The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Lectures

by Robert Bringhurst

The Tree of Meaning is a collection of thirteen lectures given by internationally-renowned poet, linguist and typographer Robert Bringhurst. Together these lectures present a superbly grounded approach to the study of language, focusing on storytelling, mythology, comparative literature, humanity and the breadth of oral culture. Bringhurst’s commitment to what he calls ‘ecological linguistics’ emerges in his studies of Native American art and storytelling, his understanding of poetry, and his championing of a more truly universal conception of what constitutes literature. The collection features a sustained focus on Haida culture (including the work of storytellers Skaay and Ghandl, and artist Bill Reid), on the process of translation, and on the relationship between beings and language. Spanning ten years of lecturing, The Tree of Meaning is remarkable not only for the cohesion of its author’s own ideas but for the synthesis of such wide-ranging perspectives and examples of cultures both human and non-human. These thirteen lectures draw together a highly personalized and active study of Native American art and literature, world languages, philosophy and natural history. To each subject Bringhurst brings an ecologically conscious, humanitarian approach and an enthusiastic interest in the world around him. “When the border guards ask, I say I’m a writer,” remarks Bringhurst. “If they ask still more, I’ll say I write both poetry and prose. That’s usually enough; they’ll shake their heads and wave me on. I wouldn’t attempt to tell them the truth, which is that writing is just a disguise. I do my work by talking to the air. Sooner or later the talk is disguised as writing and printing, because those are the simplest, least obtrusive ways of miming something spoken. “For poetry at least, speaking also seems to me a better delivery method than writing. Doing readings pays better than publishing books of poems. It reaches a wider audience too. It allows for nuances no typographer can match. And speaking is much older and more universal than writing. It seems to me a better venue, much of the time, for the evanescent, mutable agelessness that is apt to distinguish a poem. “So poems, where I come from, are spoken to be written and written to be spoken. The Tree of Meaning is a book of critical prose composed in the same way. “The book has several the nature of language; the nature of meaning; the destruction of the earth as we have known it, occurring side by side with the evident persistence of poetry and meaning. And the book has an agenda connected to these themes. That agenda is learning to read and understand a few significant examples of Native American oral works preserved often by accident, often in damaged form, which have, I think, a lot to teach us all. “In cultures that have writing, the usual way of capturing oral literature is to write it down and put it in a book. We’ve done that with the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Beowulf; we do it now with the works of Cree and Crow and Haida storytellers, phonetically transcribed in the past century and a half. It makes good sense to me that a book about oral literature should be spoken before it is written, and written to be spoken, not just read.”

Genres: Poetry, Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Language, Nature, Design

Hardcover

About the author

Robert Bringhurst is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He is the author of The Elements of Typographic Style – a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type. He has also translated works of epic poetry from Haida mythology into English.

He lives on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, British Columbia (approximately 170 km northwest of Vancouver).

Reviews

[Kathleen Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Story as Sharp as a Knife was the first book of Robert Bringhurst’s that I read and I found it so interesting I began to look around for others. The Tree of Meaning is a collection of essays, which were given as lectures on the subjects of language, mind and ecology. Margaret Atwood wrote that ‘it’s one of those works that rearranges the inside of your head - a profound mediation on the nature of oral poetry and myth, and on the habits of thought and feeling that inform them.’ It’s also about how we use language to make sense of the world, and how we can learn the language of the universe and develop a sustainable relationship with it.

Robert Bringhurst is known for his work on the mythology and literature of the Haida nation. When challenged about why he spends so much time learning and researching ‘extinct’ languages, he responds that they are of great practical value to us. ‘They are the legacy, after all, of peoples who knew how to live in this land for thousands of years without wrecking it.’

Like fossils in rock, these languages tell us a lot about ourselves as well as the people who used them and are a cautionary tale for the present. ‘A language is a life-form, like a species of plant or animal. Once extinct, it is gone forever. And as each one dies, the intellectual gene pool of the human species shrinks.’ We lose knowledge that can’t be replaced; we lose diversity and progress further and further towards monoculture. ‘The structure of meaning,’ Bringhurst asserts, ‘is polyphonic’ - the more voices we lose, the nearer we get to monotony. A culture is an ecosystem - ‘the community we create for one another’ that enables us to function as a human organism.

He refers to the colonial policies that have led to the mass extinction of languages and cultures. Bringhurst thinks that the greatest danger to the planet is ‘those who think the world belongs to them’ rather than those who think they belong to the world. Cultures are still being wiped out and Bringhurst cites the recent Bosnian war ‘where a tradition of oral, epic poetry survived from Homer’s time ....... now, at this moment, the villages in which those poets lived are rubble and mass graves.’

He homes in on our increasing numbers and the flawed logic of consumerism - ‘endlessly increasing material wealth for an endlessly increasing number of humans is a suicidal dream’. I have to agree with him, particularly when he identifies the moment it all went wrong - the moment when commerce changed from a public service meeting the needs of the community, to a predator, creating needs and strengthening demands ‘turning them into addictions which cause material goods to turn into drugs’. He doesn’t claim to have answers, but he asks questions and thinks around them in an intelligent way.

But he’s best on language and poetry. All language, he reminds us, is metaphor - standing in for the thing itself. What makes a poem? In poetry ‘it is not the text that counts. However remarkable this text may be, its poetic quality depends on its author having known how to keep alive in it the light of what is beyond language.’ And he’s very good on metaphor. ‘In every tuneful metaphor, an interval is sounded. It is heard in the mind’s eye, or the mind’s ear ..... Two disjunct constituents of reality are evoked, on top of one another, like two bells rung at once. The interval is the simultaneous consonance and difference between them.’

Simone Weil wrote that the purpose of works of art ‘is to testify, after the fashion of blossoming apple trees and stars.’ Poetry, Bringhurst adds, ‘is the thinking of things’. Though this resonates with me at an emotional level, I’m not entirely sure what he means by it in plain words. It made me think of Rilke’s lines from the Duino Elegies:

Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, -
possibly: Pillar, Tower?... but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be.

A tree has its own truth, a plant or a rock, or a star - anything we say about them can only be at second hand - though as a writer I try to get as close as I can to Rilke’s intense ‘saying’. Stories and poems grow like trees from the roots of our language - as human beings we seem to need them. These are what Robert Bringhurst calls the ‘trees of meaning’, trees that embody the whole history of our culture and take their place in the forest of cultures that have grown during the lifetime of human existence on the planet. Every tree that is cut down impoverishes our literature and our lives.

According to Bringhurst, the original text is the world itself, a text that we, in our urban, consumer-driven citadels, are increasingly unable to interpret, even as our scientific knowledge of it grows. The general message of the book is that if we don’t see ourselves as part of the ecology - the forest - of the whole planet, if we continue to exterminate other cultures and species instead of cultivating diversity, we won’t survive, and our stories and mythologies will die with us.

It’s absolutely true, but I can’t help believing that somewhere, somehow, a small group of humans will survive the catastrophe and become feral and their language too will escape into the wild, throw down new roots and grow new branches. I can’t imagine what it will look like, but on one of the twigs there just might be the story of a man and a woman, a utopia, and a fruit that gave forbidden knowledge and brought expulsion, destruction and ruin.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not quite done yet, but it can't really un-five-star itself at this point. Remarkable essays of the "I knew that in my heart/mind but I'm glad someone else said it precisely and effectively" variety.

[J.S. Graustein · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book written by a thinker about thinkers for thinkers. I could read this collection of Bringhurst's essays seven times in a row and still not absorb everything in it. His gentle challenges to change my perspectives on language, culture, and the natural world were simultaneously maddening and thrilling. But even with only a surface understanding of the philosophy presented in this book, my view of the living dictionary that is my back meadow has changed forever.

[Arnoldo Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just read an essay by Robert Bringhurst (The Solid Form of Language) then found this book. Very rarely do I read European American (or white) poets or writers. Bringhurst is an exception. He's a poet, linguist and typographer, in other words he seems to embody a creative approach to the text. I plan on writing a review of his work in my blogs when I am done.

[Magdelanye · Rating 5 out of 5]

the great danger is single-mindedness: reducing things to one perspective, one idea, one over-riding rule. p41

From reading his powerful contributions to the wonderful collection of essays Thinking & Singing put together by Tim Lilburn I knew I had to read more. This book has both satisfied and stimulated my interest in this lucid, erudite man and what he has to say.

That the book itself is gorgeous and a pleasure to handle should come as no surprise, given RB's involvement with typographic design. In fact he had a hand in the design of this book and has furthermore written a reference book of typefaces, glyphs and the visual and geometric arrangement of type. The Elements of Typographic Style. Not only this, the man is an impressive linguist and has books include translations of Haida poetry and mythology with his insightful commentary;A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World a biography of the artist Bill Reid; The Black Canoe: Bill Reid And The Spirit Of Haida Gwaii and a companion volume to this one, Everywhere Being Is Dancing. I will be able to spend a few years exploring them, may I be so blessed.

[Nick]

On the pro side of this book, Bringhurst is a stunning, thought-provoking, and persuasive writer. But on the con side I can't help but see some of his essays as basically unscientific and lacking rigor. You're not going to win hearts and sell books with analytic writing, but you're not going to find truth without it. And in this title Bringhurst seems more intent on making his points, than treating his philosophy as a hypothesis to be studied.

He also seems to be unfair to European culture, and a little starry eyed toward Native culture. It's definitely commendable to try to humanize an oppressed people, and see the beauty of their culture. But if we're going to humanize the Indigenous we need to forego the 'Noble Savage' concept, and accept that conquest and violence was present in their way of life just as it was in Europes. Natives weren't a purely good people, and Europeans weren't purely bad. This is overly simplistic, dichotomous thinking.

[Lawrence Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

These collected talks by Canadian poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst bring together his insights into art and literature, language, meaning, wilderness and natural history. If you like that kind of thing, dig in!

[Will Waller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really don't know what this book is about. It's a history of language and the construct of meaning. It's quite too heady for me to make sense of. Maybe you can, but I struggled.

[Anna J · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing is not a strong enough term. Bringhurst's prose is dull and uninspired. He can't seem to stop humble-bragging and name-dropping. His is a book of the past. We have moved beyond the need for such perspectives. He is insufferable, truly, although he has no idea and never will. An elitist parading as a socialist hero.

[Wren Wagenbach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these really spoke to me tbh. They said “hello, listen to us” and i said “ok”

[Laura Weldon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. Thick going in some spots but worth it. Here's a passage from early in the book.

"In pagan stories around the world, there is usually no original sin; human beings as a species are not guilty. Neither are they perfect, and there is no final judgement. There is death and resurrection or reincarnation, but it happens every day, through making love, bearing children, telling stories, killing animals, eating their flesh, wearing their clothes, and leaving animals enough, and fish enough, and trees enough, that they will be here next year and the next and the next without end. There is, I think, an implicit understanding in these stories that you must eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, a little every day, and that you can eat from the fruit day after day, but what you mustn't do is cut down the tree or sell the ground on which it grows."

[Elizabeth]

A wise book - a book guided by long thought. Because it's thirteen talks, themes and ideas repeat themselves through the book, but that makes it more of a conversation. This is a prod to read more deeply into American poetry, and by that I mean the few examples of well-translated Native American epics.

[Rogayeh · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book talks to me... the words are Humane

[kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

liked the end better than the beginning few essays but also enjoyed more once i started reading that wole soyinka book. cool.