Windthrow

Returning from Italy and L.A. to Oahu, I drove from the airport through the rainforest along H3, an elevated highway forty feet above the jungle. You can look directly into the depths of an environment in the Ko’olau Forest Preserve that is the cradle of humanity, the kind of primal forest where islands develop. An old road runs down below the elevated highway, where Hawaiians trek to hunt da pig. It’s not necessarily a friendly place, crawling with centipedes and spiders.

But it’s gorgeous, its vines, roots, branches, gingers, heliconia, monkeypod, liana climbing sixty feet against the fluted mountains, and down in the understory woven into a braid as tight as the synapses of the brain itself.

This is the island’s brain, downed wood in various stages of decay which create in fact a healthy fungal ecosystem, a support system for creating oxygen, whose complex green surfaces all have different ways of turning sunlight into nutrients for the island.

Edaphology studies the influence of soil on living things, and here the root hairs of palms, epiphytes and bromeliads form a root mass, a carpet where the planet communicates as efficiently as space does through the cosmic web, the energy grid, the plasma filaments which convey electric pulses much faster than the speed of light, connecting the universe to itself instantaneously.

Oceans share a similar network of winds and currents; they are a giant brain whose tentacles listen to one another and react across immense and powerful seiches which sometimes roll as one mass.

Windstorms uproot weak trees from the soil matrix, where a fungal lattice forms an equally interlinked blanket of sensations. There are pits where the trunks used to be, until the forest floor uprooted with the tree falls back on the ground as the trunk decays, creating a mound. The buttresses, runnels, flutes of the mountains are completely carpeted in ferns, trees, and shrubs, but the flat ground is here and there roiled with the topography of pits and mounds.

Craquelure is a similar trellis of veins in the surface of old European oil paintings, a crack morphology where capillary forces in the gesso and tempura of paintings delineate the authenticity of, for example, the great Italian masters like Giotto or da Vinci, similar to the interstitial mesh underlying our own skin, an interconnected, fluid-filled lattice of strong collagen and elastin bundles which acupressure utilizes to heal one part of the body from a seemingly disconnected and distant spot.

I wanted to mix up the cracks of craquelure on Simone Martini murals in Siena with the primal meshes of the tropics, as I was filled with emotions from our rapid transition between both climates. All these networks are wefts through which our planet talks to itself.

Having lived in rainforests in Thailand while recording the sound of vampire bats at night, having broken trails through dense undergrowth on a property we owned against the mountains in Kahalu’u, where we had old mango groves, overgrown heiau sites, flashflood riverbeds, koas strangled by liana vines, I was overwhelmed with the complexity of the forest weave that makes up the skin of the land on all the Hawaiian islands.

I am a great fan of the manicured forests of Fontainebleau, the wild jungles of Cambodia and Sri Lanka, the royal jungle preserves of Nepal, and I thought I would write a poem to their matrices, their snarls and circuitries. I see it as an ode to the tropics, where Cathy and I have spent so much of our lives, and whose exotic depths I explored when I was young. I wanted an explosion of words, like the profusion, the overgrowth of the jungle, the confusion of cracks in old oil paintings.