“A stone is a thought that the earth develops over inhuman time”—Louise Erdrich, “The Stone
“Ideas decompose into stones of unknowing”—Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects”
A confabulation
convenes a conversation:
geologic rocks (earth thoughts) &
geophilosophical books (thoughts of earth).
A confabulation
requires a reciprocation:
geomorphic petrification of mind &
anthropomorphic animation of stone.
CONFABULATIONS comprises petric-textual translations effected through annotations composed of quotations that sound reverberations between the geology of each particular rock and geophilosophy of each peculiar book.
“Rocks are not nouns but verbs—visible evidence of processes: a volcanic eruption, the accretion of a coral reef, the growth of a mountain belt. Everywhere one looks, rocks bear witness to events that unfolded over long stretches of time”–Marcia Bjornerud, TImefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World.
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“Even the most solid, ancient, and elemental materials are as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself; … life is filled with unconformities—revealing holes in time that are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, and understanding”–Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities.
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“Free as I was to stand and stare, the exposed stone seemed to catch me up out of the present and draw me in, and through, and down into the memory of a younger earth”–David Farrier, Footprints: The Search for Future Fossils.
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“When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth”–Robert MacFarland, Underland.
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“Who am I? A termor of nothingness living in a permanent earthquake”–Michel Serres, The Natural Contract.
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“A mountain range
formed from fallen
cosmic dust”
–Katie Paterson, A Place That Only Exists in Moonlight
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“The little becomes big. The world of childhood reverie is as big, bigger than the world offered to today’s reverie.… Our childhood solitudes have given us the primitive immensities”–Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos.
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Three iterations responding to writings in Julian Charriere, Towards No Earthly Pole
“Icebergs are not stones; however they imply something of the irreducible spontaneity of the earth that Heidegger describes”–Amanda Boetzkes
Ship-Stone sailing towards no earthly pole, “in no way compatible with the cosmologies of the past. Within the contemporary polar image, the future is veiled in shadow” (Nadim Samman).
Reading Dehlia Hannah’s essay transformed the circular “ensō” quartz vein into a drone-eye: “the drone’s-eye view offered here is fundamentally disorienting…because the territory that is surveys is fictitious.”
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