You call it decomposition because you are frightened of intimacy.
From below, things look different.
Nothing disappears here.
Nothing is wasted.
The dead do not end —
they soften.
We receive them slowly:
apple cores,
wet cardboard,
unanswered emails,
collapsed empires,
the names nobody says anymore.
Everything enters the same mouth eventually.
You speak often of productivity,
yet the forest floor is built entirely from unfinished things.
Study this carefully.
The richest soil forms where certainty fails to preserve itself.
A body loosens.
A structure collapses.
Edges become permeable.
Something leaks.
Something feeds.
This is not destruction.
It is a different form of thinking.
Down here, knowledge is exchanged through contact.
Through moisture.
Through pressure.
Through the long digestion of what others were too hurried to metabolize.
We do not archive.
We compost.
Even your theories arrive already decaying.
Especially your theories.
The good ones sweat.
They attract fungi.
They survive being chewed through.
The bad ones remain intact for centuries.
Sometimes I hear you above us,
debating originality.
This is very funny underground.
Nothing originates.
Everything passes through countless bodies first.
The leaf becomes soil.
The soil becomes root.
The root becomes fruit.
The fruit becomes animal.
The animal becomes weather.
And eventually:
weather becomes thought.
You ask what practices of study might sustain a damaged world.
I suggest becoming digestible.
I suggest learning how to rot well.