by Klaus Modick
It is common knowledge that plants feel a much stronger affinity to humans than to other living beings. Experiments have even shown that plants react especially violently to the dying of the cells in the human body. Of course, these experiments have always been dismissed as charlatanism and mysticism by conventional science, and I myself have, with my polemic against J. C. Bose’s Response in the Living and Non-Living, participated in this desperate attempt at so-called objectivity, this effort to seal off the domain of knowledge from the domain of experience. But here and now my old objections, disintegrating into the humus of experience, are wearing down. Surely there exists a realm in which something can transition from one point to another, from one organism into another, without time and space being relevant in any essential way.
I sense clearly that a form of communication between the moss and me is being established, that I am not only an observer but also subject to observation, even if I do not yet understand the language in which this communication is taking place. To be sure, it is not the language of which I am currently making use. And even if I were able to dissolve my categorizing habits of thought in the solution of some other kind of language, to make transparent that which does not clarify but, rather, amazes and astonishes, the communication would presumably be such that I could scarcely reflect on it in writing. And yet! As I alternate between squinting at the moss in which my feet rest, and then turning my gaze again to the paper that my hand covers with these signs, these images, there is a kind of resemblance.
I must explain this. But to whom?
For me, often, events that seem annoying or troublesome when they occur, or that are consigned to oblivion as irrelevant, sooner or later prove to be meaningful. These are the correspondences whose meaning is first revealed when suddenly, unbidden, they shoot into view, like a flash of lightning. In just this way, it seemed to me that by switching my glance from moss to paper, from paper to moss, some unpleasant truths were brought home to me once again. Ever since the memory of all that lethal scratching with the wire brush had come back to me via my recently adopted practice of morning stenography, it became acutely disgusting to me to continue to note down such details in shorthand. So I dug out my fountain pen, which, however, was all dried up. There was no ink to be found in the house. When I bicycled over to Spohle in the afternoon, on my usual shopping trip, I asked about ink at the supermarket into which Hansen’s grocery store has mutated. They carried it, but because ink is apparently seldom needed there, only green ink was available.
“We are all out of blue,” said the saleswoman. “Black, as well. Does that matter?”
Until at this moment, it did not matter to me; it had not mattered five minutes, or five hours, earlier. What’s the difference? It’s unimportant. But that I have found my way back to ink after all—ink, which does not scratch the paper, but, rather, slowly and softly sinks into it; that I have found my way back to handwriting—handwriting, which creates images in place of abstract stenographic symbols—all of this is, in truth, not unimportant.
Notice, for example, that the double o in the German word for moss, Moos, mirrors the shape of my spectacles. And just as I begin to take a sharper look at this, by not fixing my gaze exactly, there it is: the binocular microscope in the botanical institute. The place smells foul and a few of the students have gotten sick, even though the windows stand wide open. Yet the hot wind coming down from the Alps, under which Munich has groaned for the past three days, creeps inside. Our seminar is on tracking life, on chlorophyll, on greenery and verdure. Marjorie Garfield, the visiting student from Scotland, stands next to me and with her right eye investigates life through the microscope. Her left eye, however, penetrates my right eye, just as my right eye penetrates her left. In turn, my left eye penetrates into the structure of the cells. We hear Professor Mandelbaum’s voice, Mandelbaum, whom we, of course, call “the old man,” Mandelbaum, who presents his inspiring analyses, or rather preaches them.
“And so on our planet, gentlemen—ladies and gentlemen …”
Marjorie blinks.
“… living matter originates from plants, and only from plants! Therefore the totality of plants represents what ecological science designates as primary production, whose sole purpose is this: to be consumed by more complex living beings, animal as well human. The algae, the mosses, more generally all the ground plants that follow algae and mosses in their life histories, live on water, light, air, and minerals. In a synthesis of the material and the immaterial, the four elements of water, air, light, and earth merge in order to form, through this combination, the plants’ living flesh. Ohlburg! You are not concentrating. Take a careful look; otherwise, you will see nothing.”
Marjorie blinks. Her hair glows in the afternoon sun.
“A magical synthesis, which is reserved for plants alone, inaccessible to human science. And I say that, gentlemen—ladies and gentlemen—as both a scientist and a human.”
Laughter around the microscopes.
“Garfield! You are not concentrating, either. In many primitive creatures, for example, in those you can observe directly, hence the whip algae, Chlamydomonas … Ohlburg! Repeat the name!”
“Chlamydo … uh …”
“Take a better look! Everything lies right there within your view!”
Marjorie smiles.
“In primitive creatures, sexual union obtains between two absolutely identitical cells, whose sex cannot be ascertained.”
The sweat runs into my eyes. Marjorie has dark patches under her armpits.
“The powerful attraction, which suddenly draws one cell to another, may be the result of certain chemical secretions.”
The patches under her armpits.
“Thus, the subtle dialectical play of attraction, on the one side, and retreat, on the other side …”
Marjorie coughs slightly.
“… is already detectable in the most primitive life forms.”
I wipe the sweat out of my eyes and remove the moisture from my glasses.
“A quarter past five, in the English garden,” I whisper to Marjorie.
“Scottish revival,” she whispers back.
“That should be enough, gentlemen—ladies and gentlemen,” Mandelbaum says. “Ohlburg!” he calls to me as we stroll out of the classroom. “Ohlburg! You should be more attentive. Next week we will investigate the mosses—but in great detail. So things will get even more complicated, my dear fellow. But”—and here he smiles at me—“there is also plenty of moss in the English garden.
So study it well.” Study it well …
Ah, of course, the double o. Oh no, my finding my way back to handwriting is absolutely not a matter of indifference. And there being only green ink in Spohle is likewise anything but unimportant. We are indifferent only if we hold certain things to be more significant than others. But they are all equally valid.
The interests of our lives, and even more our deaths, are interwoven in manifold ways. So much so that happiness has often already been created and mapped out even while we still believe we are suffering.
THE WAY TO THE HENNTING FARM leads past the collapsed conveyor systems and sheds of a dilapidated gravel quarry. The farm is where I get my vegetables, eggs, and, for the past several weeks (to my own amazement), milk—milk, which I like and whose taste pleases me, even though I have reacted to it since my childhood with disgust and with physical allergies in the form of a red skin rash. During my previous few trips along this route at dusk, which arrives ever earlier, my attention was repeatedly drawn to a weak green-blue light, which appeared to stream out of a cavernous buried concrete silo.
The first time I encountered it, I took the flickering to be an irritation of my overtired eyes. I had spent, or, rather, squandered, the whole day reading Engler’s Syllabus of Plant Families. When I removed my spectacles and rubbed my eyes, the light phenomenon vanished immediately. Although the following night I had dreams in which the light played a certain role, but which I could not reme
mber the next morning, I soon forgot all about the incident. One week later, on the same route and at the same time of day but in a darkness that by then had already progressed further, I had the same perception; this time, however, it did not disappear when I removed my glasses. Yet as I took a couple of steps toward the silo, I lost sight of the apparition. I determined to get to the bottom of the matter the next evening.
It was almost pitch-dark when, stumbling over natural debris and scattered concrete rubble, I made my way through the entrance to the silo, which was overgrown with ivy and dense moss. As soon as I switched off my flashlight, light began to radiate from the walls and floor. It issued from particular points but was dispersed in a diffuse shimmer like weak, cloud-overcast moonlight. The botanical-analytic explanation is simple, for the so-called luminous or luminescent moss prefers to live in moist rocky crevices and cavities. It is difficult to find, being extremely small-growing and inconspicuous, but it reveals itself through a faint blue-green shimmering light, which comes about in the simplest possible way. The chlorophyll bodies in the moss absorb more light during the day than the plant needs in the way of energy. This surplus energy is then given off again, producing the shimmer that irritated but also attracted me.
I turned my flashlight back on in order to examine the moss up close, but as I touch the ground with my bent knee, suddenly it is an autumn afternoon here. Our bare knees press into the concrete floor of the half-built silo house—parents being held liable then for children’s forbidden entry into this place. The moment has come where the promises of the chemistry kit must make the transition from trial to truth, experiment to event. We bend ourselves over the green mass of fluorescent phosphorus. Franz strikes the match; the jet of flame races over his arm and shoots into my eyes; we run to the exit, screaming as we emerge from the thick smoke into the brightness. But all is covered over with a milky veil. Later the sun comes back, because the glasses that I get are strong, with a small brass rim that pinches the wings of my nose. If I read too long, I get a headache. Now and then things flicker around me. I wipe my eyes and notice that the beam of the flashlight has become weaker.
Has the moss preserved my horror all these years—sixty years, it must be? Preserved it undisturbed? Was I in this place so long? Going back sixty years? Or more? Or less? The luminous moss is a simply explained phenomenon. The excess energy is stored and later, much later, it radiates out of the plant. It is an optical echo, an echo of light, an echo image. A phenomenon that can be explained quite simply, this luminescent moss. But what does it know? What does it show? What is it communicating to me? An echo of an image? An image memory? A simple, inconspicuous moss.
That evening, the red skin rash returned, this time on my upper arms. I had better not drink milk. Or is it to do with Franz, who cools his arm in the water of the quarry pond?
THE AUTUMN ARRIVES in precipitous haste, as though it wants to make clear that its mercifulness was the reason for the unusually mild late summer that lasted deep into October. Violent rainstorms and the first overnight frosts leave the foliage scarcely any time to turn color before the fall. It is as if someone has overslept and, upon waking too late, breaks through the closed door in a hectic rush.
Next to not being punctual, which he took as a personal insult, my father hated nothing more than unkempt, tangled hair and dirty fingernails. If he caught us in such a state, especially at the dinner table, he cried out, “That is the wilderness!” Or, in what amounted to an intensification: “That is decadence!”
By way of punishment, he then ordered us into the bathroom, reached for the terribly dull nail scissors, and cut our nails so short that often blood flowed from them. He proceeded similarly with everything that grew around the Mollberg house. His archenemy, the moss, was going to be made to see reason; it was time to “cut back and clear out.” Branches, twigs, grasses that dared get too close to the walls would, with enormous hedge trimmers, with saw, ax, and hatchet, be “called to order.” The branches of the pine, which kept knocking on the upstairs window because of the wind, once agitated him so severely that he wanted to cut down the whole tree. Mother was able to dissuade him only with great difficulty.
His compulsion to bring nature under control took on, at times like this, manic-paranoid characteristics. If foliage piled up around the house, mixing into wet clumps that began to decay, then the “hour of truth” arrived for the stiff besom brooms that we used. These had to keep the “goo,” “the mud slide,” “the slime,” “the whole foliage tripe” away from the foundation, floor, and frame of the house.
“Moisture,” groaned my father, “moisture is malicious. Moisture creeps in.”
In order to understand his deep-seated disgust at all soil-created decay, you needed to have heard with what repugnance he let this phrase “moisture creeps in” fall from his lips. At the end of the summer holiday, before we could return to the city again, everything in the house that seemed even remotely capable of contributing to the creeping of the moisture had to be soaked with huge quantities of foul-smelling wood preservatives.
“Similia similibus curantur,” he said, quoting the basic idea of homeopathy—that “likes are cured by likes”—as Franz and I waded into the stinking Xylamon solution. The only time my father ever struck me resulted from this situation. For I had suggested that he go ahead and drink the wood preservative himself if it was so important to him.
He certainly did not have the ambition of civilizing the woods around the house into a park or garden. To the contrary, he was fixated on preserving the natural structure and traditional appearance of the bushy moorland that had emerged here over the course of a few decades from neglected, economically degraded pastureland. This purism, which was constantly refreshed through regular reading of works by Hermann Löns, led to a paradox: The immediate environment of the house was a well-tended forest, an area from which my father banished everything that in his view diluted the natural impression of a bush heath. When Franz once buried a few chestnuts in the autumn, which sprouted the following spring, my father tore out the seedlings—for him alien invaders—without further ado.
Nowadays the oaks, which were once kept bushy artificially, have grown up into stout trees; all manner of wild grasses, mosses, and flowers grow everywhere in the heather; and the besom brooms stand under a thick tissue of spiderwebs in the shed. There are three zones, as it were, in this shed. In the first lie, as ever, the firewood and coals. The second houses the work tools used by my brother’s family. The third consists of the workbench that my father set up there. Strangely, neither my brother nor my nephew has altered anything in this corner of the shed. It gives off in its museumlike unreality an aura that has no other function than to whisper to the intruder a quiet yet energetic Touch me not. When I retrieved some coal from the shed earlier, the reflected light of stray sunbeams, which the clouds of the autumn sky released, passed through the dim window above this altar to my father’s fanaticism for order. The work tools, arranged by size, hang in a straight line on the wall. Nails and screws lie in tin cans, each neatly marked with their respective lengths. Under the table, more canisters of Xylamon stand strictly aligned. The shelf holds, in rank and file, a parade of paint cans and brushes of various kinds.
But when I let my gaze linger a little on this statuelike sterility, I felt that something had escaped from this whole grotesque arrangement of bureaucratic accuracy, that this rigid order had shifted into an endlessly drawn-out process of disintegration. Dust and rust are the media of this patient decomposition, this decadence of the inorganic, this composting of the technological. Ax and hatchet and saw rot like the tree trunks that they cut. Shovel and spade become the soil that they shifted, brooms the mud that they swept. And over all lies the dust, like a moss of dryness.
PLAINS OF MOSS. HORIZONLESS. Heavenless. Walking in encircling greenery. Giant cats, on the hunt, pursue me. Darwin sits in a tree and shows the way with his waving beard. Wading breathlessly through bright red fields of clover
with heart-shaped leaves. The cats lose the scent. The highest leaves of the plants reach my chest. The leaves are triangular, like my own heart.
Each leaf is designed precisely like a heart, in the color of the actual flesh. Fleshy stems fan the cooling wind. The fields undulate, begin to flow, pulling me along. In the masses of clover I flow toward nowhere, pulsating. The clover stems pass through me. Pumping evenly. But suddenly—cascades. The red river falters. Foam. Contraction. Anxieties. Breathlessness. The wood sorrel juts out from the whirlpool, wide at the ends, split in the middle, and pointed toward the stem. Darwin’s beard beckons.
I open my mouth wide, for my extremities are rigid, motionless; I bite into a huge sorrel leaf, finding a hold. The red stream pulls away beneath me. Again the undisturbed pumping. A pecking sound sneaks up on me, growing ever louder, a nervous unrhythmic ticking. A tocking. The pecking, the ticking begin to race. My heartbeat cannot keep up the pace. The secondhand drives it mercilessly onward. From out of the ticking come the green lights of distant sea beacons. The second hand senselessly races around its circle.
When I look at my watch, it is the middle of the night. I take off the watch, but sleep does not want to return. My heart beats evenly. I hear it inside me. Clover with heart-shaped leaves. Wood sorrel. In homeopathy, they are prescribed for heart trouble. As in a dream, causality is twisted. Or set right. The nebulous yet often also precise perceptions, observations, feelings of dreams give rise to phenomena that one, in a waking state, would view as their cause. My heart warns me about the watch. Clover with heart-shaped leaves, wood sorrel. Darwin points where? Everything is connected with everything else. All things belong together.
Blood flows through the brain. Clover with heart-shaped leaves, wood sorrel, clover. A giant circulatory system. Cats on the hunt. A single in breath. An out breath. Why clover? Darwin studied clover. Why was that? An in breath and an out breath. An ecological circulatory system. Clover. Evenly pumping. Cats. Causality. Darwin. Circulation. Sleep does not want to come. Outside, a cat on the hunt prowls around. Its cries. Clover, cats, causality. The cat hunts field mice. Cycle. Field mice destroy bumblebee nests. Clover. Bumblebees pollinate the clover. That is the entry point, and this is how the elements of the cycle are linked together. It all comes back to me.
