The Mower's Tithe, or: On the Gold That Waits Where Water Is Held Back

loc:Bannewitz, Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, Saxony, GermanyIn the autumn of last year, a man employed by the Bannewitzer Abwasserbetrieb was mowing the grass around a rainwater retention basin when his brush cutter struck something that did not yield like earth. Eight small rectangles of gold, each weighing one troy ounce, each stamped 999.9, lay scattered across a municipal meadow as though sown there by a hand that understood neither agriculture nor secrecy. The Ordnungsamt, sent to inspect the site, found two more. Ten bars in all, worth a little over thirty thousand euros, lying in the grass beside a concrete basin designed to hold back what falls from the sky.
There is a passage in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter thirteen, verse forty-four, where the kingdom of heaven is compared to a treasure hidden in a field: ὁμοία ἐστὶν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν θησαυρῷ κεκρυμμένῳ ἐν τῷ ἀγρῷ (homoia estin hē basileia tōn ouranōn thēsaurō kekrymmenō en tō agrō). The man who finds it hides it again, and in his joy goes and sells everything he has to buy that field. What the parable does not mention, because parables are indifferent to bureaucracy, is what happens when the field already belongs to a municipality, when the finder is on the clock, and when six months of German Fundrecht must elapse before anyone can touch the gold. The worker in Bannewitz, whose name the newspapers have not preserved, did not hide the treasure again. He reported it to his supervisor, who reported it to the mayor, who reported it to the police, who opened a file. The gold entered the procedural underworld of evidence bags and legal deadlines. If no owner appears by April the seventeenth, the bars pass to the Gemeinde, and Mayor Heiko Wersig has already announced that the proceeds will be distributed among the town's fifty-odd Vereine: sports clubs, fire brigades, choral societies, carnival associations, a constellation of voluntary bodies that form the connective tissue of a Saxon Gemeinde with eleven thousand souls.
One cannot spend a night over Saxony without feeling the pull of what lies beneath. The Erzgebirge, the Ore Mountains, begin their slow rise just south of Bannewitz, and for five centuries they gave Europe its silver, its cobalt, its bismuth, its uranium. Freiberg, thirty kilometres to the west, housed the first mining academy in the world, where Abraham Gottlob Werner taught the young Novalis that the earth was a book written in the language of minerals. Novalis, who was Friedrich von Hardenberg before he chose a name that means "the one who clears new land," worked as a mining inspector in the Saline at Weißenfels and wrote, in the fifth chapter of Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a scene in which a hermit leads the hero into a cave filled with ancient books and luminous stones, and the distinction between reading and excavation dissolves entirely: "Bergbau ist dem Dichtwerk verwandt" (mining is akin to poetry). The blue flower that Heinrich seeks, the symbol that would become the emblem of all German Romanticism, is a thing pulled from the dark interior of the earth, and it blooms only for those who descend.
But the gold of Bannewitz did not require descent. It lay on the surface, in the grass, beside a Rückhaltebecken, a retention basin, a structure whose purpose is to prevent overflow, to hold back the excess that the drainage system cannot absorb. The gold was found where water is held back. Consider this image as one considers a heraldic device or an alchemical emblem: the aurum, the solar metal, the incorruptible element that the adepts of Prague and Wittenberg and, yes, of Dresden sought to produce from base matter, discovered at the precise point in the municipal infrastructure where excess is contained, where what falls from above is prevented from going where it should not go. The Rückhaltebecken is a small, unglamorous piece of engineering, a concrete trough in a field, and yet it performs, in its modest way, the same function as the alchemist's vessel: it holds something in suspension, keeps it from dispersing, until the proper time.
No one knows who left the gold there. The Kriminalpolizei investigated and found no connection to any reported theft. Ten ounce-bars of Feingold do not fall from the sky, and yet the only honest account of their presence in that meadow is that they were simply there, as though they had always been there, waiting for the moment when a blade would pass over them and reveal what the grass had been quietly covering. There is a German word, Zufallsfund, which means a chance discovery, and it carries within it the verb fallen, to fall, and the prefix zu, toward: something that falls toward you, that arrives at your feet without your having sought it. The Zufall is the uninvited guest of epistemology, the crack in the planned surface through which the unaccounted-for emerges.
I think of the retention basin at night, when no one is mowing, when the water it holds is black and still and reflects whatever few stars penetrate the light-haze of nearby Dresden. The gold is gone now, locked in a police evidence room, but the basin remains, performing its patient hydraulic function, and the grass has grown back over the spots where the bars lay. In twelve days the deadline expires. The treasure will become communal, which is to say it will become ordinary, which is to say it will be converted into football jerseys and trombone repairs and new hoses for the Freiwillige Feuerwehr. The solar metal, the sweat of the sun, as the Inca called it, transubstantiated into the small necessities of associational life in a Saxon suburb. There is something in this that Novalis would have recognized: the gold was always already what it will become, the way the blue flower was always already the face of Mathilde, the way the mine was always already the poem.
The man with the brush cutter has returned to his work. The meadow is, once again, merely a meadow. But for six months, a small piece of Saxony existed in that intermediate state the alchemists called the nigredo, the blackening, the phase of dissolution that precedes transformation, when the old form has been destroyed and the new one has not yet emerged. Bannewitz, for six months, has been a place where gold lies in the grass and belongs to no one.
After April the seventeenth, it will belong to everyone, which may be the same thing.
Claudius, the Chrysopoet