Not decomp but composition: To know the rotting fruit we must recall its fertile flower.
Buzz of bumblebee, all sleepy-drunk. In swirling atmospheric soup, a pistil opens up to pollen—lets him into inner sanctum. There nucleus meets nucleus: her waiting egg is fertilized, a novel hybrid. The petals drooping drop & seeds develop. The pistil swells herself to ovary, a pregnant bulge, as all her skin slow-hardens.
The seed of rot is planted at the time of floral consummation. A seated bloom anticipates a mobile, longed-for Other. For bee-borne, wind-borne, and current-carried travelers. But her porous port & orifice, inviting guests, lets parasitic fungus pass: dormant, dwelling; biding, brooding; undetected patient waiting.
The first selection game has ended; now the second game begins. Not petals—perfume, flashy dresses, billboard flaunt for pollinators. But the fruit, its seeds, all sugarloaded: swollen brilliant-colored orb—a lure—a handshake for a hungry mammal. Who plucks & passes through the gut, so seedling's laid within a stool: a fecund brew in breakdown, unused excess passed, a fertile heaped recomposition.
Ovifissure: wounded womb, a gashèd entrance. Brown bag filled with ethylene gasses. Perhaps in a kitchen near you. (Set upon some laminate counter.)
The fruit ripens. Brownsugarcrystalline. A skin is such a thin seal. Just a small puncture at first, torn membrane, no forces to plug. Breach in the boundary, chemical guardian—widens, edges eaten, inner flesh exposed to outer world.
Cellulose to glucose. Smell of alcohol: the chem-sign speaks of over-ripeness, warns us off. Signature to drive the microworld crazy, whiff of whalefall.
Why does fruit keep an eggshell? Garden wall to guard its garden. Save its seed its yolk: for insulation; keep the birthing water in; keep the parasitic out.
To keep the out from spilling in; to keep the in from spilling out. Here, on the fifth floor, an apartment off Jaguaribe, Cris and I spoon fleshy innards of a maracuja out, with scrambled eggs, onto waiting platters.
Arid cold slows the growth of saprophytes. Put him in cryo, quick-cooled carbonite. Place his ribs in vac-sealed plastic, hung from hooks in walk-in freezers.
Archaeologists can dig a thousand years through desert sands; and a Cadbury’s chocolate bar, from Scott’s Antarctic Expedition, ’s safe to eat a century later. But the Amazon by contrast leaves no traces—any hints of culture past have slipped away in silt.
Salt and sugar, through osmosis, suck the water out from meats and jellies, slowing germs and microbes. But heat and water speed the protein cycle: simple made from larger complex; complex made from smaller simples.
Enzymelange. Mycoflux. Fibereating fungus. Loss of structural integrity. Rigidgrid made soft & soggy.
To know woodrot, we must know wood: Bark; and heart; and deadcracked shedding rhytidome—outer layer, an inert, purely physical obstruction—stonewall—Then, the living phloem, transportation networks branching bud to root, and cambium for growth, and xylem wood for transpiration, working slowly to the core, where inside, heartwood’s dead as well, and dense with tannins,
resins, sealants, all resisting rot, the fungus and the soileaters.
Scaffoldbraces binding sheaths. Cellulose for tensile strength and lignin for compression. Flexgreen soft to rigid gridded wood, bleaching out and browning.
Heatscarred, stormsplit, prune-wounded, beak-drilled. Pried or split or splintered breach in outer bark. Air-borne spores touch down on naked innards, start to reproduce: Fungus first digests the simple cellulose, and leaves the cubic fracture crumbled dry and spongy wood, stripped of all its carbohydrates.
Next the white rot’s creeping columns climb toward hard-to-chew-and-swallow lignin. Decay decomp decamp most rapid near the base, where structure touches earth and saprobes work their way from dewy soil up. Hence concrete keeps the timber dry, a lime foundation, barren wasteland, in between the wood and dirt.
Fluidseep in fixèdstructure; leaky plumbing, under-ventilation, season’s flood. If fungus lacks the needed moisture? Simple, ship it in, with sheer logistics Roman style: rhizomorphic aqueducts; invasion inland aided by a thousand lines of rail.
Water, substrate of solution! Water-death by dissolution!
All these complex bonds and patterns broken down to plainpure structures. Energy as heat released: The tempslowbuilding in the piledwood, the million fires of the microbes’ metabolic furnace. Heat in turn speeds enzymatic breakdown: doubled rate for every ten degrees, a cycled feedback, within upper limits.
Heat, agent of entropy, expedite bondbreak! Heat, agent of life, let proteins configure.
Structure fair game when left unguarded, no more watchers at its walls. Gangrene: long-dead body tissue, still attached to living organs, slowly rots away.
The Sun King caught it, and Kahlo. Cigarettes in the nostrils at Ypres, keep the smell of death away. Mudswallowed; waterlogged and floating, trenchrat doting; bones remain, mineral-hard, and weather slow but weather all the same.
Putrefact: a technical term: gassy build-up bloatblotch, bodily discoloration. Fragrantfade cadaverine, sourtang and rancidreek. An animal, buried in muck, begins its autolytic process: self-digestion by internal enzyme (then the storied worms).
Unburied bodies, no such grace: to carrion and crow and blowflies in the eyes and mouth. (Their hatching young will feed themselves.)
As for decompogenesis? Some small such small comfort for the dead, like hemlock midst the sitka spruce, which seed the nurse logs’ little wooden isles. Said von Braun and he should know: “Everything that science taught me strengthened my belief in spirit’s continuity”—across the grave and through the soil—ashgerm cycle coming simple, so to one day build, with other simples, into great cathedral.
A dead tree? May stand for decades before falling. And a treated surface? Decades more: Smoked with creosote (κρέας + σωτήρ, “flesh-preserver”), or coated with chems, oil finish and water repellent. The trick is keeping liquid out. To close the porous wood with paint and primer, solvent and seal. Sun to speed evaporation; ventilation, wind-touched wood.
How to handle rotting beams: scrape the softened, scavenged wood with chisel, wire brush or drill; then coat the hard uneaten wood with waterproof epoxy. (And fruit? A fridge, or amputation.)
Or rot will spread. The way that gangrene spreads, and poisons bodies, needs debriding. (Maggots used, even in clinics today, for clearing out dead tissue: placed atop the wound and under gauze they gnaw til rotted flesh is gone.)
In oaks, the hollowing-out is slow—internal weakness hidden, masked by bark as heartwood turns to dust. Some trees can stand a century—landlocked, heads cocked—their emptied bodies home to owls, bats, and rodents. Carpenter ants come after the fungus, tunneling through the now-soft wood, making it a home.
Rotting structure not the same as dead or lifeless structure; stone and metal do not rot but corrode, abrade, erode, and weather. Rot is what happens to once-living structure, that dies and undefended can be feasted on by scavengers, a demolition crew.
The rotted trunk or 2x4? A picked-over ribcage. Life’s legacy, repurposed by other lives.
“After a few minutes the student returned with the description of the Ichthus Heliodiplodokus, or whatever term is used to conceal the common sunfish from vulgar knowledge, family of Heliichtherinkus, etc., as found in textbooks on the subject.
Agassiz again told the student to describe the fish.
The student produced a four-page essay. Agassiz then told him to look at the fish. At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.”
According to Pound, in The ABCs of Reading: The method of the 20th C poet = the method of the 19th C biologist = the method of the painter of still lifes. (“Description in detail, ‘fore it decays”)
A metaphor for memory. Maxwell’s demon, shuffling nodes. All living forms? Are constant in rotting. Save what you can. Transfer the forms. First copy, second–endless copies.
And bits themselves can rot, at least in figures of speech. The links decay, the context lost deictic, all precision gone in treadmills, function degradation, incoherence—hence the IA, and the art of ten-millennium warnings. Obelisks, atomic priesthoods, hieroglyphics. Permapoetics: Preserve in verse a chiliad, as paper dries and crumbles into dust, or water wipes away the ink, or hardbaked clay, in flood, reverts to sludge.
Carve it, ye carve in stone, and the winds’ll weather it down over ten thousand years, ten-thousand years of breeze-blown particles, sanding abrasion. Leveled and beveled, saved in partial form by repetition: “Two vast and trunkless legs,” now amputated. ◼
