Faron Talbot: Tree

When I tell you I’m becoming a tree, I don’t mean I’m becoming a comedy tree; not like John Cleese inside a cardboard trunk zigzagging towards you for humorous effect. Nor am I becoming a tree in the way children pretend to become trees between pretending to be aeroplanes or canoeists. I’m becoming a tree because I’ve had enough of being a Homo sapien, human being, man, middle-class Englishman. I’ve had enough of being a genius and I’ve had enough of being Faron Talbot.
At first I was only a tree at lunchtimes. There wasn’t a moment; an epiphany, I just parked by the nature reserve, trampled through mosses to a secluded spot and became a tree. Obviously not a real tree, I was still pretending back then. After a couple of visits I realised I couldn’t grow there, not in a place like that where man had lopped and interfered for the benefit of dog-walkers and school parties. I took different roads looking for the right sort of environment; abandoning city highways for country lanes.
The woodland I found was much better; sure there was evidence of replanting to bring back what chucked fag-ends and pyrotechnic teenagers had destroyed. But I found a spot where bracken tangles and ferns towered; where fires don’t start.
One day I stood there for half-an-hour, suspending as best I could the cluttered mechanisms of man. I did not need to pump blood to think – just had to circulate enough to be. Not needing to work bone or muscle for movement I stood as a tree stands, but not as a tree is. I could still see candyfloss clouds above the woodland canopy, smell the damp fungus and mosses on the floor, hear the twittering birds in branches and scratching insects around my feet. I scoffed at this attempt to join the ash and beech. But I’ll get there.

At nine–years-old I was diagnosed as a genius. Diagnosed as if it were an affliction, which in time it would prove to be. I had these genes which made me separate from most: “in the top 2%,” my parents told neighbours. I wanted to figure out how things work. I saw electric toys splutter and stop when the batteries ran out. Why? The battery interested me more than the toy so I found out how batteries work: cells and conductors, acids and currents. I mean it wasn’t exactly rocket science; though that’s easy to understand too. Consequently, by the time I left primary school the blue gas of Bunsen burners was about as challenging as rubbing sticks to make fire. By the third year at King George’s grant-maintained, I was at the blackboard practically teaching A-level chemistry to my class. I was a precocious, prodigious talent or, depending on your point of view, a pain in the arse.
After a while I became curious about how other things work. I spoke to my gran in Wales – on the phone. She’s there in Flint but I can hear her right here as if she were next to me. I understood the operation of objects; toy jeeps and the like, but the movement of a human voice from one place to another? I found out sound waves change into electrical waves by a carbon granule transmitter. Then there was television and video transferring not just a voice but people, places, whole continents. I wondered if you could transmit more, then I wondered if you could do more than just transmit. By the time I’d finished ‘A’ levels, lots of them all passed with top grades, I knew how everything worked. Except for one thing.

I began to feel comfortable in that deciduous patch. I was careful not to leave footprints on muddy days when I parked up to quickly eat lunch and become a tree. I left my rolled-up clothes by shrubbery and stood in my spot. Once I remember there was slight drizzle finding its way down through the canopy and a wind blowing leaves and detritus around the floor. I tried to close my eyes and ears, tried to avoid being aware of scuttling insect or singing bird; but that’s cheating. That’s not being a tree.
You can’t think about being a tree. You either are one or you’re not. I’m still not but making progress. That day a squirrel shot up my leg and my side stopping on my shoulder before leaping to a nearby branch. I didn’t see it, just felt my skin’s anomalous reaction.
I’d been there in the drizzle all afternoon; naked, scratched, bleeding when I ought to have been out on the road selling solutions. I cursed myself for even considering what I ought to have been doing. You can’t be a tree when you’re thinking.

I comfortably got into the best house at Oxford, cycling to and from academia’s musty halls and theatres to ingest their traditions and evidence. It was scarcely more than a finishing school for the cerebral. At least similar intellects surrounded me – even if their understanding of how things work extended little further than the pursuit of recognition. What they said, all of them, bored me. Why they said it interested me.
I knew how everything worked, except for people. I switched to biology and learned about systems: from nervous to endocrine. I discovered the batteries that power human beings, the 100 million million cells inside each of us, their spirals of DNA and chromosomes. I noted the similarity between us and that toy jeep I played with as a child. However, it didn’t explain the whole caboodle. For that I needed the brain; that big walnut which triggers everything from moon landings to murders. The hypothalamus controlling body functions struck me as a kind of battery, more lithium than mercury-cadmium I concede, but still a battery. Thankfully the amygdale where fear and anxiety begin reassured me an average electrician in partnership with a grave robber couldn’t produce a fairly accurate living human being.

When I say I want to be a tree I don’t mean I want to physically resemble a gnarled old oak or something. That would be silly. I don’t want to be composed of trunk, branches and twigs. I don’t want to be covered in bark or sprout leaves. And … I don’t even want to consider what my digestive system would be like if I had to rely on photosynthesis. No, I want to be a tree because a tree is; just is. Why not a bird you might ask: because they’re not that different from us. They’re governed by the same basic laws of survival: eat – avoid being eaten. Admittedly Homo sapien is a tad more sophisticated about it but we’re not too far apart; go brush up on your Darwin. A house brick then? Cold, hard repeated endlessly throughout town and city. I’ll tell you why not. Because if I wanted to be cold and hard and kept in my place I’d have repressed my genius and become just like the rest of you. No. It can only be a tree.

Back then I added psychology to biology. It helped me think of myself as less of a toy and more of a computer; capable of choice, but only within the restraints of societal pressures. At best artificial intelligence and don’t let the sci-fi brigade tell you otherwise.
I considered the cortex, that wrinkly layer in the brain that makes us think. You know if you took one out and rolled it flat it would be as big as a page from the Sunday Times. Funny that, considering the useful fraction of a cortex is the size of a cigarette paper.
I devised a series of experiments for myself. Comparative psychology has its uses but you can’t really compare a fruit bat to someone like me. The intention was to assess the degree to which I could filter out the unnecessary, those useless thoughts that drift into your consciousness on dull afternoons. Those thoughts of hope and fear, past and future, the responses to those who affect you taking the form of elaborate sexual or violent fantasy.
Religion supplied an unexpected key in the form of prayer. Of course it was essential to filter out God and make science the object of worship. I prayed to the Greek enquirers not the Spanish inquisitors, to Aristotle and Herophilus. Eventually I began to make my own God, naturally in my own image. I prayed to myself.

I’m spending more time in the wood. It’s starting to feel like home now I’ve put roots down. I don’t really like my apartment. I don’t like rooms anymore, not with their walls and ceilings, windows and doors. Please understand I’m not turning into one of those ‘back to nature’ types. I am nature. Some days I do become a tree. I stand for a minute without a thought crossing my mind, losing all sense of what I am. Try it for yourself. Don’t think of anything at all for a few seconds. By the way, counting away seconds in your head doesn’t count because you’re still thinking of something. Not easy is it? Well just imagine what it’s like for a genius.
I really am getting there; it’s of no consequence that I’m underneath a leafy canopy with streaks of sunlight dancing onto sweet violets and anemones, yellow spots bouncing off ivy and bramble. It’s of no consequence.

When I wasn’t being a God among the spires I studied, only sporadically but enough for first-class honours. After graduation I could easily have played the game, spent twenty years in stuffy laboratories to get my knighthood. And believe me; I would have ended up Sir Faron Talbot. Instead I became a salesman. The best salesman the company had ever known. It was easy; all it required was understanding how people work. Once you understand how people work you can make them do anything. Tyrants do it through fear. I had no need for such barbarity. It didn’t matter how big the company; be it a one-man band or a global player. And frankly, it didn’t really matter what the product was. They weren’t buying IT they were buying because I wanted them to. I enjoyed it, the satisfaction of the genius controlling the oaf or the equal: particularly the equal. The alpha male managing director with his mansion, yacht, trophy wife may as well have been Cro-Magnon when I entered his brain. But it all got boring and that’s when I’d had enough.
The company dismissed me; too many missed appointments and too many cancelled orders. I realised my hold over clients evaporated once I’d left the building. I suppose I could have gone back to the drawing board and found out how to exert influence on people; not merely for an hour but for their whole lives. I couldn’t be bothered. I’d have been nothing more than a hypnotist.
Had I not been sacked I would have quit. Work was just another system or symptom of this existence. Human existence being one-part rapture to a thousand-parts torture.

I’m finished with you now. There isn’t anything else you need to know. My reasons for being here in this woodland should be clear. It’s getting dark and I’m not going back to the city – not ever. I’m removing my batteries. In the morning I’ll be a tree.