Written in Thorns

Written in Thorns

Then round about that place there grew a hedge of thorns thicker every year…
                                                          —”Sleeping Beauty,” The Brothers Grimm

In 1992, architect Michael Brill sought to wield landscape as an alarm system. His project was part of a multi-tiered effort to bring together professionals across fields to address nuclear semiotics—the long-term warning system messaging nuclear waste. Brill’s intention was to use architecture to create a sense of sinister foreboding that will hopefully indicate to future generations that the space surrounding waste sites is undesirable land—best left untouched. He called this manifestation “Landscape of Thorns.” 

Imagine a field of enormous black thorns jutting from the ground—wounding forms, meant to communicate pain. Would you enter? Would you wonder what is beyond? It is a kindness that nuclear semiotics even exists—people trying to find a way to message future generations that we caused harm, that we buried sensory-undetectable nuclear waste within the earth. This waste will last one hundred thousand years, a number nearly incomprehensible. To cast the web of time backwards, it would be the same as Neanderthals creating a message that could be understood by contemporary humans.  

It’s like a riddle: what is a message without words, that a society we can’t comprehend, can read? One hope is that emotion will endure, and that place can be a message.

… the thorns held fast together like strong hands…

We may not be able to envision what a world or peoples will look like in a hundred thousand years, but Brill’s design hopes that they will still care about their bodies being harmed and read the jagged landscape as an unnatural warning—a place of pain. What this project does is render fear explicit, of what could happen if people did open the Pandora’s Box of nuclear waste. But what this attempt forgets, is that we’ve seen this landscape before.

… and the young men were caught 

by them, and not being able to get free, there died a lamentable death.

Safeguards indicate that there is something worth guarding, and human beings are both greedy and curious. In the Brothers Grimm’s “Sleeping Beauty,” or “Little Briar Rose,” once the princess pricks her finger on the spindle, a good fairy seeks to protect her in her slumber, foreseeing that she will awake in distress. The fairy puts everyone in the castle to sleep—a surprising solidarity—and surrounds the land in large ominous brambles and thorns for protection. Rather than being a deterrent beyond measure, for a hundred years princes and knights attempt to cross the field of thorns, hearing through the pass-down of generations that there is something worth protecting beyond.

Fear is the emotion that solutionists like Brill are depending on enduring through millennia. But what if curiosity endures as well? What if the heart of this message shapeshifts into a fairy tale rather than a warning? Some argue that the best solution would be to not indicate the waste sites at all and hope that without a message, the thing worth messaging will remain undetected—as if time can spool backwards, can unprick a finger, can uncause harm.

With roots in Iowa, Lila J. Cutter is a poet and educator now living in Portland, Oregon. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Watershed Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Stoneboat Literary Journal and Sugar House Review. Lila currently teaches poetry at The Attic Institute and Oregon State University, where she received her MFA.