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