Moiling in the Earth
“Moiling in the earth,” as Pulter calls it in this poem, is the essence of human life, even if it is a distraction. The connection between humans and humus is older than Adam, whose name in Hebrew is a word play on the “ground” from which God shapes him (adam/adamah). In Genesis, when God explains to Adam and Eve the consequence of their sin, he reminds them “dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return” (King James Bible Genesis 3:19). That phrasing is condensed as the eternal cycle of human life: dust to dust. Dust is both our inevitable destiny and our point of origin. Dust is a beginning as well as an ending. I gather here reflections on soil, composting, and the fecundity of decay from the seventeenth century to the twentieth as a reminder of the long history of linking soil and rebirth, decomposition and regeneration.
- Thus nothing perisheth that to our eyes
- Appears, for nature makes new creatures rise
- From those which were dissolved, and all that live
- Their beings out of others’ deaths receive.
- Since things are not of nothing made, I’ve taught
- They cannot be again to nothing brought.
- 1
- Something startles me where I thought I was safest;
- I withdraw from the still woods I loved;
- I will not go now on the pastures to walk;
- I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea;
- I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me.
- O how can it be that the ground does not sicken?
- How can you be alive, you growths of spring?
- How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
- Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
- Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?
- Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
- Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations;
- Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
- I do not see any of it upon you to-day—or perhaps I am deceiv’d;
- I will run a furrow with my plough—I will press my spade through the sod,
- and turn it up underneath;
- I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.
- 2
- Behold this compost! behold it well!
- Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—Yet behold!
- The grass of spring covers the prairies,
- The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
- The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
- The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
- The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
- The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
- The he-birds carol mornings and evenings, while the she-birds sit on
- their nests,
- The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,
- The new-born of animals appear—the calf is dropt from the cow,
- the colt from the mare,
- Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,
- Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk—the lilacs bloom
- in the door-yards;
- The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those
- strata of sour dead.
- What chemistry!
- That the winds are really not infectious,
- That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea,
- which is so amorous after me,
- That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
- That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited
- themselves in it,
- That all is clean forever and forever.
- That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
- That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
- That the fruits of the apple-orchard, and of the orange-orchard—that
- melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,
- That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
- Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a
- catching disease.
- 3
- Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient,
- It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
- It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions
- of diseas’d corpses,
- It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
- It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
- It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them
- at last.
In the course of any imposing of order, whether in the mind or in the external world, the attitude to rejected bits and pieces goes through two stages. First they are recognisably out of place, a threat to good order, and so are regarded as objectionable and vigorously brushed away. At this stage they have some identity: They can be seen to be unwanted bits of whatever it was they came from, hair or food or wrappings. This is the stage at which they are dangerous; their half-identity still clings to them and the clarity of the scene in which they obtrude is impaired by their presence. But a long process of pulverizing, dissolving and rotting awaits any physical things that have been recognised as dirt. In the end, all identity is gone. The origin of the various bits and pieces is lost and they have entered into the mass of common rubbish. It is unpleasant to poke about in the refuse to try to recover anything, for this revives identity. So long as identity is absent, rubbish is not dangerous. It does not even create ambiguous perceptions since it clearly belongs in a defined place, a rubbish heap of one kind or another. Even the bones of buried kings rouse little awe and the thought that the air is full of the dust of corpses of bygone races has no power to move. Where there is no differentiation there is no defilement.
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. … It is alive itself. It is a grave, too, of course. Or a healthy soil is. It is full of dead animals and plants, bodies that have passed through other bodies. For except for some humans—with their sealed coffins and vaults, their pathological fear of the earth—the only way into the soil is through other bodies. But no matter how finely the dead are broken down, or how many times they are eaten, they yet give into other life. If healthy soil is full of death it is also full of life: worms, fungi, microorganisms of all kinds, for which, as for us humans, the dead bodies of the once living are a feast. Eventually this dead matter becomes soluble, available as food for plants, and life begins to rise up again, out of the soil into the light. Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long. Within this powerful economy, it seems that death occurs only for the good of life. And having followed the cycle around, we see that we have not only a description of the fundamental biological process, but also a metaphor of great beauty and power.