The Sawtooth of History
or: the myth of linear progress
One of the best nights of my life, I stayed up until dawn assembling barricades on a dirt road in an old-growth forest. An out-of-state timber company had been hired to log the place (no locals would touch it), and at the request of local townsfolk we moved into the woods to disrupt that logging. As the early morning mist was rising, we were dragging wind-fallen trees into the road and dropping boulders from the embankment to block the loggers’ trucks. It took ten of us all night, and as the sun rose, we looked over our work, proud, then looked out down off the mountain to the mist that had gathered in the low spots. The mountaintops had become an archipelago, and we stood on an island above that pacific northwest fog.
Not long after sunrise, the loggers arrived. Their pickups couldn’t get past our barricades.
So they drove a bulldozer through, and in twenty minutes, destroyed what had taken us all night.
It is, fundamentally, easier to tear things down than build them up.
Over the course of decades, sexologists in Germany collected book after book, conducted research after research, on homosexuality and transexuality, both new words. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was open from 1919 to 1933, offering consulting to all comers about sexuality. They pioneered ideas like “let trans people just live as whatever gender they want – it dramatically improves their lives compared to trying to convince them to act normal or whatever.” Groundbreaking stuff. Germany, between the wars, was one of the best places in the world to be LGBT. The slow, hard work of shifting cultural attitudes was being done.
On May 6, 1933, the Nazis marched on the institute, a brass band playing. They stormed and looted the place. Four days later, they were back, and they burned books and papers. They burned countless lifetimes of work. The famous photos of Nazis burning books are of this event.
It takes an awful lot less time to burn a book than to write it.
The first woman to undergo gender reassignment surgery, Dora Richter, either died directly in that attack or disappeared into the Nazi death machine. A life, any life, is built moment by moment, year by year. It can end in an instant.
As best as I can tell, this is a cycle that’s happened time and time again, over the millennia all over the world, for folks whom we’d now categorize as LGBT. I didn’t take careful enough notes at the time, but I remember reading about an island in the Mediterranean where, for decades during the middle ages, homosexuality was welcome – then over the course of a year or two, society abruptly changed its course and gay people were criminalized and killed, or forced back into the closet. I read that and thought “oh, that just… happens sometimes, doesn’t it?”
It’s hard not to think about that in the modern context–for a century now, we’ve done the hard, slow, dangerous work of building a society that accepts us. With a few legislative sessions, we see so much of that work reversed.
I used to make my living as a street musician. I lived in squats, so I didn’t need much, and the few dollars or euros thrown into my accordion case kept me in beer and french fries well enough – scavenging from dumpsters provided the actual vegetables and nutrients I needed.
Being a street musician is good cover for when you’re standing sentry, like if your friends are busy redecorating a building somewhere and need a warning if cops are inbound. One time, in Amsterdam, I was playing accordion, watching out for cops as some antifascists made a few choice alterations to a billboard in the middle of downtown on a busy street. A friend hung out next to me with a walkie talkie.
An older man approached my friend and asked him, in Dutch: “why does the accordionist play such sad music?”
The real answer, I suppose, is that I’m a goth. But I like the answer my friend came up with better: “because we’re squatters. We take over buildings, and we build lives for ourselves, build walls, fix the plumbing, and make the place beautiful. Then the police come, evict it, and destroy all our work. Every six months we start over.”
When you do sound design, you work with a bunch of different waveforms, different patterns of sound. You’ve got the sine wave, which smoothly oscillates up and down. You’ve got the square wave, which shifts immediately between two positions. You’ve got the triangle wave, which is like a sine wave that comes to a point at the top and the bottom of the cycle.
And you’ve got the saw wave, in which the wave builds linearly, then collapses in an instant.
I used to think of history as a sine wave, an ebb and flow.
These days, I think about the saw wave, ripping through history. We build our rights, we build our lives, and in an instant, the forces of reaction destroy them.
I came up an anarchist, a revolutionist. Revolution seemed like the tip of that saw wave, a moment of destruction when all the evil systems come toppling down. The neck of the billionaire might just be the gordian knot, easier to cut than untie. I’m still an anarchist, but I’ve inverted my thinking on the subject – most of our work is the building. Building systems of care, safety, and trust takes work, the kind of thankless work that we put in day after day. The revolution is built free meal by free meal. It’s built through phone calls with friends who need support. We build the revolution when we build workers cooperatives and when we build alliances. The violence in our work is generally the violence of defending things that have been built.
Even some of our wildest plans – like seizing the means of the production from the bourgeois – are fundamentally about, well, defending what is ours. The billionaires did not work with their hands to build the factories and machinery; workers did that.
War, genocide, and ecocide are the ultimate expressions of this sawtooth effect. We’re currently watching as Israel attempts to destroy an entire people – not just end individual lives, as if that’s not bad enough, but an entire culture. Bombs destroy in an instant what hands built over the course of decades, centuries, and millennia. Artifacts have been passed down generation to generation for two thousand years, only to be torched in a hellfire so that the land can be razed and seaside condos built for settlers.
The Industrial “revolution” took hundreds of years to get going, but in geological time, it was an instant. The Earth blinked, and suddenly millions of years of evolution and balance are coming undone so that coal barons could live like kings in the 19th century, so that tech billionaires can overcharge us for disposable appliances today.
The sawtooth of history will rip through anything.
These patterns can’t be simplified into dichotomies like “creation good, destruction bad.” Everything is a balance, a dance.
In high school, I took shop class. Our teacher was missing a few fingers, because the table saw is always hungry. I own a table saw now, it’s the most dangerous tool I own (and I also own firearms). It’s the most likely to hurt me. It’s built for destruction, built from tiny little saw waves that rip through anything that gets close.
I use my table saw to build furniture and instruments. Destruction is, and always will be, part of creation. Snags and deadfall are a vital part of a forest ecosystem. “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge,” Mikhail Bakunin reminds us.
The best quote about this, though, is possibly apocryphal. There was this anarchist general named Buenaventura Durruti, fighting in Spain against the fascist invasion during the Spanish Civil War. It’s possible this quote was made up by a journalist and falsely attributed to him. I love this quote, regardless of whether or not it came out of a specific man’s mouth.
The journalist was pressing Durruti on the destructive nature of warfare. Told him that if he won his revolution, he’d be sitting on a pile of ruins. Durruti said:
We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a time. For, you must not forget, we can also build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities here in Spain and in America and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place. And better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.
Throughout history, folks of every marginalization have built something of a life for themselves. Us queers have built our freedom with blood – often our own, often the blood of bigots. Time and time again, the support structures have been ripped out from underneath us, casting us back down. We never go away, not really – you can drive people underground, but you cannot remove the human instinct to seek love and affection from people of all genders and you cannot have a society with gender roles without some people preferring to take on other roles than those you try to force upon them.
I say this not to spread fear – we certainly have enough of that – but so that we think about what we might have to do in order to maintain these freedoms we’ve won. We cannot take our progress for granted.
I’ll quote another anarchist babe, the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta. He said “we will take or win all possible reforms with the same spirit that one tears occupied territory from the enemy’s grasp in order to go on advancing.”
And so we go on, advancing, liberating territory. Of course they are fighting back. And of course, everything is fragile. All of us are mortal. One day we’ll be caught up by the sawtooth ourselves.
My teacher didn’t stop working with wood after he lost his fingers, but he certainly let his accident serve as an example for us.
Dora Richter is called “the first woman to undergo gender affirmation surgery,” not “the last.” The Nazis destroyed endless hours of work, they ended individual trans people’s lives. They didn’t end the idea of being trans. The Nazis killed millions of Jewish people. They did not end the Jewish culture or the Jewish faith.
While I was doing forest defense, after the bulldozer came through that road and took out our barricades, we were back the next night. This time, we had plans to block the bulldozer itself, and we stopped work for most of the day. Our lawsuits against the timber sale crawled their way through court, and though we didn’t win outright, neither did the logging company. Fifteen years later I walked through the area, seeing what we’d saved, what we’d lost. Some massive trees, still thriving. Some massive stumps, like the graves of the fallen.
The Irish didn’t stop fighting the English after the potato famine, and gay men didn’t stop organizing after the AIDS epidemic. Anarchists didn’t give up after we lost the Spanish Civil War.
Because the thing about a saw wave, is that the end of a cycle isn’t the end of the sound. The sound goes on. We go on.
And, incidentally, if you stack several saw waves on top of each other, you can make a really sick synth sound and use it to write witch house.
This brought a smile and tears to my face in the midst of a bleak time. How beautifully you speak of tearing down and building back up.
Bravo!