Poe-tree

There’s a small but ominous-looking tree on Highway 65 just north of Branson (the photo below is just a placeholder—not the actual tree). I’ve long wanted to photograph it in late autumn when it stands bare, then "dress" its branches with two ravens—though not real ones. I imagine two women, elaborately costumed and made up as ravens. For fun. For juxtaposition.

While ravens are now understood to be the smartest birds—possibly the smartest animals—Edgar Allan Poe’s use of the raven was based on a very different view. In The Raven, the bird is perceived as a “non-reasoning” creature, merely an echo chamber for the narrator’s unraveling grief.

In Poe’s narrative, the man—desperate over the loss of Lenore—projects meaning onto a bird that only repeats one word: Nevermore. His ongoing dialogue with this silent witness becomes an intentional self-torture, a descent into madness.

Arthur Hobson Quinn described this in his biography Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1998:441), noting that interpreting signs that bear no true meaning is “one of the most profound impulses of human nature.”

It’s definitely an impulse of mine.

Some—like Poe, or Quinn—might argue that this is the behavior of a person going mad. But I suspect that, even if the signs themselves carry no inherent meaning, they act to drive out the songbird within us—the voice of creativity, longing, or truth.

And perhaps the best creatives are a little mad. Would you agree?

Juliana FayComment