Succession — a rambling reflection
succedere — Latin for “what comes after.”
I’ve pulled quite a few tails over the last few years in a lonely war on the myth of progress, leading many progressives to suspect me of personal hostility, but I ain’t mad atcha. I actually share many of the mid-range political goals of so-called “progressives” (who used to just call themselves socialists — as I still do).
The myth of progress is an imperial myth, imperial all the way down. But the most frequent objection comes in the form of “what about.” What about vaccinations? What about electricity? What about airborne ambulances? What about antiperspirants? What about Twinkies? There is always one or more things that we hold so dear that the imagination of their absence feels intolerable. We also hate ourselves, or at least our imaginary past-selves, the “lower forms of life” to which we now trace our existence.
“We are the only people who think themselves risen from savages,” writes Marshal Sahlins. “Everyone else believes they descended from gods. . . . We make both a folklore and a science of the idea, sometimes with little to distinguish between them. The development from a Hobbesian state of nature is the origin myth of Western capitalism. But just as Hobbes did not conceive that the commonwealth abolished the nature of man as wolf to other men, but merely held that it permitted its expression in comparative safety, so we continue to believe in the savage within us — of which we are slightly ashamed.” (Culture and Practical Reason, 53)
So how would I account for these various “gains” that have accompanied, and occasionally mitigated, the inhering violence of modernity? And how do we project into that other mythical beast — the “future” that never arrives — without some kind of roadmap like the progress narrative? I prefer a narrative cribbed from biomes — interdependent communities of climate, geology, flora, and fauna . . . like a forest: succession.
It’s a slightly off-putting concept for us modern/postmodern subjects, because we are the people of impatience and frozen time — we freeze ourselves in texts and images, then try to write ourselves through those frozen moments, little hallucinations of petrified emergence. Succession is an off-putting concept because succession respects no conceptual boundaries — it is not just physical, not just biological, not just material, not just semiotic, not just climactic, not just geologic, etc.
Succession also calls up our own animal-reminder mortality, something we spend most of our days in late consumer capitalism trying to evade and deny. That’s why progress narratives are so attractive and false, and why modern culture spawns superficial personhoods insatiable in the pursuit of “experience,” as if the fact of experience (“good times” — “Polaroid moments”) might somehow balance death’s memory-free finality. Any account of human existence without death as a great obelisk in the center of human consciousness isn’t worth a bucket of warm piss.
Succession tells us we cannot “build” a deciduous forest where one has been scraped away. When I worked on the Permaculture Project of the Adrian Dominican Sisters a few years back, there was a playground, tennis court, and mown field of around seven acres by a Montessori school that had been closed. These were maintained through constant mechanical and chemical intervention to prevent this seven acres from returning to their former state of mixed deciduous and conifer forest. Just seven acres of green turf grass and a patch of ground exposed where the tennis court had been pulled up.
The first thing we did was stop mowing and stop any application of chemicals. When the grasses grew high, storm runoff was substantially slowed, leaving the seven acres wetter than it had been in decades.
Then we committed one major intervention to correct another. The convoluted terrain had been laced with a system of drains. We collared off the drains, raising them high enough so they only caught overflow, then we used a bulldozer to scoop out six berm-boundaried swales — one leading to the other with little spillways. Now the area would catch, hold, and slowly sink storm runoff instead of draining it into high-velocity pipes to be externalized. We spread tons of compost and almost a hundred bales of wheat straw, and seeded the bare patches with clovers, vetch, native grasses, and wildflowers. We planted more than four hundred plants, species that were specifically adapted to the variable levels of sun, wind, and moisture. Many would eventually die. Many other species would blow in.
Then we waited. And each year, the great field changed. Within three years, whole new guilds of flora and fauna popped up, and patterns began to emerge. Now the three dozen or so fruit trees that survived punctuate a landscape that looks like patches of texture and color — a Van Gogh.
We’d given it an initial boost, but now the field was undergoing a succession on the way to becoming a forest again. First, there are pioneer species — like that annoying thistle which actually pulls minerals from the subsoil and enriches poor soils. Grasses and flowers mix and match, each year changing, then come the shrubs, then a few young trees . . . in a few years, mature trees . . . and on it goes. Eventually, if left alone, a forest will reach its most stable and lasting state — the climax state of the mature forest. And with each succession, biodiversity increases and each element is further contextualized by all others.
People can interfere with the process, even help it along, but the complexity and interdependency of the forest is only superficially knowable — it requires our neglect as much as our attention. Every bacterium, every ant, every worm, every spider, every bird, every flower, every piece of deadfall, every woodchuck and skunk, every bush, every fly . . . each works in highly specialized ways without intent more effectively than any human can imitate. There is no snapshot that can stand for what is, because there is no what-is, there is a becoming that is always happening — not in the past, not in the future — now.
Death is an integral part of this. Everything and everyone that dies, dies now. When I die — the actual event — that event will happen now. I won’t experience it as a memory, and it won’t conform to my own dark projections about death “in the future.” In a hundred years, there will be no one who remembers. My collection of “Polaroid moments” will be erased, as if they never happened. But things will continue. Succession emerges, patient and yielding. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I believe in a vulnerable God.
If there is a virtue to be had in this rambling reflection, it is patience. Yes, I can do things that make a difference, but that does not mean I will make the difference I anticipated. Hardly ever. Any fool can pick up a stick and swat a hornets’ nest.
Sometimes . . . a lot of times, the best course of action is to wait. Some things cannot be “built” — an engineering trope that contaminates the modern episteme. I may want a forest, but for the forest I shall have to wait. Only arrogance tells me otherwise. Even death can be a form of participation, albeit without that ego that fades and cracks like an old snapshot.
