[don't miss Mary Kate's awesome Game of Thrones Day post!]
Well, I did it. My book Stories of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman was due to U Minn Press on Feb. 1, and I actually made the deadline, pressing the SEND button mid afternoon. It's a relief to have a project over which I've spent so many years agonizing out of my life for a little while. It will be back: though it's under contract (look for it in spring 2015), an evaluator must sign off on this final version ... and of course there is the copyediting and so forth to come. Still, this is a major milestone.
Eventually I will write a cautionary blog post about the Writing Lockdowns I used to complete this project, and the very real toll that this labor took on my health ... but for now, I am happy to have the thing gone. As I posted on FB, I completed the book during a run, when I scooped a stone into pocket to remember a phrase that had come to me about textual effects and lithic materiality ("Because of its ardor for unconformity, stone sediments contradiction, there to ignite possibility, abiding invitation to metamorphosis"). And I'll repeat here what I said there: Thank you, everyone, for your support during the long process of composition. I could not have accomplished this without you. Finally concluding the book has been a moment to think about the many, many people who have sustained the project, and I want you to know that I am grateful. This applies to EVERY reader of ITM, whether you ever commented on any of stone blog posts or not. Just knowing that this work had readers was sustaining.
Here, for anyone who is interested, is the book's conclusion.
Epilogue:
Iceland
I.
Needful Stones
Stones,
wrote Bartholomaeus Anglicus, are the “bones of the earth.”[1] They
grant the globe stability and prevent its lands from pulling apart . Without stone we would possess the barest
of lives. The lithic arrives in so many species and shapes, holding so much power
to sustain diverse relations, that through alliance we transform every ecology into which we step.
Bartholomaeus describes stones as “profitable and nedefulle” for the building
of houses, walls, pavement, and bridges. Guide and matter of transport, refuge
against tempests, rock conveys and protects, a shelter against the predation of
enemies, wolves, and “evil beasts.” The substance of the inhabited world, the
materiality through which hearths, homes, towers, and cities arise, stone “helps
and heals” bodies beset by sickness and founds the courts of kings. Through stone
and with stone we fashion monuments that endure.
Or so we
tell ourselves, because our histories are small.
II. Divergent Tectonic Plate Boundary
(MAR)
To journey
in Iceland is to traverse a landscape thick with story, a topography known
already through medieval sagas: an enormous boulder that Grettir once lifted, a
hill where Aud the Deep-Minded set a cross, a glacial river where Njal’s sons
ambushed their enemy. Guidebooks often describe the feel of the island as primeval.
Shaped by recent volcanoes, ongoing tectonic shift, and frequent glaciation, its
expanses are however geologically young. Iceland sits upon the mid-Atlantic ridge.
As North America and Eurasia pull away from each other, the island grows at
about a centimeter a year, along a rift just below where the assembly known as
the Alþingi used to meet. A þing is a gathering, a convocation where
frictions surface and force is exerted, a making of the real through
deliberation and debate. Bruno Latour points out how extraordinary it is that thing, this “banal term we use for designating
what is out there, unquestionably” should be the inheritance of “the oldest of
the sites in which our ancestors did their dealing and tried to settle their
disputes.”[2] Þingvellir,
the fissured expanse where the Alþingi was convened into the eighteenth
century, is now a World Heritage Site. Tourists wander the rift valley in
search of human history, while below their feet tectonic plates diverge, liquid
rock rises from the mantle, and the seabed spreads.
I travelled to Iceland to finish this
book. Some of the island’s geography resembles the Irish Burren [Boíreann, “rocky”], a landscape rich in lithic
art catalytic to the project’s commencement. Yet Iceland holds nothing like the
standing stones, barrows, rings and dolmens of Ireland, Britain, France. Human trace
is more recent. Except for the occasional remains of a farmstead’s hearth, fire
and stone collaborating still to send story forward, the landscape holds few
lithic communication devices. Stone is everywhere entangled with the aqueous: volcanic
fields scraped by errant glaciers, marshes where lava penetrated an ice shield to
form pseudo-craters, turbid rivers of melt that plunge into the earth, rock and
water in constant terraforming partnership. In the polychrome valleys of Landmannalaugar,
where vibrant rhyolite shifts beneath your feet as you hike, blue, green, pink
and white mountains rise. Steam drifts from geothermal vents. Bartholomaeus described
Iceland as place so full of ice [perpetuo
glacie in Latin, “alwey ise and glaas” in Trevisa’s translation] that water
has become stone. Its mountains, he wrote, are hardened snow, while its ice petrifies
into beautiful crystal.[3]
Iceland reminds
that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.
III. Moody Beach
In Maine (another
place where this book that keeps beginning commenced) my brother Mark asked me about
Iceland. I told him its lesson of impermanence. I began my long study of stone seeking
something that endures. Yet rock moves like any liquid, restless and ephemeral:
sedimented, recycled, engulfed, pulverized, melted, metamorphized, eroded, rebirthed.
We think stone persists only because it outlasts. We trust stone as archive and
monument, but we may as well write on water. The fossil record is scanty, its
gaps enormous, its lacunae inscrutable. Stone promises futurity but provides only
a brief and fragmented recordation. Particles will in the end remain. We will
be readable from atomic traces, not from the architectures we build, not from
bodies or machines or the stories that we tell. The music of the spheres is the
whirl of these bits and specks, objects of the smallest scale. Boulders,
cliffs, mountains, sea floors, bones, continents, plates, planets: stone's
destiny is the cosmic dust that once it was, carrying some new chemicals
perhaps, betraying to someone’s instruments the telltale signs of organic life
that needed stone to burgeon, dwell, and thrive -- but particles all the same,
fragments that near silence.
IV.
Lithic Gravity
In writing this
book I have been drawn constantly back to the stones that companioned its composition.
Geologic
collaborations are like the slow movements of tectonic plates. You don't necessarily
get an earthquake to announce that alignment has shifted. Forceful action is
invisible. Yet sometimes in looking back with enough perspective the wandered landscape
reveals a past rather different from what had been thought. Ground's drift is
relentless, a quiet friction that is a drive towards strange conjunction, perilous
continuity across vast spans. In the company of archaebacteria, dinosaurs or
humans, volcanoes erupt, continents wander, the ocean floor rises and falls. The
geological strata upon which we walk and build, foundation both literal and epistemological, is full of shift. The
desert was a seabed, the whalebones top a mountain, the past is never what we
thought, and every object is full of strange relation. Stories
of Stone is built around such truths, and written in the
conviction that medieval writers meditated upon inanimate matter and came to
rather similar insights, expressed within differently sympathetic modes. Rock
communicates something nonhuman and yet weirdly creaturely, queerly vital, even
to writers who supposedly had all the answers they needed in theology, science and
received history. Trekking the ashy wastes surrounding a volcano (Hekla, which
last erupted in 2000, and in the Middle Ages was described as Hell's Gate);
standing where the Alþingi once unfolded, the pull-apart where the
island rifts and new stone emerges; finding rocks that mark the hearth of a tenth-century
homestead; walking atop the glacier Langjökull, on the move and taking us with
it, filled with moulins down which melt swirls, secretly afraid that Alex or
Katherine might vanish because all lives are limned by catastrophe: these
experiences were material reminders of something I knew already but perhaps needed
Iceland to feel.
Too
sentimental, I suppose, to write such things. Too personal. There is something
uncomfortable about losing stony detachment. Yet better rocky than secure. Glimpsing
landscapes known from medieval texts, hiking land shaped by abiding inhuman
force, was a reminder that we dwell between catastrophes, between fire and ice.
Geology is a perilous science. To write of stone is to know despair. Yet when
Hekla spews its flame, when the earth shudders and ash drifts cold air, the
people of Reykjavik climb into jeeps and drive to watch the red of molten stone
at twilight. They drink beer and watch rock in fiery motion -- not without
apprehension at what this flow discloses, companions in sudden yet abiding community,
in stories composed with stone.
[1] See John of Trevisa’s translation of De proprietatibus rerum, 16.74. In describing
stones as the bones of earth’s body, Bartholomaeus is directly following
Ambrose, but the trope is ubiquitous.
[2] “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters
of Fact to Matters of Concern,” 233.
[3] On the Properties
of Things book 15.173. Only polar bears (“white beeres mooste huge and
moost fers” seem strong enough to break through this frozen landscape to reveal
the floe of water – and fish – nearby. Bartholomaeus describes the generation
of crystal through freezing at 16.30.
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