Moss

by Klaus Modick

  Darwin determined that only bumblebees visit the red clover blossoms; other bees do not come around for their nectar. But if the bumblebee were to die out or become more scarce, says Darwin, the clover would also be encountered less frequently or would disappear altogether. How many bumblebees there are in a particular area depends in large part on how many field mice live there, since the mice destroy the bees’ nests and sources of honey. But the number of field mice depends fundamentally on the number of cats who hunt in the area. Bumblebee nests are found most often in proximity to human settlements and small villages; their whereabouts can be attributed, in turn, to the large number of cats that subsist on the field mouse population and thereby keep it in check. Thus the presence of cats determines, indirectly, whether particular plants will flourish in a particular area, by affecting the size of the mice and bumblebee populations.

  The clover that can vigorously propogate itself, thanks to the bumblebees and also the cats, serves as pasture for cattle. Sailors require large quantities of pickled beef. Accordingly, England can thank cats for its sea power. It can also thank older, unmarried women of England, with their boundless love of cats. Even as naval power led England into war and took men away from women, it produced a multitude of English women who, in the absence of marriage partners, fell in love with cats. The cats, however, keep the mice in check, to the benefit of the bumblebees, and back again to the beginning. That was the circle—a curious history. It was the classical history of the ecological cycle. Mandelbaum enjoyed telling it. Always from the beginning. Always in a circle. He lovingly embellished this story with details.

  “Do you have it, Ohlburg? A cycle. No beginning, no end. Everything is one. Do you understand?”

  The second hand chases my heart. But why do I need a watch here? When I leave it off for two days, the automatic mechanism comes to a halt. It stops. The thought makes me tired. Then sleep comes. Dreamless. Deep. I am asleep.

  I no longer wear a watch.

  MINE WERE THE TYPICAL SYMPTOMS of a cold—swollen nasal mucous membranes and increased production of mucus, which during the day lodged itself in the frontal sinus cavity and during the night, when I reclined, dissolved and ran down. But from the start, I had believed all this was instead an allergic reaction, of the sort that I had already become somewhat accustomed to from the climate systems in American houses. Either way, the condition was more than just an inconvenience. It created a feeling of pressurized closedness in my head; this muddled my powers of hearing and also my concentration, if I can label as concentration the considerably weakened attention I devoted to things at that time. I experienced a deadening of my entire sensorium; day after day, I had the feeling that I was packed in cotton, looking out at what enclosed me but without being able to get any closer to the surrounding environment.

  It was all the more numbing since in recent weeks I believed that I had observed myself to be—half willingly, half compulsorily—in a kind of harmonious interplay with the world of appearances. I noticed these coincidental encounters with the world of objects because I began to experience that world unquestioningly, freed from the pressures of causality and logical analysis. In any case, the illness-induced sealing off of my head hindered any further advances into this domain; gradually, progressing in waves, it took over my whole body. My taste buds largely failed to do their duty, my glasses could no longer fully correct my weak vision, and even my sense of touch was diminished in a frightening way. Once I dropped a cup of tea, because I believed that I had a firm grip on it, whereas in reality I had scarcely touched it at all.

  I had almost decided to consult the physician in Wiefelstede, when a technological failure presented a solution to—and relief from—these circumstances. At the onset of the heating season, I had only ever made use of the electric heating system that Franz had had installed some years earlier. Feeding the old tiled stove seemed to me too complicated and inconvenient. The electric heating, however, operates via a principle of nighttime storage and gives off heat during the day only if one adjusts it appropriately at night. One evening, I had forgotten to set the circuit breaker before going to bed, with the result that the next day the heating elements radiated only cold air. I therefore turned off the system and with quite some difficulty got the tiled stove to work.

  When my coldlike symptoms did not act up this day, but, rather, suddenly disappeared, I did not at first attribute my improvement to this change in heating methods. But when on the following day I switched on the electric heating, now properly recharged, my symptoms returned with undiminished severity. In order to assure myself on this point, I turned the heat on and off a few times at half-hour intervals, and my body responded immediately. Presumably, the reason for this change is that the heating system’s blower stirs up the house dust and triggers my reactions. The symptoms, in any event, have not reappeared since, and just in case, I still heat the house only with wood and coal. So it will not do, after all, to speak of using the stove as an annoying, troublesome business.

  In fact, I experience a feeling of deep satisfaction when, three or four times per day, I must go back and forth between the shed and the house in order to provide for my own heat. Despite its low heat value, wood has become for me far preferable to coal. When I load thick pieces of wood in my arms in order to carry them back to the house, an agreeable warmth already radiates out of them. When they then burn and, crackling, broadcast their new condition through the oven tiles, these waves of warmth resonate with the clear signals of a speechless form of communication. The fundamental distinction between burning, on the one hand, and heating with something, on the other hand, is now clear to me. I heat with the wood, and the wood heats for me. As I gratefully acknowledge its friendly service, its warmth imparts to me the feeling of a wholly unfamiliar well-being.

  Sometimes, though, it makes me sad that I have not known, not seen, not cut down myself the trees that undergo this transformation from a luscious green to a red-hot vital force, giving life. I frequently sit with my back leaning against the oven and listen to the singing of the logs inside. Some days, keeping the house heated with wood occupies me completely, the process taking up so much of my time and energy. Before I throw a piece of wood through the oven’s hatch, I take it in hand, feel it, observe it with the greatest interest. No one piece looks like another—a banality that has been banal for so long that it is no longer recognized as such. Yet the variety, particularly of burl wood, is more than astounding. I attempt to estimate the age of the wood by reconstructing the size of the trees, their double life in earth and air, their simultaneous upward and downward growth. Now and then I chew small pieces of bark, especially ones that already have moss attached to them.

  A piece of root, to which I had at first paid little attention, was too bulky to pass through the oven hatch. I set it down on the floor in front of my feet and observed it in the encroaching twilight. Shaped like a slingshot, its form reminded me vaguely of a straddle-legged person standing there, especially since the thick upper end resembled a head. The surface was fuzzy, frayed out into various threads, beardlike. For a moment I believed I had a mandrake root before me, except that it was too large.

  The more intensely I observed the root, the clearer its appearance became; however, when I squinted slightly, it seemed to look back at me. Eventually, it occurred to me to remove my glasses. For a moment I saw myself in a half-blind mirror, saw myself in front of me, lying with splayed-out legs, but also saw myself sitting bent over me. This perception lasted perhaps only a fraction of a second, but it had an inner duration that belonged to an altogether different system for timekeeping. I did not want to burn this piece of root; instead, I picked it up, went outside, and searched in the woods for an appropriate place to put it, which I thought I found under a birch tree with two trunks. I laid it there in the moss.

  When I passed by this spot a few days later, I noticed that the root was now a cushion of white moss, of the sort that is commonly used as an ornament for wreath
making and in cemeteries.

  THE CLEAR, SNOWLESS COLD PREVAILS, dry and quiet. Around midday the sun appears with surprising strength. I have made it a habit to take my midday rest in a recliner on the balcony, wrapped up, onionlike, in many layers of blankets. The balcony is open to the south, but its other sides are closed and roofed over. On the glass wall of the east side, ice flowers are to be found every morning. This astonishing phenomenon proves that talk of inanimate matter is mere nonsense: even the stars of ice mimic vegetative forms. At midday, when these living ornaments collapse into the humus of the meltwater, a pleasant accumulation of heat develops here, the sensation of which is all the more comfortable when I can feel and see the cold that encloses this winter greenhouse.

  During this time, I feel like a cell pulsating with heat in the midst of a polar hostility to life, like life as such within an eternal icescape, and at first I spent these hours reading T. F. Thiselton-Dyer’s The Folk-lore of Plants. This work is, it must be said, marked by a rare sensitivity toward the indefinable. But even it painfully demonstrates how much harder the disappointment hits us, the more we strain the spirit, stretch the intellect, augment our information, and refine our methods of inquiry in attempts to corral the wondrous. Yesterday, when I set the book down yet again in order to reignite my extinguished pipe, I inadvertently inhaled the tobacco smoke very deeply, which is not customary for me and which immediately created a swirling dizziness in my head. I exhaled the smoke forcefully and expansively; it combined with my frozen breath and developed into an impressive cloud. I leaned back and followed the figure of the white floating image in the still air. It moved off toward the group of three spruce trees that are about as old as I am. My father planted them himself, with the assistance of Franz and me. It appeared to me as though the spruces, for their part, drew toward them the smoke that I had pushed out with my breath. In constantly changing movements and formations, very much like a dance, it played around the boughs and branches of the small group of trees, rising and falling as it leisurely drew itself between and through them.

  In the rhythm of the figures that formed there, an intuition touched me suddenly, like a wing beat; it far exceeded the limits of my field of research—indeed, extended far beyond my capacity for imagination more generally. It is impossible for me as a musical dilettante to describe this intuition, which in this moment revealed areas that otherwise only music, if anything, could penetrate: the weightless no-man’s-land or, better put, the land for all that lies between immediate sensory intuition and intellectual, reflective reality. Between these poles shimmered alluringly, almost like a panderer, each smoke image, and if I cannot reconstitute in writing the immediacy of my experience of this group of trees and their dialogue with the white traces of my breath, I at least want to try to remember the dimensions of knowledge that passed before my mind during these few seconds. Perhaps the process of writing it down will bring back an echo of the immediacy in question.

  Reading Thiselton-Dyer’s work may have contributed to the way that everything appeared in a limitless simultaneity before my mind’s eye—all of what I, from my childhood up until this moment, had absorbed while reading about plant mythology and plant cults. My account, which must necessarily be presented successively, will in no way do justice to the crowded contiguity and interpenetration of the images I remembered. Perhaps, however, my limitations can be overlooked. I am not a poet. And indeed, long before a poet like Ovid spoke of Philemon and Baucis, myths, sagas, and recollections of plant metamorphoses were found in the history and the representational worlds of all peoples, all cultures.

  Narcissus is the best known, and the most fascinating. Phoroneus was the son of a tree nymph, and Attis came from an almond. Myrrha was changed into myrrh. Even Jupiter was once a tree, and the Egyptian goddess Hathor is supposed to have emerged from a mighty trunk. Hesiod believed that humans had developed from the seed of the ash tree; Homer said it was the seed of the oak. In India, the fig tree is held to be the cradle of humankind. According to the Nordic sagas, the whole of humanity stems from the ash and the elm trees. Our word ash comes from the Nordic aska, which means “man.” Yggdrasil, the world-spanning ash tree, was sacred to Odin, because its roots reached out into the universe.

  And Yggdrasil was itself rooted in the tree of life from the book of Genesis, from whose roots in turn the Kabbalah’s tree of life sprouted—the tree of life that bears the pomegranates in which the Star of David lies embedded, as can be seen when the fruits are cut open. The Christian God died on tree wood formed into a cross. On Borneo, the Dayaks worship the spirit of rice. The Polynesians pray to the soul of flower fragrances, while the Sinhalese say that the coconut palm will die of grief if it hears no human voice. The Miami Indians recognize the spirit of maize, and the Iroquois fear the spirit of the pumpkin. In Walachia, there is talk of the soul of the water lily. For their part, some Siamese people offer trees cakes and rice before cutting them down.

  Artemis lived in a cedar, in a hazel bush, and in meadows. Athena dwelled in the olive tree. In the Persian pantheon, the cypress is the symbol of the ultimate, while Buddha was reincarnated forty-three times as a tree spirit before he experienced enlightenment as a human under the fig tree. As for oaks, it was not only the Celtic Druids who knew their power. Homer called them “the guarantor of safety.” It was from their rustling leaves that the oracle of Dodona prophesied. Our word church comes from the Latin quercus, and hence the oak.

  The oracular power of trees stems from their roots, which maintain a connection with the underworld. The Old Testament records numerous speaking trees: the magical oak near Sichem, the mulberry trees of David, the burning bush of Moses. And then there is the holy plane tree of Zarathustra in the Caucasus; the holy palm of the pre-Islamic Arabs in Nejran; the power of the laurel, which seers ate or smoked; the fig tree in whose place Rome was built; the lotus, which Egyptians, Indians, Tibetans, and Chinese sanctify as the seat of the most holy; the lilies of Hera, the roses in the groves of Diana, and the red anemone marking Adonis’s death.

  All of this stems from, roots itself in, and is interwoven with these three spruces, which have lived for about as long as I have. And when the smoke had dissolved into the night, I continued to stare into these spruces. All that I had known in these moments about the secret of trees, of plants, I felt and experienced—but not via this poor enumeration of this, that, and the other. Rather, all of it got entangled, became intertwined, knotted together, simultaneously and infinitely, brightly and lightly. But it disappeared with the smoke. Only the spruces remained. I tried to remember the magic of the Christmases of my childhood, but it did not return to me, did not want to come into my head. I tried, but I could not make it come.

  Now, as I try to put down on paper the memory of this event, I am struck by the irony that to my knowledge moss never was anything other, was never considered as anything other, than what it always was and is and will be: moss. Perhaps the mosses have their seeming inconspicuousness, which I begin to see through, to thank for this: Their low growth, and the concealed place that they seek out in surrounding vegetation, has excited the curiosity neither of collectors nor of botanists. They are, as plants, without secrets. And even the mythological, occult thinking that has covered almost every other plant with magical or symbolic meanings forgot the mosses. They have no nutritional value and no toxic effects. Only sometimes, I believe, have they taken on poetic significance. Their only use is indeed their uselessness, although they are not really ornamental plants. They are probably so beautiful because that is all they are: beautiful.

  And yet there must be something more to moss—something that attracts me, involves me. Something that drives the moss to approach me. But what? I know—or rather, I knew the answer once. But when?

  ALONG WITH MILDER COLD, a snowy new year has arrived. Yesterday Franz, his wife, Marianne, their son, Peter, and their five-year-old daughter, Claudia, all left. They have been visiting with me during the week between Christmas and
New Year’s to celebrate the holiday in a natural setting with their daughter—but probably also, as Franz remarked with somewhat awkward irony, to check whether the old emeritus is coping as a hermit. I can’t say that I felt bothered by the visit, and I have actually enjoyed the days spent with family. But now that I am alone once again, I feel liberated. Although I have been throughout my life a gregarious person who enjoys discussion and debate, the sudden presence of five people, the ringing out of five different voices, awoke in me on several occasions a disturbing sense of strain, as though it had become difficult for me to look at anything, to listen to anything.

  That said, it was very pleasant to have the management of the household chores taken out of my hands for once. As an old bachelor, I am accustomed to performing these daily tasks, but in the past weeks I have felt increasingly weaker, physically speaking. It was only the care of the tiled stove that I refused to relinquish, although I did name little Claudia as my assistant and initiated her, to her great enthusiasm, in the secrets of the oven fire. She handled the wood extremely carefully, without my having to admonish her.

  Marianne and Franz, who is a longtime hobby chef, took over the kitchen. All sorts of meat was served. I refrained from any discussion of that issue, not only to avoid disturbing the peace but also because, to my own surprise, meat once again tasted good to me. For years I had dropped it almost completely from my diet; here in Mollberg, I renounced it entirely. I have never stopped to consider why that was so. My need for meat seemed simply to fade away. I did not have ethical motives; indeed, as I write these words I am struck by the thought that an ethical vegetarianism probably can only emerge from an ignorance of nature, for whoever does not want to sink his teeth into the flesh of animals must sink his teeth into other sorts of living organisms.