Wham!!:a firsthand report on the eternal question of falling trees.

[Joseph Tracy]

We enjoyed a rousing  conclusion to our Saturday last night. It was  
the second day of my daughters 2 day visit, we had gone to a  
symposium on art concerned with the human brain, after getting jazzed  
particularly about one piece that created a sculptural map of of a  
human brain relating it to the Oedipus Story.  The artist, named Katy  
Schimert was funny and smart and we ended up talking afterward about  
Oedipa in Lot 49.

One topic was brain injury and the visual manifestation in angiograms  
and  as we drove home through an ice and wind storm the brain injury  
topic got us talking about the physical vulnerability of the   
illusory construction  we call self.  We were home, a warm fire  
going. My daughter and I doing watercolors and my wife in bed reading.

A great cracking wham shuddered through the house. At first I thought  
it was an ice shelf sliding and hitting a a lower section of roof  
below a line of dormer windows.  I was announcing that was what it  
probably was when Priscilla says" No it wasn't".

We went into the bedroom and the cracked off point of a tree branch  
was sticking though the ceiling.   We were scared and trembly and  
weirdly amused at the same time. Our neighbor has a row of pine  
trees  along the edge of his property. One had broken about 6 feet up.

So while i have no new information on trees falling unheard in the  
forest, I can say with powerful personal conviction that when those  
suckers fall on your house ,  as Oedipus explained to Antigone, it's  
pretty much of a loud motherfuckin WHAM!

Now to talk with my very sweet neighbor.