Qu'est-ce qu'une pierre?

Qu'est-ce qu'une pierre, ce que nous nommons une pierre, cette chose de la nature terrestre dont notre cerveau nous propose une image visuelle particulière, une idée d'origine et de composition dans le monde de la matière, que le poète accueille dans son monde d'expérience intime avec la vie, les choses de la terre et la lumière...

La matière manque-t-elle vraiment au poème? Le poème existe-t-il en dehors du corps-cerveau-société des humains qui le vivent, l'écrivent, le disent, le lisent et le revivent, chacun selon sa propre expérience, selon la complexité de son cerveau unique, sa vie unique? Je ne vois comment se pourrait opérer la séparation entre le poème, le corps-cerveau humain, les sociétés humaines, la terre et les Univers???

From an interview with Lorand Gaspar by Laurent Margantin on remue.net

Poets from the Volcano

Arenal
Originally uploaded by Clearly Ambiguous.

The 20th Century poet René Char made no secret of his admiration for his long-dead 19th Century predecessor, the young French poetic genius Arthur Rimbaud who completed his entire oeuvre before the age of twenty-one, then left France on a series of adventurous engagements in far-flung parts of the world, travelling as far as Java in the pay of the Dutch Colonial Army and working as a merchant in Ethiopia.

Char admired Rimbaud's decision to leave Paris. In his poem: "Tu as bien fait de partir, Arthur Rimbaud. (You did well to leave, Arthur Rimbaud)", he writes of Rimbaud the outsider, Rimbaud who "abandoned the streets of idlers, the taverns of lyric-pissers." He asks: "Si les volcans changent peu de place, leur lave parcourt le grand vide du monde et lui apporte des vertus qui chantent dans ses plaies. (If volcanos barely move, their lava travels the great emptiness of the world and bring to it the virtues that sing in its wounds.)"

In this metaphor, we see Rimbaud going out into the world as a stream of lava, bursting from a volcano, scorching the ground over which it travels. There is the sense of the departing lava creating a wound in the volcano, but also the idea of these wounds being worthwhile, becoming virtuous as the poems left behind in them begin to sing. The volcano is at once the city of Paris, but also the sum of French culture at the time: something static, that barely stirs.

In another poem, Char addresses a different voyaging hero Antonin Artaud as follows: "Je n'ai pas de voix pour faire ton éloge, grand frère. (I don't have the voice to praise you, great brother." The poem seems to have an elegaic theme, but at the same time revolts at such a concept as elegy and, speaking of Artaud, states: "Pour nous, rien n'est changé, / Rien, sinon cette chimère bien en vie de l'enfer qui prend congé de notre angoisse. (For us, nothing has changed, / Nothing, if not this lusty chimera out of hell which from our anguish takes its leave.)"

Earlier in the poem, Char speaks of "a heart shared by us" that "kills, goes hollow and burns, / Then is reborn in the softness of the mushroom" and of "lightly chopping down a forest / With our entrails for an axe". As in the earlier poem to Rimbaud, there is a creative confusion between inner and outer spaces, the poet a phoenix-like force capable of devastating the physical world, but containing the idea that this devastation is really internal, and associated with the poet's own demise, the spilling of his own entrails.

Then Char commands Artaud to return to the same place from whence Rimbaud emerged: "Il suffit. Rentre au volcan. (It suffices. Go back into the volcano.)" In so doing, he writes a kind of formula for his ideal poetic character: eruptive, wounding and feverish.

The title of Char's most famous book "Fureur et mystère (Fury and Mystery)" might even have been made to describe volcanos which are always a source of fear for those who live near them and of mystery for those who try to understand them. And might not these features be also what Char admired in his "great brothers"?

Go, My Sons

Go, my sons, sell your lands, your houses, your garments and your jewelry; burn up your books. On the other hand, buy yourselves stout shoes, get away to the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest recesses of the earth; mark well the distinctions between animals, the differences among plants, the various kinds of minerals, the properties and mode of origin of everything that exists. Be not ashamed to learn by heart the astronomy and terrestrial philosophy of the peasantry. Lastly, purchase coals, build furnaces, watch and experiment without wearying. In this way, and no other, will you arrive at a knowledge of things and of their properties.

Petrus Severinus, Idea Medecinae Philosophicae, 1571.

Petrus Severinus, here quoted in 'The Founders of Geology' by Sir Archibald Geikie, was a Danish professor of literature and poetry, of meteorology and of medecine.

Snow Notes

In the Alps again last week, this time for a week of skiing. It is the first time I have skied in the Alps, and I feel rather over-awed by the beauty and majesty of the place in Winter, despite the tracery of chairlifts and pommels which depart in every direction. The skier does his or her best to domesticate the mountains. There are half a dozen or so large vehicles working through the night to flatten the miles and miles of pistes each morning - so that when the skiers awake, refreshed, they are greeted by smooth, soft carpets of softly pulverised snow. Every support is provided in terms of their security: trees wearing padded vests, chasms and cliffs roped off. All is directed to the thrill of the descent, the possibility of total inclusion, even for children who have barely learned to walk.

I love skiing: to descend from the top of a mountain to its base in only a few short minutes gives a feeling of god-like omnipotence. One does so in a sort of concentrated trance, eyes more or less permanently fixed twenty yards ahead, trying to detect the crease in the snow that risks to send one flying. You feel totally saturated by the environment. Your mind utterly concentrated on the task in hand. You cannot daydream about poetry. And then you reach the bottom. You find another lift to take: a different destination, you sit back and take in the view, admire the shadow of the chairlifts on the snow, which look like musical notes floating restlessly up and down their staves.

As I sit there, I ponder the idea of risk. The risks that I take in skiing without any insurance; the risk I negated by buying snow chains (against the advice of my friend who said they would not be necessary, his concept of risk different to mine); the risk our friends took at New Year when they encouraged their children to propel fireworks towards their Portugese neighbours house; the risk that youths at the supermarket take on New Year's Eve, stuffing bottles of Jim Bean's into their jackets. The risk that I sometimes take when writing poetry, and other times do not take.

Because there is risk, and then there is the risk you take in not taking risk.

There is risk inherent in the world. We deal with it all the time, without even knowing that we are dealing with it. We do not know fully the risks that we face. To keep your eyes fixed on the present, this is a way of minimising risk. The poet who is constantly looking backwards towards the classical world and the poet who is trying to gaze into the future, to be contemporary: both are taking risks. But the risk is not of the same genre. T.S. Eliot: a young avant garde risk taker and an old reactionary risk taker.

The risks that scientists take. The scientist who explains things by reference to daily occurences compared to the scientist who explains things with theories completely out of the norm. Writers of classical antiquity who insist that mythological floods cannot have occurred because the presence of a calibrated daily tide are well known and established. We so often think we know, when in fact we know so little. Even when we think we know better than myth, indeed myth can know better than we do. Rivers that flow under the sea: they do in fact occur. When I see avalanches in the snow, I think of them, knowing that the same slumping and chaos occurs at continental margins, deep under the sea. Great avalanches of which we know or suspect practically nothing. None the less, great risks.

Our lives could be snuffed out in a moment, by the arrival of a fair-sized meteorite, the rapid onset of an ice-age. Everything disappearing under this immense whiteness, like the whiteness of a page. As if an empty page could erase everything that had gone before: Bluey white, grey shadows and black rocks, a cold, scientifically organised chaos in which the eye picks out shapes which were not meant to be there: notes on a stave, the shadowed face of child on a pillow.

Existential Geology

“it is the Word which gratifies and fulfills like the sudden revelation of a truth. To say that this truth is of a poetic order is merely to say that the Word in poetry can never be untrue, because it is a whole; it shines with an infinite freedom and prepares to radiate towards innumerable uncertain and possible connections . . . . it is like a monolith, or pillar which plunges into a totality of meanings, reflexes and recollections: it is a sign which stands.”

“Thus under each Word in modern poetry there lies a sort of existential geology, in which is gathered the total content of the Name . . . . Each poetic word is thus an unexpected object, a Pandora’s box from which fly out all the potentialities of language”


(Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero)

Troubadours and Crystal Cups

Alison Weir's historical biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine is a wonderful read. It explains much about the early development of the English and French nations and of the relationship between church power and regal power in the 12th century. Eleanor took part in the 2nd crusade with her first husband, Louis VII of France, whom she was forced to marry at a young age when her father, William X Duke of Aquitaine died while on pilgrimage to St Jacques de Compostella. It is said that 100,000 people left Paris to take part in the crusade, which eventually, after two years of difficult journey, achieved practically nothing.

This is just one of nine crusades preached by the Catholic church between the years 1095-1291 that has left an indelible mark on relations between the Christian West and the Muslim East. The term 'crusade' has come to be seen as synonymous with 'a good fight' and in the West, Good King Richard is seen as being pitched against the evil Saladdin. The early French poets known as troubadours who flourished in the courts of Eleanor, made the crusader into a romantic ideal, singing of the chivalrous knight who must depart on crusade before his chosen maiden will accept a proposal of marriage. This image of a 'good fight' is now blighted by the view of modern historians such as Steven Runciman, the leading western historian of the crusades, who ended his history with a resounding condemnation: High ideals were besmirched by cruelty and greed.. the Holy War was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God"

The first troubadour is acknowledged by Alison Weir to be Eleanor's grandfather, William IX of Aquitaine, who was a renowned philanderer and bawdy poet. He had also taken part in an earlier crusade, fighting the North-African Almoravids in Spain. At this time, there existed an unusual alliance between the Muslim king of Saragossa, Imad al-dawla abd al-malik ibn Hud and the Christian Aragonese fighting under Alfonso I. It is thought that Imad al-dawla fought alongside William IX, and that, as a sign of good will or thanks, gave him a crystal vase.

The vase was handed down to Eleanor and later given as a wedding present to Louis VII, her first husband. Louis, being of a pious nature, gave the vase to the powerful Abbot Suger, his religious and political advisor, who in turn consigned it to the treasury of the abbey of Saint Denis. Today the vase is the only surviving personal item owned by Eleanor and resides in the Louvre museum.

It is one of a number of extremely rare crystal vases, cups or ewers which were obtained from the Muslim East during this period of crusades. There is a particularly lovely ewer in the collection of the V&A Museum in London. According to the associated article: these ewers were made for the Fatimid caliphs who ruled Egypt between 969 and 1171. Great skill was required to hollow out the transparent, crystalline stone without breaking it, and to carve the delicate decoration. In some places, the rock crystal is barely more than a millimetre thick. By the 1060s, many thousands of rock crystals had been accumulated in the Fatimid treasury in Cairo, but then there was a financial crisis, and the caliph's troops raided his treasury. The soldiers sold their loot on the market, and some was bought eagerly by merchants from Europe, where nothing like the rock crystals had been seen.

Exactly how do you hollow out a crystal? It can't be easy. This article about another ewer similar to that in the V&A suggests that the crystal was worked into shape using abrasion, the sculptor endlessly rubbing the crystal with sand or a paste containing diamond powder. A trepan may also have been used, in particular to produce the small holes that decorate the animal reliefs.

I don't know where the rock crystals would have originated from, but they were obviously quite large to allow a ewer to be cut from them, probably something like 15 cms across and 25 cms long judging by the current dimensions of the ewers. This article shows that rock crystal can grow to considerably larger dimensions and large crystals can be bought today on the internet for a few hundred dollars. Theses crystals originate from Brazil, but the caliphs crystals must have come from closer to home. The beauty of the objects, however, comes from the skill of the workmanship, something that has never been repeated.

The crusades were extremely important to the West in terms of opening up trade of materials with the East, and perhaps more importantly, of ideas. Not only were ideals of beauty trabsferred, as witnessed by these vases, but so were architectural notions and philosophical ideas. It was in Eleanor's time that the first universities were being created by academics who were rediscovering classical thought, preserved for centuries in Arabic libraries.

We may think of troubadors such as William IX with his bawdy verses as among the originators of a western tradition of poetry, but it maybe that William was inspired by his Muslim neighbours. Here is a verse from Abbas ibn al-ahnaf who lived from 750-809 from the book or Abbasid poetry entitled "Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster" (Penguin Classics):

You've never really suffered, or known
The anguish of insomnia.
It is I who can never sleep,
And while I live, I cannot stop
The tears welling out of my eyes.

You scorn me when I speak to you,
yet lovers who quote my verse succeed.
I've become a candle thread destined
To light a room for other men
While burning away into thin air.

These Abbasid poets take their name from the Abbasid dynasty centred in Baghdad, at that time, to quote the book, "the centre of Arab-Muslim culture where the assimilation of Persian, Indian and Greek writing and thought produced a rich a diverse literature."

Finally then, a thought for Baghdad and Iraq as a whole, where the headline Terror claimed another 500 civilians lives this week, at least 21 of them children is absolutely normal and and where four million Iraqis are displaced refugees half outside of Iraq and half within the country. Iraq, a country where a botched and self-interested 'crusade' has become a humanitarian disaster.

The Idea of Stratification

The picture above is a geological section that was published in Gideon Mantell's Wonders of Geology in 1838. It is a highly schematised (one might say synthesised) represenation of the stratigraphy of England going all the way back to the Cambrian. Each layer has its own characteristic colour and texture. The vertical feature that cuts up through most of the other layers is a basaltic dyke, an enlarged fracture filled with volcanic material. We know that the dyke emplacement is early Tertiary in age because the Tertiary deposits lie on top of the dyke and are not cut by it.

The 'idea of stratificiation' is a recent subject of the re-posit weblog of the sculptor Richard Aumonier in which he talks about a book called 'A Thousand Plateaus' by the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. He was put in mind of this by my post comparing geology and literature.

"Through the brilliantly maverick character of Professor Challenger, borrowed from Conan-Doyle, Deleuze and Guattari deliver the third section of Mille Plateaux as a deranged lecture: The Geology of Morals. (Parapraxis of Genealogy of Morals by Nietzche?). The flavor of Challenger's lecture is a confusion of biology and geology. The idea of stratification is developed as a philosophical abstraction, a general theory of double articulation, symbolized by the lobster. Sedimentation and becoming stone for instance, involves a double articulation, a structuring. The organic strata also structures itself through double articulations. God is a lobster. Yes, the Heteradelph is a crustacean. The material itself, as D&G subtly indicate, is completely unpalatable. Reading Mille Plateaux is hilarious, frustrating, astounding, exhilerating..."

The second link comes from Joe Milutis' very enjoyable "New Jersey as an Impossible Object' blog, where he has posted a series of fascinating interviews with poet Lytle Shaw about William Carlos Williams' book Paterson. Lytle interprets the geological heterogeneity of mixed sand and shale beds in the drill-section presented in Williams long poem Paterson as a representation of the 'buried heterogeneity under American life', a reminder from Williams of the underlying resource available to an America that has a tendency to neglect the 'utopian possibility of lost pasts'.

Stone Blind

Thinking back to last weekend and a discussion with George about drill bits. I tell him my brother is planning to illustrate one for my collection of poems about life on the oil rigs.

George remembers a story told to him by an Indian poet who describes how he was up on a ladder, trying to screw down a piece of corrugated iron to the roof of his house. The electric drill with which he was trying to pierce the steel plate kept skidding off the mark, leaving curious traces. It could not find purchase. This, said the Indian writer, was the metaphor he would call on to represent his approach to writing.

It made me think of that famous sentence of Samuel Beckett's from Worstward Ho: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

This idea of failure, or incompetence with an electric drill, seems, at first, strange in a world where the majority of society has been programmed to value success, the achieved work, completion.

I remember at school, I once finished a general studies essay with an open ended question. 'Never finish with a question' wrote the teacher in red biro.

A few days after our meeting, I listened to an interview with George on the radio. He talked about the poem as a building that might be haunted. Of returning to poetry as one might return to a once visited house. Does it matter if we return always to the same house? Not at all, there is always a new door to open.

If the poem works, a ghost might be discovered behind the door, haunting the structure constructed by the poet. What matters is not the house, it is that the house is haunted.

Imagine writing a poem about a place, an experience. You try to make it true, to avoid falseness, but you are drawn to a certain story, a certain emphasis. In doing so facts are changed, falseness creeps in. You fail.

Later you read the poem. You see you have failed. You go back again. You try to put it down true. Pressing hard, you discover things you hardly remembered, and things that were mere associations. You slip further off the subject. You skim wider.

The harder you drill, the harder the thing gets. You see you will never penetrate the thing, but in skimming around it, you circumscribe it.

Incredible that man can drill through rock with a bit nine inches wide to a depth of several kilmetres. It is the theoretical equivalent of a hair being slowly pressed several inches vertically into custard.

The bit eating eating. Churning rock between its teeth.

I remember seeing a used drill bit lying on the deck. What would become of it? It looked kind of heroic, all ground down.

Today I visited the opthalmologist and discovered I will have to start wearing glasses. Too many hours spent staring at a computer screen at work.

I feel rather like that drill bit.

Without warning me, the opthalmo fired a jet of something into the centre of my eyes. Without explaining, he asked me to go and sit down in the waiting room. As I sat staring at the telly in front of me, I suddenly realised I could no longer focus on the screen. It was as if I was going blind in real time.

I had no idea what was happening to me, and the opthalmo never bothered to explain. He saw me again for some more tests. I told him I couldn't see properly and he said it was because he had put something in my eyes. I walked back to the office, everything around me unalterably blurred.

Back at the office my colleague told me my pupils were hugely dilated, blackness filling the iris. She warned me to shade them, something the opthalmo had not bothered to do.

Can a look not 'drill into you'? 'Be penetrating?'

An unfocussed look could not drill into you or penetrate.

Unfocussed I was unable to work. I sat and discussed with a colleague, as a manager would.

I remember the snake-headed Medusa slain by Perseus who could turn humans to stone if they looked directly at her. How did Perseus slay her? He approached by watching her reflection in his shield. The reflection could not slay him. Its power was diminished.

In the interview, speaking of a particular poem, George describes how he stands behind his mother's back, their eyes communicating in the mirror. He explains how eye's meeting in reflection are ambiguous, lke the shared glances of passengers on trains who do not stare drectly into each other's eyes (for fear of being turned to stone...) but instead gaze at each other's reflections.

This is allowed, because their gaze is ambiguous, at once taking in the external scene and the reflected world. Only the inner focus knows the truth of what is being penetrated.

My powerlessness at work, in my unfocussed state. Nothing ambiguous about it.

Tomorrow I'll be buying some pebble lenses.

Geology and Literature

Randall Jarrell's description of the long poem 'Paterson' as a 'geological event' (see previous post) suggests that Paterson:

(1) was a major happening
(2) occured quite suddenly (in geological terms, 'event' almost implies catastrophe)
(3) was something that didn't happen too often
(4) was something that changed the landscape of literature
(5) would enter into the 'geological record'

If we accept Jarrell's statement on behalf of Paterson, we must also accept that there is a close metaphorical relationship between literature and language on the one hand and geology and earth processes on the other. Otherwise the statement would be inappropriate.

The fact that this relationship exists is clear from the lack of explanation that Jarrell's comment requires.

So what are the comparable aspects of these two domains:

Separation of process from product: Literature is not language. Language is a process for dealing with ideas and the product it creates is literature. Literature is an accumulation of manufactured story or poem objects in the same way that geology is an accumulation of manufactured rocks. The language process is comparable to the depositional process. Different languages equate to different depositional processes.

Historical development: both literature and geology have long histories. While we can pick up a copy of Homer from the bookshelf today, we are in fact taking the work from close to the base of a huge pile of literature that has accumulated since. Although deeply buried, Homer can continue to influence literature today. The same happens in geology. What was once buried becomes uplifted as mountains. The mountains are eroded and provide material for ongoing sedimentary processes.

Interpretation: Both literature and geology require that the observer undergo some sort of prior educational process before they are able to comprehend. In the case of literature, it is necessary to learn to read. In geology, rocks must be identified. A book held upside down will not be understood. No more will a pile of rocks that have been overturned. A trained reader will know when the book is upside down. A traned geologist will know when the rocks are upside down.

Hierarchy of events: The processes of geology and literature are going on all around us, all the time. We have become so familar with both that we are hardly aware of them. However, we learn to separate both subjects into a hierarchy of events. The literature of the newspapers, for example, can be compared to the everyday deposition of a river or of dunes in the desert. Books are perhaps the occasional landslide on an unstable hillside. Some books are decidedly geological events comparable to major inundations or volcanic eruptions.

The process chain: Every writer is familiar with the process chain of literature. It would seem, at first glance, that any writer could create anything that they wished. Another Finnegan's Wake for example. But the reality is that every writer is constrained by their experiences, their knowledge of literature, their ability to grasp for the building blocks of literature (words, sentences) and their will to subvert and tangle with language). This is why every writer produces something different, and why different kinds of sediments lie at the bottom of every sea.

Evolution of Process: Ferdinand de Saussure, the renowned Swiss Linguist wrote: "speech always implies both an established system and an evolution; at every moment it is an existing institution and a product of the past. To distinguish between the system and its history, between what it is and what it was, seems very simple at first glance; actually the two things are so closely related that we can hardly keep them apart." In the same way, depositional processes which we see occuring today are similar to those of the past, but not exactly the same, since they evolve to correspond to current conditions. Many processes have been adapted in relation to organic evolution, for example, the creation of coralline limestone made out of corals that have evolved through time. The instrument of speech, the voice box, has also undoubtedly adapted to better perform its process of communication through man's evolution.

Making the invisible visible: So much of geology is about creating something from nothing. Eroding grains of sand from a mountain, blowing them across the desert and piling them up in a dune, the beds of which will actually conform to the invisible processes which transported them there. Language similarly makes use of what is invisible: perceptions, ideas. These invisible things attach word objects to themselves and become utterances and finally literature. The language patterns of that literature tell us under what conditions it was created.

A Geological Event

A copy of William Carlos Williams' long poem 'Paterson' came through the mail this week.

What decided me to buy this tome? Well, firstly reading the blog of Joe Milutis called Impossible Object and, secondly, reading this quote from American poet and critic Randall Jarrell:

The best poems in Elizabeth Bishop's 'North and South' are so good that it takes a geological event like 'Paterson' to overshadow them.

I like the idea of a poem as a 'geological event'.

Nebulous Ideas

I have a sort of nebulous cloud hanging around me made out of diverse ideas which may have some relation to each other. Let me try and write them down.

(1) The growth of primate brains evolved in direct response to a need for growing communication requirements. According to David Attenborough, primate specialists are able to look at the size of a monkey brain and assess what size of social group that monkey lives in. Primates with small brains live isolated lives. Primates with large brains (such as man) live in large groups, communicate all the time, and rely enormously on this communication for their survival.

(2) Levi-Strauss believes that it is through language that man became separated from nature. Other animals communicate as well so that poses the question is there something particular about the language of humans which separates them from other animals? Levi-Strauss follows Rousseau in thinking that man became self-conscious - aware of himself as a member of a we-group - when he became capable of employing metaphor as an instrument of constrast and comparison. The first time this metaphor was applied was when man recognised the diversity of other animals as a way of metaphorically describing social differentiation. For example: I am a lion man, you are a worm man.

(3) What is the poet with repect to the rest of humanity? Is the poet something special? Is writing poetry a special gift, or can anyone acquire this skill? A lot of poets I have met have not really been group people, capable of holding their own in fast conversation. They are, generally, outsiders and fairly isolated individuals. Is writing poetry a compensation for lack of oral communication skills? It should be noted that Plato wished to expel poets from his ideal Republic. I think that really good poetry actually undermines language. Poetry is ambiguous by nature, it is unclear. Thus, going back to (1), it undermines the social good by muddying the waters of clear communication.

(4) Why is French poetry so concerned with abstract thinking around metaphors. I read a large chunk of 'Women's Poetry in France' the other evening and was totally overwhelmed by the homegeneity of this style of abstraction. I found myself thinking: doesn't any of these women have a pet cat she would like to write about? Is poetry in France just a mental gymnasium for abstract thinking? Was my frustration the same as Plato's?

(5) When Guillevic writes a poem about a stone, he is not actually writing about the stone, he is writing about the void which the stone represents. The stone becomes a metaphor for a nothingness where it is no longer necessary to seek answers. This is a complaint against humanity's allotted role to quest, and in questing thereby exploiting and destroying. He envies the stone its peace. The stone's own form is its philosophy, it 'finds peace in perspectives'. Guillevic finds his own peace in studying geometry. Making poems that are solid as stone out of reflections on geometry. Does he say anything about nature itself in all this? I don't think so. He merely states: Nature doesn't ask questions.

(6) When Caillois writes a poem about a stone, he is actually seeking natural laws. He will try to apply this law to something else. If he is able to do this, he will derive some satisfaction in the influence of some higher (divine/natural) power controlling all things. He will be satisfied that making the connection wil justify the case, rather than seeking after underlying complex science, and he will be happy that he leaves the universe a more connected place. He seems stones as particularities, objects for individual worship. As opposed to Guillevic who sees all stones as the same, equally lucky or unlucky.

(8) Magpies also appreciate the attractive qualities of precious stones.

(9) Why write about stone anyway? Why not write about potatoes? I have noted that many of the women in the book I mentioned use metaphors derived from seeds and growing things rather than stones or objects. I thought then of the stone age tribes where the men exchange stone axes (their symbol of masculinity doubling as a representation of woman) and the women who are responsible for growing things and collecting food in nets (symbol of womanhood). Stones are the symbol of manhood par excellance. Phallic menhirs have recently been installed over the central esplanade of La Defense.

(10) The poet is a maker of culture. Every piece of culture the poet makes, separates him/her further from nature. If you believe that culture is not nature, which may be debateable. Does it not bring us nearer to nature to realise that French male poets obsess about stones and French female poets obsess about plants?

(11) I read a very good poem yesterday in which Elizabeth Bishop transformed a poorly developed rock rose (gypsum crystal) into the body of her lover on the grounds that her lover was a rose with sharp edges. She did this using literary 'magic'. Was it this use of 'magic' which annoyed Plato? Not a very logical conception is it?

(12) So, hang subject matter and elemental laws. Hang cultural or natural constraints. Hang thinking about where it all comes from. Do the trick and make the trick work in such a way that everyone sees that it has worked but leaving no way of explaining exactly how it worked or even that it was a trick at all.

The Language of Stone

A few posts back I wrote about the language of food, showing that any given meal has a particular structure in the same way that a sentence has a structure, and that it has a particular meaning.

Writing about this caused me to wonder whether there is also a language of stone.

Most of us have little opportunity to speak with stone. It is the prerogative of architects and sculptors.

When we do say something with stone, however, we may wish to consider our statement carefully: a memorial stone, for example.

Or a worktop in the kitchen. It needs to be hard-wearing because it's used all the time, but also it will say something about the chooser.

Or the stone in a ring.

For a memorial stone, we would probably choose a stone that was hard and lasting. That is our privilege today. Centuries ago it was local stone that was used for memorials, and if the stone was easily weathered, the names would become largely worn away.

But is it the names that speak, or the stones themselves?

If it is local stone, then it reflects the land under our feet, the local character.

Most regions take their character from the local geology. My wife comes from Sillesbourne in Warwickshire and the houses there abouts are built with Wilmcote Stone which comes from quarries only two miles from where she grew up. The stones are flat grey slabs a couple of inches thick. They are distinctive. Just as most stones are distinctive.

So, a lot of the language of stone is local dialect.

But in cities, this local dialect can be lost. Not in Paris, where most of the stone came from quarries directly beneath the city. But in London, where there is no such potential for quarrying, the stone was delivered from surrounding areas.

In cities, such as London, stone makes its statements.

What do we say with stones?

On Flickr, I found a photograph of the United States Supreme Court building in Washinton D.C., focussing on the base of columns and steps built in solid white marble. The caption reads: "conveying legitimacy".

I found a BBC geological tour of Maidstone which describes the different types of stone used throughout the town. Sometimes particular stones are used for practical purposes: hard-wearing granite kerb stones placed outside the brewery so that they wouldn't get worn out by the brewery barrel carts.

At other times, the stone is purely for effect. Like the St John's Travertine from the Tivoli Hills above Rome used on the front of McDonalds and the Rustenburg gabbro used along the base of the facade. Here is another geological tour, this time of Ipswich town centre which describes exactly the same use of stone for a McDonald's frontage. According to this site: "rocks fronting this establishment are also an advertising symbol and are used by McDonalds all over the world."

Returning to Maidstone, we see that red and pink coloured rock was favoured for the Queen's Monument built in 1862 to mark Queen Victoria's Silver Jubilee. The columns and the plaque are made from Peterhead granite (carried all the way from Scotland) which is easy to recognise by its pale pink colour that is described as being like "tinned salmon". The base is pinkish coloured Permian sandstone which is not weathering well. Apparently, the pink colour was so important that two different rock types had to be independently sourced. The aim was apparently to add some warmth to the otherwise cold and distant persona of the Queen.

The walls of 'The V Bar' are white-veined dark-green slabs of a metamorphic rock called Serpentinite (because in the Victorian mind it looked like serpent's skin). The mineral calcite fills lots of fine cracks producing veiny patterns. The black and white crackles generate a sense of excitement that is suited to a cafe.

White Portland Stone is used in the upper windows of Renaissance Couture Bridal Wear, again providing a feeling of purity. Yellow Bath Stone is used in the windows and cornice of The Bath and Spa Company.

All of these stones are imported to Maidstone for effect. The Archbishop's Palace is a much older building constructed of local stone; Kentish Ragstone, called rag because this stone is difficult to work.

And if these stones had not been imported to Maidstone, the alternative would have been brick. Local brick from Kent and Sussex clay pits. Brick says something also: it says "cheap, efficient and easily available".

Do "red brick universities" not suffer by this association with the materials from which they are built as compared to, say, Oxford and Cambridge colleges built of Cotswold limestone...

Underlying the meaning of stones are the property of stones:

In his story 'The Valley of the Beasts' about an English hunter who tries to persuade his indian guide to lead him into a forbidden territory, the point-blank refusal of the guide to continue is described thus: "It was as though a granite boulder spoke." It's a nice phrase, evoking as it does the speech of stones. But why a granite boulder? Why not a sandstone boulder? Because sandstone boulders crumble. Granite boulders are hard and intransigent.

The colours of stones clearly have different cultural significance. I wrote a post a while back about the use of ochre in body painting. This material, a sort of reddened ironstone, is widely considered 'the blood of the earth' by aboriginal peoples. Red colours are generally associated with passion.

White stones such as the Portland Stone used to build civic buildings in England represent purity and integrity. The White Cliffs of Dover are made of chalk and they exude a sense of unsullied purity. They symbolise island nationhood.

Black stones such as jet are carved to create memento mori, rememberances of the dead.

What are the properties of stone that can be evoked? For example, the heaviness of ironstone; the lightness of pumice; the sharpness of flint; the softness of talc; the hardness of granite; the weakness of sandstone; the untrustworthiness of shale, and the brilliance of diamond.

The individual stones themselves and their properties are merely the language of stone. The 'speech' of stone is found in the work of architects and sculptors. Sometimes, as in the case of the McDonalds facade, that 'speech' can be extremely repetitive.

Concentration

Image courtesy of Wikipedia article on Anna Akhmatova.

Last week I gave a poetry reading at The Highlander bar in Paris. I got there a bit early and spent half-an-hour chatting with a French lady who had also arrived early. She was a student of one of the other poets reading, Amy Hallowell, who teaches Zen meditation.

I asked the lady if she thought poetry was 'Zen' and she said: "yes, Zen meditation and poetry are both acts of intense concentration".

This made me think of a television program I had seen a day or two before about the Cresta Run in which tobogganists slide downhill, headfirst, at up to 140 km/hour with their noses only six inches above the ice. This is perhaps the ultimate concentration sport - a minute or so of pure concentration and exhilaration.

One of the tobogganists said that he was only capable of doing the run one or two times a day, the mental effort was so draining. Even going through the manouevres in your mind while standing up straight and moving your body from side to side in simulated negociation of the turns was exhausting.

This is indeed somewhat akin to the act of concentration in poetry. The act of creating a poem is one which slows down time. In concentrating, the poet becomes unaware of the passage of actual time, and focusses instead on the time-space of the poem. Some writers have discussed the poem in terms of a dance which implies a rhythmic entrancement with form.

These ideas of the stasis created by writing a poem collided with another experience that I had last week which was to give a lecture about working as a geologist, my 'metier' to use the French word, or 'profession' in English.

I took along some 'props' to help me explain. As I pulled them out of my bag at the start of the talk, I felt something like a magician, getting his tricks out. One of the objects was the ferrous concretion made of Goethite that I wrote about here.

I explained to my small audience how a concretion forms, growing slowly beneath the ground. Also, I explained, that because of their weight, hardness and strength, a bed of concretions could sometimes becomes concentrated at an unconformity surface, that is to say, a surface between two sequences of rock which reflect a phase of prolonged non-deposition or hiatus.

My goethite concretion was found on an unconformity surface, that between the Aptian and Albian age deposits of the Lower Greensand.

After the talk, the person who had organised the occasion (called Larysa - a Russian name) wrote to me to say that my goethite concretion (named after the poet Goethe) had made her think of another poet: Anna Akhmatova.

Anna, she said, wrote a mere 20 poems in the ten years between 1925 and 1935; for her, who could write a hundred poems in just one year, these ten years were an "unconformity" and the 20 poems she wrote were "concretions".

Written in Blood

Image courtesy of www.civilization.ca

We recently visited the walled city of Provins which is situated some fifty kilometers south-east of Paris. It was an interesting day out. The town retains many aspects of its medieval character, including a large section of its high defensive wall and a number of ancient medieval houses restored to their original character. The town was an important trading place in the 14th Century due to the special protection given to traders voyaging into the region by the Dukes of Champagne. The town became well known and attracted trade from as far away as Italy and Scandinavia. These traders in turn brought items such as cloth and spices from even further afield: the Orient for example.

What caught my attention among the many interesting exhibits was a recreation of the fabrication of parchment from animal skins. Parchment became important at this time in the first banking enterprises. The word 'bank' comes from the French word 'banc' describing the wooden table at which the money changer would sit. Rather than travelling between trading posts carrying large sacks of money that might be stolen, merchants began to use guarantees of payment on parchment which could be bought and then later traded in for money at the next trading post.

The fabrication of parchment was a labour intensive one and included treating the skins with various caustic ingredients, thinning them by scraping and stretching them on a frame. Seeing the effort involved in producing the equivalent of what we so take for granted: a sheet of paper, I started to reflect on what a revolution parchment, and later paper, really was.

How would people have recorded information before that? There are several methods: papyrus paper made from reeds; printing into tablets of damp clay that was later allowed to dry; writing onto stone such as slate and, lastly, writing on the body.

The last of these is almost certainly the oldest method of conveying symbolic meaning. Aborigines today still paint themselves with ochre, a red, brown or yellow coloured iron ore. Archaeological studies indicate that ochre has been used by man for at least 300,000 years. Thousands of pieces of ochre have been found in cave excavations in Africa and detailed analysis of this material using microscopic analysis of surface textures has shown that the wear on the ochre may well be compatible with use for body painting. Some pieces have also been shaped into crayons which might have been used for the creation of symbolic patterns, similar to the 'totem' symbols that aborigines paint themselves with today. To quote the Australian Museum on body painting:

For these communities, body painting is not necessarily just about visual artistic creativity, it relates to conventions, laws and religion. It is a means of communication.

The body painting not only communicates membership of a particular group, but it links individuals to the patch of earth on which they live:

For Indigenous Australians, spirituality centres around the land. The nurturing and life-giving capacity of even our hardest terrains has been the mainstay of Indigenous religious beliefs. Incorporating the earth into spiritual ceremonies is done by many tribes using various ochres.

The patches of earth are themselves related to dreamtime stories so that the totem symbolises a myth, for example the story of the origin of red ochre earth from the blood of a dying giant kangaroo that I mentioned recently in a previous article here.

The anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss was interested by body painting and discusses it at some length in his book 'Tristes Tropiques'. He was struck by the beauty of the designs used by Brazilian indian women to decorate their faces and read in these designs histories of the past greatness of a society:

The female beauties trace the outline of the collective dream with their make-up; their patterns are hieroglyphics describing an inaccessible golden age, which they extol in their ornamentation, since they have no code in which to express it, and whose mysteries they disclose as they reveal their nudity.

If we can allow the word 'poem' to express a condensed and elegant method of expression, then it is almost certain that the first 'poem' was written in ochre on a human body. The poem would have appeared as a symbol summarising a well known story, in the same way that the calligraphy of a few chinese brush strokes may summarise a complicated concept like the rising of the sun in the morning.

I think these marks, written with ochre (the "blood of the earth") on a human body represent the earliest writing. These early writings might well have begun tens of thousand, if not hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Cherry Stone

When I was an undergraduate student, nineteen years old, I travelled to the Cantabrian Mountains in the north of Spain to map an area of around 35 square kilometres. I went with two friends and we drew straws to decide which of us would get the best mapping area. I won, much to the chagrin of my friends who, quite rightly, considered that I had not put as much effort into the planning of the trip as I should have done. Their mapping areas were covered in prickly, scrub vegetation which they had to thrash their way through day after day. They would come home to our camp in the evening covered in horsefly bites and bleeding scratches which they would show me, murderous looks in their eyes.

My mapping area, by contrast, was a paradise on earth: green meadows out of which ancient rocks poked that were full of fascinating fossils; a deep river where I could sit and watch magnificent trout swimming. It was an enormous pleasure to walk around this area of gentle hills, meeting shepherds, their fierce but well-behaved dogs, encountering strange and brightly coloured insects and wild animals that had little fear of humans.

One of the rocks that I had to map was Griotte, a striking rock of Middle Cambrian age which is found in this area. The Middle Cambrian was around 500 million years ago so this is a relatively ancient rock. What is striking about Griotte is its cherry red colour and, in the area where I was studying, the presence of abundant pieces of crushed trilobite and shells within it. I had never seen anything like this rock before. It's colour so bright and strange and all the tiny pieces of fossil inside it.

Griotte is actually a term which is widely used for similar rocks in Spain, France and Italy. Griotte marble is well known for its decorative value and is often used for fireplaces. The name derives from the French word for 'cherry' and, as you can see from the photo at the top of the page, Griotte can sometimes look just like a jar of cherry jam. In fact, the red colour comes from iron minerals such as haematite and goethite.

Since this first encounter with a bright red rock, I have discovered other, similar red rocks in my years of research as a geologist and have always been rather struck and fascinated by them. I have seen the Red Molasse of the Alps, the pink Hopeman Sandstone of Northern Scotland and the stunning red rocks of Utah. I, like humans since time immemorial, have been deeply impressed by these rocks. It is not surprising that they have entered into the mythology of mankind. Apart from cherry jam, of course, the other association that comes to mind is blood. This is the association that the poet Supervielle makes in his poem Vertigo, of which I recently published a translation here.

Many red rocks are silty or clayey due to the fact that they were often originally deposited on the banks of rivers. They can be quite soft and easily reconstituted as clay. Clays with iron ores can be powdery and are know to have been used in the formulation of red, brown or yellow paints by prehistoric cave artists. Here below I have collected a number of references to the tradition and mythology surrounding clay, red clays and ochre. The story of humankind's creation from clay, it seems, is almost universal.

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Your Lord said to the angels: 'I am creating man from dry clay, from black moulded loam. When I have fashioned him and breathed of my spirit into him, kneel down and prostrate yourselves before him.'

The Koran translated by N.J. Dawood (Penguin Classics)

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Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Genesis 2:7

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Adam meaning "Earth" or "Man" in Standard Hebrew.

Adam meaning "Soil" or "Light Brown" in Arabic.

Wikipedia

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Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me...?

Adam speaking in Milton's Paradise Lost, reproaching God.

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In Sumerian myth the senior gods spent their time in leisure, while the junior gods laboured at digging the channels of the rivers and other tasks. Eventually the junior gods rebelled and threatened to overturn the heavenly order. The senior god Enki therefore fashioned the first men from clay, mixed with spittle and the blood of a slain god, so that men could work and the gods could rest. Originally Enki made seven men and seven women, but the numbers of mankind soon multiplied.

Wikipedia

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Whether with particles of heavenly fire,
The God of Nature did his soul inspire;
On earth, but new divided from the sky,
And, pliant, still retain'd th'ethereal energy:
Which wise Prometheus temper'd into paste,
And, mix't with living steams, the godlike image caste...
From such rude principles our form began;
And earth was metamorphosed into man.

Roman version of the Prometheus legend in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'

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On the following morning the master called his son-in-law and his favorite pupil and acquainted them with the instruction he had received from Heaven. He also asked the two to help him in the work he was about to undertake.

"Four elements," he said, "are required for the creation of the golem or homunculus, namely, earth, water, fire and air."

"I myself," thought the holy man, "possess the power of the wind; my son-in-law embodies fire, while my favorite pupil is the symbol of water, and between the three of us we are bound to succeed in our work." He urged on his companions the necessity of great secrecy and asked them to spend seven days in preparing for the work.

On the twentieth day of the month of Adar, in the year five thousand three hundred and forty after the creation of the world, in the fourth hour after midnight, the three men betook themselves to a river on the outskirts of the city on the banks of which they found a loam pit. Here they kneaded the soft clay and fashioned the figure of a man three ells high. They fashioned the features, hands and feet, and then placed the figure of clay on its back upon the ground.

In the 16th Century, Rabbi Loew creates a golem who will protect the Jews from persecution (from Angelo S. Rappoport, The Folklore of the Jews, London, Soncino Press, 1937).

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According to the Torah ( Genesis 2:7), Adam is said to have been formed by God from "dust from the earth"; in the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 38b) of the first centuries of the Christian era he is, more specifically, described as having initially been a golem kneaded from mud .

Wikipedia

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The early Islamic commentator Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari adds a number of details to the Torah, based on claimed hadith as well as specific Jewish traditions (so-called isra'iliyyat )[15] . Tabari records that when it came time to create Adam, God sent Gabriel (Jibril), then Michael (Mika'il), to fetch clay from the earth; but the earth complained, saying I take refuge in God from you, if you have come to diminish or deform me , so the angels returned empty-handed. Tabari goes on to state that God responded by sending the Angel of Death , who took clay from all regions, hence providing an explanation for the variety of appearances of the different races of mankind.

Wikipedia

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The natives in their wild state have no covering for their bodies and are perfectly nude, possessing no shame. As ornament they fasten rats' tails, or twist and spin up their relatives' hair, with which they dress their own, binding it together at the back of the head to prevent it from falling over their eyes, as they wear their hair long and greasy, rubbing emu fat, etc., on it. This hair dress is not at all picturesque. For, owing to continual grease and dirt it forms into knots, each often matted into five pounds weight, as they have no substitute for a comb. They also dress their beard in a similar manner. They spin hair into belts, in which they hang small game, coyleys, etc., when hunting. They are particularly fond of greasing their bodies and rubbing on decayed ironstone (ochre), white chalk, and charcoal. They also use these in painting their shields, and as colouring for all purposes.

(from John G. Withnell, The Customs and Traditions of the Aboriginal Natives of North Western Australia, 1901).

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Describing the Wilgie Mia aborigine mine of Western Australia from which thousands of tonnes of ochre (iron ores of haematite, goethite and limonite) have been mined by generations of aboriginal people, Josephine Flood relates the aborigine tradition:

"The ochre was formed by the death of a great kangaroo, who was speared by the spirit being called Mondong. the kangaroo leapt in his death agony to Wilgie Mia, where the red ochre represents his blood, the yellow his liver, and the green his gall. The last leap took the kangaroo to another hill, called Little Wilgie, which marks his grave."

information from 'Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age' by Richard Rudgley (Century, 1998).

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According to Encyclopedia Mythica all of the following deities created humans from clay:

• Arebati, god of the pygmies of Zaire.
• Dohit, god of the Mosetene Indians.
• Esaugetuh Emissee, in the Muskogean (Creek) tradition.
• Zanahary, supreme god of the Madagascan pantheon.
• Chnum, Egyptian ram god who makes the Nile delta fertile and forms children from clay before placing them in their mother's womb.
• Es, supreme god of the Siberian Ket people.
• Mbere, supreme creator in Fens (western Bantu) mythology.
• Khonvoum, supreme god and creator or the pygmy people of Central Africa. He created black and white people from black and white clay, and the Pygmies from red clay.
• Kane, god of creation in Hawaiian mythology created mankind from red clay.
  
• Mawu-Lisa is the Dahomey god of the Fon people.

Woodchip Wallpaper and the Meaning of Cave Art

When I was a youngster, my family moved into a house that had woodchip wallpaper in the downstairs loo. Woodchip wallpaper is a kind of textured paper which has small flakes of wood incorporated into it during its fabrication. Each flake is a small, rough-edged and individual creation of different shape and size. Sometimes a number of flakes will aggregate together to form more complex clusters. The individual woodchips or the small clusters, however, form discrete elements in the wallpaper having little interaction with each other, a bit like falling snowflakes.

Every time I went to the loo, I would sit gazing at a patch of this white-painted woodchip wallpaper. As I gazed, certain chips or clusters of chips would begin to be reminiscent of a face, an object, an element of nature, a tree, a flower, a fence, and the more I looked, the more it came to seem like that thing it resembled, and the less it came to seem like anything else. Finally, the object would require to be named: it would be "The Gun" or "The Farmhouse", "The Robber" or "The Skull".

The next time I returned to the loo, the same objects would still be there. I would have no problem remembering them now, and what is more, the objects would be connected by an invisible line which marked out a narrative that had begun to develop between each one of the objects. The narrative was conjured up by the images and was driven by the individual elements as they were added. The invisible line connecting the objects grew steadily longer as I recognised new objects and perceived their place in the story. The story was certainly a slightly odd one, dreamlike in character, but it had its elements of drama as indicated by the titles of individual woodchips that I referred to earlier.

This story wasn't something I dreamt up one week and forgot about the next. Rather, it was one which sustained my imagination over months if not years. I never told anyone about my ongoing woodchip saga, but in fact, it was something I was quietly passionate about: both the daily repetition of the story and the addition of new elements into the extending "songline". (If you don't know what a songline is, then you must read Bruce Chatwin's book of the same title.)

I have been thinking about this after visiting the famous Font de Gaume cave in the Dordogne last week. This cave (pictured above) is now probably the best place for viewing original cave art in the Dordogne region. It is close to the town of Les Eyzies which houses France's national prehistory museum. The cave is not widely publicised and entry is limited to 200 people per day in order to keep the temperature inside low and the damage to the cave walls to a minimum.

I have also visited Lascaux II which is a perfect replica of part of the Lascaux cave, rightly renowned as the most beautiful and well preserved example of prehistoric cave art, certainly in France, if not in the world.

A common observation I took away from both these visits was of how sensitively the art had been overlaid onto the geomorphology of the cave interior. It is not an original observation and indeed it is something that is stressed by the guides that showed us around both Lascaux II and Font de Gaume.

The painters made no attempt to chisel flat the walls or to prepare a smooth surface on which to paint. Instead, they were intent on identifying the features already present in the rock and interpreting them through the addition of paint and fine chisel marks. The guide at Font de Gaume lifted his torch to create a shadow on a slight ridge in the rock, and it immediately became apparent that the shadow of the ridge defined the external form of the bison's head which was drawn there.

Like the indians in Papua New Guinea which I wrote about in a recent post who believed that the axe heads they chipped from the rock were already present in the rock, the prehistoric painters of reindeer, mammoth and bison in the Font de Gaume and Lascaux caves believed that the animals they were painting were also already there in the rock. All they had to do was identify their presence.

I feel certain that, as the painters identified the natural sculptural presence of these animals, a kind of narrative would have evolved for them similar to the kind of narrative I discovered through identifying real objects from ragged scraps of woodchip. Whether the narratives that were created might be readily interpretable to modern eyes I think is doubtful, but they would have been powerful enough to their creators and to anyone who was let in on the secret.

La Gogotte

This weekend I joined an excursion to see the Fontainbleau Sandstone, an Oligocene age (30 million year old) formation of the Paris Basin. While on the trip, I discovered the concretions that Roger Caillois had written about in a poem which I had translated some time ago and posted on Connaissances. I have since removed it from the site, so here it is again, posted below. The concretions really are fabulous to behold, and after a search of the internet, I think I can say they are probably the most fabulous in the world. These concretions are known as 'Gogottes'.

The most amazing example I have found is housed in the National Museum of Natural History at Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. There is a good photograph of it here. However, there are not that many examples illustrated on the internet as far as I can tell.

I also posted my interpretation of the poem as part of a long article entitled 'Do Scientists Use Metaphor?'

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Siliceous Concretions

after the French of Roger Caillois

In the Ile-de-France, in a sand pit, halfway up a quarry face, lie concretions of silicified sand. They have the appearance of palms or palm leaves, of half-open hands, of crumpled petals. Irregularly spaced, oriented in the same sense, they are aligned in a sort of discontinuous horizontal bed.

The longest concretions seem made of a flowing or crumbling substance, suddenly hardened by ice, then holed here and there by a stubborn wearing away which has hollowed out one part or another, surfaces offering themselves to be pierced at their weakest points. A game of forces which have the time for accumulating and altering, thickening and thinning the mysterious and perfect masses which make public their laws, sign and authenticate their needs.

Other volumes, more powerfully curved, hold up an efficient shield to invisible pressure. These are the ones which are slow to thin or fold themselves, the opposite of lazy they are fashioned by a long evasiveness.

An underground current filters through the sand to slowly form these great tears of stone fixed in a flight which is forever headlong, forever immobile. For it is the water which flees. And, fleeing day after day, century after century, it entrains a fine substance and deposits it on any poor obstacle, never ceasing from cloaking, expanding, changing it into some immortal form. Many of the most beautiful modern sculptures have been found in this sheltering place. They have been there for twenty-five million years.

Michaux's Furrow

Last week I was in Belgium, staying in an establishment which had, rather surprisingly, an enormous collection of books by Belgian poets. Henri Michaux, whose work I have been translating for the past few weeks, was born in Belgium, although he rejected his country of orgin and, as far as I know, never wrote about his childhood there. Nonetheless, his work was well represented in this miraculous library and I was able to browse it at leisure, also leafing through books of his art work (which was very extensive) and a thick biography published by Gallimard.

One book which I found particularly interesting was 'Miserable Miracle', a study which Michaux made of his experiences of using the drug mescaline. The images which he drew while under the influence of mescaline immediately struck me as being very geological and put me in mind of images I had seen of the great Mid Atlantic Ridge which runs from one end of the globe to the other, is several kilometres high and over a thousand kilometres wide. The ridge is offset along its length by transform faults which are exactly the type of structure which Michaux draws offsetting what he calls his 'furrow'.

Reading through Michaux's account of his mescaline induced hallucinations which can be found here, one is immediately struck by the intensely geological character of the experience.

As his trip begins, he hears the words "Krakatoa!" and "crystal" repeated untiringly like a mantra until he feels like a castaway on an island, the word becoming everything to him, staring at the ocean out of which it had just come and out of which he felt he had just come.

Suddenly, preceded by the word "blinding", a thousand dazzling scythes of light, start furiously splitting space open from top to bottom with gigantic strokes, passing furiously from impossible heights into abysmal depths, with the ruptures ever more monstrous, insane...

These strokes create Himalayas that are higher than the highest mountain, sharply pointed, ever more acute, rising to the very edge of space. While Michaux is watching, possessed by intense urgency, he settles on the letters "m" of the word "immense" which he was mentally pronouncing, and the "m" begins stretching to become enormous baroque cathedral arches ridiculously elongated.

The Himalaya producing machine had stopped, but now it starts again and great plowshares plough up a stretch of space. Michaux has the sensation of a fissure which he tries to hide from, wrapping his eyes with a scarf. But there is the furrow, a furrow with little, hurried, transverse sweepings. In it is a fluid, mercurially bright, its behaviour torrential, its speed electric. It seems elastic, swishing, trembling.

Michaux feels as if the furrow were crossing his skull from the forehead to the occiput. It is strange for him that he can see it. It is a furrow without beginning or end, a furrow that seems to come from one end of the earth, passing through him and continuing on to the other end of the earth.

He contains the furrow, except for the extremities which disappear into the distance, and yet it is himself, it is each of his instants, one after the other, flowing in its crystalline flux. In this flux his life advances. Fractured into a thousand fractures. He stands in front of a rock. It splits. Then it is healed. Then again it is split in two. Then once more it is no longer split, and this goes on indefinitely...

The furrow remained the central problem of Michaux's halluginogenic visions. He drew it over and over. Could this trench, which had been so dominant, and so constant for hours on end, and whose existence he found more evident than his own, could it have been a sign? Or was it perhaps only a simple comparison? A word reflection meaning "I am more open". Why did mescaline always come back to this same, or an equivalent, image?

Even twenty days after his mescaline trip, the furrow was still there, passing straight through Michaux's head without paying any attention to the brain, splitting him from one end to the other, joining him to infinity, by an infinite path, a magnetic field linked to what... he knew not.

It was these images of Michaux's that put me in mind of writing about plate tectonics and Mid Atlantic ridges. Reading the description of his experience makes me feel certain that he had some access to a geological model with had fleshed out his halluginogenic experiences. The last part of Michaux's description of his furrow precisely describes Mid Atlantic Ridge formation: rock splitting, healing, splitting, healing again, splitting again, indefinitely. This is how the two sides of the Atlantic spread apart, opening a fissure into which with upwelling magma continuously flowed, rehealing, accreting on either side.

Miserable Miracle was published in 1956, a time when oceanographic research into Atlantic topography had been continuing for some 15 years. Bruce Heezen, Maurice Ewing and Marie Tharp of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory were the scientists who first discovered the Mid Atlantic Ridge while carrying out marine survey work and creating the Heezen-Tharp physiographic maps of the world's oceans. From this citation to Maria Tharp we learn that "in the early 1950s, Tharp found the first evidence for mid-ocean ridge rift valleys and stood by her finding in the face of long-held, deeply entrenched beliefs that continental drift was scientific heresy. Soon after, with Bruce Heezen and Maurice Ewing, Tharp helped establish the existence of the Earth's most dramatic and fundamental geological feature - the globe-encircling, 40,000-mile-long mid-ocean ridge system."

It would seem the timing of this amazing discovery in the depths of the oceans was perfect for inclusion in Michaux's exploration of the depths of his unconscious. And after one hundred and fifty million years of splitting and rehealing, the kind of infinity to which mescaline gave Michaux access, here is what the Mid-Atlantic Ridge looks like today.