Thor's Cultural Landscape Issues

Cultural Landscapes

Some years ago people began to understand that there were things like our beautiful valleys, mountains and lands and waterfalls, etc. that could have some special attention paid to them, not always because they were beautiful, but that they were human landscapes that bore witness and testimony to our unique human cultural footprints and that they needed to be, sometimes, preserved and paid attention to in just that same way that we have nodded to the natural world. Here are some examples that I have written about:

This land is your land, this land is my land. The sign said, "no trespassing," but on the other side it said nothing. Well, I know it is a little like the elephant in the room, but have you ever noticed how the backsides of street signs are like the emperor's new clothes — naked and ugly (no offense to him, of course)? Perhaps it would be cool to find a way out of these obvious signs of denial out there, not to mention the ubiquitous power lines (Yuk!).

Maybe an army of CCC-type artists armed with imagination and good aesthetics could create signs of recovery. I'll go for the new buffalo gourds next to the Rotarians on the Old Pecos Trail myself. Keep up the gourd work!

This is a Boy Scout camping spot in Oregon. The look of amputation is all around, with that zero look of the log ends, the stumps cut at a comfortable height for a chain saw operator and then just left there as if there was nothing wrong.

Or:

George Bush and his chainsaw mentality, treating the world like he was clearing brush on his ranch in a screaming fit of willfulness, filling space that might be filled with thought, heart and true quiet strength. Best put that saw and its mentality in the shed before going into the house. Now it is Sarah Palin, with helicopter safaris to hunt the caribou and the wolves, her butcher knife mentality for political actions and cutting words against her perceived foes. McCain's "fight, fight fight", "bomb bomb Iran" and Palin's "Drill, baby, drill" could be replaced with "Listen, mirror, validate" and "Think, think, think"; use forgiveness like the Amish did recently. And that doesn't mean what we give up our power but it does mean that miracles can begin to occur and peace and prosperity and "Win-win" situations can arise. As a tool user myself, I think it best to use the right ones for the jobs.


What I am trying to get at actually begins in my own heart and experience. I tried that chain saw mentality – so easy to do when you work with them and other tools that scream their way through the materials – and found out the hard way to “Stop It”. I also had an amazing experience as a young man in Bombay (Mumbai) when I first walked out onto the streets and a tall, thin, woman beggar walked right up to me and stuck her amputated arm stub (perhaps cut years ago just for that purpose) right in my face and asked for money; that was horrifying to me. In the process of working with wood, I began to realize, as the Japanese do in their advanced techniques and attitudes toward woodwork (the woodworker is considered a special, highly advanced person worthy of great respect –as opposed to here where we are pretty much ignored- and one of their tenets is that the end grain of wood is to be avoided; being neither delicate nor elegant and they tend to not use finishes, stains or paints on wood) that in the shop as well as out on the ranch the look of a amputated branch is , basically, offensive; both from an aesthetic point of view and one that is part of a land ethic and philosophically. I actually create "through" mortise and tenon joints with the exposed end showing and jutting out slightly, then rounded off slightly and polished slightly - it looks great to me and shows off the craft and is a celebratory joint.  So there are exceptions and personal choices here.  But I have spent lots of time trying to figure out how to either not show the look of chopped off ends, which is especially hard in rustic work, or to detail the end in some way as to make it less stark. On the ranch I sometimes put stones up on my railroad tie fence posts and I have done that for sculpture as well and I often round an end cut some or maybe paint it with a turquoise paint, or mostly try to leave the ends natural and do not cut them. It is an ongoing problem and I am still looking for good solutions. It is all kind of odd from an Americana perspective, but I have found that these considerations go fairly deep into our cultural needs.

So, sometimes it looks better to snap a limb off than to cut it and often it is better to cut the tree down at or near the ground level (taking care not to damage the chain saw with dirt and rocks at that level) and then to cover the cut with dirt or mulch. If you go into a thinned out area of the national forests you will see what I mean; the place is devastated from this aesthetic point of view and will look unnatural and damaged for many years. If you get right down to it, the process of milling wood is quite violent and that beauty that we tend to see within speaks about it, silently but strongly. So, as usual there are compromises and balances and paradoxes in the created world and we are left to sort it out for ourselves as to the values and the courses of action. Now you might not see  the world quite the same as before you read this, perhaps obsessive, piece.