The Corpse Is a Workshop
Filmed out front a month before the stalks went black. The black-eyed Susans are in bloom. The coneflower has already let most of its petals go, and the cone that will feed the goldfinches in December is sitting there holding rainwater. The flower is the part that was leaving. The seed head is the part that stayed.
Two weeks ago the rudbeckia and the purple coneflower out front were in full color. This week they are black. The petals are gone, the stems have stiffened and darkened, and what is left standing is a row of hard cones on sticks. Every gardening instinct says cut it down. The instinct is wrong, and it is wrong in an interesting way.
Start with what is actually there. A blackened coneflower stalk is not a plant that has died. The plant is at ground level, a flat rosette of leaves that stays green through the winter. The stalk was a temporary structure, built in June, used in August, and abandoned in September. What it holds up is a seed head, and the seed head is the one part of the plant that is not finished.
There is a way of stating physics, worked out by David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto and called constructor theory, that describes this stalk better than the language of storage does. The usual way to state a physical law is to say what happens next, given what is happening now. Constructor theory states laws differently. It asks which transformations are possible, which are impossible, and what has to be present for a possible one to occur. The thing that brings a transformation about, and is still able to bring it about again afterward, is called a constructor. A catalyst is one. A goldfinch is one.
Look at the seed head in those terms. It is not a pantry. It is a piece of matter arranged so that a particular set of transformations has become possible that was impossible a month ago. A goldfinch can land on it, which it could not do on a flower. The bird can strip the seeds, digest most of them, and carry a few in its gut to a fencerow eighty yards away, where they are deposited with fertilizer. The dry, hollow stem can be occupied by a small solitary bee, which will spend the winter inside it. The tissue that is not eaten will be taken apart, over months, by fungi and bacteria, and some of its nitrogen will be back in the rosette by spring. Not one of these transformations is available to a living flower. All of them are available to the corpse.
What passes through all of this unchanged is the instructions. Every seed carries the same genetic sequence its parent carried, and constructor theory has a precise name for information of that kind. It is information that causes itself to be copied, so that it stays present in matter while everything around it is transformed. Marletto calls this knowledge, and the word carries no suggestion that anyone is doing the knowing. The goldfinch eats because it is hungry. The seed head is built in such a way that hunger is one of the routes by which the sequence gets copied. There is no intention anywhere in the arrangement. There is only a structure, and the set of transformations that structure permits.
So the blackened stalk is not a plant in storage, waiting. It is a site where matter is being taken apart and reconfigured by everything that can reach it, bird, bee, fungus, and frost, and where one thing, the sequence, comes through the reconfiguration intact and multiplied. Calling it an information transformation zone is not a metaphor. It is an account of which transformations the stalk makes possible, and which it survives.
Leave it standing. The practical case is already made: the North Carolina extension service says to leave the seed heads on as winter food for birds, goldfinches especially, and the rosette underneath is the plant’s actual body, present and green. The stalk you were about to cut is the part that is working.
A flower is what the plant looks like while it makes the seed. A corpse is what it looks like while the seed does the work.