again, consider how a favorite shirt becomes an image of the body, acquiring signs of your habits of posture and activity—a worn elbow, a stretched seam—becoming, after a fashion, a familiar.
In plants and animals alike, the first habit is orientation to the vertical, to the Earth’s gravitational field, the second to light, prototypically though not necessarily that of the sun. It would be cute to say: to an axis defined by gravity and light, the Earth’s center and the sun—but while gravity is more or less constant, light, be it that of the sun or some other source, varies with time of day, season, latitude, circumstance. Clearly they are in tension, gravitaxis and phototaxis—but that tension is more complex than the taffy-like stretching suggested by axis.
Like plants, we are thigmotropic: we grow toward touch.