Transformotion

Heat forces the segmented chunks into motion, the pieces fighting for control in great cataclysmic dramas. The minerals at play, now in the freemoving play of agitated molecules, soup together to become primitive bacteria, feasting on the floating particles from which they emerged. As the primordial reactions cool into relative stability, the new forms grow out, the basic seed of the family tree of all life, slowly expanding from its deepest roots (still visible on deep-ocean vents, sucking down plutonic gasses) onto the newly solidified continents.

In reading the world around them, the common mistake of the American nature writer, no doubt schooled in all the pioneering sciences of the new continent, is to believe what he sees to be an assemblage of verticalities. This appears in their narratives, tales of audubon-correct collections of sights seen, leaping off the page like listing off a catalogue.

A rabbit nibbles on grass, pressed furtively into the marshloam. Shadows and sounds dance at the periphery of its awareness to the horizon. A raptor soars from the globe-wrapping winds, from cirrus-skies, sighting its dash, descending to bring down forces of beak and talon into its flesh, piercing its skin and dragging it through the ground, settling in momentum with the corpse transmuted to meat. When it returns to the air, successions of consumers take their morsels until the corpse has been reduced to the nitrogen, seeds deposited from the raptor’s winds embedding deep to spring up the next generations.

Beginning in the civilized world, he enters nature removed from it. While in awe, his awe is that of an invader, of an outsider, humbled before the face of a great God before him. As such, his journey into nature is just that - a journey, a passage. He conducts himself as an alien in another’s land. It is for this reason that American naturalism is obsessed with preserving some platonic ideal of the forest, disallowing even limited usage and artificially forcing it to not react or change in tune with the world around it. The consequences of this can be seen in the great Yellowstone fire of 1988, where a crown fire destroyed more than ever imagined by human insistence that no fire should occur in their Garden of Eden.

Vapors collect at the mercy of the wrapped winds, condensing to heavy finalities, cirrus wisps accumulating to stormclouds. When their weight grows too much to bear, their mass descends to Earth as liquid water. Hydrophilia forms puddles, forms streams, wears down channels, inscribing its movement downhill into what it should fall upon. At the terminus, what was stripped from the land and what fell to the ground returns as sand, as mineral, as water, to the watery depths it all emerged from, the beginning, the end.