by Klaus Modick
Once I had objected: “But the moss is so lovely.”
“Lovely?” My father had shaken his head indulgently. “What is harmful, my child, what is harmful is never lovely. Everything in its proper time. Everything in its proper place. There”—as he gestured toward the woods—“there is the moss. And here”—as he pointed to the brick—“here we are. Everything must be in order.”
My father was considered to be an excellent pedagogue. Hence we, his sons, scratched at the moss until our hands burned and our backs and knees ached, so that our father upon his return could say, from out of a hazy fog of schnapps and beer, what he always said: “You see? Here one can really live.”
When I lay in bed, when the room was flooded by night and dreams—not the gray night of the city, but, rather, the blue-and-green night that came in through window, roof, and walls—I felt every single muscle in my hand, which had guided the wire brush. I felt the pain diminish in the pulsing of my blood, although I did not know whether the pain was mine or that of the moss. I heard the harsh scraping of the wire finger, the wire hand, on the dry bricks, fell asleep in the endless back-and-forth of my hand, which moved over the brick, just as it scratched over slate tablets, drew up infinitely long love letters, signed a thousand documents, hastily used a pencil to arrest my thoughts in a leaden fixity, lacerated—but also described—the moss.
As I sit on the terrace in the warm September sun and write these lines in shorthand, I see that all the joints between the bricks are grown over with moss; the red surface is covered with a veil of green. I take off my shoes and walk barefoot over this veil. Always in a circle, always in a circle. The veil lifts, swirls around my hand. A wind blows tiredly from the south. Always in a circle. The great pine tree leans down toward me. I know it speaks, but I am deaf. I go in a circle. The bricks are warm; the moss is cool. The bricks are dry; the moss is moist. Always in a circle.
“HERE ONE CAN REALLY LIVE,” my father shouted out jovially when the wire brushes had won their annual struggle against the wild growth of the mosses. If he had known how well one can die here, too, if only the wild growth is allowed to take its natural course, he would perhaps have been spared a horrible half year in the hospital ward for hopeless cases. As we gathered around the sterile bed, the whole family was more relieved than saddened by his last words—“Now I don’t understand anything anymore”—because his suffering was finally over. All this had only made his passing more difficult for him. Rather than being able to demonstrate his cheerful, loud strength, he floated off into a mute helplessness.
In the face of the big sleep, his lifelong slogan, “Reason delights,” must have seemed to him the great error of his life. I watched him descend to a place where really there is nothing more to understand; and then I euthanized my own fear by engaging with Franz in all-night debates. We argued about which biological terms can most precisely delineate the death of living tissue. Franz reached eagerly after materialistic explanations that explain nothing, because he, with his psychology, was shoved up against the limits of the mind sooner than was I, with my biology. I had an arsenal of concepts that, by way of the symbolic language of chemical compounds, ultimately misconceives and masks the mystery of death as a scientifically knowable process. As for the panicky agitation that shot out from my father’s eyes at that time, we kept that quietly under lock and key. Looking back, I realize that my father, who knew every bird, could assign every tree its Latin name, warded off with these terms his fear of nature, the disquiet that pounced on him when the moss swelled up out of the joints between the bricks. The terms were my father’s intellectual wire brushes. And so have I—the beloved son, the good child—kept my father’s fear alive for another lifetime. This fear has driven me to such heights of my profession that the peak I have reached is now finally beginning to crumble.
In essence the problem can be described thus: The artificial constructions of conceptual exactitude, which have given unique terms their internationally binding force—terms with which Linnaeus two hundred years ago made daisies Bellis perennis—have not given names to nature, but, rather, stolen names from it. In other respects as well, Linnaeus’s nomenclature is a difficult inheritance, for its system is not merely descriptive but also strangely, and infamously, evaluative. It is simply outrageous that the chimpanzee is denigrated as troglodytes, the orangutan as satyrus. And it is a feeble joke for Linnaeus to have given the amoebas the name Chaos chaos. After all, amoebas are the atoms of biological and therefore also logical order. The label Chaos chaos can with equal, if not greater, justice be applied to Linnaeus’s own nomenclature!
The annihilation of the name through the concept, of the living expression through the scientific term, has sped up and sealed humankind’s alienation from the surrounding natural world. In the natural course of things, the complete loss of a name, of form, occurs only in death, in which beings decay and enter into a great formlessness, just as brooks, rivers, and streams lose their names when they flow into the sea. In the same way, when in the past prisoners were identified with numbers, they were stricken from the list of persons, and exiled to a space devoid of memory. Even when it comes to sites, places, and cities, this process of numbering does not stop; thus post codes are destroying our very homes. The use of numbers instead of names for streets in the United States always disturbed me during my years there. Now I know why.
I can hear my colleagues voice their doubts about whether I’m still in my right mind. In reply, I say that I have seldom felt as sane as I feel these days.
That plants, animals, persons, streets, and places have names is, in fact, only part of the truth about the relationships between words and reality. The other part, which slips past us, is that names themselves comprise things, that names are things, that around names fields of force have taken shape; by means of these force fields, the material and intellectual reality of the surrounding environment interpolates itself into a name. In this way, things bespeak their life. An established name is thus, biologically conceived, the result of a mimetic process.
We know about the protective adaptations of many animals; thanks above all to their color, but sometimes also their form, these creatures can match their appearance to the animate and inanimate bodies in their environment. Analogously, the mimetic properties of names seem to radiate out toward all that has been, toward all that is now living, and to reveal their full potential in the face of death. Living life: That is what a name preserves. Perhaps that is also the reason why this knowledge has only now, toward the end, penetrated through the tank armor of science to reach me. If adaptations of the sort that extend beyond us are achieved through the medium of names, it must be possible to use this medium not only to trace past experiences but also to map out future ones. In just the same way, all things human were anticipated long ago in the plant.
Strange thoughts on which I have come to dwell. Or have these thoughts, rather, come to dwell in me? In actuality, these are not thoughts, but, rather, experiences—experiences that the nature of this place has given to me and unlocked ever since I began no longer merely to visit but also to get involved with, or in, the place. Indeed, what made it clear to me that names radiate their mimetic force only through such interconnected experiences, to which rationalistic inquiry, however, remains closed, is the name of this place: Mollberg. In its minor key, its Moll, resonates the serene, melancholic, but not resigned musicality that is woven from the sounds of nature and pulsates audibly through the place. In strict geographic terms, Mollberg belongs to Dringenburg; but it is a sign of the local residents’ indigenous sensitivity to place that they have always felt this whole area belonged with the name Mollberg. It is the area around the small lakes on whose shorelines the machinery of a onetime gravel mine gradually falls into weather-beaten disuse, becoming nature once again. Here are oak and pine forests, with fields that, offering wide vistas, are bordered by wildflowers; there are also dusty brick paths leading through bird-filled hedgerows. Yes, let geography be
geography: It is truly a rare art to be able to let things be! Likewise, no matter how far and wide you look, throughout the whole of the Mollberg area there is no mountain, no berg. Some other kind of elevation must be at stake, then—an ascent of a mental sort, perhaps. In the end, I simply do not want to know.
The melancholy of the place that its name bespeaks—the melancholy of the indeterminacy of its name, which appears to lie over the country like an unwritten history—is also the melancholy of the passage of time. Everything here is so unexciting and unostentatious that, barring the risk of finding a long stay burdensome, one always wants to remain. This remaining, this letting oneself be, is a temperate swim in a landscape that brings no cause for fear. It is simply there, lovely, mild, and very green. When it rains, the landscape becomes blue, as in certain Romantic paintings, and happily offers up its lush fertility for consideration. The only attraction here is that of having my thoughts soothed with memories that grow over me, soft as a moss, from all quarters.
These memories empty time of duration. Days lose their dates, thoughts their pompous urgency, their grimace of haste. When, as now, at the end of September, yellow blends with the lusty plumpness of summer, as it gently cools down; when birch leaves drop palely on the paths; when in the autumnal withering one last greenness shimmers, soon to be exhausted—it is then I know that a year holds everything, both taking and giving; that a year is nothing but a glance, a batting of the eyelashes, a casual intake of nature’s breath. Mollberg is—I know no better words to use for it than the ones I once read—rediscovered time. As a child, I had time. It was endless then and did not matter. The present was always there. Then came life; time, at that point, possessed me. Now death approaches and time will be returned to me.
And how clearheaded I am!
SINCE MY ARRIVAL HERE, I have not shaved. After I came to the house, I discovered that I had forgotten to bring my razor blades, but I did not want to make a special trip to Dringenburg just for that. When I went for my weekly shopping trip, I got myself some blades; the tough beard stubble began to be bothersome, rubbing on my shirt collars and causing my face to feel at once taut and ticklish. Yet when I finally sat with lathered face in front of the mirror and tried to shave the first tracks across my cheeks, my skin became so unbearably irritated that I stopped with a pain-distorted grimace.
At the place near my right ear where I had initiated my shaving attempt, I had inflicted upon myself a cut that was bleeding heavily. In addition, this shaved patch of skin immediately began to turn a dark red and was covered with rashlike pimples. Angrily, I wiped the shaving cream from my face, although the word anger does not capture the feeling that gripped me. A fearful uneasiness warned me that the old man in the mirror no longer had the steadiness of hand required to shave himself, that the beard, against which he would no longer be able to struggle single-handedly, would continue to sprout until the end, an outwardly visible sign of his decline. But this scornful self-knowledge, this insight into the helplessness of the old, became entangled with the thought that my body had, in effect, protested against an unnatural intervention into its growth; that the corporeal decline this protest had brought to the surface also began to bring forth in me a new quality, a wellspring emerging from my own desiccation.
I sat in front of the mirror and stared into the wasted stubble landscape of my face, from which the blood from the cut on my jawbone dripped slowly downward. I watched as the white-gray frill on my upper lip began to move in a blur, lost definition, changed color—becoming a blond fuzz on sun-browned skin, which, now that I’m again back in the bleak classroom after the summer holidays, will soon be bleached out. Into my reverie comes the roar of the North Sea surf, the rustle of the dune and beach grasses, the cries and bleating of the gulls, and from very far away a voice calling my name. Tziebäcke, my bench mate, pokes me in the side.
“Lukas!”
“Yes?”
“Having a good sleep, Ohlburg?” The mocking voice of senior teacher Dr. Wölk. “Would you please do us the favor of reciting the masterpiece of German poetry for which you were to prepare? If you please, Mr. Ohlburg!”
Tziebäcke shrugs his shoulders, smiling ruefully. Felmhofer grins mischievously; Eilert smirks. I rise from the bench and stand in the aisle between the seats. Through the open portion of the window, the part whose prospect is not clouded by milky glass, streams the holiday sun.
“Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. ‘Afterglow in the Woods.’
‘Into the forest I went …’”
“Fled,” whispered Tziebäcke.
“Uh, ‘fled, / A wild animal hunted to death.’ Uh …”
Tziebäcke shrugs his shoulders again.
Wölk’s mocking nasal voice: “Tomorrow you will know this. Perfectly. And with an appropriate emphasis, if you please. And add to it Meyer’s ‘Feet in the Fire.’ But with the correct emphasis, Ohlburg. This is lyric poetry; this is magic. You ruin it all with your stammering. Ohlburg, man! What do you plan on doing with your life? Sit down! Obbie, recite this for us.”
Obbie is at the top of the class. He recites the poem. But does Wölk take his oily singsong recitation to be an appropriate emphasis?
Into the forest I fled,
A wild animal hunted to death.
There the last glow of the sun
Streams down smooth tree trunks.
I drift back to Wangerooge Island, back to the sand, back to the sea, and through the wind comes the German poetry that Obbie is droning out.
I lie panting. Behold, to my side
The moss and stone are bleeding—
There was more to it, something else. What was it?
The blood streams out of my wounds
Or is it the evening light?
The red clot of blood in the moss of my beard crusted over scabbily. I continued to stare at myself, saw a stranger, frightened of himself. Where was that? When is that? That skeptical look, that disgust at the growth of the beard?
Mother says, “Boy, look at yourself.”
Traffic noise, flushing toilets, showers. Strange smells, a strange language, which was at one time familiar to me, very familiar. The tiny, dirty hotel room. Chelsea. London, at the beginning of 1934. The crossing was terrible, the ferry overcrowded, luggage in the corridors, vomit everywhere. I am seasick. I curse continuously.
Franz says over and over again, “Be glad that we’re getting out.”
Of course, he is so right, so terribly right. But I cannot, still do not want to believe it. Why were we all so sure of ourselves, Father, Mandelbaum, I? When Father was suspended from his position, father of all people, with all his good breeding and sense of order, we should have been warned. At the very latest. Or even earlier—namely, one year before, when Marjorie packed her bags and left.
“You folks are crazy,” she kept saying at the train platform through her tears. “You folks are crazy. You call that science? You call that politics? I call it mysticism, plain mysticism.”
It certainly was idiocy that flooded the universities at that time—race, blood, the whole absurd irrationalism, which poured out in an ever more brazen way from the lecterns. And as for us botanists, us biologists: Ironically, our fellow students abandoned their enthusiastic, intoxicated pursuit of knowledge; let the truth be the truth; preached nation, blood, and soil; forced Mandelbaum, who had spoken publicly about the death throes of such backward people, into retirement. He fled to the United States. At first, we laughed about it all, but it was a doubtful, desperate laughter. With Mandelbaum’s exodus, our laughter died away.
Then came Father’s dismissal, Father, who in front of his students had railed against the government as a pack of uncultured, ill-bred philistines on the chase, and then our pamphlet, in which we made fun of the so-called race theory and which we distributed in the institute. I was forced to ex-matriculate; Franz, shortly before graduation, was expelled from high school. One night, as Father drunkenly made his way home, he was beaten up. Mother’s eyes were s
uddenly opened; she made up her mind. The house was sold. Our bags were packed, and the furniture followed later—to London. Franz and I came next. Bleary-eyed and dirty, we arrived.
“Boy, take a look at yourself. For God’s sake! But the main thing is that you both are here.”
I look in the mirror, disgusted with my five-day-old beard. So before I fall dead tired onto the bed, I shave myself, heavy-handedly, not concentrating, slashing myself. You have to fight it; you cannot just let it grow. It overgrows us, devours us. As I am falling asleep, I hear Franz say that he wants to study psychology, perhaps in Sweden, perhaps in the United States. He is already practicing it, saying, “Shaving oneself is the most subtle form of masochism.”
He laughs; I sleep. I dream of algae, brown algae, ferns, beards, mosses. It grows all over me.
I started, sitting before the mirror, and had the feeling that it was in a certain sense no accident that I had forgotten my razor blades. Forgetting helps us to remember. Now my beard has outgrown the stubble phase. It is soft. I have accepted it. I look in the mirror. I am glad that I am changing.
IF EVEN NAMES CAN BE MIMETIC, imitating things in the medium of sound, all the more can one shape imitate another in the medium of disinterested observation. When it comes to my devoting more and more attention to the carpet of moss on the terrace, Franz would no doubt explain this behavior via developmental psychology: I seem finally to have succeeded in disentangling myself from Father. It is not that simple, however; it is even simpler. For when I touch the moss with my feet, at the same time the moss also touches my feet. The moss attracts me even as I turn toward it. But the more firmly I renounce an analytic, terminologically driven, category-bound way of seeing, the more I lose the botanist’s penetrating gaze, and the more powerfully I seem to attract the moss. Do you understand what I am saying?