Rot and Redemption

Every place I hike is a graveyard, and each bed I make on the earth is made atop death.

Damn it, Walt Whitman. You put me in this mind.

It has been my habit as I venture into nature to take a bit of poetry or literature as a companion for the journey. Today my hiking-fellow is “This Compost,” a poem chosen from the father of free verse’s Leaves of Grass. We walk the Benton MacKaye Trail.

In and up, the trail takes us over the hills of Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest.

I am, however, having trouble with this particular fellow, who requires continuous coaxing along the way and refused at first to embark upon the trail at all:

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.

What’s wrong, friend? I ask. He replies not to me, but to the ground:

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.

Whoa, buddy, I say. Let’s get going a little ways. I’m sure you’ll shake off this feeling, whatever it is.

But he keeps on. And the longer he keeps on, the more the morbid idea infects my thoughts. The ground I walk on is composed of all the broken-down bodies of lives no longer living. In those bodies are the very infections, diseases, shortcomings, excesses, and sins that brought them down to death — all still there, making up the very earth now smeared across my hands and knees.

We walk up the steep path. Roots flow down the hill like water. Water flows down the path like water, banked on each side by growing mosses. If I stop, I can almost hear the flora imbibing nutrients from the ground, reinvigorating itself with new life.This place built over death is teeming with life.

I turn to my companion and make note of this, but he is lost in his own explorations. Then, as if I were not there, he bursts anew:

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 apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches …
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, …
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

Interesting, I respond. I weigh it myself. If I touch the trunk of today’s tree, I am safe from the influenza of yesterday that killed the man on whose body the tree is nourished.

A conversion has taken place, I say to myself. Or rather, a redemption of material. My hiking-fellow turns. It’s as though he’s finally heard me.

What chemistry! …
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 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.

Redemption by chemistry, yes. The apple I eat grows in a graveyard. Death is turned to life.

But while my companion is fixated on the breakdown of bones into berries, my mind has jumped to a different plane. What of the errors these humans committed? Are their sins somehow also broken down into fresh and living soil as their bodies are broken down?

If my hiking-fellow notices my spiritual considerations, he is not doing so on the surface. He has been struck with and is stuck in awe.

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 distills 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.

Yes, yes, yes. The earth is mighty. By bug and bacteria, by fire and fungus, it resets things as they were at the start. Still, I find myself wondering — how great is the redemptive power of the earth? How far does it extend? If renewal is allowed for the physical body, is there a renewal for the spiritual one?

Surely, my sins are better if broken down rather than found whole in the dirt. But can this be done? Worms cannot eat what they cannot eat.

I begin to walk more slowly. My hiking-partner pesters me to move on. We have many mountains to summit today.

 

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