“The axe forgets what the tree remembers”
- Shona proverb, Zimbabwe
The wisdom of this African proverb about the axe and the tree is readily apparent: those who cause harm are less likely to remember having done so, but those who are injured never forget. The axe and the tree work perfectly to provide a visual metaphor for this idea, since an axe is barely dinted by felling a single tree. For the tree itself, however, the axe is a catastrophe. It is the end of its existence as a tree. There is a lesson here everyone is capable of taking on. Yet while I do not want to detract from the simplicity of this proverb, this particular imagery can be taken further.
What may not come to mind in the image of the axe and the tree is the fact that the axe itself was once a tree. As such, the axe is more than just a tool, it is part of a practice that turns trees into axes - not every tree, true enough, but the moment we have our first axe, we have a means to turn other trees into axes. It is a potent metaphor for the escalation of harms, something also captured in the original imagery of karma as a destructive wheel, turned by previous harm and causing future harm. Harm is self-perpetuating.
What’s more, in order to turn a tree into an axe, we have to join metal to it - and metal is in many ways the greatest symbol of technology. In Greek myths, Prometheus steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, and this tale is the great tech heist of Mount Olympus. Sure enough, fire works well as a symbol for the power - and risk - of human tools. But fire in turn is precisely what gives us metal... Hephaistos is first and foremost a fire god. He is only later the god of blacksmiths, and solely because it is fire that turns the smith into the maker of powerful tools - metal tools.
Metal is the perfect emblem for the escalation of technology as well. It is not a coincidence that historians talk of ‘stone age’, ‘bronze age’, ‘iron age’… Fire that burns wood for heat or for cooking may indeed be powerful and dangerous, but when it is coupled with the discovery of metal it sorely intensifies the lust for technical power. Knowing this, the smiths kept the secret of metalworking within their trade... There was no question of ‘for all humanity’ in antiquity, and even today it is only an oddly successful PR campaign that keeps this story going against the backdrop of our fatal confusion between the sciences and technology. These are, after all, not one thing at all, but rather a kind of knowledge and its subsequent exploitation. You cannot follow both masters and remain honest.
With metal, comes coins. Jesus is said to have stated that “the love of money is the root of all evil”, and if so then the fire and the technical prowess it represents provide the firmament that this malevolent tendril grows within. The technology of money, of coins as representations of trade value, depends upon the metal, the metal depends upon the fire - and all this depends upon consuming the wood, the charcoal. It all rests upon the use that the fire puts to the tree once the axe has felled it. The axe is both the recipient of the gift of fire and its reciprocator - for it brings back the wood that the fire requires. Every tree a potential victim, and sometimes a new axe as well.
Here, then, is my esoteric reading of the Shona proverb about the axe and the tree. Not only is the axe the source of harm that forgets what it has inflicted upon the tree, but it was never even aware of the harm it is capable of inflicting. For the axe is not merely incapable of remembering, it and the hand that wields it cannot see that together they transform the very meaning of the tree. It is changed from a living, breathing, participant in the lives of every being in the forest, into wood, a mere resource to be used up. The harm the axe inflicts does not begin when it fells the trunk and its branches, it is inherent to its very existence. The axe destroys the cyclic patterns of existence, transforming the tree into a mere standing reserve to be exploited.
With thanks to Caroline Kaye, for inspiration.
The Axe and the Tree
Since
“It is changed from a living, breathing, participant in the lives of every being in the forest, into wood, a mere resource to be used up. The harm the axe inflicts does not begin when it fells the trunk and its branches, it is inherent to its very existence. The axe destroys the cyclic patterns of existence, transforming the tree into a mere standing reserve to be exploited.”
Our take-away should be that we should stop making axes? I don’t think so. Human are the most aware and powerful life-form that, like every other earth-bound life form, is existentially embedded in the earth’s ecology. For our long-term survival we need to be constantly aware of the power we wield through fire and all its children and act accordingly.