Photographs By Roman Loranc, Essays and Poetry By Lillian Vallee

Two-Hearted Oak

In a world of constant and irrepressible change, stillness is a profound human need, and the lens of a skilled photographer can act like binoculars, excluding all that is extraneous, focusing on the lineaments of the beloved, on the object of desire, on mystery or beauty cleansed, for an instant, of memory, pain, or suffering. — from the introduction by Lillian Valee. Read more of the Introduction here.

Two-Hearted Oak
For Roman
They start out as two hapless acorns
Planted by a jay who knew all about
Delayed gratification; uneaten, unfound,
Forgotten perhaps, they lean easily
Into the sun until only a slight blade
Of light separates their lichen furs.
At what instant, in what slow surge of
Vernal hope do the cells decide to knit
Themselves into just one ring of bark?
The groove is now a line only the practiced
Eye can see in the single trunk with two
Melting cores, each with its own choirs
And architecture, each with its own
Crooked grasping for light.

Winter, San Luis Island
In winter I feel the hunger of hawks
Waiting on posts at the roadside
Waiting on snags along the sloughs
Cruising the ponds and the tules
Fluttering in the middle of a field
Like the Holy Ghost. The black
Fallopian rack of the elk bull
Rips across the waning sky.
I am not empty: in me the rain
Surges to bud the leafless willow
In me the bulb pushes its leaves
Through the yielding earth —
Panicles and umbels —
The small intricate reachings —
Undulating, scalloped, or smooth
Whorled, coiled, or serrated
Mouth, finger, feather, hair
Torn or warm, clutching or
Beating the air — what force
Will tear this racing heart to pieces?
Whose incessant hunger will it quell?

From the Introduction to Two-Hearted Oak

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
The world offers itself to your imagination
Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
— Mary Oliver

Spring has arrived in the Central Valley of California while I have been thinking about how to introduce Two-Hearted Oak … Our backyard in Modesto is ablaze with tall golden currant in full flower, a hermit thrush scratches at decaying oak leaves to scare up a pill bug or two, and a black-chinned hummingbird works the fuchsia-flowered gooseberry, then rests on its thorny cane and shakes the raindrops from his tiny dolphin frame. I am reminded that the store of natural forms awaiting attention and sometimes divination is inexhaustible. The title of this book comes from an observation from our daily walks along Dry Creek in East La Loma Park: we noticed that the scrub jays in the park cached their valley oak acorns, and that occasionally one of these caches would produce a small stand of oak saplings growing together. On closer inspection we noticed that some of the large oaks we had thought of as one tree were actually two, fused together. The observation gained the force of a metaphor and from it sprang a poem and a photo and now a book.

Two-Hearted Oak aspires to accommodate two pleasures:looking and listening. It is about looking hard, looking past,and looking within. In a world of constant and irrepressiblechange, stillness is a profound human need, and the lens ofa skilled photographer can act like binoculars, excluding allthat is extraneous, focusing on the lineaments of thebeloved, on the object of desire, on mystery or beautycleansed, for an instant, of memory, pain, or suffering.

But Two-Hearted Oak is also about listening, about augmentingthe visual with the aural, about the search forrhythm and order in tangled, chaotic spaces and in thicketsof emotion. For me, language is most appealing and mostevocative as incantation, a summoning forth, a song to theworld. And like a camera, rhythmic language can clarify byselection, by creating small nests of words to which we canretreat for safety and solace until we are stronger and canbrave the elements.

On the days when Roman and I work together, the boundary between image and text sometimes becomes fluid. We joke about the way we work when we go out on one of our forays into a Central Valley wetland or woodland. He dashes out of the car, grabbing tripod, filter, his magic cape; I open the windows and sleep. While he rushes to capture the last light of dusk, my body shuts down to listen. One such evening at the Nature Conservancy’s Cosumnes River Preserve delivered images of backwater ponds and oaks and a poem that came to be called “Sleeping Among Oaks.” Roman’s images sustain the power of the experience, and I can revisit them to retrieve it. I, in turn, am given the task of naming the photos, of lending them a slightly different intention, work I delight in because it is play and confers upon me the freedom to add a serious, lyrical, or wry twist, as in “Dendritic Oaks” or “Tule Fish.”

A fluid boundary is not without its dangers; it assumes a degree of reciprocal generosity and a certain loss of proprietorship. We got to know some of these dangers firsthand when we began to assemble this book and had to reconcile the views and ambitions of a photographer with those of a poet-bioregionalist bent on passionate advocacy. I began to worry about something a biologist had told me when I mentioned our two-hearted oak observation. Sometimes, he said, the merging weakens the tree. We are designed, it seems, to mirror nature’s complexity and ambiguity.

Fortunately, in the end, we realized that Two-Hearted Oak is really a book about yearning, a yearning to reconcile different aspirations, to escape certain individual and collective identities, perhaps even histories; to be better than we suspect we are; to be worthy and capable of love. We have spent too much time along riverbanks and in oak woodlands, too much time under roiling canopies of geese to consider our small dramas apart from the needs of a much broader community. We have realized that the book can accommodate the needs not only of poet and photographer, but of our audience. In collaborative exhibits and readings, we have learned that people are hungry for a more spacious form, one that accommodates both word and image and provides art with context.

And so, Two-Hearted Oak strives to widen the circle of human compassion and return the viewer and reader to the quickening experience from which the words and images derive. Two-Hearted Oak is not about beauty that is a trophy, a memory, a pennant marking the bones of the vanquished; it is about a hard-won but accessible beauty that calls to us “like the wild geese, harsh and exciting.” It is a call to work, to healing, to active participation in a mercifully forgiving landscape.

Our hope is to alert the public to the singularity andfragility of Central Valley rivers and wetlands; to highlightthe cooperative efforts of residents and various public andprivate agencies who are acquiring and restoring lands criticalto the survival of migratory and resident wildlife; and toexpress the aching beauty that surrounds San Joaquin Valleyresidents in restored habitat and remnants of the ancientpast. With the work of our hands, minds, and hearts we arepleading for an understanding of the Central Valley thatwill make a difference in what people value and do there,and for an appreciation of our region that champions itswild cultural roots and refuses to reduce it to “half thehorse,” that is, to merely its economic value.