faces/bodies/animals in embers/ashes/clay/ice
LIVING THINGS IN THE LIVING
LIFE THAT RESEMBLES OTHER LIFE
faces/eyes/animals etc. in wood
insects that resemble land animals
faces/body parts/animals in root vegetables
sea animals that resemble land
animals/birds
birds that resemble land animals
sea animals that resemble plants
He had made similar outlines many times, moved the various categories around and tried to make the whole thing work out, but so far he’d never been satisfied, and it was always the same points that caused him trouble. Most problematic were the two main headings “living things” and “dead things.” The skeletons that lay on the table by the wall definitely came under dead things. But at one time they had belonged to living things. The question was whether a skeleton was living when it was part of, and was surrounded by, something that was alive? Or was it dead the whole time? What did being alive really mean? If, for instance, you chopped off your arm, the arm went from being alive to being dead. So one might imagine the rule to be this: if a part of living things is removed, that part enters the category of dead things, while the main part remains living. That’s how it was with his father’s toe, which he still had on ice in the cellar, more than six months after it had been amputated. It had become gangrenous the previous winter, and as there hadn’t been anyone except them on the farm, his father had gone to the neighboring farm to get help cutting it off, but the men there were out in the forest, and so when he got back he’d decided to do it himself in the evening after everyone had gone to bed. He’d sharpened a knife, placed his foot on a stool, and begun to cut. Noah, who’d been woken by the noises of someone moving about in the kitchen, had crept downstairs. Silently he’d stood in the hallway and watched his father hunched over, cutting at himself with a knife, illuminated by only a candle on the table, and without making so much as a whimper. The toe had stunk like rotten meat, his father would later relate, and that he’d been filled with such a great hatred of it that he’d felt hardly any pain, just a longing to be rid of it. When he’d cut through the last fiber, he put the toe on the table and bound a cloth tightly around the bleeding wound. Then he’d picked up the toe again, studied it for a long time by the light of the candle, before limping out into the hallway, pulling several pairs of thick socks onto his wounded foot, pushing the other into a clog and going out. Noah, who’d concealed himself behind the open clothes cupboard, crept out after him and saw how he threw the toe into the woods. When Noah was certain his father had gone to bed, he fetched the candle and slipped in among the trees. After searching a few minutes he found the toe, packed it in snow, placed it on top of a beam in the cellar, and had, ever since then, replenished the ice surrounding it at regular intervals. A part of his father belonged to him, he liked that thought, and at the same time the toe was shelved beside many of his other objects, between living and dead things.
His father didn’t say a word to anyone about what he’d done, as he realized that amputating part of oneself would say something about him, and he’d rather not have that. But, of course, the silence also “said” something, and only strengthened what he wished to avoid. When one summer’s day, taking a break from the haymaking with some others in the shade of the trees by the river and cooling themselves by sticking their feet into the ice-cold water, questions arose about his toe, which no one knew was missing, he decided to forestall the tale of “Lamech” by narrating what had happened himself. Noah hadn’t been present, but Anna had, and she’d mentioned how strangely talkative he’d been and that he’d said that the oddest thing about it all was that he could still feel the toe. It’s as if it’s there! he’d said. I think about curling it, and then I feel it curling. Even though it’s really lying rotting in the forest.
But of course it wasn’t. That toe he sometimes felt obey him was in his son’s possession, on ice on a beam in the cellar. The toe had gone from living things to dead things, whilst its original place of growth, his father, still lived, and thus proved the rule about parts dying once they lose contact with their place of origin. But Noah had also seen examples where the rule didn’t apply, or was postponed: once when he’d lifted a large stone up in the valley, there’d been a grass snake lying underneath it, and in his fright he’d let go of the stone, it had chopped the grass snake in two, and both parts continued to live. The rear part wriggled in front of his eyes; the front part, consisting of the head and about an inch of body, shot away into the grass like lightning and vanished. Hens with their heads cut off continued to flap their wings; sometimes they ran around for several minutes before they fell down. Even in human bodies death wasn’t absolute: nails and hair continued to grow after the body was dead, that could go on for weeks. The line between what was living and what was dead wasn’t absolute, neither was the boundary between what was dead and what was living. Weren’t living things composed of dead ones? Blood, wasn’t that dead? The skeleton? The hair? The nails? To solve this problem, he had for a while divided “dead things” in two: “dead living things” and “dead things.” The idea was that there was a difference between what had always been dead — stones, mountains, earth, etc. — and dead things that had once been alive — corpses, amputated body parts, broken-off branches, cut grass, etc. The advantage of this tabulation was that the division between categories wasn’t so fluid. The common denominator of dead things that had once been alive was that they rotted. Therefore everything that didn’t rot was either alive or dead:
LIVING THINGS
DEAD LIVING THINGS
DEAD THINGS
(which don’t rot)
(which rot)
(which don’t rot)
a human being
a human corpse
the skeleton
This had satisfied him for a long time. The problem of the skeleton had been solved: as it never rotted, it was a dead thing, even while it was part of a living thing, whereas blood and tissue, which rotted, were not. Most of a human being, for example, belonged only to the two first categories, “living things” and “dead living things,” and that applied to almost all living things. And then in addition there was a small portion of living things that came under “dead things”: the skeleton, the hair, the nails.
On closer consideration, however, even this wouldn’t do. What happened to “dead living things” after they’d rotted? They turned to dust. And as dust didn’t rot, it came under “dead things.” Living things that died were, in other words, dead in the same way as things that were dead. In principle there was therefore no difference between the skeleton/hair/nails and the rest of the human body, other than that the latter was converted into a dead thing, whereas the skeleton/hair/nails were dead all the time.
The arrangement was further complicated by his father’s gangrene, where what was rotting wasn’t dead, but living tissue.
And so it seemed reasonable to assume that everything belonged in the category of “dead things,” but that some “dead things” were alive. And this was the wall into which all his speculations eventually ran. What in fact was life? What did it mean that something was alive?