The fallow field is not exactly what it appears to be. The size alone is anomalous. Stretching off beyond the horizon more like an inland ocean of brown soil and the cut stalks from last year’s harvest. And in this oceanic fallow corn field, there is a black plastic bag caught on one of the old stalks. A plastic bag like the type you get from a department store or a fancy clothing shop. The bag might belong to last year’s harvest for all I know. 

And that field—Ohio corn and soybeans. But also anhydrous ammonia; Azoth: a principle agent of non-life from the alchemists set of reagents from which a form of life now stretches out all over the world and right over all other forms of life. From the Ohio fields and the anhydrous ammonia and Azoth and an invisible form of life that subsumes all other forms of life. It is like fighting fire with fire, fighting life with life. How that corn and all those soybeans come up in and on land that cannot support life at all except for the alchemical non-life of Azoth and anhydrous ammonia even in the midst of our enlightened times. It all depends on that non-life at the center of life from which we can derive a form of life. 

No, this ain’t ma and pa’s field. Not really a field at all. Still, I can hear the crow a-crowing as he always has, and we can gather brown eggs as we always have, and the folks down the road will sell sweet corn and delicious Ohio summer tomatoes on the honor system just like they always have, and the old half-deaf black and tan hound dog is barking at that plastic bag. Silly old dog, and silly old man, both of us fussing about that damn black plastic bag—making too much out of nothing. That strip of black plastic half-rooted in the dead earth of that dead field laying fallow until it is infused with that alchemical principle of non-life so it can renew a form of life that will stretch over the world and over all other forms of life, that invisible form of life. 

Not far off the massive grain elevator will sort out the fruit of the land, or the gross domestic product, depending on how you see it and measure it. The fruit of the land, the Ohio corn and soybeans, sorted and separated into profit which will sort and separate all of us from each other so that, not further off from here, in another vast inland ocean of brown soil and last year’s corn stalks, the houses will begin to rise up out of the earth, and invisible non-life will overtake life, and we will all mistake all this death for life. 

Michael Templeton is a writer, independent scholar, guitar player, barista, cook, and the main writer for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He has published articles and essays on contemporary culture and several works of creative non-fiction and poetry. He lives in the middle of nowhere Ohio with his wife who is an artist.