Tree

When I began reading the Browne texts I found them quite impenetrable. The language slows you down with its archaicism and precision, but I pressed on with an effort of will and now feel the enchantment of Browne's style. In response to the beauty of the words I felt  that I wanted to use trees arranged in a quincunx formation and I wanted them to move. This was too costly and so now I have one robotically controlled tree. Passers-by will take the places of the missing four as the tree glides up and down King street. I wanted to use a real tree because there is such life in the Garden of Cyrus, you know that Browne has spent hours crouching down peering at things. I wanted an enchanting tree, the sort you would have found almost human as a child.  My tree has a lovely shivery quality to its foliage, and is slender as a nymph. In Browne's writing is the understanding of the physical world through Creation, whose purpose will be revealed in numbers. I suppose this goes back to Pythagoras? The Universe is a great divinely made mechanism whose parts express the maker's purpose. This understanding of the world has been obsolete (to a non-believer like me anyway), so putting the (natural) tree on the (robotic) base is a contemporary expression of this nature/order.