by Klaus Modick
Evolutionarily considered, moss, in fact, has no future; one could say that it is always only pondering its own past. Its present, however, is pure, humble beauty. As rather regressive plants, mosses evolved from one of the simplified-to-the-essentials, long-ago-vanished primitive land plants, perhaps in the Tertiary period, perhaps earlier. Their sexual propagation reveals these connections very clearly, playing out exclusively in the medium of water. Moss thus reflects the age-old tendencies of its ancestors. But true regressions are unknown to evolution; the regression of moss is a simulated one, which has ensured its survival.
Life constantly uses reversions, harkening back, but it disallows truly retrograde movements, even if it often simulates them. Just as the regression of moss falls short of being an actual regression, so, too, will the old man who thinks childishly fall short of becoming a child again. Likewise the scientist whose thoughts are grown over with images will fall short of becoming a painter or—if his ideas are instead attacked by a kind of poetry—a writer.
WHENEVER I’M AT THE HENNTING FARM to buy supplies and pick up the mail that the country postman delivers there, ever since I told him it was not worth his while to make the detour to my place, especially in the snow, I stay for a half hour, more or less, sitting in the great kitchen and speaking with old Wilhelm Hennting, who has been around a dozen years longer than I. As the result of a stroke, he has been confined to a wheelchair for seven years; and as the result of a second stroke last spring, he has also become, as one says, confused. From time to time, however, clarity comes over him. He then recognizes me again, knows my name and remembers things and events that a younger person would already have forgotten long ago. I feel akin to him, though in the manner of a mirror image. His moments of clarity reveal thoughts that seem unclear to me, and in his absences of mind he perhaps gets closer to things than I can get through my considered reflections.
In any case, my family owes a lot to the old man. During our nearly fifty years of forced stays abroad, Hennting has, with a country person’s guile and stubbornness, ensured that we were not dispossessed of our house in Mollberg. Shortly before our emigration, Father had officially transferred the house to him, and Wilhelm acknowledged the arrangement with an indefinable wink. He had never told us the details about how he convinced an expropriation-mad regime that the house was actually his own. His influence in this region, growing out of the four-hundred-year tradition of Henntings living on their farm, was evidently deeper than political power structures. In any case, in 1947 he handed over to us with great matter-of-factness the key and the deed to the house, refusing any form of payment. He never spoke of politics, but he made no secret of his contempt for National Socialism, which earned him more than a few friends in the neighborhood.
And so it surprised me all the more when during my latest visit, which found Hennting in a clear state of mind, he did not speak as usual about old times, good and bad harvests, or seed qualities; nor did he fulminate about the pernicious influence of technology on country life, one of his favorite subjects. Rather, he asked me directly what I thought of the political movement that designated itself as Green. He watched a lot of TV, such and such shows, not understanding much any longer; but he had picked up enough to realize that nowadays one could form a political party from the most obvious feature of the earth. Could it be that people had finally grasped that not politics but, rather, nature constitutes the true concern of humankind? But how, exactly, does one go about doing politics by means of nature? That may be the biggest piece of mischief. Of course, whoever destroys nature destroys him- or herself. But how could that issue be negotiated in parliament? The supporters of this new party would do better to come here for the harvest and lend a hand. An extra pair of arms would always be welcome.
Yet these young people knew absolutely nothing about what they romanticized. How can you talk about the environment, cleaner nature, pure eating, and so forth if you’re speaking of matters of which you have no knowledge whatsoever? Did I believe, he asked, that even a single one of these Green youths knew how to milk a cow correctly? Or how to distinguish rye from oats, oats from wheat, wheat from barley, summer grains from winter grains, early sowing from late sowing? Did any of them know what an oak is? A birch? A spruce? For them, a tree is a tree, grain is grain, and if they ever heard a nightingale, they would probably think that it was a blackbird singing. What a joke! They held seats now in parliaments, regional councils, local districts. Everywhere. They demonstrated against nuclear power. That was all well and good, but they probably did not even know how to work a wood-burning stove. At first, when the party bigwigs would come to the farm to solicit his vote, he told them that he had no time for politics. Eventually, though, he had to ensure that politicians got something to chew over. Some talk. Others do things. It has always been so. His son, who now managed the farm, slowly came to realize that all of the artificial fertilizers, the chemicals, were just a mess. They destroyed the soil, and the critters, as well. Then everything got out of balance. Everything. And it could never be set right again.
Before I could utter even a single word in reply, the old man’s stream of speech dried up as suddenly as it had burst forth out of him. He stared sightlessly out of the window and did not seem to register my parting salutation. Where had he gone? Not having to take a stand on the issues he had raised, though, was fine by me. The subject reminded me of a disagreeable discussion that had taken place among Peter, Franz, and me over Christmas.
Peter turned out to be, to Franz’s great anger, a member of the ecological movement, this being difficult to reconcile with his neo-Marxist tendencies. Franz had held forth in a very engaged manner, asserting that this pseudopolitical movement heralded the return of Luddism, irrationalism, nativism, and indeed blood-and-soil ideology. He had attempted to entice me to break through Peter’s defenses, for he had counted on my being, as a botanist, a capable ally. But I held myself back—it may have been because I did not want any hostility around me, or it may have been because, like old Wilhelm, I cannot or do not wish to grasp that our environment is already so badly ruined that anyone with a commitment to it wins elections.
To the discussion at hand, I made only a single contribution, mentioning something I had read. Specifically, it has been observed of mosses that they develop astonishing capabilities of absorbing chemical substances in large quantities from the environment, sequestering and then ultimately neutralizing those substances. For example, radioactive waste originating from nuclear power plants has been found, concentrated 100,000-fold, in a moss native to France, Cinclidotus danubicus. Peter had expressed disgust about what that means. Did it therefore follow that this moss would soon be domesticated by us, as well? I replied by saying that I was surprised at the phenomenon but could not interpret it.
On my return from the Hennting farm, the matter kept going around in my head. Maybe it signified nothing other than that mosses are waking up out of their evolutionary dormancy and, in view of the destruction of the earth, the disappearance of humans, beginning a desperate attempt to put a stop to this destruction with their feeble means. Moss could be trusted to do that.
But my confidence in it is even stronger.
THE DAYS BECOME JUST BARELY perceptibly longer. The sun stands higher. My midday meditations on the balcony expand in time as well as space.
If one stares into the sun for a few moments with open eyes, as soon as one shuts them again, streaky patterns and shapes appear on one’s retina. Most noteworthy are their motions, which flow out in all conceivable directions but without the patterns thereby losing their contours. A green circle grows, pulsating, out of a yellow one, which for its part flows out of a red one. It moves away from me but also enters into me; moves upward into my brain but at the same time remains near my lower eyelid; billows out on all sides and yet continues to hover, balloonlike, in the center—shrinking, growing, gestating, dying. As I try to adapt the movements of my mind to these shifts, which bring the dynamic into the
static and the static into the dynamic, apparently irreconcilable elements are joined together in a flattened formation that creates an infinite expansion of space.
The body, my body, emulates these movements. It outgrows itself without departing from itself. I do not just sit on the balcony but also feel that I am sitting together with the balcony, the whole house, within the space of myself. I can reach the clouds. This unconditional and boundless mobility is not goal-directed; rather, it emanates from itself and melts down into every tiny particle of movement the movement of the whole. Is this like the bodily sensation, in the mother’s womb, of the unborn child?
Childhood arrives and renounces the contracting impulses of concentration; it becomes lost in an indiscriminate melting away in all directions. Adulthood overcomes this condition, replacing the desire for boundlessness with a concentrated decision in favor of a few firmly held elements—a decision by means of which the mature individual achieves productivity. One no longer swims directionless in the great stream of the whole, going anywhere and everywhere; rather, one builds a filtering sieve through which that stream flows, and thereby attempts to catch the parts of reality that are necessary for the construction of personality. Hence adulthood is similar to the mouth of whales, through which masses of plankton are sieved, or even the formation of a reef, to which ever new corals of experience, knowledge, and memory cling, such that a person takes shape. Then in the conscious approach toward death, in becoming old and wanting to be, to remain alive, the circle is closed. The oversaturation with concentrated creation, with ideas and information, releases a new form of self-awareness—the awareness that the self can melt away again. In this closing of the circle, life achieves an apparent regression similar to the one that evolution brings about in the mosses.
My circumstances resemble ever more closely the patterns that form on my retina at night. Separations, distinctions, become impossible and meaningless. The I overlaps with the All. The All begins to moss over—to mossify—the I. The capacity to become similar becomes more powerful with each act of empathetic identification; it becomes the capacity to undergo metamorphoses and, finally, the ability to become interchangeable. And equally valid.
The similarity between humans and all of nature, as encoded in the myth and fable of the mandrake root, spreads from the appearance—the phenomenon—to language and thought. For the mandrake is really the omni-mandrake, the fundamental equivalence of all being. Ultimately, this impulse encompasses all conscious and unconscious functions, all aspects of the individual, until it is entirely equivalent even to what is opposed to it and everything can be anything. When I look at the pine tree or the moss, the plant gives me a kind of psychic charge, and if I have, in turn, charged it with myself, it mirrors me back again and I it. Thus the plant actually approaches me; it becomes an island in space, sees only me, becomes one with me. This is all so simple that it resists being described.
As I now write down the word Moos, as I have done so often before, my eyes and the two middle letters fall into one another. I drop into realms of dark green, swim through forests of algae from which the mosses evolved; sink into cells, bottle-shaped ducts; and penetrate, in the form of a colorless spermatozoa, to the tip of these bottlelike shafts. I push deeper, turn back again—my movement however always being directed forward as I search, in a stretched-out shape, through a structure that lacks cell walls. Ocean plankton rises, sinks back down; the blue of the sky disappears; the chlorophyll is gone; a gray veil of mist is everywhere. I assume the shape of a drop, waterlike; large white spots proliferate across a colorless sky; the canvas becomes visible, the blank paper, the coarse-meshed grid. The wind lifts me up. I drift, circling endlessly in the cool breath of the wind. Shady gray wisps of cloud. Softly falling crystals of snow. Look.
On the blanket lies snow. A moss of coldness. Snow glitters in my beard. My face burns in the chill air.
WHERE CUSHION MOSSES cover the ground, the winter holds off the March wind much longer. The melting has been oozing through the forest for days, laying bare the clamminess of it all. The long rigid freeze is loosened, as if with a smacking of the lips. There is a slow dripping from the roof—or rather, from everything in general. Rays of sunlight lick the remaining patches of snow. The wind lifts vaporous mists from the ground. The earth yawns and turns over in its sleep, stretching mightily. Joints of frost spring up like roots that had been deeply buried. In the sandy paths, these crusted clumps seep back into the ground as mud, in all its monotony. A release, a gentle pulling, a stretching, and the snow cover is rolled up.
The last white-gray pillows of snow cling to the moss in the tree limbs. Starlings swarm against the gray sky. Sometimes, between them, a track of blue appears. Something lifts. The grass gulps meltwater. The cold falls, powerless, from the pines, oaks, and birches. It trickles. It drips. The winter staggers. There is a thawing, a growing, a proliferation, a beckoning. A wind blows constantly. The winter disappears, and in its dwindling something swells. The pulse beats restlessly; the heart keeps false time.
I journey to Wiefelstede. The doctor listens. Nods his head. Listens. Taps. Nods his head.
“You already know what it is?”
I nod my head, tell him the name of the medicine I need. He nods his head, writes a prescription. The pharmacist cannot decipher what it says. I tell him the name of the medicine. He nods his head. Then, in the bakery, I order tea. Seven drops three times a day. A dripping, a thawing. It becomes quieter. I walk through the village, which is much changed.
The church stands in the middle, as it has for six hundred years. It has not changed. The foundation walls were hewn from granite boulders, reminders of the ice age. They are as high as my forehead. Piled up across them are weathered bricks, held in place with rusty wrought iron. And growing over all of it, moss. Over joints, crevices, cracks, and gaps.
The door is ajar, but I don’t want to go inside. I remain outside; it is too early. The cemetery has a great beauty. It is taken care of but not worked on. It is left alone. Only where sites are freed up through decay is there space for new resting places. The centuries lie next to and on top of one another. But the marble stones disturb the peace. They are foreign; they will remain foreign. Their surfaces are completely smooth.
The rock mosses here settle only on the granite rocks, on the boulders from the ice age. They cover the surfaces with dark, almost black cushions. They love an erotics of death. And they live the erotics of erraticness, which outlasts death. In their growth, they track all the uneven areas in the stones’ surface. They anchor themselves in—become almost inseparable from—the stone. They cover the pious sayings. They grow over the names. They spread out over the dates. They love very cold temperatures, yet they survive the summers. They go to sleep along with the winters, persevering in a patient stillness until the cold returns and they awaken. Then they once again extend out over the stones. But they avoid the marble. They know that it comes from the south. It is too warm, too smooth, too youthful. The rock mosses love the cold. And the old. In the springtime they go to sleep.
Moss. Tomb of stones.
AS THE ROCK MOSSES FALL ASLEEP, to hibernate during the summer months, all the other mosses assess the state of the snowmelt for purposes of food intake, growth, and reproduction. One finds here biological and botanical evidence for the thermodynamic fact that water’s melting point and freezing point are the same. The fact of this sameness is undeniable, even as a parallel fact remains inconceivable—namely, that love and death are also identical.
Ever since my sojourn to the cemetery, I have felt so healthy again, in the blossoming spring, that I face the prospect of my own death with great calmness. It is another indisputable fact that my good health is due to the heart medicine. But that doesn’t explain my readiness for death—really, a kind of muted wishing for it. I have fallen in love with moss, and when I sense how this love is reciprocated, I yearn for the moment—without wanting to hasten its arrival artificially—when my increasing
ability to be similar to moss, to undergo metamorphoses, will pass over into a pure identity, one no longer requiring interpretation.
The life of plants corresponds to the death, the being unborn, of humans. Moss lives only in the here and now, at the level of the group soul, the collective consciousness. It has refused individuation but thereby developed the maximum degree of living self-awareness. Thus it forms a fully autonomous, independent realm, hermetically separated from the animal world and yet unconnected to the rest of the plant world. Apart from preventing the soil from drying out, it is absolutely useless. That explains its singular beauty, whose use, though, is to reveal through its mere existence the uselessness of usefulness. In order to capture all this, one needs a way of observing and describing that makes transparent the impenetrability of science. Even as I hear the call for this kind of representation, I translate it, in turn, using my impenetrable terms, going around and around in a circle. That is the revenge of my lifelong botanical gaze.
In this science, arguably, the use of approximations is concealed. It thus leads up to the inexpressible that lies beyond the nameable, but never reaches it, does not recognize the name of what is nameless. This is particularly the case in our times because scientific knowledge expands ever faster and more comprehensively, at the largest as well as the smallest scales. The increase of knowledge does not reduce the puzzles, but, rather, multiplies them; does not illuminate the secret, but, rather, throws ever new veils over it. Every term for a new phenomenon, every answered question gives rise to a thousand new questions, and makes a thousand new terms necessary.
