Blake’s notebook from 1793 comments on the Poison Tree: “There is just such a tree at Java Found.” The tree is upas, which legend has endowed with the power to kill creatures for many miles around; its native name means ‘poison’.
I’ve always wondered about this poem… listed in Blake’s ‘Songs of Experience’ cycle, it is anger, hatred, Schadenfreude; pruned, watered and nurtured. Every other poem on earth warns us that it will be us lying beneath the tree if we bottle up anger, nurture it, etc. etc., but not our William. No warnings, just …somebody dies. Songs of experience, indeed…
I don’t often gloat, per se, but I’m getting to the point with an Unnamed Annoying Person that I’d like to see him poisoned and laid out beneath a tree, any tree. Preferably one I don’t have to look at. It’s ironic, since we’re allegedly supposed to be both working toward the good of one project or another, yet we’re at total cross-purposes, and it’s all because I’m a girl, and he’s a boy; I don’t have his degree but a degree in a different discipline, so he’s all follicle defying static electricity and spark that I’m “criticizing him” and trying to take over, and I spend at least seventy-five percent of our time interacting trying to soothe his stupid hormonally imbalanced nerves.
I so tire of people who are threatened by others with a few more creative ideas than themselves. I go back and reread that line, and it sounds snobby. Let me restate: It’s tiresome to feel required to have to contain yourself for the sake of the other people in the world who might feel threatened if you speak up and have an idea. It’s quite ridiculous, really, and I don’t know what to do about it, I truly don’t. I want to be a Nice Person. We girls all grow up knowing how important it is to be a Nice Person, and the more I deal with this Annoying Personage, the more I feel I am veering radically from Niceness. This is a scary prospect. I am a girl: thus I am supposed to be Nice. Who am I if I’m not nice?
It’s especially bad because I think females tend to grow up stifled. It’s something that we don’t even notice, and it’s hard to resist it. Yet, according to American Association of University Women (AAUW) report, Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America, there are plenty of ugly statistics (which probably also relate to girls and women in the UK and otherwheres) that include the fact that women and girls are routinely exposed to teachers and school-work frameworks from childhood up that erode their confidence. And it’s not like I’m beating the drum of “boys are the awful enemy,” either. Somehow, structurally, our society seems content with boys always being the winners, and the rest of us have to just hush up and take second place. It’s just baffling and scary that this feeling still exists when we’re no longer in school.
Maybe the real issue is that Annoying Person never left, in his mind. He’s still fourteen or something, with apologies to all the fine and upstanding junior high kids out there.
I don’t know what to do.
I’m trying not to water the Poison Tree.
But those apple blossoms smell so pretty…