The Sawman

The noise was barely noticeable at first. You hear a lot of noises living on Capitol Hill in Seattle; sirens, motorcycles, busses, leave blowers, garbage trucks, car alarms, and crazy people. It began with the simple rhythmic back and forth sound of cutting through soft wood with a handsaw. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I decided they must be pruning the hedges outside the building. When I moved into this 1910 brick-wood-and-plaster apartment building, one of the features that attracted me to it were these enormous camellia trees and laurel hedges that surrounded the building. It gave the place sort of an old world, Alice-in-Wonderland kind of feeling.

However, the building had been sold about a month back and was now being managed by a property management company rather than a private owner. Not long after the building was sold, the new managers decided to “trim” the laurel hedges out front of our building, which were admittedly in need of a little care. I can sort of understand why they were allowed to get so shaggy – it’s a lot of work to maintain those hedges, and unless you do it yourself, keeping them up can be expensive.

Well, the new managers took care of that problem and hired a tree service company to cut the hedges in front of the building in half! Not give them a trim, but literally cut these 10-foot hedges in HALF. Well of course, it looked terrible. These once majestic plants that had grown there for more than half a century were suddenly reduced to squatty bare bushes with a few freaked-out leaves twitching around the base.

Now, as I heard the small chain saws, I thought, “I can’t believe their going to cut them back even further.” But I was heavily involved in a project and decided basically to tune it out. After all, what could I do? It's beyond my control. But it became harder and harder to ignore as the screeching sound of the saw blades tearing through thicker and thicker branches.

Suddenly I heard a woman screaming, “What the hell are you doing? Mother fuckers!” It was my neighbor Natalie from down the hall. Of all my neighbors in the building of approximately 30 or so units with 4 floors, Natalie is among my favorite. She is a radical in every sense of the word. Nothing about Natalie is ordinary. She's a sassy broad from New York and remembers the 70's but lives in the present. Her style is eccentric and extreme - with wild hats, animal prints, shiny black vinyl boots, and fake fur outfits. She's the lead singer of a really cool, artsy, Goth band, called Lady Shiva and Licorice Lounge. For money, she teaches yoga and meditation classes. I first met Natalie when I locked myself out of my apartment one time, and she let me hang out with her in her apartment and gave me some soup and corn bread while we waited for the landlord to drive over from Graham (about 30 miles away) with a spare key.

I decided to put on my coat and hat and walk outside to see exactly what was going on. Natalie had gone back into her apartment and was on the phone with the manager. As I descended in the elevator, I could still hear her yelling into the phone, "I'm furious! What the hell is going on!" I got downstairs and there he was, a man about my age in coveralls shoving huge piles of branches and whole trees into an enormous wood chipper. I asked him what was going on, and he said the owners wanted all the trees and bushes surrounding the building to be cut down because it blocked the view of the building from the street. "These trees have been here for nearly a century. What a shame that they're being cut down" I said.

"Yeah, I know. These are some beautiful old trees." he replied.

"So then why are your doing this then?" I asked in response to his statement. He looked at me with bewilderment - not sure if I was serious or not.

"Because they're paying me." He said without much thought.

"So because somebody pays you, that means it's okay to do something you know is a shame?"

"what are you talking about?" He said.

"Well, you just agreed with me that you know it's a shame to cut down these very old and beautiful trees, yet here you're doing exactly that."

"Look, I'm just doing my job. Why are you giving me a hard time?"

"I just want to know why you would participate in something if you know its shameful."

"Are these condos or something? Do you own a part of this building?"

"No, these are apartments. "

"Well the owners of this building can cut down all the trees they want."

"But this is our home. We may not own the building, but we live here. How would you feel if some one came to your house and started tearing up your yard?"

"I own my house, and I have a mortgage to pay. You don't pay the mortgage on this building, or the property taxes, the owners do. And they're the ones who pay me to cut down these trees so I can pay my mortgage and property taxes on my house which I own!"

"But doesn't the bank own your house? If you don't pay your mortgage the bank can take it away from you. And if you don't pay your property taxes, the government can put you in jail. So who really owns your house?"

"Look man, what's you point. I gotta get back to work."

"My point is, you may think that you own the things you own, but all of it can be taken away from you or lost. You're house is not the same as your home. Home is something intangible, an idea that you create - your home is yours, your house is not. This may not be my building, but it is my home. It is disrespectful to me to alter my home without talking to me about it. You acknowledged that it was a shame to cut down these trees, yet you're doing it anyway, and I want to know why."

"Yeah, it's a shame that I have to cut down these trees, but I’ve been unemployed for a month, what the hell do you want me to do? Not do my job, not get paid, let my family starve, and loose my house, all so you can have your goddamn camellias? Screw you!"

I didn't know what to say. I realized this guy was not my enemy. He's just someone getting by in the world the best way he knows how, the same as me. I felt tremendously sad and sorry all of a sudden. Sorry that I had harassed him, but also sorry that I had failed to get through to him.

"You're right." I said, "I'm sorry. This isn't your fault. " He didn't say a word. He just turned the wood chipper back on and began shoving more branches through.

I went back upstairs. I knocked on Natalie's door, but she didn't answer. I went back to my apartment and sat in the chair by the window and watched them clear the trees until there was nothing left but several stumps.

I began to ponder what this was all about. What was I really trying to say? Why was I so bothered by a few trees? But it wasn't just the trees. It was the violence of it. Here it was, a peaceful and clear morning, the sun shined down on the trees as they had for decades, giving off oxygen, providing a home for all the creatures that dwelled there, a place for countless birds to perch and sing outside our windows, a place for homeless people to stash their bags of food, shade for the building and passersby, flowers that perfumed the air when the camellias were in bloom, etc. Then in less than an hour, they were gone - shattered and shredded into millions of bits, leaving the building naked and exposed. And all of this because the property owners wanted prospective tenants to be able to see the building better from the street. It seemed like such a violation - a rape almost. And it troubled me that anyone would participate in such an act, knowing, as the sawman did, that it was “a shame”. Even though the sawman was not without his justifications. But what really affected me was the words “let my family starve”. This truly was important, more so than his house, and more so than the camellias. Were I in his shoes, I would feel the same way. This man had to make a choice – cut down our camellia trees, or let his family starve – it was a no-brainer.

The property owners also made a choice – to hire Emerald City Tree Trimming to cut down the trees. Since there are multiple tree-trimming services in Seattle, I’m sure they got bids from a few companies before deciding on the one that was the most cost effective. Their motivation – to make it easier for prospective tenants to see the building from the street, and possibly to avoid the cost of maintaining the trees which were healthy and grew rapidly. This would allow the corporation that recently bought our building to save a significant amount of money. In addition, prospective tenants could see the “for rent” signs from the street, which meant the corporation could spend less money on advertising for vacancies. Also, the homeless people (of which there seem to be a lot more of these days) would have to find someplace else to stash their bags of food and bed rolls, and rent paying tenants (current or prospective) wouldn’t have to see them anymore or be made uncomfortable by the occasional plea for spare change. It would seem that the motivation for making this drastic change to the landscape of our building was profit. And what does profit allow? The accumulation of more things in order to make even more profit and get more things and so on and so on. Thus, we have the phenomenon known as GREED. A maddening cycle of want – buy – have – want – buy – have, driven by the belief that matter is the only thing real in the universe.

We are so enslaved, I thought, by our material world that we are willing to ignore or dismiss things like love, compassion, forgiveness, respect, and gratitude, for the sake of maintaining and increasing our material possessions, including our physical bodies.

What would it take for us to free ourselves? Nothing less than a shift in consciousness of Copernican proportion, I think. We believe matter is all that "matters" because we believe that only matter is real, and anything that is non-material is secondary or doesn't even exist. But all matter must come to an end, and even diamonds aren’t really forever.

When we give someone flowers, it's not really the flowers that are the gift, but rather, the experience of receiving flowers. The flowers themselves will die in a few days and be thrown out, but the pleasure and joy generated by receiving them will linger in the heart and memory of the person who received them for years, if not the rest of their life. It may even lead to a compassion and/or inspiration for the person who received them, which could lead to a chain of events that could impact the future for everyone everywhere for ever and ever. Therefore, the entropy of giving and receiving flowers is eternal, while the material components are temporary.

I wonder what would happen it were to be proven beyond all question that matter was secondary, and that the nature of reality was actually non-material, including our own bodies and brains. How would things be different if we knew for a fact that the material universe, which we experience with our senses, was merely a shadow of a deeper reality, as Plato suggested in his allegory of the cave over two thousand years ago.

Would we be as concerned about our money, our cars, our clothes, our buildings, or as obsessed with our bodies? Maybe non-material realities such as love, compassion, respect, forgiveness, and gratitude, would be far more important than the material things associated with them. And maybe people would think less about material gains and more about increasing the positive entropy of the universe as a whole, because in such a non-local reality, our experience of ourselves as being separate from each other and everything else in the universe is only an illusion.

I looked around at my apartment, for which I had not paid rent yet, and tried to look at it through this paradigm. Nothing around me seemed to “matter”. Not my desk, my piano, my computer, my furniture, my microwave, or my hair products. The only things that seemed to have any value at all were things that I had attached meaning – like pictures, letters, cards, and various mementos from loved ones. But even those things were transient, and their real worth lied not in their material manifestations.

It occurred to me that as long as I was tethered to all my stuff, my address, and my income, I would always be like the sawman who believed he had no option but to engage in an activity that he knew to be shameful. I realized my reaction to him wasn’t about the Camellias or the Laurels, it was about what they represented – the meaning they carried. Their violent removal became a symbol our devotion to the material – the rape of our hopes, and dreams, and very lives, all in the name of capitalism, and corporate greed.

I went downstairs just in time to see the sawman get in his vehicle and wave at me as he drove away. I sat down on the steps in front of the building, looked at the barren plot of earth where once stood giant camellia trees and now only stumps and saw dust, and began to weep.