By Thorolf Johannes Van Walsum
A Foray into the World with Semioticians and Philosophers
On October 8th, 2022, students of semiotics and philosophy gathered in front of the Tartu humanities building at 9 am. Roughly. Much to the relief of those who were late (and consternation of those who had run to get there ‘on time’), it was quickly realized that the bus would not be coming precisely at 09.00. And why should it?
By nine-oh-five, various theories were forming. Naturally, no humanely organized event could expect its attendees to be there precisely at or before 9. We were thinkers, semioticians, husbands and walking hangovers. That the bus would be late for us was a given. How late, on the other hand, was an entirely different matter—and a matter of respect, at that. Would the department think so little of us that the bus would show up as late as 9.20? Or would their high expectations set the bus rolling around the corner at 9.05? None were too displeased when the bus arrived at 9.08, and the tittering flock mounted into their transport with new and better things to talk about.
And so it was the party set out for Männikjärve bog in the 10-thousand hectare Endla nature reserve. What could possibly await us in an area so definitively flat? Devoid of mountains, redwoods, or monkeys locked in cages, what natural beauty could there possibly be to engage with? The wisest reader, cleverest reader, most serene and incalculably minded, will know that such a set up could only precede a rejection: through the lens of biosemiotics, a bog becomes a living revelation.
Kalevi Kull, our guide in biosemiotics of University of Tartu’s Semiotics department, ensured that the picture offered to us students of the bog—backwards and forwards—was understood and appreciated. In the beginning, the earth was without form… but we’ll skip that. Roughly 10,000 years ago, Estonia was submerged under a glacial layer of ice approximately 1km thick, which retreated, at the end of the last glacial era, northward. Depressions left by the glaciers were filled with runoff and termed ‘meltwater lakes’. Plants, too adventurous for their own good, began growing, dying, and decomposing in these lakes.
Sphagnum moss, the dominant plant of bogs, has a unique feature to keep much water in it, even if there is no depression . In bogs, the threshold between life and death does not render itself completely. On the surface of these ecosystems, the mosses that grew buried the dead plant matter beneath it: plant matter that was incompletely decomposed. The bodies of the dead do not return to nourish the souls of the living, but rather remain petrified; sedimented; frozen in near-complete synchronicity. It is by this means that peat bogs come to form: the sedimentation of layer upon compact layer of biomass, averaging about one thousand years to the meter.
Life in the bog does not proceed from birth to reproduction to death, but is rather the perpetual deferral of death’s consummation—or so went one of the spontaneous theories of the day. The sphagnum moss found at the surface of the bog is a vegetative extension of an organism that, if threaded back through muck and time, was likely to be several thousands of years old. Where else can we find such a phenomenon? Although the tissue of the plant at the bottom of the bog was alive before the time of the pyramids, the body remains mummified; Heraclitus and his philosophical fires do not get their due. Passing on the oscillatory traditions of creation and annihilation, the moss leaves an undead tracing of the epochs. Life does not come to an end as such, but is suspended indefinitely as the years pass and the moss crawls ever onwards. As such, for all the credit given to the rainforests and redwoods, peat bogs are mastermind Olympians of carbon fixation. They render carbon into the most radically stable timescale. The average Estonian bog is 6 thousand years old, which typically correlates to about 6 meters of depth of pure carbon, energy, and history. It is for this reason that the sciences of paleontology turn to bogs as historical records: by cutting to the core of a bog, you are cutting, too, into a nearly perfectly preserved material glimpse of the ages. Exoskeletons, pollen, genomes, and isotope ratios are nearly indistinguishable in quality at the bottom of a peat bog as they are at the top.
Oh how reductive the position becomes by leaving it there! Woe! Woe! The bog has been placed on a great examination table, deprived of its life’s cycles and cut into a two-dimensional diagram. Yes, the formation of peat is a biological threshold unlike any other- but how colorful are the bogs! These mosses steeped in a timescale closer in kin to that of geology than our run-of-the-mill metabolic organisms exist as such in relation to their environmental factors. When enjoying a bog, the presence of a subterranean encyclopedia does not strike the eyes so much as the colorful composition of borders that appear. Greens, grays, sulfurous reds and the colorless depths of pools abound, forming stained ridges with clear transition thresholds from one form of life to the next. The beauty of this cannot be properly appreciated until it is taken in at the scale which the Endla nature reserve makes possible through its four-story observation tower.
From such a height, the suspicious patterns that tickle one’s senses on the preceding walk becomes a formal orchestra dressed in red, yellow and green. Shuffling semiotics students could only be so polite as to comment that the tower’s six-person limit seemed a bit odd, and that a structure so sturdy really should allow up to ten-people at a moment. This number could as easily been any whatsoever that would need to be implemented to allow them up without hesitation; the message was clear. Let me see.
Let us reattach biosemiotics to our sensors, lest we find an even higher aesthetic. In a bog, the smallest tree could be hundreds of years old. Standing at a meter high, like a master’s student with one too many victory-laps, this might seem like an incomplete victory. The circumstances of these trees, of course, are much less favorable for speedy growth than the full-sized trees at the bog’s border, who stand much like children at the edge of a pool. But the neighbor of these small bog trees to note most is rather the grasses, crowberries, mosses, and algae.
As mosses follow their process of growth and sedimentation, certain areas are bound to be exposed to various degrees of anoxia and malnutrition—and, as has been established, therefore differential timescales. As areas that are more inclined to accumulate stagnant water facilitate greater anoxia than those that are drier, the timescales begin to shift into new gears. The tree growing to a height of one meter after two hundred years of struggling may be dwarfed by their luxuriating ancestors—but relative to the timescale of the sphagnum mosses, this organism has fallen upon the bog like a bolt of lightning. It was for on these facts that Kalevi Kull based his advice for all orienteers: when lost in a bog, do not follow the edge of the lakes, but rather head directly away from them. Peripheral areas of the bog will have fewer concrete bodies of water, as this differentiation of various ‘timescales’ has not yet been given the chance to pronounce itself; the ground is sparse, mushy, and spotted with erratic trees, but rarely does it expose open water. This claim was met with interest, as well as skepticism. One hiker quipped “If you’re living a life where you are getting lost in a bog… you may as well stay in the bog.”
What ‘the bog’ becomes—or has become, certainly, for this fledging biosemiotician, at the least—is not merely a re-conception of the general physic of death, but a topographical mapping of the consequences thereof. When we see, as is shown above, clear gradations of micro-environmental conditions and species (algae, litoral grasses, red sphagnum moss followed by higher plants and finally trees), we can think of these not in terms of competition, tangled-bank niche-fillings, nor a monosemic fitness. The only understanding that allows us to take the differential paces of the life-process seriously is that these thresholds exist not by merit of domination or efficiency, but rather as simply parallel timescales. While that of the tree, from its height, is relatively fast and is such that larger and more complex structures come to be, the depths of the lakes in bog-center are bound to be in so deep a sleep that transients such as ourselves might only use the word ‘immortal’.
The topography of a bog in space might be said to therefore be only the mapping of various functional diachronies. To view a wetland as does a curious bird would reveal a painting of dots, sores, smudges and finally noise—each threshold, blemish or coloration constituting for itself a timescale proper to it. These in turn take patterned forms only in accordance with the play of these timescales with that proper to the ecosystem, and our world in general– thanatotic, observant, and perhaps one day final. That is to say, while the development of a peat bog deploy themselves on a unilateral function, that of an ever-creeping life leaving behind ever-forgotten bodies, there exists various ‘gears’ in which this development can appear by order of their environmental circumstances. The topography of a bog, colorful, rich, mysterious and often cranberry-flavored, is synonymous with the mapping of these timescales coming to tear away from one another. A lake grows in a bog only by relations to the shore. But bogs aren’t for everyone. Our philosophizing brought to its conclusion, the swarm hungered onwards for new subject to model: the Palamuse museum, for an afternoon coming to understand the history of Kevade, a historically significant popular novel for Estonian media culture. Ideas that had been rafted together now floated apart, and minds were left to reconstitute themselves in a new milieu. So goes the poesis of semioticians.
