Soren's Rocks

I confess to immense knowledge-envy:  I've always been fascinated with rocks, but have never systematically explored geology.  When my other (right now difficult) work-world was planning on going to the Yucatan next May, I was already planning how I might put my hand on the iridium layer of the asteroid collision; I have a weird obsession with trilobites, back to the 2nd grade; I used to carry chunks of pink granite in my pocket.  So, I delight in Soren's new rock-knowledge, especially in being able to see these eons, not just read about them.

Ominous, though, the thought of coal here in Boone County.  I hope not in any abundance:  I have visions (which in medieval times might have made me either saint or heretic) of machines larger than Stewart Hall, but smaller than Sam's Club or HyVee, crushing the landscape, changing Missouri into West Virginia.

And, I confess, that I kind of love the road cuts, along Stadium Blvd. and south 63 toward Jeff City.  Where there aren't signs that threaten sniper fire or Star Wars laser incineration for stopping, I do like to stop, pick up the fallen rocks, haul them off for ceremonial circles, fence repair, and so on.  Each rock seems valuable, storied, in ways I can't unfold. 

I know that geology people, and the "real science" people in Geography, would laugh, but I'd love to go out to Stadium or 63 or the rock quarry, with someone who could point out the layers, connect abstract time with quite-solid reality.

Best would be Soren's ancient oceans--I want not just the idea.  I want to touch an equatorial seabed and know what and when it is, to imagine that moment of earth and fill it with life, and write the poetry that scales us beside this.

Tonight in my intro creative writing class, I showed Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the Scottish environmental artist, Andy Goldsworthy.  For that class, the purpose was to connect with the power of image (we're doing our poetry unit).  But Goldsworthy speaks some things useful to us:

"we misread the landscape when we think of it as being pastoral and pretty"

He talks about trying to caputre the moment/sense of a specific place with his creations:  "you feel as if you've touched the heart of the place."  He wants to "[see] something that was always there, but you were blind to."

He works with leaves or ice or iron-rock pigment or dandelion blooms with a river, and says that "river is not dependent upon water--we're talking about the flow."  When he is invited to NY to put in a huge installation (a stone wall), he lets the stone-workers do their job:  "their dialogue with the stone is what makes the wall," while he directs them to build according to "the line that is in sympathy with the place throught which it passes."

Hmm.  Rocks.

later, bob