sour decision tree
I'm feeling anomic.
Everything hurts a little. Everything is a decision. While each snip that prunes the branching possibilities in my daily life doesn't feel like major surgery, I do feel it.
Masanobu Fukuoka, a major thinker in organic farming, famously opposed pruning trees. Reading him, I get the sense he was OK with using a thumbnail to nip things in the bud, but uncomfortable with using a saw. He talked about grafted trees from the nursery coming to his farm in a confused state, set to put branches out in an unnatural, unhealthy, sometimes suicidal way. He suggests that they be pruned toward the shape they would have if they had grown from seed, without pruning.
I'm told that the word "decision" is rooted in a metaphor where pruning trees represents making choices. The conceptual tool of a "decision tree" seems to have developed independently, but seems to me a recognition of a fundamental similarity of pattern.
Looking up "anomie," and how Durkheim cultivated and shaped the use of that word, I get the sense that many people are like those grafted trees from the nursery. Me included. Fukuoka's books are used to inform agriculture, but they were meant more to guide people's internal lives; it would've been interesting to see him talk with Durkheim.
A little lemon tree has sat in a disintegrating wine barrel by my front stoop since I moved in a couple years ago. It nearly died last year, mostly from my mistakes and neglect. I've taken much better care of it the past three months, with some help from the internet. Last I checked, eight little bean-sized lemons were forming. But its young branches cross each other, and would shade each other out if they had more leaves. Its central leader is dead and rotting, and I don't have the heart to cut it off. I tore a long gash in the tree's living bark the last time I cut such a large branch, and while I can cut with more skill than that, I still lack the expertise or decisiveness to choose where to cut.
When it goes dormant again, with the change of seasons, I'll prune it a little, hoping that the current confusion of leaves has let its roots store up enough calories. And I'll be certain to pinch off buds that seem ill-advised next autumn.
If only my habits were so concrete, so synoptic. If only their care and feeding were so easy to research.