The Greek Tree

I come back to the tree whenever I feel like I’ve lost something. It’s always there, untouched, and from its branches hang persistently preserved memories. I can reach up and grab each one, look through its foggy glass and peer in to search, even if I don’t know what I’m searching for, because that’s just how it is with all that inner-searching bullshit. Sometimes I don’t need anything more than the tree itself to find whatever it is. It’s strange because that tree doesn’t exist anymore, not in the ground where it once stood. It exists here, though. It might always exist here, so long as I don’t forget it. 

In my last year of high school, when my parents finally got me an English tutor, I made this place. The pressure of Extension 2 and the overwhelming influence of English on my ATAR encouraged me to seek some guidance. I was always great at creative writing - the fictional kind¹- and I don’t mind being considered conceited for saying so because it's the truth. However, essays always served as irksome vines I had to chop through before exploring the rainforest hidden behind. 

I’m a shit essay writer. So, I got a tutor. Margaret was² (and still is) our neighbour and a friend of my mother. She was on the older side, with just one daughter still at home, who was about my age. It was a brief five or so-minute walk from my place to Margaret’s, though most of that time was spent braving the irritatingly busy and crosswalk-less road that separated us. Sometimes I’d be forced to wait for several minutes or else have my guts splattered all over the concrete just for some English tutoring³.

Margaret was notably a feminist and had kicked her good-for-nothing husband out years prior. She was obsessed with all things Grecian. 

Proof: 

• She was doing her PhD on women in Greek Mythology. 

• At her dining table where we’d sit, she had a huge bookshelf full of Aristotle, the Odyssey, and everything concerning Greek mythology. 

• The time I was studying Homer in Extension 1. It was the most engaged I ever saw her.

• She considered Aristotle's lost works an enormous tragedy, particularly his work on rhetoric in comedy. I guess we’ll never know if he was funny or not. 

• Whenever she wanted to teach me something, she’d find a way to explain it with the help of a myth.

One of our first lessons centred around the foundational Ancient Greek idea of memory palaces - a technique for memorisation also known as the method of loci. Essentially, you picture a familiar physical environment, like your home street, and store information there to recall later by retracing your steps. For example – and this is a true example⁴ – you walk up your street into your house and enter your bedroom where a giant bright lime-coloured frog sits on your bed. As it opens its mouth it croaks out that STEEL paragraph you tucked away for the next exam. 

What was so helpful about memory palaces to my English grades, anyway? Was learning a complex and ancient memorisation technique worth the trouble for a few quotes and STEEL paragraphs? It wasn’t apparent to me at the time, but the impact shined through my writing. Not just my essays, but my stories too. It had restructured the very way I think, so the shape of my writing underwent a bit of a metamorphosis. The structure of my stories became grounded by an idea, sprouting smaller ideas that occasionally branched off from the centre. A bit like a tree.

While it’s the environment my tutor suggested to me, I didn’t see the point in storing valuable information in my home street. My family are renters and have been for a long time, so it's not a secure spot to keep things. One day, I’ll move from this street or this city, this country, this hemisphere. Then I’ll have a new home street and I’ll have to move everything from my old mind palace over. So I picked something less fickle and susceptible to change; a childhood memory. 

I went to a huge daycare, with kids from early childhood to preschool-age. The daycare separated the children by age group, and naturally, my memories from the earlier stages have faded. I remember a sleepless naptime, laying on a cot in silence until I could get up again⁵, but that’s about it. The preschool was leagues better, larger, at least I thought so at the time. At the centre of it (though it wasn’t really in the centre, it was near the back of the playground) was a ginormous tree. It absolutely towered over everything, webbed branches blanketing the surrounding area from the sky. 

Around the tree was the bike path. We had these bikes, they were red and operated by sitting in a large, close-to-the-ground seat and pushing the pedals ever-so-lightly with our tiny feet. It felt fast, regardless of its child-friendly design. From the low vantage point of the bike as you circled the tree, it felt domineering, but not unapproachable. It had a cavity in its centre, and you could fit at least one child in there comfortably. I’ve never been a tree climber, but this was easily reachable, and once you were in, you were inside the heart of the tree, and the heart of the daycare. 

I use this place because it’s a bit more fixed. The faded memories make it easier to traverse. The air in this place is quiet. The real place was full of noisy, snotty-nosed children, laughing and screaming and bickering. ⁶But it’s not like that inside my memory palace. In my memory palace, I’m the only one really there, everyone else is a light smog in my peripheral, a smudge on the edge of my glasses lens that I haven’t bothered to wipe away. The faces of the other kids are gone, only snapshots of moments, unimportant. I peacefully push that pedal bike around the big tree. 

I typically imagine it’s a muggy day – I find days of unpleasant weather the most memorable, dirt reduced to slosh slotting into the soles of my shoes and sometimes climbing up my little legs. I’m there – kid me – sitting alone in the sandpit and drawing whatever comes to mind using a brittle stick. I’m there too – me now – standing outside the sandpit so I don’t get sandy. Being sandy didn’t matter to me back then, hell, I used to eat a little sand from time to time. I’m certainly not as friendly with sand nowadays. 

He’s how I remember myself though, even if we’re so different by comparison. As he looks up at me with uninterested eyes, still digging that stick into the sand, it’s almost enough to bring me back to childhood. I see him and remember sitting in a circle as a carer challenged us to rub our stomachs and pat our heads at the same time. I remember a man coming to re-paint the bathrooms and pretending to agree to our request for him to paint intricate cartoon care bears on the wall. 

That being said, I don’t think his presence here is too important. I don’t believe you can ‘lose yourself’ over time, because you’re always going to be you. And even if you’re putting up a front, like high schoolers trying to look cool, you’re still you. Sometimes though, people actually do become the front that they put up. You see that sort of thing all the time in musicals. A few examples: 

In these musicals, there’s always a reversal, the ‘squip’ turns out to be evil and Michael saves the day with limited edition Mountain Dew, the two friends reuniting. Evan reconciles with his mother and friends and the bully’s family somehow forgives him for his lie (they shouldn’t have). Veronica kills the leader Heather along with a couple of others, watches her boyfriend blow himself up, and makes-up with her best friend. It’s often framed a bit like the person re-discovered themselves, disillusioned from whatever fantasy they’d let run amuck. Yet they’re always different people by the end anyway, so I wouldn't say they ‘found themselves’ again. 

Anyway, the tree is by far the most significant and useful thing in my mind. I use it to visit different places in my memory. I follow a branch, climbing higher than I ever could as a child. The reason I never climbed trees was because I could only see myself falling. The imagined sound of my back making impact with the ground would play over in my head with every touch of the bark. But that’s not an issue here. Once you climb high enough, you can peer down and observe the whole daycare, a swingset never unused, and the kids peddling below you. Cycling around the yard, they almost resemble vultures – but if I’m the one stalking above them, aren’t I the vulture? 

My least favourite English Advanced Module was Module A; Textual Conversations. I had to study a poet who was only famous because he said he’d die unfamous and unrecognised, and then he did indeed die that way. Even his tombstone was bitter, it reads: 

“Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” - John Keats (1821), single and broke. 

What a huge sulk. I often used my memory palace when I needed to recall Keats' quotes. I would follow a branch to my childhood home, a small two-bedroom apartment that housed my family of four. I keep the quotes in something I remember: a recipe for Pikelets that my mother used to make, pinned to the fridge by a cat-shaped magnet. As a result, it’s become a monstrous mix of quotes and instructions that prevent me from ever remembering the recipe in full.

⁸

There’s decay here. Trees don’t live forever. It’s not like it’s going to wither away to dust, since that’s not how I remember it. But even in my own mind I can’t help but force things to trudge against the tide, like a tourist swimming against the Aussie current. Like someone who overestimated their ability and is swimming outside the flags. I prefer to, yes, but I’m a strong swimmer.⁹ I’ve always liked that feeling of control when in water, but like a bull tamer and a bull; if you can’t tame it, it’ll control you instead. The tree is a strong swimmer, too, but that’s not always enough. When the tide gets angrier, and the waves higher, what are you supposed to do? My desire for change is stronger than my desire for nostalgia. 

Sometimes, when I climb a branch to visit somewhere, the branch snaps under my weight and, while I don’t fall, the branch shatters into scattered glass on the ground below. The children ride their peddle bikes over the fragments, mushing them into nothing, and then that's it for that section of the memory palace – I can only hope I didn’t store anything important there. It’s probably for the best this way – hoarding runs in the family¹⁰. Besides, if the branch was weak enough to break, it probably wasn’t all that important anymore. 

Margaret probably would have compared it to the crumbling of Ancient Greek architecture – a tragedy, but a part of history. I mean, for all we know, Aristotle’s book on the rhetoric of comedy was total shit, so it being lost to history may be preserving his reputation. The tree, my own Parthenon, slowly wastes away under the winds of time. The rain here speeds its erosion. Long cracks form in the bark of the tree. Yet it still preserves the history embedded in it through the sheer act of existence. That’s what the Parthenon does for the Ancient Greeks. It says "We were here." That's what my tree does for me. It says "You are here." 

¹ This is a nod to my dislike of non-fiction. Something I dislike almost as much as hypocrisy.

² It feels more natural to say ‘was’ because I haven’t spoken to her in quite some time. 

³ I knew a girl in high school who got hit by a car crossing the same street on two different occasions. She was fine on both occasions. She stole my bread during Year 7 camp. I don’t mind that she got hit. 

⁴ As in this is a true example of how I’ve used memory palaces. The frog was put in there by Margaret. I added the STEEL paragraph. Despite Ashfield being built on a swamp, I’ve never seen a frog around.

⁵ You try sleeping in one of those cots and see how well you sleep.

⁶ I am not fond of children. That’s why I became an English tutor myself. To take joy away from them. 

⁷ There is a semi-popular ship between Evan and his dead bully. The ship name is ‘Treebros.’

⁸ See what I’ve done here? Hermit crab essay. Margaret taught me these.

⁹ I actually didn’t learn to swim until a bit later in life but was so naturally good at treading water (an impressive skill, I know) that I was pushed into water-polo.

¹⁰ So does pyromania. My grandmother set fire to a national park when she was younger.