The felled tree: decoding the destruction

The deliberate felling of an iconic tree is a story that author Theodore Brun had heard somewhere before, prompting him to explore the reactions to it further.

Theodore Brun

Theodore is author of the historical fiction series The Wanderer Chronicles.

A felled decidious tree lies sprawled on the ground. The freshly sawn stump and roots are in the foreground

The stump of the felled sycamore tree.

Wandering wounder, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

News of the felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree was greeted across the country with shock, sadness and disgust. Shock at the wanton vandalism; sadness at the loss of an iconic feature of our British Isles; disgust at the kind of nihilism it must have taken in the mind of whoever did the deed. Predictably social media blew up. I blew up with it. This was ‘our’ tree - held which such affection by those of us who knew it across the nation as to be almost sacred. The spiteful disregard for that affection felt truly shocking.

The most natural reaction to this is anger. “Throw the book at whoever did it!’ was the general feeling - whether it was the 16-year-old boy first arrested or the 60-year-old man detained later. No motive could justify such a mindless act.

But then came the double shock for me. A jarring recollection that it was the story of the felling of another great tree that had been the seed of inspiration from which grew my entire historical fiction series, The Wanderer Chronicles. And in that story, the man doing the felling seemed to me something of a hero. The tree in question was a mighty oak, dedicated to Donar (better known as Thor) the god of thunder, which once stood in the province of Hesse in central Germany. In the early 8th century, an English missionary, known to history as St Boniface, took an axe to Donar’s Oak, a sacred place of worship to the local pagan inhabitants, even as a large crowd of them stood by raining curses on his head. Boniface would have justified his act of vandalism on religious grounds: the tree was the site of horrific human sacrifice and rituals of witchcraft, and must be destroyed, in part to prove the impotence of this pagan god.

Shocking as his act must have been, Boniface’s aim was not to offend. It was to overthrow. To overthrow a system of religious and spiritual oppression. A system of cruelty, death and bondage. In a sense, it was an act of expulsion of false gods who demanded everything and promised nothing in return. That would have been his justification, at least. And in its place, he intended to plant a new culture of faith, freedom and forgiveness; of truth and love. It’s telling that he used the timber from the fallen oak to build a church.

The event marked the beginning of the widespread destruction of many sacred groves and other places of pagan worship in the decades that followed, symbolic of the supplanting of one pre-existing culture by another, more powerful culture on the rise.

So, can Boniface’s good intentions be distinguished from the apparently nihilistic felling of the Sycamore Gap Tree in our own day? I think they can. But no doubt many would disagree.

After all, these days, we find the idea of one culture asserting itself over another almost as abhorrent as the human sacrifice Boniface was trying to suppress. Certainly, to post-modern sensibilities and values, religious motivations no longer justify any kind of cultural vandalism. Few would have much sympathy for the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. Nor for the deliberate arson attacks in the mid-nineties on over fifty churches in Norway by neo-pagan Black Metal bands. Even today, the demolition of a Palestinian mosque by Israeli shells as an act of retaliation attracts media opprobrium, no matter the human death toll that provoked it.

So, is there any good for which vandalism may be justified?

In a world and culture that feel ever more divided, perhaps the Sycamore Gap Tree, even in its destruction, can give us some hope, some fleeting moment of cultural unity.

The protest actions of environmental groups like Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion fall into that vein, and strongly divide opinion. They proclaim a new gospel of environmentalism. Turn around, mend your ways, and be saved. (Although is it really just an old message of paganism: Appease the gods of sun and thunder or else face oblivion?) In any case, it’s a message burning with no less zeal than did old Boniface’s. And while they may not agree with their methods, many would at least agree with their cause and motive. The question is: how far can you stretch a point?

The fact is that there is much that we do not agree on. Borders, taxation, healthcare, education, marriage, sex and gender, even what constitutes a human life. Cultural divisions seem to grow only wider. Increasing mistrust has us standing in opposition to one another - vitriol and disdain filling the space between us. Two tribes in a stand-off. Rather like the two hills that form the gap where that beautiful tree stood until last week. The gap is empty now. The tree is what brought them together. The tree was what completed the whole scene. Without it, we see only the empty air between the two opposing hills.

In a world and culture that feel ever more divided, perhaps the Sycamore Gap Tree, even in its destruction, can give us some hope, some fleeting moment of cultural unity. Trees still represent to us an essential good. Their existence transcends the passage of our short lives. They stand through storm or shine. They sink their roots deep into the good earth. They stretch their limbs up to the skies. They are a metaphor for a life well lived.

The felling of this iconic and beautiful tree is a pang we can all feel, the more so because it seems to have been done as a naked act of vandalism with - so far - no justification offered. Maybe this then is its greatest legacy: that, rather than reaching for the easy emotions of anger and blame, we can transcend our differences for just a moment. And allow ourselves to be reminded that, more than we ever realised, we loved that old tree. And we shall miss it now it’s gone.

If we can all feel that, perhaps there’s hope for us yet.

The Sycamore Gap Tree as was.

A black and white photo show a single mature tree silhouetted in the gap between two hills..

Article

Art

Culture

Film & TV

21 January 2025

5 min read

The constant pull of David Lynch’s direction

What made the director’s films so universally resonant?

Sonny Tindall

Sonny works creatively with videography, graphic design, fashion, and photography.

Lynch painting.

At the age of 16, initially wanting to experience the infamous performances of actors, John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins, I decided to watch The Elephant Man (1980). This was the film that opened up the weird and wonderful world of director, David Lynch, a world I immediately wanted to dive headfirst into.

I did so by watching the film that became the catalyst for world-renowned director and producer, Mel Brooks, offering Lynch the chance to direct The Elephant Man. The film in question? His very first, Eraserhead (1977).

It was, and remains to this day, the most singular cinematic experience of my life.

I’m of the opinion that almost all filmmakers fall in to one of two categories; those who become artists through the medium of filmmaking, and those who are already artists who choose the vehicle of filmmaking to create their art. David Lynch is, for me at least, the ultimate embodiment of the latter. Proof of such can be found in his status as a renaissance man.

Originally a painter, a practice he continued throughout his life, his desire to transition to making films was borne out of wanting to see his paintings move. He was also an actor, a musician, and sound designer. Not to mention, a furniture designer who regularly built props for his films, author of several books and designer of his very own comic book.

The television show, Twin Peaks, is perhaps the best example of just how impossible it was to bind Lynch to a single artistic form. The seminal TV show revolutionised what television could be, as it was the first show to stray from the episodic storytelling format, instead choosing to follow one continual storyline through an entire series.

David Lynch exists within an exclusive category of artists, those whose names have become an adjective. Lynchian, similar to Kafkaesque, Brechtian or Daliesque, is recognised as an official word in the Oxford dictionary. An eponymous adjective is an honour reserved for only the most unique and distinct of artists.

Although it could be argued that the term – Lynchian - is now too loosely applied to anything deemed to be somewhat counter-cultural within mainstream cinema, its true meaning relates to the often indefinable style and voice of the man himself.

He invoked the spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

I’ve come to think that it’s the ultimately the spiritual essence of Lynch’s films that make them truly unique, and him a worthy recipient of an eponymous adjective. Lynch’s films exist within their own world, frequently reminiscent of a dream.

Sometimes euphoric, often a nightmare.

He was an avid practitioner and advocate of transcendental meditation, so it’s perhaps not too surprising that when speaking on his creative process, Lynch attributed many of his creative ideas as emerging from his own subconscious through the practices of meditation and daydreaming. He’s often compared ideas to the act of fishing, they aren’t created, they already exist, you’ve just got to have the right bait to catch them.

I wonder if this process is what makes the worlds housed within Lynch’s films unlike any others. He invites us into his own subconscious, by allowing it to bleed out onto the screen.

Despite his allusivity in style and format, what I’ve always found most confounding about David Lynch’s work is its universality.

I feel as though the term ‘fringe artist’ has scarcely been better applied to anyone other than Lynch.

How has a man who’s created some of the boldest, most avant-garde and, at times, downright disturbing art of the last century picked up four Oscar nominations (and an honorary win), a Masterclass and a Disney movie (The Straight Story)?

Surely translating your own subconscious, something we view as idiomatic to each individual person, onto the screen is a guaranteed recipe for alienating your audience?

So why does Lynch’s work, instead of pushing us away, so consistently pull us in?

I could pontificate on the different potential techniques Lynch employed to keep his work just grounded enough to allow us to relate to it. His films being rooted in instantly recognisable symbols of Americana, for example. Or perhaps his deployment of easily digestible genres and conventions, Twin Peaks is a melodramatic murder mystery TV show, Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are, at their core, noir films and even Wild at Heart (1990) is a textbook road movie.

But Lynch’s work has taught me to dig far deeper than that.

He invoked spiritual depths of us, the existential longings and cravings, the questions that seem intrinsic to the human condition, the wonderings that feel as though they originate from somewhere deep within us, our souls, perhaps.

That, for me at least, is the answer to his universality.

But how did he do it?

As has already been mentioned, it’s by mining his own subconscious and the spiritual within himself, and allowing it to flow into the worlds he created. But, most importantly, he never definitively characterised these things, he simply let them exist, depicted them. His work doesn’t come to us with the answers, it comes to us with questions. David Lynch’s questions: questions about the world. Questions about himself.

The very same questions we all ask ourselves on a daily basis: is evil within us or is it the product of what is around us? How can we allow light to prevail over darkness?

His work allows us to sit, ruminate, and respond to those questions.

I didn’t anticipate how profound of an effect David Lynch’s passing would have on me. It’s undoubtedly the strongest feeling of loss and grief I’ve felt from the passing of someone in the public sphere.

So deep were my feelings that I felt I needed to process it through the writing of this piece.

And despite the myriad of feelings and thoughts that have been swirling around my head since originally reading the news headline, I find myself continually returning to the very first thought I had. It was a quote from American comedian, Theo Von. When mourning the death of fellow comedian, Norm Macdonald, Theo said,

‘It feels like you’re losing a book that nobody has copies of.’

I feel despair that I’ll never be able to see the world through David Lynch’s eyes again. But I find great comfort that he, through his art, has passed his vision onto us, ensuring that we’ll always be able to see the Lynchian in our world.