The Pine-Woods Notebook

Following the traces of the trail blazed by Francis Ponge in Le Carnet du bois de pins (1947), THE PINE-WOODS NOTEBOOK offers a simultaneous study of two environments. It documents the ecologies of two particular stands of conifers (one in the Wasatch front of the Rockies' western edge, the other in the coastal Cascades of the Pacific Northwest); at the same time, it investigates the linguistic environment at the intersection of the words pitch and pine in all of their denotations. An essay built from densely patterned sentences, THE PINE-WOODS NOTEBOOK records the surprising resonance of chance lexical encounters and argues for the inextricable interweaving of the phenomenology of the conifer (its shape, scent, and cool darkness--as well as the distinctive sound of the wind in its branches) together with the vitality of its fluid sap and disseminating reproductive processes. Both the distinctive scent and coolness of a pine grove, for example, turn out (according to recent scientific studies) to be consequences of the same chemical process, in which uniquely structured molecular chains form as the trees 'exhale.' Similarly, the emotive 'sigh' of the wind in the pine--recurrently regarded, across cultures and centuries, as the most beautiful of natural sounds--can be heard as sexual reproduction made audible, since the pine depends on the wind (rather than insects or birds) for pollination. Here, the erotic longing of pining meets the affective reflex of breath as they articulate the branching of the signifier.