Hollow Men

The great language animal is running out of things to say, running out of being. There's something grotesque about not being able to speak, something terrifying in this silence.Know the times we live in. Mark it down. Or up. It is the dry season. It accumulates. We have but dry thoughts in a dry season. And it lasts for ever. Or at least no-one knows for how long. The world has been turned upside down. Something gnaws at our heart, sticks in our throat like a bone. A prickly pear. Only the ugly have any resilience


"The greatest are believed to be 1,000 years old, but it's their surreal shapes as much as their presumed ages that have always marked them out. The Senegalese trees in Mimi Mollica's portraits seem to be chimeras, hybrids between plant, animal and rock. They're alabaster columns, lava streams, desert boulders, cave mouths.

A related story tells that the primordial baobab was too beautiful for its own good, so the gods punished it by turning it topsy-turvy. In Senegal, villagers once buried their dead in the hollow trunks. It's not that the trees are seen as gods or wreathed by taboos. They are accepted as members of the community, arboreal village elders.

Baobabs share many of the qualities of their human compatriots. They're citizens of the arid lands, frugal, resilient, inventive. The tree originated in Madagascar, where there are seven indigenous species; 10 million years ago.

They grow quickly and soon become hollow, at which point they may be dragooned into use as village reservoirs: a water tank inside a watery shell. But the biggest and oldest baobabs become places. Their characterful bulk makes them landmarks, meeting points, shrines.

Humans have anciently had intimate and affectionate relationships with huge trees. Not just because they so surpass us in size and longevity, but because they stir empathy. One of the awesome South African baobabs, the Hoedspruit giant, is a writhing mass more than 30m in circumference. It has horizontal trunks, immense supporting buttresses, huge fatty calluses.

Its history is impenetrable. It may have been knocked down by an elephant in its youth, blown apart by storms, set on fire by honey-hunters. Yet it's still vivaciously alive, and growing back towards the light.

All trees react positively to damage. They don't repair wounds, they transcend them, creating a new kind of tissue called "reaction wood". This is the sinewy material that edges scars, that supports wind-warped trunks as they begin their slow climb back to the vertical.

We recognise this. In ancient baobab or beech we instinctively understand the tree's response to a challenge shared by all living things: of staying upright, holding the centre in a disorderly world. "

-----From The Guardian