A translation by Randolph Burks of L'envers du paysage, from Nouvelles du monde [Short Stories from the World], by Michel Serres (pp. 57-62).
The Underside of the Landscape A beautiful lacework made up of inert matter worked by the time of the living and the history of cultures, and whose sensory information – calls, diverse odors and colors – traverses the hundred folded tissue, the landscape, fragile, in disequilibrium beneath its tranquil serenity, is exposed to the risk of collapse. When two or three deep plates quake beneath it, the Earth seems to want to rid itself of this precarious and aerial interlacing like superfluous clothes, whose rags immediately tear and fall amid the organ rumbling of these shocks and their waves. So, beneath the appearances drawn with great difficulty, for millions of years, by the fauna and the flora, the peasants, the workers, the architects and the gardeners, but destroyed in an instant, the underside of the landscape, what it conceals and how it comports itself without humans can be seen: a veil is torn, a barrier crashes down, a boundary opens before a never seen reality, while the habitual condition of being blind and deaf ceases: a truth appears, which the planet, fundamentally naked, intentionally seeks to have be glimpsed. What to call the terrain discovered beneath these ruins and about which no one knows how to say, on that day of wrath and joy, whether it bears the end or the beginning of the world? Language lacks, on this all too wise point, a word that would designate what lies beneath this discovery, in the sense given to this term, not by the dictionaries, but, in their daily practice, by the sand and gravel extractors, the quarries, the miners, the public works professions, whose first work consists in extracting the layer of surface dirt above the material, more or less precious, to be exploited; since this mantle hides the stock, its removal precedes the extraction. Thus the earthquake contributes to the discovery of this place, fundamental and wild, where all human intervention is nullified and erased. A well-kept garden at a latitude without any major risk, France remains silent about this terrain above which its landscapes, living and human, raise and weave their beautiful lacework. For such a secret, which the learned term noumenal, to appear, a phenomenal event, “phenomenal” in the most vernacular sense, is needed, a gigantic wrath on the part of the elements which, beneath the flagellation, total and meticulous, of their ire, devastate the whole and the detail of the appearances; the labor of discovery having thus become perfect, the terrain that has no name in any language occurs, the black depths of the well of truth. For during a fiery rolling of the deep earth, a thick rocky plate has to suddenly break: catastrophe, then, around the epicenter; or a violent thunderstorm has to ravage the mountain on which the alpinists, lost, know things are hopeless; or in a desert, burning or icy, a sandstorm has to throw its razor blades at ground level; or the winter bad weather has to populate the night of the ice floe, or a cyclone has to blind what remains visible of the world; or a tornado has to cause a raging sea, to turn them into filthy hells: it's in God's hands! Four times I had the good luck to survive a landscape whose collapse allowed seeing this real rise to the surface beneath the ruins, like a memory of the primal earth: during the Loma Prieta earthquake of
Serres/The Underside of the Landscape October 17, 1989; in the fire and lightning of summer thunderstorms on Monte Viso and on the summit of the Barre des Écrins; in the air during Hurricane David in the Gulf of Mexico around Puerto Rican waters in October 1973; on the water lastly, plunged, rolled, beaten by a winter storm in 1956 between Port Said and the shores of Crete. So I have seen, felt and heard the wild language of the inhuman; the language, incredibly low, of the abyssal earth; the tongues1 of fire, in a foul rain, of lightning; the tongues of vipers, cutting with sand, that slash one's legs and hack at one's face; the windy tongues of turbulence, that shove and knock us over at random; but I especially remember the tongues, white, gray, foul, of giant waves breaking before the prow and suddenly hurled upon my shoulders, as though the walls of tall buildings were collapsing on me; ruins of water weigh tons. In each and every case, the body, standing, can't maintain its usual station, but falls and lies down, carried off, rolled, shoved, hammered, ground up, trampled. It collapses with the landscape. Behind the simple sensory qualities, the thunderstorm eradicates dimensions, in the sense of measurement, since the height of the waves under the violence of the wind exceeds the gaze's estimation, since the howling of the elements wins out over hearing's capacities, but also in the sense of the stable basic directions, since foundation, height and depth flee. The inner ear secures the sense of balance via the proportioned pressure of fluids, while the outer ear allows us to hear sounds via certain vibrations. There exists a site where the inner ear, which sculpts the global bearing of the weight body, touches the outer ear, which, by transmitting the information of noise and language, therefore introduces us to cognitive significations; the ensuring of the relation between the soul that senses, knows or thinks and the body that stands and survives; this point anchors us in the habitat and secretly ties our inwardness to the world. Should, through the excess of the commotion, the typhoon exceed the measure of the outer ear, now incapable of hearing its language, and, due to the destruction of the dimensions, overthrow the capacity of the inner ear to regulate our habitual bearing, then not only do the body and mind slip away, each in its own direction, but above all their intimate association or junction, their vital and spiritual marriage scatter into the disorder of the elements. This is called death. That's why what's discovered there has no name in any language, for no language designates the cadaver in this state. That's also why someone who leaves it has few memories of it, readily confessing that someone else withstood it in his place, and that, after six nights in hell, he was reborn: same and other, he doesn't know. Along with the underside of the landscape, he experiences the underside of the body. Just as reality appears beneath the eradication of appearances, so, thus denuded of their daily playacting and their agreed-upon gestures, grated, scraped out, peeled just as much as the landscape is, men of themselves give what remains beneath their discovery. Either they can't sustain this fundamental honesty and so founder and sleep, overwhelmed, suffocating, drugged, after a more or less serious and long panic attack, or they stand up and steer the boat with only four or five people, two on the bridge and three at the machines, clinging at the same time above and below the speaking tubes, the spiritual and energy axis of the terror-stricken flotsam lying-to, while the twenty others, useless, slumped, fastened into their bunks, changed into vegetables or beams, vegetate. And again, we lack the words to say how the body comports itself when the wild terrain demands barbarous manners from it. Profiting from the loss of its high point, between the ears, in the head, it might be thought that it suddenly descends back down evolution and climbs back up, gropingly, in 1 Tongues=langues, which refers to language more strongly than the English does.
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Serres/The Underside of the Landscape order to choose other bifurcations in the tree and stay for a while in the nest of another species. The emergence of this fundamental earth and the birth of acts of elementary life correspond. The body enters into primordial eras. Among other memories, it seems I had to change my mammalian axis, erected by gravity, into the punctual symmetry of a radiolarian or of a roly-poly toy, whose ballasted ball, naturally adapted to vertiginous mediums, went from the floor on to the wall, soon horizontal, and from the latter to the facing wall through the intermediary of the floor, also soon horizontal. In order to do this, it was necessary to abandon the Homo erectus's final prayer, its final kneeling supplication: so, the body clings less and less to a bar or a rope, ties that let go, but rather becomes incorporated into the vessel, so that never has it resembled a ship so much, and not its pilot, but rather its hull or its beam, fundamental places where solids and liquids are wed, ultimately resembling a sea urchin or a starfish, flexibly stable in the furious waters. And since it can't have any relation with things, fleeing beneath its hand, its pockets must be filled with all the necessities, compass, watch, food, drink: without any object, animals find everything directly on their bodies. While in the crew quarters vegetables doze, on the bridge and at the machines a few animals are bustling about. No, my memory doesn't go back up the course of my life, but rather up the global time of living things, while the Earth, beneath the discovery, returned, suddenly, to primordial eras. Flora and fauna on the skiff, in the primitive hubbub. Beyond those stupid and thoughtless days, lived unto death and in the porous confinement of walls of iron and water, shaken, tormented, harried, manhandled, drowned, cut to pieces by the tumult, racket and fracas of the permanent cataracts and their disordered impacts, deafened, strangled, blinded, frozen, starving, thirsty, stiffened, exhausted by the lack of sleep, beyond those six nights without respite or memory was suddenly born, within what remains of the body, through its sharp pain and the blackest darkness, an immense, giant, explosive, ecstatic, paradisical, thundering joy, whose endless growth fills the space resurrected from the dying tatter with its full mystical density – silent and tranquil peace in discovered terrain. What life will be born, likewise, at the point of death?
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