Splitting firewood - much like breaking up concrete with a jackhammer - is a visceral, yet unexpectedly surprising experience. This is because if one isn't exposed to these things directly in one's own life, one gathers conceptions of these things through media like movies and TV, in which the subject pounds away at crumbling concrete with a jackhammer or blasts apart a quarter of wood with one deft swipe of the axe.
Normally the intention of the media is not to actually document the process itself in painstaking detail, but to represent it and situate it within a greater narrative, typically in an aesthetically pleasing way that doesn't necessarily seize the attention in an inordinate way, which is perfectly fine within the confines of the media piece and what the media piece is trying to do.
But to experience the process in painstaking detail is to experience something very different. I said "quarter of wood" because that is the part of the log round that is ready to split in that satisfying way, where most of the tension holding it all together is gone, and the axe cleaves right through the middle and sends the halves of the quarter toppling in a show of power and result. Splitting a fresh round, on the other hand, is more laborious, especially if it still contains a lot of moisture and is larger in circumference.
One has to look for stress fractures - called "checks" - to determine the direction of the grain and where the log is weak, and then one buries the axe in the thing, wiggling and working the axe back and forth, hoping to wedge the grain apart, growing the fractures, which can then be followed and then hit subsequently with the axe, finally splitting the wood apart. When a round is halved, it gets much easier because all of the energy going into the wood at the point of the falling axe then has a place to go: outwards, instead of circulating within the log and holding it all together.
And so a quarter of the log - if it is large enough and worth splitting again - is ready to be split apart with ease and satisfaction, making that moment a transferable scene that makes for an attractive building block for further works of aesthetic and narration in a media piece.
Working a jackhammer is much the same. One expects the concrete to blast apart upon coming into contact with this powerful tool, but really that is just the end result, the point in which the subject with the tool prevails over the hard substance and there is a dramatic toppling or crumbling of concrete which yields to the jackhammer.
What happens in the meantime is the jackhammer point vibrates on a depression or a weak point until fractures begin forming around it, and one chases the fractures and wedges the pieces of concrete apart, which upon breaking apart, allow all of the force vibrating from the point to escape out into space, taking the concrete with it. It is slower and more painstaking this way, but an interesting process in its own right. Unless of course you have a bigger, more powerful jackhammer, a better instrument of destruction. So too do hydraulic log splitters do the job quite nicely, but we'll get to that part in a bit.
What exactly is the point of all this? For me, these processes experienced in their fullness yield certain insights of their own.
What we are talking about is the nature of manipulating physically very hard things that are made to persist: tree trunks have evolved to carry enormous standing weight for long periods of time, and concrete of course is selected for and specifically engineered to hold up towering human made structures and rolling transportation behemoths, among other things, all of which feature incredible amounts of weight, and which are to last in that space indefinitely.
Similarities become apparent in the constitutions and behaviors of the individuals, communities, and institutions that make up civilization, that great organic formation that has evolved to expand outwards and take on mass indefinitely and persist into perpetuity, and so its constituents must relate and bond together very tightly and rigidly; they must evolve to be very hard.
And you do see it: you watch as the everyday pressures and energies of mass suffering and grievance push and pull at the daily realities of industrial civilization, seeking to alter its course, which then relentlessly snaps back into place and resituates itself into the preferred forms of its most powerful and privileged.
Individuals, organizations, whole cultural milieus reach bursting points and then crack around various centers of intense energy or concentrations of force, altering in stops and starts, their abilities of resituation weakening until disintegration is more complete and something else can arise in their stead.
It is the builders of the hard and the massive themselves that have the necessities of managing and directing the shape of the built, and so develop the instruments of force and violence concurrently, those powerful jackhammers and logsplitters, which are to accelerate and direct the formations and disintegrations that change the shape of the greater mass.
And indeed, it is the fevered construction of perpetuity, the concentration of mass, the constant accumulation, and then the instruments of destruction to direct and manage those formations, which all go together, and which all make up this sort of central process that indicates what civilization is really about. The old imperial method of divide and conquer is just one of the available phenomena to study, to make sense of the process itself and the human relations that go into the process.
Who is to control the instruments of construction? Of destruction? The shape and succession of civilization certainly modulates along these changing circumstances, which make up the human element of the struggle over the shape of civilization. But it is civilization, that objectified result, that acts on everyone and transforms everyone in the end.
