The Last of Us

Marcescence on the Edge of December

The streets of the neighbourhood glitter with windshield. Two sparrows crowd close on their dumpster lip. A box wheels down the sidewalk, containing its delivery. It stops at the light. One modern wheel spins one human down one sidewalk. One armload of bedding dragged through a neighbourhood.

The capacity to forget, lay aside, suspend. But not abandon. To have the mode you remember return. The deer on the shoulder holds memory of dew. The drone assumes a hopeful tenor.

—from Ghost Extraction Laurie D. Graham’s Substack Crop Circles

My Mother in the hospital

Just after my birth my mother noticed a maple leaf land on her windowsill. She was left alone for some time even falling asleep and dreaming and I in my incubator breathing. The last leaf sculptural, slightly marred, resting there on the other side of the window, on the sill, her eyes streaming with tears. And the tears like a lens making that one leaf crystal clear. Her own leaf. I read this in a page photocopied from her handwritten diary my Papa dug up about the morning of my birth. Years later she was in a different hospital and again she watched a leaf. A single leaf fall from a tree and become itself. “I had finally seen a leaf,” she says in the documentary made by the NFB and her best friend Bronwyn Wallace. When she says this, she somehow laughs while looking reverent. Closing her eyes for a second to make you feel what she felt. Remembering a moment again, alone in a hospital bed, now not giving birth but recovering from radiation that would never fully kill the cells moving through her blood. The leaf was so red. So singular, that the whole world around it blurred to make it known.

Video Games, Tom Cruise

Years later I met a guy who designs arcade-style video games. These games were experimental, made by artists and I thought I would love to commission him to do something wildly creative but I couldn’t think of anything until I saw the trailer for Mission Impossible 2. I was going to a lot of movies by myself in those days and there was something about that trailer. Firs, the extremes of the Grand Canyon and the camera skating over it, tight in on the beautiful reds carved deep deep and curving and then a speck is moving along the cliff, and we zoom in and it is Tom Cruise free climbing, pulling his whole body up with the force of his will gripping with toes and abs and his whole body, but he slips in a little puff of sandstone dust and now it is just his fingers holding rock. He is wearing sunglasses of course and the sunglasses kind of bleep red and it is a message from headquarters and the British guy on the other end says sorry to bother you on your vacation and you realize that Tom Cruise’s death defying climbing up the sheerest part of the Grand Canyon in just a little pair of shorts with no safety equipment or spotter is his version of a vacation. And after registering the message, he whips the sunglasses off and they self destruct in a satisfying explosion with the message somewhere high above the Colorado River and then the music comes on. Or something like that.

Immersive Life and Death

Anyway I decided that I wanted to make a sort of immersive video game that starts off like how that first the camera wheels over the landscape, blue sky, red rocks, tiny river way down below, no humans for miles around but you can look down at your hands which are holding onto a little crack in the sheer rockface. Or maybe you are dangling from an old wizened tree growing out of a crack in the cliff. Either way you, the player of this game is looking down thousands of feet of sheer drop and looking up there is more cliff and empty landscape and sky going on forever and it is clear that there is no way out of this situation. The game controller has two buttons. One says HOLD ON, the other says LET GO. You might, in keeping with the usual goal of staying alive in games, keep pressing the hold button for quite a long time. A few buzzards way above you in the sky and a few below you might come into view. The river way down below glints, the clouds move slightly but nothing else happens. Eventually, you, the player, will try the other button and LET GO. Because it is immersive, you will feel your grip loosen and then the feeling of falling. Terrifying, flailing, but also an inevitable feeling, a feeling of letting yourself unclench and just giving yourself up the elements. The feeling of free falling. The feeling of the wind and the rushing. Maybe finally, a feeling of release. The good feeling that you do not have to keep trying so hard. That what is happening is happening.

But I wrote a book instead

I thought this game would be good for people in the big cities who are tightly holding onto their life. A way to safely let go of it all. I even thought after you died at the bottom of the cliff you would get to re-experience that feeling of falling in other configurations. Other ways of hanging on and letting go when the hanging on seemed just impossible or unnecessary or that hanging on was just prolonging the fear and stuckness. I never made this arcade game. But I did, around this same time, make a book called If We Ever Break Up This is My Book which was an illustrated break-up book, and on the first page after the dedication and publishing notes it looked like this:

Buy Something for the Holidays

I occasionally also have copied myself and made artwork for people getting married that has these two buttons floating on an otherwise blank page. And this weekend I made about maybe 50 ink tests, all 6 inches x 6 inches, with either the words HOLD ON or LET GO scratched across the bottom using my own homemade black ink. If you get a subscription or a gift subscription for a friend this week, I will send you one. If you buy two I will send you the set. Its less than $60 a year which is a low price to pay for original art. You can also see them in person at Horses Atelier on Walnut Street if you are in Toronto. They also have beautiful clothes.

— Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963

Meanwhile back in nature

Everything seems poised in the fulcrum of hold on, let go. The buds are just showing themselves containing all the spring’s hopings. You can see the buds now that the leaves are mostly fallen. The air goes so chill and seems to clench a whole snowstorm somewhere up there in the roiling grey sky. It’s the last leaves that I am noticing most though. Leaves that hold early December’s tensions. A clinging. Especially the young beech trees and some of the oaks are still holding their leaves. O! those crinkly last last leaves frozen in this moment. Almost cast in bronze. And their sounds! A kind of rattle in a silent forrest in winter. First the wind from far away sounding like distant waves, and then something still muted but with a rolling crackle not quite musical, not quite beautiful, softly brittle, like slowly pulling the plastic tines on a comb. Why when the snow covers everything does just this one small sapling its shivery fleet of bleached ribbed boats keep holding on?

A Botany of Hanging On

"Deciduous" means "the dropping of a part that is no longer needed or useful" and the "falling away after its purpose is finished." Deciduous trees actually do quite a bit of work to form a protective layer where the leaf will fall off, and the moment of letting go involves a whole series of cellular, hydration, light, temperature, and chemical cues. But some deciduous trees do not drop their leaves until they are pushed out by the new leaves of spring. It has a name of course:

Marcescence

Ultimately from Latin marcēscō (“I wither”). The most common trees with marcescence in my part of the world are oak, beech, hop hornbeam maybe also witchhazel. But lately I have been seeing all sorts of trees with leaves still clinging waiting for that one last windy rainy day to signal going to sleep and then just give it all up until spring. Botanists are satisfyingly divided about why marcescence happens. In younger trees and in lower branches the leaves may hide the living buds (I wrote about this last year) protecting the lower branches from deer and other herbivores. It may be that holding onto leaves acts as a timed fertilizer for plants that need the un-decayed nutrients of leaves after the winter. It may be that these trees are a hold-over from some earlier phase in the tree’s evolution. Or there may be, and I hope this is true, that there is some other balancing act going on here that we are not meant to know.

Whatever marcesence is exactly, I wonder if you can feel its soft pull. The holding. The letting go. The not quite deciding moment of the year. The not quite decided moment of human history. The very air seems poised with a bristling of your unanswerable questions. This in between-times. This non-binary becoming. This now. November. December.

—Jason

Limestone hand holding a disk and pieces of fruit, Metropolitan Museum of Art: Greek and Roman Art The Cesnola Collection, Purchased by subscription, 1874-76 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

More of the Clingings Moodboard

and a sweet video of the beech tree by my house. all below for Subscribers. I Love you all. Your support continues to support the writings, the research, the slow coming together of a community who like you feels something that could use re-grounding, colouring-in and colourful co-mingling of matter and spirit, plus maybe some Canadian sense of balance.