The Place of Plants in War 

Taraxacum kok-saghyz

INTRO: RUSSIAN DANDELION

On my visit to the Holocaust Galleries at London's Imperial War Museum, I was struck by an exhibit label describing a ‘blue and grey striped rough wool or 'shoddy' dress’ on display, hauntingly bearing the number '7963' and red Star of David. The label referenced ‘dandelion plants’, in conjunction with French and Jewish biologist Claudette Bloch, who in the summer of 1942 was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau as a prisoner, and later wore the dress at a protest ‘in front of the German Embassy in London against the resurgence of Nazism in Europe’ in the 1960s. With a PhD in biology, Bloch became a scientific asset to the Nazi party and was sent to work as a research assistant in Rajsko, a sub-camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Here she was forced to aid the rather cumbersome task of synthesising Russian dandelion, or Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), into rubber, as Germany and other countries suffered from a dearth of supplies, blockaded by Japan from Southeast Asia, namely the prolific Hevea brasiliensis. Little is on public record of Bloch's life, but the botanical research she undertook at Auschwitz demonstrates the Nazis’ desperate attempts to prematurely concoct technological alternatives out of whatever materials they could muster, lowly weeds included. Ersatz, as they were commonly referred.

Seizing USSR land in Ukraine, ripe with fertile soil conducive for the abundant growth of Russian dandelion, the Nazis continued its cultivation, distributing samples for the research labs occupied by prisoner scientists such as Bloch. However, the latex distilled from the Russian dandelion was not known to be so amenable as the Havea plants of Southeast Asia, namely due to high rates of coagulation. Astonishingly, efforts to augment the production of rubber using Russian dandelion are being reexplored, many decades after the war, researched as a potentially more ‘sustainable’ alternative latex material to the dominant rubber plants. The hardy Russian dandelion was recalcitrant to the Nazis’ efforts to transform it into rubber. Despite being nominally ‘Russian,’ the eponymous plant is native across central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Uzbekistan, border encroaching, without the invasive bellicosity of industrial military complexes.

While Bloch recounted the rather terrible conditions she and others experienced at Rjasko, her botanical erudition and concomitant connection to plants in the context of the war ultimately released her from the death camps that sealed the fate of so many others. As William G. Clarence-Smith writes, ‘Paradoxically, the Russian dandelion saved the lives of some Jews in Auschwitz, mainly women’. At Rjasko, Bloch and the Jewish inmates she recruited as researchers were allegedly ‘treated somewhat better than in the main camps’. Importantly, Clarence-Smith concedes that ‘The German managers were not acting to save Jews, however, but to advance their scientific careers and avoid being sent to fight on the eastern front’. Notwithstanding, the Russian dandelion's contribution to the turn of events is striking and demonstrates how the lives of humans and plants intersect in times of adversity, oftentimes changing the course of history. The recalcitrant wildness of the plant stalled the Nazi's technological development and in turn deferred Bloch's likely death.

These historical events reminded me of the writings of the late Bruno Latour, whose 'actor-network-theory' describes the influence enacted by all manners of beings, no matter how diminutive or even sentient they are. As Latour explains:

An “actor” in AT is a semiotic definition -an actant-, that is, something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general. An actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of an action. Bruno Latour

What follows is a musing on the place of plants in war, what spaces they occupy, in both a metaphysical and moral sense...

PLANTS AS SYMBOLS OF REMEMBRANCE

Wars have a pertinent influence on the ways that people come to interact with plants, not just as resourceful materials, but as auxiliaries for wellbeing, poetic influences, but perhaps most powerfully, as co-inhabitants and as kin. Although animals too contribute significantly to the mechanisms and semiotics of war, their involvement is more explicitly avowed than plants and in a less metaphorical way. We see this for instance in the variation of the purple poppy, intended to elicit the remembrance of animals lost to the war; namely that of horses, ponies and canines. While the plant plays the signifier, it is normatively the human/animal that is signified. The purple poppy that UK charity Animal Aid had originally conceived of, however, was to be replaced by an enamel badge in the shape of a paw, as to dispel the perception of animals as heroes, supplanting the misnomer with 'victims'. Isn't it interesting then that the First World War saw the phrase 'Lions led by donkeys'? As if the very concept of heroism wasn't influenced by the animality that the red poppy excludes, and that the enamel paw corrects.

Perhaps the retrospective power of floral war symbols is that they oversimplify, a bit like stone monuments that root a historic and complicated figure into a city centre, serving to venerate or vindicate, eventually to be torn down by city dwellers that disagree with tacitly problematic, lithic reverence. The organic vibrancy of flowers is that they grow, wilt, die and decay. But the plastic poppy, pinned to one's lapel is solidified in time in quite a different way to the sessile plant. The white poppy is intended to provoke remembrance for victims of all wars, which has been perceived as reactionary. This litany of prismatic poppies, oftentimes eliciting incredulity, however seems to highlight the parochialism at the heart of the red poppy, or indeed any floral symbol of war, which is susceptible to circumscribe victimhood or indeed heroism to one particular characteristic.

When lieutenant John McCrae wrote his poem In Flanders Fields, the red poppies he saw growing amidst the graves of his fellow soldiers were representative of both the dead and the living, whom fought at the Battle of Ypres. 'We are Dead' McCrae declares, 'Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved, and were loved, and now we live in Flanders Fields'. Poppies emerge from the aftermath, living in or from the remains of the dead. McCrae is the survivor, the dead accompanying the living, not a surrogate but a spectre. The poem evinces that survival from war is really a type of death, but is this 'we' delimited to McCrae and his battalion? In some ways, yes. But as the red poppy began to encompass more, the day of 'Remembrance' itself, its capaciousness came into question and other poppies of different stripes emerged.

What is so especially allegorical and indeed powerful about the poppies growing in Flanders? Admittedly, the flower of the poppies themselves are rather striking, a prodigious flower, akin to a head standing strong atop a lofty torso. The solider's bodies perhaps? Without losing the plants themselves to the power of men, there is a blissful continuity between what is materially and indeed allegorically true. Though a commemoration of kinds to McCrae's friend and fellow soldier Alexis Helmer, who died in the second battle of Ypres at a tender age of 22, the poem is in a profound sense anonymous. When we think of the poppies at Flanders or any meadow of flowers for that matter, there is something inherently anonymous, almost egoless, ghostly even, to the scene, comparable but not quite equivalent to perceiving a sparkling array of constellations in a clear night sky. As discrete as they may appear, the flowers' collective anonymity is much like the anonymity of the dead that lie beneath both them and McCrae's poem. To broach this thread further, we shall invoke the work of 'mystic' philosopher Georges Bataille.

GIVING BATAILLE HIS FLOWERS

For Bataille, both continuity and discontinuity are very real to both life and death (La vie la mort, as phrased by Jacques Derrida, who highlights their contiguity). Discontinuity is normative to our everyday, stratified existence as individuals. However, as Bataille demonstrates, many experiences and indeed desires are shaped towards shattering discontinuous existence. While oft erotic in nature, the ecstasy of continuity, that is a form of coincidence and togetherness, is also anxiety inducing, as is it in some sense reflective of death, the cessation of self. This is why Bataille writes 'After the living man the dead body is nothing at all...what we experience is a kind of void, a sinking sensation' (Bataille, Eroticism, 58). It is the 'growth of vegetable life' that Bataille characterises as the 'continuous piling up of dissociated substances corrupted by death' (Ibid., 60). Even in this decomposed mass, or compost, Bataille asks rhetorically 'How could anyone assert that that stinking mass is nothing at all?'.

There is a dynamic between continuity and discontinuity present in McCrae's poem. The soldiers are anonymous, continuous with one another like the poppies. They are continuous, however, not only in the soil of Flanders, but also with the living, hence why McCrae is in some sense already dead even in his survival. It is this life of continuity, that which is suggestive of death, which Bataille intimates we are fearful of, but desire notwithstanding. A desire for unity is, as Bataille suggests, a desire for transgression, in an act of copulation, war or death, for example, attempts 'to get at continuity...without actually crossing the boundaries of this discontinuous life' (Ibid., p. 141). We may think of the plant as demonstrative of the continuous anonymity of vegetal life, the basest of all life that sets the stage for discrete animality. But this vegetal continuity undergirds our own discontinuous life, especially potent in the emergence of poppies amidst the grave stones. This phenomenon is both poetic and metaphysical, an allegory that literally erupts from the earth. The symbol of the poppy is not merely representative of something other, for the poppy symbolises itself, enveloping humans in the life-death of its own planty existence. 

Though a lamentation of war, McCrae's poem demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the desirousness of death that Bataille broaches. Soldiers do not become continuous as such as a troop, but are made continuous in death, fused in some sense after life. This vegetative rebirth is really a reminder of the anonymous continuity inscribed in our lives, that while we might not recognise, will come with time. Regardless of the colour of the poppy in question, this continuity persists like a brute fact of existence, meaning that any delimited characteristic ascribed with a floral object is made tenuous, for the vegetation is a tapestry of soldiers wearing different stripes. To disavow the actual plantiness of the poem is to disavow death, mere pathetic fallacy. By disavowing the continuous, 'Mankind conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of things.' (Ibid., p. 59) The poem really does see the soldiers become plants, not strictly as symbols of who they were as people, but actually as plants that were dormant on the battlefield, able to emerge through the destruction as boots and bullets brought seeds up with the lime-rich soil that sustained their latency. As Bataille puts it, 'Death is really the opposite process to the process ending in birth, yet these opposite processes can be reconciled. The death of the one being is correlated with the birth of the other, heralding it and making it possible.'

CONCLUSION: REMEMBERANCE AND JUSTICE

...Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?

We will write our names with scarlet steam.

We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.

We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here

our blood will plant its olive tree.’ 

- Mahmoud Darwish ‘The Earth is Closing on Us’

What does it mean to remember, to remember those that came before us and have passed? Memory is spectral, haunted by what can never truly return, yet persists in some other form. In wars so many lives are lost, red poppies, purple ones, others too. These are the forms that humans, animals, plants and other life forms take, metamorphosing into something that for a second, translates, only to look completely different in another light. Plants, whether we like it or not, play some kind of role in the remembrance and justice that comes with war and death. They don't merely act as an arbitrary sign, designed to signify a predictable image. Plants and their floral manifestations are visually captivating, not as mere adornments, but as exceptional bursts of life that embody the truth of continuity invoked above, expressions of romantic love and commemorations of death, what we were and what we become.

Plants are the life in death; this pervades religiosity, in the Buddhist lotus or in architectural, Islamic floral patterns, even in the secular environmentalist faith and solicitude, that which engenders care for the lives and generations whose future may hinge on our actions. Sometimes in these environmentalist circles, the focus on plant life leaves a sour taste. As Naomi Klein concedes, ‘People do tend to be put off when their lives are treated with less respect than flowers and reptiles' (Klein, 129). At the extreme, where ecology intersects with fascism, Jonathan Glazer's film The Zone of Interest shows a Nazi family take care of the flowers and plants growing in their garden with such delicate tactility at the anterior of Auschwitz-Birkenau, whilst the bodies of the prisoners are incinerated. Images of humans bodies fertilising the soil reappear, but in a more egregious way than Flanders.

This is also evoked powerfully by the extract of Mahmoud Darwish's poem above, whose writing illustrates the complex and deeply rooted relationship between the Palestinian people and their Olive Trees. Genocide attempts to wipe out the sui generis of a particular human ethnicity, but in turn also the relationships between them and other plants, those that been able to historically flourish, olive trees and orange groves in the West Bank. The question of remembrance and justice in the case of war and genocide is therefore infiltrated already by the presence of plants. It is not a matter of commemorating all lives, human and non-human as if they were of equivalent value. But nor is it a case of forgetting the lives that entwined with those that we once loved, whether animal or vegetal. The anonymous envelopment of life, vegetal in nature, means that remembrance can never truly restore what once was. I leave you with a quote by Derrida, which intimates the role of remembrance when it comes to the justice engendered by the memory of the once living, both human and not so human:

'To exorcise not in order to chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome— without certainty, ever, that they present themselves as such. Not in order to grant them the right in this sense but out of a concern for justice...One must constantly remember that it is even on the basis of the terrible possibility of this impossible that justice is desirable: through but also beyond right and law.' - Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx 

References

Bataille, G. Eroticism. tr. M Dalwood. Penguin (2001)

Derrida, J. Specters of Marx. tr. P. Kamuf. Routledge (2006)

Klein, N. On Fire: A Burning Case for a Green New Deal. Alfred Knopf Canada (2019)

Sleeping like a rock: Unearthing the wildness of chalk

In spite of the demarcation lines separating the walking path from the surrounding pastures, a certain kind of wildness was palpable. Inculcated not only by the arpeggiated song of lively sky larks above,  but by the worn, skeletal ground, consisting of amorphous calcified remains. Ill defined footholds, etched by interminable steps, exposed as superficial and unreliable. Walking was more like stumbling. Down Castle Hill and onto the chalky South Downs, where uniformity is met with  caprice, a geological, but organic, sublime, luminous white like the moon.

Chalky remnants under the soles of my shoes, these traces of life engendered a question. What makes something organic? Within the scope of organic chemistry, organic materials are constituted by their combination of carbon and hydrogen, in simple terms. Once believed to be solely produced by living beings, chemists narrowed down organic substances to their molecular and elemental composition, discovering that organic materials were not unique to earth and therefore, not simply a by-product of life. In the context of geology, organic rocks are those that are composed of once living organisms and this principally involves sedimentary rock. As a sedimentary rock, chalk is composed of the calcite of marine organisms, namely coccolithophores; autotrophic phytoplankton, whose scale-like shells deposited layers of calcium carbonate, accumulated over millennia to form abundant layers of chalk, such as the ones that undergird and constitute the organic geology of the Downs. The chalky soil is actually nutrient poor, but this is beneficial for the grasses and orchids, maintained by grazing sheep, which signals the arrival of butterflies and skylarks. These ecological features are shaped by the unique geology of the Downs, and despite anthropogenic influences, such as Neolithic forest clearing and Ovis grazing, the concomitant emergence of the orchid, lark and perhaps even a fairy ring of parasol mushrooms, a certain kind of wildness murmurs on the rocks. If wildness is conceived qua life, namely wildlife, then non-living entities such as rocks are at least prima facie excluded from such characterisation. However, rocks, or rather mountains, feature heavily in the imagination of the aesthetical sublime, as conceived of by Kant and later interpolated by Romantic poets, most notably Coleridge and Wordsworth, celebrations of the sublime beauty of nature.

This celebration of rocky wildness pervades Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Though she reveres the immensity of the Cairngorm mountain ranges of Scotland, made from igneous granite rock, that is cooled magma, crystallised quartz and mica, Shepherd writes that she wishes to 'come to the living things through the forces that create them, for the mountain is one and indivisible, and rock, soil, water and air are no more integral to it than what grows from the soil and breathes the air' (Shepherd, 48). As she contends, 'All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird - all are one.' What is interesting is how Shepherd so effortlessly distils the coalescence between life and nonlife on the mountain, yet concedes that the granite is 'inanimate' and in turn, avows of the cleavages and differences that manifest between holistic and contiguous beings.

For nature writer Robert McFarlane, Shepherd's writing provokes comparisons with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body and his conception of the 'flesh of the world', an entwinement between self and world that intuitively challenges dualisms that normatively cleave mind from matter, life from nonlife and so on. In McFarlane's words, this demonstrates that we are 'co-natural with the world and it with us, but we only ever see it partially'; namely, through flashes of perception which shatter previously conceived bifurcations (Ibid, xxx). This is famously made clear by Merleau-Ponty's example of touching one's hand with their opposing one, whereby one perceives oneself as both subject and object, though never concurrently. Analogous implications are present in Shepherd's musings, as McFarlane intimates when he quotes Shepherd writing, 'Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered'. While McFarlane demonstrates parlance with the phenomenologist, his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty is slightly undercooked when he writes that just as for Shepherd, the mountain ''lives' because of our 'outgoing address' towards it', that 'matter is 'impregnated with mind''. In some ways, McFarlane actually betrays the phenomenological ontology of entwinement that he attributes to Merleau-Ponty and Shepherd alike, suggesting that the contiguity between body and matter is merely achieved through inoculating nature with our human perception. For Merleau-Ponty, 'life is not a separable thing' in the first place, something that is added on to matter to make it living, but is 'an investment, a singular point, a hollow in Being' (Merleau-Ponty, 2003; 238). In other words, life emerges or unfolds out of matter, pregnant as it is with this possibility. This is similarly expressed by Shepherd above, when she invokes the forces that 'create' or engender the living.

What makes the mountain living for Shepherd, is it not merely our minds or the life that blooms on Cairngorms against the odds, again erroneously thought of as a life added to matter. Subtly differential, it is the life that emerges in tandem with non-life; that is, life that can manifest with the support of matter, without as Merleau-Ponty puts it, being simply a 'causality telescoping the other'. Shepherd invokes the heather, moss, lichen and algae that are made manifest on the granite rocks of the Cairngorms, patches of life that are able to appear through an amenable rocky substrate, as though translucent. As Shepherd recounts, invoking the plant life growing on the Cairngorms, 'These mountain flowers look inexpressibly delicate; their stems are slender, their blossoms fragile; but burrow a little in the soil, and roots of a timeless endurance are found.' (Shepherd, 49) Fragility and endurance are intricately wedded in the very makeup of life, as plants appear fragile on the surface, yet hardy down below, what Merleau-Ponty characterises as life's contemporaneous 'fragility' and  'obstinacy'. The line is not clear, perceptually speaking, between the organic nature of the soil and the rock, appearing like a plenum that furnishes the life that blooms therefrom. The organic and inorganic are not synonymous with the dividing lines between life and death, for their coalescence instantiates a deeper coalescence between life and death itself. This coalescence is intimated by Shepherd when she writes about the profundity of sleeping on the Cairngorms, as a means of cultivating an intimate bond with the mountain. As she contends:

'Such sleep may last for only a few minutes, yet even a single minute serves this end of uncoupling the mind...I do not ascribe sentience to the mountain; yet ant no other moment am I sunk quite so deep into its life. I have let go of my self. The experience is peculiarly precious because it is impossible to coerce.' (Shepherd, 91)

Letting go of herself is not contrived, because as she says, this experience of being 'sunk' into its life, as if she struggled to separate herself from the mountain, comes as natural as sleep. Stationed in situ, amidst one's environment, non-differentiated, Shepherd sleeps like a rock. But as she concedes, these moments may only last a single minute and yet, their profundity is not eschewed. Sleep is an experience that is perhaps closest to death, but this death isn't the end, but more like a transient state of dormancy, one that is analogous to the unborn seed and yet also to the enduring existence of the rock.

However, is a rock merely enduring, as if impenetrable? As Shepherd suggests, rocks are not invulnerable, for they are at the mercy of 'disintegrating'. Yet, can we in good faith, paint all organic and inorganic beings under one brush? Chemical classifications and nomenclature may mostly have recourse in the context of science, but the meaning of these terms can also be gleaned intuitively, one that can align with our experience of the world. Of course any entity, whether organic and inorganic, is always at risk of exposure, but whether this exposure can be characterised as vulnerability, across the board, is a question that deserves critical reflection. Organic rock, such as chalk, don't necessarily always furnish the most fecund and diverse ecology, because as we saw above, in the case of the Sussex Downs, much adaptation has had to occur for the flora, fauna and fungi to consolidate its place in alkaline heavy soils. Notwithstanding, chalk is often a substrate that furnishes novel and salient ecosystems, including chalk streams, of which 85% are found in the UK. These streams are conducive for thriving numbers of Atlantic salmon and trout, as well as watercress and water-crowfoot, providing clear and filtered, mineral rich waters. This contiguity between chalk and wildlife sharpens the wildness that we experience when engaging with environments such as chalk grasslands or chalk rivers, meaning that chalk is perceptually salient for appreciating wildness.

Not only is chalk entwined with organic beings, but it is an organic being itself, if not the most organic rock there is, only really comparable to diatomaceous earth in its organic composition. But as we broached briefly above, is this phenomenologically salient, as well as geochemically? In certain ways yes, because as we have illustrated, chalk is so often enmeshed in and requisite for the wildlife that we come to appreciate, perhaps in a way that is differential, but not necessarily incommensurate, to other rock varieties. Chalk is a composite of micro-fossils, remnants of organic matter, not mineralised in the same manner as other fossils. As Merleau-Ponty intimates below, about the significance of the fossil, we are struck by the shell of life that continues to unfold in its vulnerability to the world, just as the chalk that sticks to our soles:

The trace and the fossil: ammonite. The living thing is no longer there but it is almost, there; we have the negative of it, which is related to it, not as the sign is related to the signification, the effect or the cause, but something for itself. And the mineral, reoccupying the hollow, remakes the animal in quasi. But hollowed fossils are more striking: there is nothing between them and the very animal—the trace of the footstep—Trace of the “statistical rise” it is still there. (Merleau-Ponty, 2003; 276)

What is more striking about hollowed fossils, those imprints of the living that haven’t been filled with minerals and cast into stone? As Merleau-Ponty suggests, there is no screen between the fossil and the ‘very animal’ or once living organism. Without claiming that the hollowed fossil gives us more direct contact with the living organism than the mineralised fossil, Merleau-Ponty intimates that there are perceptual differences, such that one is more striking. Striking perhaps because they are ‘almost’ there, immovable and yet bearing the history of their once living movement and their continuing placedness, like a dinosaur footprint etched in sandstone. This uncanny ‘almost’ is analogous to the cave paintings of ‘Cueva de las Manos’ in Argentina, a tapestry of hand prints which log the contact made between hand and rock through stencil. Haunting in their anonymity, their liveliness is expressed notwithstanding.  Traces for Merleau-Ponty seem to be the living, not a copy but a hollow, that needn't be mineralised to signify, that don’t have to become stratified objects, to be held and moved in space, for they once were and continue to be a hollow in being. 

Are we at risk though, of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen refers to as 'organic chauvinism' (Cohen, 16)? In his book dedicated to stone, Cohen argues that ecological analyses stick obstinately to ‘green’ symbolism, gathered primarily from the world of plants. Consequently, we fail to grasp ‘the slow immensity of the geologic’ according to Cohen. As he contends ‘Although tree rings and ice cores yield tales of ancient pollen, glaciation, and aerial chemistry, stone’s archival force endures far longer.’ (Ibid, 35) While he concurs with new materialist Jane Bennett that the ‘omnipresent vitality of matter’ is “obscured by our conceptual habit of dividing the world into inorganic matter and organic life”’, this overarching concept of stone that Cohen develops, glosses over the phenomenal differences between organic and inorganic beings (46). This is why Merleau-Ponty’s characterisation of the hollowed follow as ‘striking’ is pertinent, because it demonstrates how the sense of organic matter can be expressed intuitively. Qua traces of organic matter, the fossil expresses the sense of the living, as well as the dead. 

This is why for ecophenomenologist, Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s avowal of the ‘ongoing resistance of matter and life within spirit’ can give phenomenological sense to both life and death, as an intra-organic phenomenon (Toadvine, 55). Perhaps this is why Merleau-Ponty contends that ‘the living being is known long before the inorganic which is ordinarily expressed rather poorly by speaking of infantile animism’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1963; 157). He is therefore gleaning the phenomenal differences between the organic and inorganic, imploring one not to conflate the two, thereby distorting our understanding of either variety of being. One might argue that this more binary thinking is indicative of Merleau-Ponty’s earlier writing, which is perhaps differential to his later ontology of the flesh. However, I would respond that whilst he moves toward a more holistic view of nature in his later writings, these phenomenal distinctions still remain, albeit never stringently. Therefore, even if such a coalescence between life and matter manifests, this does not, à la Shepherd, mean there is an equivalence or indeed coincidence in Merleau-Ponty's terms. For Merleau-Ponty, the organic have an ‘an immanent signification’, which is of course variegated, but still distillable (Ibid, 134). As  Toadvine importantly concedes, however, ‘This doesn’t mean our scientific account is somehow already contained within the sensible encounter with the fossil’. Rather, the intuition serves not to echo a concept, but confronts us ‘viscerally’ as Toadvine puts it, or striking as Merleau-Ponty does. The phenomenology of the fossil is expressed by Toadvine, who writes: 

As the trace of another life and another world separated from my own by an unimaginably vast temporal abyss, the fossil both invites and eludes my sensory explorations, and I register this invitation and escape in a corporeal way, as the very experience of what it means to perceive a fossil as such. (Toadvine, 4)

Our perception of the fossil inculcates the sense of life within matter and matter within life. This intuitive grasp of the nonliving also gives sense to death, which is not the extinguishing of matter and life, but its continual unfolding. However, not all things unfold in quite the same way, hence why organic things decompose and inorganic rock weathers and erodes. But do these classificatory distinctions have any phenomenal standing? They must do for Merleau-Ponty, who contends that life is 'Not a hard nucleus of being, but the softness of the flesh' (Merleau-Ponty, 2003; 238). If life and its organic continuation after death is the softness of the flesh, perhaps the inorganic constitutes the harder outer shell of the flesh, requisite but differential to life. The organic flesh of the world is the literal petrified flesh of once living things, who continue to unfurl within our temporal purviews, decomposing, bio-degrading like compost.

***

All stone may wear away and disintegrate, weathered by water and air, but chalk, as shown (>), has a kind of contiguity with water that demonstrates its vulnerability, as a once living, decomposing being. Its organic nature is perceived, splintering off as remnants of archaic life. For Cohen, stone is ‘neither dead matter nor  pliant utensil’, but a ‘bluntly impedimental as well as collaborative force, stone brings story into being, a partner with language’ (Cohen, 4). As dead matter, though, the log is dissolved, an abatement that is stretched out but indeed perceptible, infested by the living fungi, moss and lichen, insects and bacteria, which all occupy it as a nutritious sojourn, soon to be returned to soil. Soil and rock may be perceived as a plenum, both requisite for the emergence of life, but the soil, like its chalky bedfellow, is a motley trace of life, of vulnerability, ephemerality petrified, a reminder of the sharedness of our exposure. Exposure may be the fact of the universe, but our earthly one is surely what constitutes the sense of our experience. Without glossing over the magnificence of stone, organic phenomena shines forth, but never in isolation. For organic things come before and after life. We sleep like a rock, but more aptly, like a log, as the proverb so often goes...a log dissolving amidst a chalky stream.

References

Cohen, J. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015). University of Minnesota Press. Minneapolis.

Merleau-Ponty, M. The Structure of Behaviour (1963). Metheun & Co. Ltd: London. Tr. A . Fisher.

Merleau-Ponty, M. Nature Course Notes (2003). Northwestern University Press: Illinois. Tr. R. Vallier.

Toadvine, T. The Memory of the World Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology (2024). University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Shepherd, N. The Living Mountain (2014). Cannongate.