Decay
Like other entries in our list of seed words, received notions of decay become suddenly muddled whenever plants get involved. Were we to try and identify distinguishing properties of decay from those of its close kin, death, we would soon realize that this hasty comparative scaffolding is bound to generate a straw man argument. Rather than illuminating the distinctiveness of each, a conceptual duality would likely form in which decay becomes only thinkable in relative terms to death, and vice versa. Seeming correspondences deriving from this juxtaposition would instead relegate them to ontologically divergent spatiotemporal fields with uncompromising metaphors and ineluctable chains of associations. Not only does such an approach foreground a perceived division of labor between the biological and social as indisputable, but it might even create a detrimental ecological fantasy that is utterly divorced from empirical evidence. Still, we cannot help but wonder if there is a measure of usefulness in pursuing this course of investigation—if not for the benefit of the pedagogical exercise in demonstrating how to methodically knock it down but, perhaps more importantly, we may discover what becomes thinkable if decay and death are understood as each expressing a specific phase of a continuum, à la Gilbert Simondon’s notion of individuation in which each phase shift is a form of transduction toward the creation of something inherent but entirely novel.[1]
Present exploration is organized around an eclectic mix of loosely conceived instantiations of decay. Whereas the processes of decay are universally accepted as biological phenomena subject to the same scientific objectivity and rigor, how different communities uniquely define and expertly refine various phases of decaying bespeak the actuality of discursive heterogeneity in which socioculturally imbued values and judgments are reflected. After all, not all forms of decay are bad and harmful. On the one hand, death construed in a sociocultural sense is typically experienced in a temporally restrictive term. Frequently accompanied by an indelible time stamp, a person’s death tends to register as a singular moment in time when the life activities of an individual organism cease altogether. A pronouncement of (human) death therefrom sets in motion a multitude of tedious bureaucratic tasks for those left behind. Imposing a decisive tone of finality and irreversibility, death must be handled swiftly so that it poses no threat to the existing social order. From a certification of the event, an official registration of the loss, to a lawful disposal of the body, there is an expectation of strict adherence to a rigid timeframe for processing and recordkeeping of (human) death. Most societies are known to comply with established codes of meaningfully compartmentalizing (human) deaths by confining them to a sphere of sociopolitical existence so that they can be stowed away as a singular event without fear of spillage or contagion.
If life before death were characterized by vigor and possibilities for subsequent transformation, life after death would certainly strike as a misnomer. In the absence of hope or prospect of a physiological rejuvenation or resurrection, there will be nothing left to observe. Unless, of course, we include zombie-existence scenarios, in which death does not constitute a terminal point of activities. For instance, brain death continues to pose medical, ethical, and philosophical quandaries to this day. Once one is declared brain dead, a company comprising family members, legal guardians, and doctors can proceed to lawfully and ethically harvest and “recycle” the individual’s functioning body parts. Advances in medical technology have managed to defer the death of one human—previously defined narrowly as an uncompromising cessation of life activities and agency—by prolonging another life by way of various life-preserving methods, including organ transplants. Despite the solace this life-giving gesture offers to some, this category of death does elicit a sense of uncanny among others. Given this ambivalence, it is perhaps no coincidence that the brain dead are routinely described as being in a “vegetative state”—a stationary, plant-like existence that passively responds to external stimuli, characterized by a legible absence of agential capacity.[2] Such an impoverished state of existence is analogous to death, understood to signify the end of one’s political, social, familial, spiritual, and corporeal life in our day-to-day. Brain death seems to exemplify a zombie existence by hovering over an indeterminate space between the animate and inanimate body.[3]
Decay, on the other hand, denotes more of an open-ended temporal framework where changes are presumed to take place over time without an easily discernible breaking point. In fact, this open-endedness suggests that a duration of decay may well begin considerably before the “time of death,” and it likely extends further thereafter. In the course of decaying-time, one’s experience of time can also become inflected; time may feel like speeding up, spiraling out, slowing down, and/or dragging on. Through fluctuating tempos of deterioration, degeneration, and decomposition, the process of decaying embodies an ever-shifting instability and impermanence. In other words, decay is an ongoing process of transformation where a phase shift itself is hard to arrest and ascertain.[4]If death is an injury that gets attended for an eventual healing (or an eventual outright loss), decay is an open wound ripe for contamination, infection, and transmission. This openness is precisely its blessing and curse.
For instance, do plants ever die, or do they merely decay? What about the plant specimens that are carefully dehydrated for future (re)animation? Does the point of having a plant specimen not hinge on its future seed-collection and regermination by rehydration? Are the specimens in suspended decay or life? Insofar as processes of decay are integral to formations of new life, does a plant’s death not amount to life cloaked in a (series of) temporary death(s)? At what point in a plant’s life should we definitively declare its death? Is it when specific plant species finally become extinct? Farmers, gardeners, and chemists are in general agreement that decay is an imperceptible process of creation in disguise, as it coincides with a time of bustling activities that critically feed into formations of novel organismic life. This is, perhaps, how the foul-smelling composting bins on the conscientious suburban dwellers’ pristinely manicured properties fit into the current discussion. Division of labor between the biological (decay) and social (death) reflects our practical treatment and conceptual schema of the contemporary world. Except, when thinking through and with plants, the division of life/growth, death/decay, and animate/inanimate is suddenly no longer so self-evident.
Below are a few examples where the said ontological divide (between decay and death; life and death; plant and animal; animate and inanimate; etc.) collapses to give way to something else, as the respective biological phenomenon of decaying takes on mythical, symbiotic, category-bending, culinary purchase as instances of a “life-giving” phenomenon.
1) Origin myth: Japan’s oldest surviving written work, The Kojiki (712 CE), recounts a famous creation myth involving two original deities, Izanagi (He Who Beckoned) and Izanami (She Who Beckoned).[5]No sooner did the spirits of heaven command the siblings to form islands than Izanagi and Izanami began dutifully begetting spirits to inhabit newly formed islands. Izanami was said to have been so fertile that after falling fatally ill, she still gave birth to seven more spirits from her vomit, excrement, and urine. In fact, her fecundity knew no bounds; her maggot-infested, decaying body continued to be a source of new lives. From her head, breasts, stomach, groin, hands, and feet, eight additional spirits were born. Interestingly, births of their spirit offspring prior to Izanami’s exile to the Land of the Dead were all instances of sexual reproduction between Izanagi and Izanami. However, every spirit creation after Izanami’s exile was a case of asexual reproduction from her decaying body. Following Izanami’s untimely death, Izanagi famously, and singlehandedly, produced three of his “noble children” to rule the high plains of heaven, the realm of night, and the sweeping plains of the salt-tide sea—another case of asexual reproduction. Fantastic procreation events by numerous other progeny depicted in The Kojiki are also mostly of asexual reproduction from decaying bodies. For instance, the spirit of the slain Lady Great Sustenance was known for having produced silkworm from her head, rice from her eyes, foxtail millet from her ears, red beans from her nose, barley from her privates, and finally soybeans from her rear. Critically wounded or slaughtered decaying bodies of female spirits depicted in The Kojiki remained both formidable and fantastically generative. While this seemingly echoes pervasive discourse surrounding Mother Earth, asexual reproduction by the female spirits (and sometimes male spirits) unambiguously deviates from a conventional paradigm of (human) sexual reproduction. Furthermore, while asexual spirit creation may not faithfully mirror asexual plant reproduction, its process is consistent with ecological rejuvenation processes. Nurtured by deaths, decay makes new forms of organism not only thinkable but materially realizable. However exaggerated and absurd the decaying-cum-birthing myths might be, few will question the potency of agricultural metaphors invoked in these stories.
2) Melons and parasites: Examples of decaying corpses offering themselves as a site of potential regeneration and a conduit of new lives abound in the plant world. For instance, in the late 1910s, alerted by famers in Ishigaki Island, agronomists discovered a widespread infestation of melon flies among the varieties of Cucurbitaceae(cucumbers, gourds, and melons), Capsicum annuum (peppers), and tropical fruits (mangoes and papayas). Over the course of the next eight decades, melon flies, who were suspected to have originated in Taiwan, steadily expanded their territories across the Ryukyu islands. With assistance from entomologists, agronomists ascertained that parasitic melon flies routinely targeted melon fruits to lay eggs deep inside their flesh. Once the eggs were hatched, maggots devoured the surrounding soft, juicy parts while being protected by the hollowed-out interior of the fruits. When they reached maturity, they would jump out of the rotting fruits to spend the next pupal stage underground, until they were fully ready to eclose. Infestation of melon flies usually went undetected until signs of decay finally became outwardly legible. But, by the time the parasitic activities were visually observable, the fruits had already been reduced to vectors of infestation and were no longer fit for human consumption and thus unmarketable. To prevent melon fly invasion as well as to contain an infestation to a localized area, until the late 1990s the Japanese government altogether banned produce grown in the Ryukyu islands from being “exported” to the mainland.[6] The case of decaying fruit bodies giving births to billions of melon flies exemplifies the cyclical nature of plant and animal organisms: The unbroken cycle of parasitic life is contingent on the plant’s perennial feedback loop of nutrients and chemical reactions, which is intertwined with the process of decay and genesis of life.
3) Slime molds: Ecologically speaking, exploration of decay must include some, albeit very limited, consideration of fungi, especially of slime molds. To be precise, fungi are neither strictly animals nor plants. The slime mold is a singularly fascinating organism because its life activities present an ontological conundrum for existing systems of botanical and zoological nomenclature. Not only are slime molds effective facilitators of decay, but they are exceptional agents of symbiotic lives, which merits our attention following the example of parasitic melon flies. The slime mold’s notable ambiguity stems from its unusual range of behaviors. During one life cycle, a slime mold goes through three distinctive stages of development: (1) a single-cell organism, (2) a multinucleate cell organism, and (3) a spore-making fruit body. It is during the second stage, when a slime mold takes on a living structure known as a “plasmodium,” that it starts to behave like a predatory animal; instead of “obediently” staying put as a plant might do, it begins to move in order to prey on other bacteria. When it transitions to the final stage, however, its manner of behavior returns to a more recognizably plant-like stationary existence.[7]Such a transformation obfuscates the conventional system of classification on which plant studies rely to determine the nature of existence. Insofar as slime molds are part of a spore-producing organism that feed on organic matter—an integral process of decay—the predatory behavior that slime molds exhibit poses an existential ambivalence. As such, slime molds challenge the conventional boundary that separates plant and animal, in a spirit not unlike how decay challenges the received notion of life and death.
4) Fermentation: Thanks to the cultivation of choice molds and the controlled breakdown of organic substance by bacteria, yeasts, and other microorganisms, we reap the benefit of fermented food, from beer, wine, sake, cheese, pain pouliche, and kōji to a wide array of pickled food. It’s been said that all successful fermentation is a product of happy accident, where a measured organic transformation process not only has kept its toxicity level negligible for most people but produced organic compounds that are known not only to provide immense health benefits but also to offer delightful culinary experiences. Amazing bounties are due to select strains of fungi activities and varying degrees of (arrested) decaying process, and as such, sometimes the processes can go awry and, unfortunately, death does occur.[8] Even so, the aforementioned openness of decaying is critical, as it allows inherent potentials to become actualized as delectable cuisine, thus instantiating a wonderful case of novel creation.
We might argue that death is a constant companion to life, and decay is like another form of death, except its much slower-paced companionship is more potently generative. While both death and decay are integral processes of life, only in retrospect do phases that separate life/growth, death/decay, and plant/animal become recognizable. Some iterations of decay are more acutely experienced as terminal, for they resemble something more readily recognizable as death, while other articulations of decay are ongoing and hardly detectable. The long duration of decay is only legible after decay finally manifests itself as the death of an organism, a novel creation, and the birth of another. We could approach death and decay as questions of hermeneutics, or we could explore them as expressions of different phases of life that demand a radical reimagination of life itself.
Notes
[1] Gilbert Simondon and Taylor Adkins, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
[2]It is no accident that the “vegetative state” is also known as a suspended “state of temporary death” (kashi jyōtai) and that a period of dormancy is essential for some plant species. Metaphors are, by design, slippery and transformative.
[3] Osamu Nishitani, “The Wonderland of ‘Immortality,’” in Contemporary Japanese Thought, ed. Richard Calichman (Columbia University Press, 2005).
[4] Francois Jullien, The Silent Transformations, trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski ([2009] Seagull Books, 2011).
[5] Yasumaro Ō and Gustav Heldt, The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters, Translations from the Asian Classics (Columbia University Press, 2014).
[6] Yoshiaki Ito and Hiroyuki Kakinohana, Nōyaku nashide gaichū to tatakau (Battling Harmful Insects Without Agricultural Chemicals), Iwanami Junior Shinsho 311 (Iwanami Shoten, 1998).
[7] Shinichi Nakazawa, ed., Mori no shisō (Thoughts of Forest), Minakata Kumagusu Collection ([1992] Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2019).
[8] Takeo Koizumi, ed., Hakkō shokuhin gaku (Studies of Fermented Food) (Kodansha, 2012); Victoria Lee, “Mold Cultures: Traditional Industry and Microbial Studies in Early Twentieth-Century Japan,” in New Perspectives on the History of Life Sciences and Agriculture, ed. Denise Phillips and Sharon Kingsland (Springer, 2015); Victoria Lee, “Wild Toxicity, Cultivated Safely: Aflatoxin and Kōji Classification as Knowledge Infrastructure,” History and Technology 35, no. 4 (2019): 405–24.