The nun in her habit// sang inside the pomegranate.

‘Waltz in the Branches’ by Frederico Garcia Lorca from Poet in New York (1940)

I am spending more and more time with trees for this reason: I am trying to get back to that first encounter when green chlorophyll was suddenly torn through with sunlight above my head in the garden: a green curtain filling up with light looking down on me. Like that famous ceiling fresco by Andrea Mantegna Camera degli Sposi (1465-) where chubby cherubs and peacocks and aristocratic ladies resembling Jesus or the saints look down from their big blue eye in the sky. Ceiling oculus it’s called: a ceiling-sky that looks back.

Perhaps it was the beginning of knowing — that memory of me lying beneath the apple tree in the garden — that someone else is watching you: other forms of life. This happened when I first read The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. I was five and the world of Moonface and Silky and Saucepan Man suddenly appeared on my conscious horizon: creatures with curvy faces built around circles and rims (think of a moon, think of a spoon, think of silk spools turning). For weeks or months I was spending all my time in the sky.

Blue and green spill out from rims: the edge of the sky in that Mantegna painting is a huge ceiling-circle you have to crane your neck to look up at. Generations of brides and grooms lying in the bridal chamber in the ducal palace at Mantua spent their whole time gazing at the ceiling. Distracted from their purpose. As a viewer you must be prone, as you must be to imagine Blyton’s faraway tree; to meet the beguiling curve of that world at the top of the branches looking down on you.

The line above is from the Spanish poet, Frederico Lorca’s poem, ‘Waltz in the Branches’. Lorca lodges us inside a set of branches and leaves us there with a most peculiar set of images. Here is a nun singing from inside a pomegranate. As a writer, it is often difficult to transport ourselves away from the empirical world; to pull ourselves from pure documentary towards that ambiguous and puzzling place lying somewhere between fact and fiction. It’s where I always want to land eventually, embedded inside an image that is confidently ludicrous is its own invention, its peculiar and untypical, nonsensical way of seeing things.

The nun’s habitat is the pomegranate and the pomegranate is attached to a tree. We are waltzing in the branches of a tree as we sit planted inside the most finicky of exotic fruits. A rather pointless fruit I’ve always thought. What do you get from it? Nothing but seeds and a bit of pulp. And a strange sense of being had by something that looks rather alluring on the outside and then—- seems to disappear when you try to enter in. Lorca’s nun is a knowing subject: she knows more than we do about what goes on inside the skin of pomegranates. Best accept the state of things. There is a dead woman in the branches above —

There is a dead lady

in the branch of the tree.

— and beneath, a girl reaching for the pinecone from the pine tree. At least that’s what I think she’s doing. Whatever, she seems very confident in her doing, and she is the ‘mine’ of the poet-speaker: his creation, his gift and behest, his creative confidence, which is far-reaching.

This girl of mine

reached the pinecone from the pine.

This post is for Rebecca Birrell, a brave foot soldier in the struggle to make art matter - not for money - but for quality of life.

‘The artist is the only hope in the world today, for we are all in the soup.’ (Mary Neal, suffragist, social worker, educational reformer)