Moss
Page 9
AT MATURITY, MOSS DOES NOT RELEASE its spores immediately out of its capsules. They become free-floating only when the surrounding tissue has finally rotted away. This often takes up to a year, or longer.
THERE IS A SMALL FAMILY of turf-forming mosses with only a single genus, Splachnum, which is essentially restricted to Arctic areas. But for a few days now it has flashed up around the house; this in itself is amazing, given that the heat and brightness are now constantly increasing. The luminous yellow- or red-colored canopy of the moss is remarkably signal-like. The facts of the matter are as follows.
With its flickering color and the indole-like smell that it exudes, this family of mosses, giving off an odor that is to me at once stimulating and narcotizing, now begins to settle in my beard, attracting insects that ensure the dissemination of its spores. This is quite exceptional for mosses. Even in the choice of its substrate, the home where it settles, this moss family demonstrates a special, worldly-wise cleverness. It grows exclusively on rotting organic matter. Of all the mosses, this moss is possibly the only one that will be able to rise up out of the evolutionary standstill into the colorful, fragrant realm of the higher plants. In the end, such presumptuousness, which I indulge negligently as the temperatures rise, is all for naught. But the glow, the swarming everywhere, the odor of deep blue—all this is a vehicle in which I can travel farther.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
I GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE ASSISTANCE I received from Nicola Bigwood’s partial translation of Moss, submitted to fulfill the thesis requirement for her 2006 M.A. degree in Interpreting and Translating from the University of Bath. Bigwood’s thesis constitutes an important resource for any reader of Moss, and though I did not discover the thesis until after completing a draft of my own translation, I drew on her work while making final revisions. I would also like to thank Klaus Modick and Elana Rosenthal for their invaluable feedback on previous drafts, and copyeditor Carol Edwards for her careful work at a later stage. All errors and infelicities, however, remain my own.
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