A heavy tree, old and stalwart, robust, set in its ways, has been speaking through time, its bark (bark everywhere) more available than its bite (it has no bite). What does have bite is a saw, and some officious saw has felled this regal tree (all trees are regal). Now, fallen onto its side (just like us when we die), the tree releases a soft, arborial death-rattle, a century-old agony of silence. Is its cutting going to be useful? Oh no doubt. The tree will become coffee stirrers, toothpicks, pencils and tacky sheets of populist plywood.
The tree on its side allows us a glimpse of autopsy. We can see how thin-skinned it was (its bark was clearly just an over-compensatory armour). And we can tell how old it was. If you listen very carefully—and respectfully—the tree will whisper to you all of what it has seen and it will recount the horrors before which it has had to stand mutely by.
