Before Breaking Off

A section of stem base lies horizontally on the ground, with a break wound left at one longitudinal end. Shallow roots enter the soil from one side, and leaves lift from the other. If one imagines it as originally upright, the leaves would slant sideways, and the roots would no longer point downward. This entire prostrate section of stem base has already had an above and a below divided out by roots and leaves. The broken end is still conspicuous, but the posture before us does not belong only to fracture: the roots in the soil and the leaves facing upward are all things that continued to happen after breaking off. Some prostrate plants still have very shallow roots; a gentle pull lifts them away from the soil surface. They seem to have already stood firm, while still retaining the looseness of having just arrived here.

A detached unit hangs above the grass layer. It has not touched the ground; the whole section has dried through, with no sign of rooting. Observation has left no continuous process of what happened between detachment and drying. It cannot receive a biography as long as that of the previous plant; this small blank also keeps the already rooted plant from representing all fractures. Some breakings-off leave only a terminal state, suspended between blades of grass and the ground.

Returning time to the plant that has already rooted: the detached unit has just fallen into a patch of open ground among the surrounding vegetation. Rain continues to come down, and the root system already inside the stem base touches soil. The shallow roots visible today are not an answer that suddenly grew out of the fracture. A gap in the ground received it, and the weather also entered this stretch of growth. If one looks back only from the already rooted result, these inconspicuous participants are easily cut away, leaving only a wound, like an overly clear beginning.

Breaking can be called a beginning, just as sowing can be the beginning of germination. But when the fracture occurs, the soil has not yet received anything, and the rain has not decided its future for it. It opens the process, but it has not pre-loaded the process inside itself.

Stepping further back, the field records show, at the same time, soil turned by foraging armadillos and fragmented plants. The records have not left a complete shot of how a particular armadillo caused this section before us to break off, so here we can only stop at the accompanying traces: a lateral part was once connected to the central stem base, and later detached from its original position. To write the animal as a destroyer or an unwitting sower would both move faster than these traces allow.

Before breaking off, the central stem base stood upright on the ground surface. Axillary buds grew outward into lateral units; these units put out leaves, flowered, and also formed root systems internally, while their bases remained attached to the main stem base. A visible morphological connection can persist for several decades. Here there is no need to translate connection into kinship, nor to imagine the later detachment as premeditated. Decades of growth preceded that episode of force, and also preceded the success or failure we would later identify. Farther-out lateral units continue to put out leaves, their bases still connected to the central stem base at the ground surface.