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  • Nature Deficiency, Nature Hunger
  • Mark Payne (bio)

What comes after the poem? The idea of a work On Nature (Peri phuseos) appears in the clearing afforded by the silencing of the poem, but what does the post-poem demand of its maker? If the post-poem is a symptom of the disturbance in the thesis of the ‘there is’ that roiled the Eastern Mediterranean circa 600 BCE, is the post-poem a “deflationary solution” to the problem with appearing that was the lived form of this disturbance?1

“Immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living their death, dying their life” (Heraclitus DK 62). θνητός, ‘mortal,’ is often contrasted with its opposite, ἀθάνατος, ‘deathless,’ in poetic and ritual contexts in which the plural, ἀθάνατοι, is a customary designation of the gods. In the post-poem, however, the contrast expresses a relationality between mortals and immortals for which there is no syntax, and which is figured instead as an emblematic arrangement of their way of being together. Immortals are disposed as a choric presence around human life, and from this arrangement an insight emerges regarding their common [End Page 196] difference from what is without life: immortals live the death of mortals, and mortals die their life.

The post-poem demands preconceptuality. Preconceptuality is the condition of the post-poem’s operationalization, as inspiration operationalizes divinity’s auto-mediatization for the poem. The demands of the post-poem are unremitting because Nature is always at hand. Whereas divinity picks out its receiver according to a temporality of its own, every place affords an occasion to witness what unfolds according to Nature, and to voice it in corresponsive form. The post-poem dissolves the hierarchy of places accreted by human culture, as an exorbitant responsibility to the nonhuman.2

Cosmos (theistic, demiurgic, noetic) leverages human action to tell us why the place we inhabit feels the way it does to us. The postpoem leverages human being to attest to what cannot be articulated in terms of human action (things being the way they are because it is their nature to be so). Nature hunger is this vocation to attest to the choric surroundings of human life as what declares itself as such. The adumbration of a whole that exists through self-care gathers itself in the figure of a being that crosses the threshold of awareness unbidden: a tree, a mountain, a cascade. φύσις, is what appears in us, incalculably. [End Page 197]

On my second day in Mount Moriah Wilderness I reached the Table, a vast mesa just below the elevation of the forested mountains that surround it. It is covered with yellow grass, and grey stones with orange lichen. Storm clouds ring around it, and ravens are flying at its edge. Walking across the tundra surface that crunches underfoot, my ears are full of the sound of grasshoppers, dozens to the square foot, whose hopping is like the pattering of raindrops. At the far edge of the Table is a grove of bristlecone pines in their natural estate. On a couple I see dark blue first year cones that look almost like fruit, as well as older second and [End Page 196a] third year cones. They call it a grove, although the trees grow some 40–50 apart feet from one another. Some of them predate the post-poem by a millennium.

In my mind it seems like an image of the place, rather than the place itself: the flat table of land slightly inclined with ridges so that there is no uninterrupted line of sight, the ring of rounded peaks, the dark clouds that promise lightning and hail, the swarms of grasshoppers everywhere underfoot, their pattering at some threshold of hearing that only attracts my attention when I move, the discordant bright orange of the lichens. I recall the difficulty of the ascent: 6,000 feet in 10 miles, such that I named every stage of it: ponderosa flat, where I camped; aspen meadow 1, an elongated wood with tall grass among the thickly clustering aspen poles; aspen meadow 2, opening on the face of the mountain, where its snows descend; bee meadow, thick with yellow owlsclaw; then the final ascent through stunted poplars and limber...

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