Traditions of Time & Identity

Methuselah

Here’s the title of the article: Seed of extinct date palm sprouts after 2,000 years. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Planted on Jan. 25, the seedling growing in the black pot in Solowey's nursery on this kibbutz in Israel's Arava desert is 2,000 years old -- more than twice as old as the 900-year-old biblical character who lent his name to the young tree. It is the oldest seed ever known to produce a viable young tree.

The seed that produced [the seedling nicknamed] Methuselah was discovered during archaeological excavations at King Herod's palace on Mount Masada, near the Dead Sea. Its age has been confirmed by carbon dating.

Now, I’ve been gingerly making my way through Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, which does an excellent job picking apart the history of intergenerational arboriculture at its attendant ramifications on collective memory, mythology and culture. In his exegesis of the verdant cross, there is a wide-ranging discussion of the role of the date palm as the Tree of Life. Specifically:

As a source, scripture was supplemented with the various versions of the Legend of the True Cross. In a twelfth-century version Adam, nine hundred and thirty-two years old and (understandably) ailing, sends his son Seth to fetch a seed from one of the Edenic trees. Returning, the son the drops the seed in Father Adam’s mouth, from where it sprouts into sacred history. It supplies a length for Noah’s ark (a first redemption), the rod of Moses, a beam in Solomon’s temple, a plank in Joseph’s workshop, and finally the structure of the Cross itself.

While we might not necessarily buy that a man can live over 900 years, we know that trees are capable of living a great deal longer – including the Sequoia and Pinus longaeva:

The oldest known living specimen is the 'Methuselah' tree, 4,789 years, age verified by crossdating, sampled by Schulman and Harlan in the White Mountains of CA. An age of 4,844 years was determined post-mortem (after being cut down) for specimen WPM-114 from Wheeler Peak, NV. The age is largely crossdated (Brown 1996). It seems likely that trees exceeding 5,000 years exist. They may never be identified, however, because exceedingly old bristlecones share with a few other ancient pines the ability to adopt a strip-bark morphology.

The really fascinating thing about the new date palm seedling is not its age – it’s the fact that it constitutes a kind of resurrection. Of course, the date palm is the single most mythologically burdened tree to choose for this particular type of resurrection. Maybe that was the point? Frankly, it’s just a really neat story.

Hot Fudge Medusa

The only thing I can think of that might possibly be neater than the resurrection of the date palm would be a finely crafted sculpture of Sir Elton John made entirely out of chocolate.

Oh, for those who might have found this post irritating, here’s a fun article about an achondroplastic dwarf who got into hot water with Wal-Mart because her facial paralysis prevented her from smiling.