Passing of Trees

January 25, 2006 | Laughing Knees | 15 Comments 

In the depths of win­ter the de­sire comes to you to plant a seed and shep­herd a life. You break the soil and drop in the ker­nel, then cover it up and wait for the world to shiver and wake. The months go by, bring­ing the Spring rains, the breath of the South, and the beam­ing face of the Sun, in­cu­bat­ing the loam till veins stir to life. And then one day in June, while ab­sently stick­ing your face out of the win­dow, the green shoots greet you with their lu­mi­nous green light, lit­tle chil­dren out to give the world a try.

And that’s what I did four years ago a year af­ter mov­ing into this apart­ment. I planted two zelkova seeds and watched them grow along the edge of the tiny gar­den I have. They grew quickly, al­most a me­ter a year, last year about three me­ters in just three months. This year they were des­tined to push above the roof of the apart­ment build­ing, and spread out in a great canopy of sigh­ing leaves. The two trees shielded my win­dow from the pry­ing eyes of neigh­bors, blocked the sear­ing sum­mer sun to cool my stu­dio, and en­ter­tained me with their Bali shadow pup­pets upon the cur­tain. In the midst of this Tokyo grey they were two lit­tle arms of hope and joy for me. Just the sound of the leaves rustling when I opened my win­dow would elicit a deep sense of relief.

Then, yes­ter­day morn­ing, my door­bell rang. It was my land­lord. He’s ac­tu­ally quite an ami­able old man, al­beit with a hand-​​wringing, leering-​​about-​​money sense of greed about him that never lets me quite trust him. He held his hat in his hands and, bow­ing pro­fusely, an­nounced that the gar­den­ers would be com­ing to­day and re­mov­ing my trees. “You see, the leaves get stuck in the rain gut­ters. But don’t worry,” he amended, “They’ll just cut the trees down to their bases, leav­ing the stumps in­tact. We won’t re­move the trees entirely.”

Af­ter ex­pe­ri­enc­ing all forms of gar­den out­rage, this was the last straw. In sput­ter­ing Japan­ese (my tongue gets all clay-​​like when I get emo­tional in Japan­ese) I de­clared, “You’re cut­ting the trees to their stumps? Just like that? Hokaaay! I don’t know why the hell I picked this apart­ment with the gar­den if I can’t use the gar­den the way I’d like to. I mean if you’re just go­ing to come stamp­ing in here every time you feel like it and re­arrange my gar­den any way you like, then why should I even bother mak­ing an ef­fort to take care of the damn thing? Well, why don’t I just make it easy for you? This week­end I’ll get my shears and chop down every­thing in the gar­den. Make it to­tally bare. That way you won’t have to worry about any­thing clog­ging up your gut­ters or at­tract­ing any kind of life what­so­ever. Okay?”

Need­less to say this ges­tic­u­lat­ing, cross-​​eyed for­eigner los­ing his cool just ren­dered my land­lord a bit dazed. The smile was gone. “There’s no need to do that! Please don’t mis­un­der­stand, you can use the gar­den any way you like. It’s only the trees that we want to cut down.”

“Ah,” I replied. “Only the trees. Well, I guess cut­ting them down just to the stumps doesn’t re­ally make sense, does it? I think you’d find it in your in­ter­ests to get rid of the trees right down to their roots. Oth­er­wise, next thing you know you’ll have them crawl­ing all over the gar­den again.”

His eyes lit up. “Would you re­ally go for that? To pull the trees out by their roots? That would be most help­ful. I’d re­ally ap­pre­ci­ate it if we could go ahead and re­move the trees en­tirely. I’ll have the gar­den­ers drop by some time around 10:00 to­mor­row morn­ing, okay?”

I know they’re just trees. I’m not sup­posed to feel any­thing se­ri­ous about them, and most cer­tainly not get at­tached to them. Dogs and cats and horses have their places in our hearts, but trees and cock­roaches don’t have souls you see, and there­fore their lives are for­feit to ca­sual swip­ing into obliv­ion. That they come alive, strug­gle to con­tinue, and carry out all the same pur­poses in their lives as you and me means noth­ing. In the movies peo­ple will holler bloody mur­der if a cat or a dog is mis­treated, but no one squeaks a mur­mur when show­ing pro wrestlers chew­ing on worms or he­roes’ boots crush­ing the life out of a cock­roach. The same goes for trees.

But for some rea­son it hurts to see my beloved trees hacked to bits and hauled away. Some­thing in my­self feels the chop of the blades. And an empti­ness remains.

To make mat­ters worse, the land­lord has been march­ing around the neigh­bor­hood chop­ping down all the an­noy­ing trees on his lands. Just up the street a mag­nif­i­cent zelkova stood next to an­other apart­ment build­ing, al­ready tall and splen­did when I first moved here five years ago. Two years ago the land­lord de­cided, in that typ­i­cal, Dra­con­ian Japan­ese way with gar­dens, to lop off all the zelkova’s branches, leav­ing the poor crea­ture stand­ing naked through­out the years. The only con­ces­sion was a tuft of sprouts cap­ping the trunk, just enough to al­low the tree to scrab­ble for doses of sun­light. It was but a large stick stand­ing in a park­ing lot, not re­ally a tree at all.

And af­ter all that, yes­ter­day the land­lord or­dered the tree to be chopped down and removed.

Five years I walked by this tree every day and not once did I fail to stop and ad­mire it, even if only for a sec­ond. Now it is gone and no one will ever lament its pass­ing. What a waste of a life.

The End of Our World

January 17, 2006 | Laughing Knees | 6 Comments 

This ar­ti­cle spells out ex­actly what I have been strongly feel­ing these last few years, es­pe­cially with all the re­cent mad weather around the world and the ac­cu­mu­lated news of such things as the melt­ing of the Arc­tic ice­cap, the Antarc­tic ice­cap, the per­mafrost in the Arc­tic, and of glac­i­ers all around the world; the sud­den fail­ure of mil­lions of seabirds in the North Sea to lay eggs, of sar­dines to ar­rive at their spawn­ing grounds in the Pa­cific, of the mass plague of wood bore bee­tles in the Arc­tic, de­stroy­ing en­tire re­gions of forests; the record snows falling just here in Japan, the mon­ster storms hit­ting the coasts every­where, the huge mud­slides in rainy climes, enor­mous flood­ing, deserts ex­pand­ing, rain forests falling, is­lands dis­ap­pear­ing un­der the waves…

You see all this… if you take the time to gather it to­gether in your arms… and you won­der, “What ex­actly is wrong with us?” It’s like we’re mes­mer­ized by the lights of Ve­gas, un­able to pull away from the slot ma­chine, even though we’re about to find our­selves des­ti­tute. Does it take the vast hand-​​swipe of God to bring us to our senses? The aw­ful part of it is that we seem to deny the re­al­ity of the nat­ural world like some peev­ish teenager; it still never oc­curs to us that we are not the cen­ter of the uni­verse, that the world will erase us as ca­su­ally as we step on cock­roaches or spray mos­qui­toes. Our ab­sence will be missed by no one and noth­ing. Only we make so much of our­selves that we would risk our own ex­is­tence and the sta­bil­ity of the planet to hawk our wares. The ut­ter cal­lous­ness and stupidity…

I have writ­ten about this of­ten enough to know that a great many peo­ple will pooh-​​pooh me for be­ing too alarmist and pes­simistic. But I think it is that so few peo­ple want to open their eyes and see just how bad things re­ally are. Or, if they do, they will vig­or­ously shake their heads, clap their hands over their ears, and shout, “No! No! No! No! No! No! No!”. They say, “Miguel, why do you have to be so de­press­ing all the time? Life is hard enough with­out wor­ry­ing about things we can’t do any­thing about.” We have the symp­toms of ter­mi­nal can­cer, but by God, we’re go­ing to de­feat that no­tion out of sheer op­ti­mism and to hell with the doctor!

I have di­a­betes. It is in­cur­able. I will most likely die from com­pli­ca­tions that it causes. And I know what it is to deny an aw­ful truth in your­self. Peo­ple who love me tell me, “You have to be more pos­i­tive about the dis­ease, Miguel. Fight it!” Of course I fight it. What else can I do? And yet the ker­nel of truth re­sides within me and there is no deny­ing it. It is a hard, im­per­sonal truth, with no feel­ing this way or that whether I live or die. God, nor any other god, is not go­ing to step in and save me.

I think that’s what the world’s pop­u­lace is wait­ing for, some deus ex machina to come float­ing down from the clouds to grant us ab­so­lu­tion and sprin­kle fairy dust over the land, cur­ing all wrongs. But vol­ca­noes and earth­quakes and floods and hur­ri­canes and tsunamis act like the gods… supremely in­dif­fer­ent to our ex­is­tence. And like the gods, when the mor­tals deem to in­sult them, the ret­ri­bu­tion is ter­ri­ble. The El­ders of our tribe long ago un­der­stood this in­trin­si­cally. We make fun of them to­day, call­ing them ig­no­rant and backward.

Per­haps it’s, as Love­lock pro­nounces, too late. If so, our en­tire civ­i­liza­tion is about to end. Can we even grasp that? And if the re­al­ity hits home, what can we do about it? Or more im­por­tantly, what can we do about our­selves? Is there dig­nity in extinction?

A Good Laugh

January 15, 2006 | Laughing Knees | 4 Comments 

Now this made me laugh:

Go to the Google Video site to see the original.

Great way to end a re­ally grey, dis­mal Sat­ur­day of tor­ren­tial rains.

via Steve at On­My­Mind

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Sun­day, Jan­u­ary 15, 2006

I’m not sure what is hap­pen­ing, but the com­ments link at the bot­tom of the post doesn’t seem to be in­di­cat­ing that peo­ple are com­ment­ing. The com­ments ARE get­ting through, though. Must be this new fan­gled Word­Press ver­sion hic­cough­ing bugs. Don’t have time to work it out right now, though. It’s a beau­ti­ful day af­ter yesterday’s an­tedelu­vian dark­ness. Time to get out­side and get some real bugs be­tween my teeth!