This made me think (because of how oddly my mind works) of the pre-contact Andean cultures quipu system of writing, a textile-based language system forever lost, in which, we surmise, the size of knots,their orientation on the string, their color,their relationship with other knots, conveyed meaning. We are a self-centered species. We even have a word for it: Athropocentric. The ancient Greeks said Humanity is the measure of all things. Im beginning to think they were wrong. Perhaps it was we who have been measured. Perhaps we, who have stomped and stumbled our way through a pretty paltry run on this planet, who have been been found wanting. If we knew, for instance, that when we clear cut a forest, would we be less likely so to do? I doubt it. The misguided yearning for the mythos known as profit drives the worst among us, and the worst among us often have the greatest power. I have been called treehugger with the same venomous tone of voice reserved for older and much uglier epithets. I have, however, embraced the term, for I have also embraced trees, hugged them, and have known it to be a transcendent experience. Strangely enough (or perhaps not), the first poem I ever wrote was in 7th grade, when I found out the woods where I played where being cut down for an apartment complex. I was hurt and furious. Those woods were a source of constant joy and adventure. An old orchard hid among them, as did the ruins of an old house, and even a grave with its old barely legible stone. A neighbor who was a college professor (he was the first person to show me the majesty of a planet through a telescope) and I even transplanted a pair of peach trees to our back yard. They never yielded ripe fruit, but they were, for me, a connection to anytime gone before. All this was what was torn apart when those woods gave way to profit for a local man who already had more money than he could ever count. That poem, long since disappeared, began: The trees. They tear them down with every breath I take. I think I remember that because I remember my own grief at seeing them go. That wound has opened anew every time I have seen the hateful piles of trees from the hideous clear-cut job that precedes every Mountaintop Removal operation. They lay there, bulldozed into grievous piles of wooden death, waiting for some Friend of Coal to come and put the torch to them before another Friend of Coal on another bulldozer pushes their charred remains into a valley soon to be filled with not only them, but the last earthly remains of another mountain. What if the whole planet is alive? What if it is not the trees, but our own future to which we set the torch and shove into the valley?
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 05:37:51 +0000
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