Arborified

Abstract

Arborified TESSA RANSFORD Julia told me she worshipped trees. We were walking through Harvard Yard under the spreading elms on the way back from the Widener Library to her tiny apartment on Massachusetts Avenue. It was October 1981 and I was staying with Julia, having met her in Scotland only a few months earlier, when she was visiting her friend Dr. Emily Lyle at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh’s George Square. Hence the title.* Baum is “tree” in German while Flora, flower, is the goddess of spring and desire, with her gardens, five gardens, like the star at the heart of an apple, or the fifth constituting that which subsumes the other four: “the fifth, the final garden is the garden of the whole,” writes Julia in her introduction. The five books, bound with green linen covers and gold lettering on the spines, are poem-gardens. Though numbered, they were not written and do not need to be read sequentially. Time is kairos, the now-time, spiralling and patterned. “The subject of the poem is desire,” wrote Julia in 1991 in “Query Re One’s Work,” a short essay on her work. “The poem itself is desired,” and she quotes Rilke (also a poet of gardens and trees): “Ach die Gärten bist du, / ach ich sah sie mit solcher / Hoffnung.” Book one is centered around the Tree of Life and book five around the Tree of Knowledge. In between are the books of Beauty, Truth and Goodness. *Julia Budenz, The Gardens of Flora Baum (Chelmsford, Massachusetts : Carpathia Press, 2011). Five volumes, 2,254 pages, hardcover , $175. Book One, By the Tree of Life; Book Two, Towards a Greek Garden; Book Three, Rome; Book Four, Towards Farthest Thule; Book Five, By the Tree of Knowledge. arion 20.2 fall 2012 Born on May 23, 1934 in New York City, Julia died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 11, 2010, her work almost finished, most of it digitized and proofed for final publication, then posthumously edited by Emily Lyle. Her life was her work, and it is strangely impossible to imagine her living after it was finished. Julia was nine years an Ursuline nun before leaving to study and then to write. The habits of perfection and devotion were not cast aside. She joined the convent after graduating and took a further degree , beginning to teach classics while still with the Ursulines . After leaving the convent in 1966, Julia took a degree in comparative literature (Greek, Latin, and English) at Harvard , before turning to creative work in the light of her scholarship and vision. I first encountered Julia’s work in the form of the poem “The Lay of The Last Monk” which begins book four, written mostly in Scotland and described by her as the book of “the good” which “blooms with human relations.” I read it in Edinburgh in Duncan Glen’s magazine, Akros (vol. 12, no. 36), in 1977. Nature, passion, intellect, life-fire are in every line. The ruined Cistercian Abbey in Melrose spreads beside the River Tweed at the foot of the three fairy Eildon Hills, where Julia has Anthea, a moon-goddess, meeting an inquisitive monk in what is an echo of Thomas the Rhymer’s encounter and sojourn with the Queene of Faerie. And the poem closes with tranquil beauty: Honey columns of stone rise on the slope In the rose of dawn. White silence and rainbow song Alternate in the air. A swan from the north Shakes his cold wings by the laurel in the southern sun. Walls are down. Paths are radiant. The death of Julia’s mother in 2002 occasioned an entry in The Diary of Flora Baum, a long sequence covering many years, which concludes book four. Julia’s father—when she was eleven years old, an age for the onset of discriminaarborified 156 tion—was dramatically converted from being a staunch Communist to Roman Catholicism. For Epiphany 2004, we have a sense of the transfigurative experience of taking vows: The marriage, the chapel, the chant, the Latin, The candle, the banquet, the sacrifice were facts Acting, dazzling, entrancing together . . . Ending with: The heart’s Latin lasts forever...