by Graham Dunstan Martin

Homage to Bachelard (1884-1962)

Architecture has at least two sides:  it’s a science;  and it’s one of the arts.  It’s akin to technology; and it’s akin to poetry.   This is why architects find Gaston Bachelard’s books interesting.  He was Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Sorbonne and the rational &  creative sides of his mind worked equally well.   He published about 9 books on philosophy of science, about 9 on the poetic imagination.  Believed:  ‘the masculine, workaday consciousness (animus), which strives towards scientific objectivity & the rectification of concepts, must be complemented by the nocturnal, feminine consciousness (anima) which seeks poetic subjectivity, reverie, imagination.’  I shall not refer to Bachelard again.  But, as you see, he’s an excellent kicking-off-point.

Everyone’s mind has those same two sides.  Though often one dominates over the other.  And I question whether it’s right to label them male and female.

Seeing Nature as a Mirror

Many years ago an ex-student of mine paid me a visit.  It was a cold day in winter, he came into my office, sat down, and we started to talk.  Since leaving University, he told me, he’d had a nervous breakdown — but now he was cured.  ‘But,’ he said to me, ‘if I’d still been ill, when I came in this morning I’d have thought you were angry with me:  because the gas fire is on (bright red); that poster on the wall is crimson; and you’re wearing a scarlet tie.’

This is poetic thinking:  my student in his illness was thinking everything around him was targeted deliberately at himself.  He was taking the world personally.  Every detail in his surroundings was aimed at him.

There is a term in lit crit:  the ‘pathetic fallacy’ (Ruskin).  This is when an author is writing a novel:  he comes to a sad chapter – so he makes it rain;   or a violent chapter – so he gives us a thunderstorm;  or his characters are having a happy love affair – so he makes the sun shine into the bedroom.   But it’s neither pathetic nor a fallacy, really:  because we are in the world, we relate to the world, we depend on the world, we see it & need to see it in terms of our needs and  purposes.  (And remember, our ancestors were in the World long long before we were human at all, or anything like human.)

So how do we see the World?  We don’t just have a logical, utilitarian relationship with the world, we have an emotional relationship with it.   This is shown in the words we use about it.  E.g. fires ‘rage’, waves are ‘angry’, trees ‘whisper’ or ‘weep’,  rocks are ‘dangerous’, mountains are ‘majestic’, a stone can be ‘obstinate’, a rock can be ‘threatening’, a cave can be ‘welcoming’.   We have this tendency to attribute intentions & emotions to our surroundings.   It’s useful to see things this way:  if you see fires as ‘raging’ or waves as being ‘angry’, it warns you not to get too close.

Stone is a fellow-inhabitant of our human world.  We relate to it, and it relates to us.  Of course, you will tell me I’m speaking ‘metaphorically’.

George Lakoff

According to the American philosopher George Lakoff,  ‘Metaphors are basic to thinking, above all to abstract thinking.’   According to Lakoff,  we tend to use systematic patterns of metaphor to explain the world to ourselves.  We thereby spread our human meanings out across the world.  Not only do we colour everything we see with human metaphors;  we can’t think without them.   As a great French thinker once said, ‘If the Triangles had a God,  he would be three-sided.’

For instance here’s a metaphor that should appeal to architects:  according to Lakoff we speak of theories & arguments as if they were buildings. We say ‘What’s the foundation for your theory? – What are the building blocks? — Your theory needs more support. –  The argument collapsed. — We need to construct a strong argument. – We need to buttress the theory with solid arguments.’   And so forth.

Or take the way we speak of time.    Time is thought of as a resource:  ‘Time is money.’ – We spend our time (cf money) doing things. — He wasted his time. – You don’t use your time profitably. — Time is precious. — He ran out of time.’

Or take the whole notion of causation – which is surely a basic human concept:  it simply has to be there right at the beginning of conscious life, away back into the processes of evolution, long before philosophy & science were invented.   According to Lakoff, the notion of causation is based entirely upon our own human experience of our own free will in action.  You’ve seen small children roaring with laughter as they throw a rattle out of a pram – again and again.   They’re experiencing their own newly-discovered free will, that wonderful sense of power, their own new-found ability to cause something to happen.¹

Connexions

At least before science came along (& that was just yesterday afternoon), –  the sorts of meaning we attributed to the world around us were the meanings it would have if we human beings were the world’s central purpose.   E.g.  the phases of the Moon and the female period are both 28 days.  Our ancestors noted the connexion, saw it as meaningful in a human-centred way, and therefore worshipped the Moon as a Goddess.

Now there’s no end to the distance  the mind can travel if you keep associating things, putting them  together:  the mind can go on, like on stepping-stones – stepping from one idea to the next connected idea for ever.   The moon & its phases connect with woman, goddess, fertility, life, white moonlight, purity, emptiness, barrenness, infertility, death….

The rational, utilitarian mind is neat and tidy:  it likes to find patterns, put things in order, classify, sort things out into neat little groups & categories.  Its ideal image is a tidy pile of  impassive motionless symmetrical boxes.  But the imaginative associative mind is like a huge disorderly labyrinth of connected ideas, all in motion.  It’s a frantic mind-boggling tangle, endless connectivity, leaps in the dark, flashes of illumination.  It’s a dark cave, infinite, multibranched, leading God knows where into the mysterious underground of the mind.

And of course it’s a terribly useful creative source:  you can’t do without it.  When you can’t solve a problem, don’t go frantic, give it to your Unconscious – Sleep on it – Take the weekend off.   Scientists too make discoveries this way.  There are many famous examples of the Unconscious taking a hand in science.  Think of August Kekulé, who fell asleep on top of a London bus – and dreamed the structure of benzene – or Dmitri Mendeleyev, who was given the pattern of the periodic table, the organizing pattern of the elements, again in a dream.

So now let’s enter that cave.   WHAT IS THE METAPHORIC LIFE OF STONE?

HOW DO WE RELATE TO IT?   Obviously the right place to begin is a long way back in time, in

 

The Stone Age

Because stone was for a million years the hardest thing in the world.  All other degrees of hardness were softer than this.  The opposite of stone was breath or feathers.  For all the long millennia of our ancestors’ lives, stone was the hardest thing that anyone had ever known — until the Bronze & Iron Ages — but iron itself is found within stone.

So we made our weapons & tools, knives & hammers out of stone.  Without tools and weapons we’d never have become human.  At the Parc Archéologique at Tarascon, they show you how these essential implements were made.  Did weapons come first, or tools?   Robert Ardrey used to claim we humans are a violent aggressive species:  it was weapons first;  we’re ‘the killer ape’.

Houses

The prehistoric house took various forms, but let’s just think about the Wheelhouse² for a moment:  it was round, built of an outer circle of stones and a set of pillars like spokes to support the thatch.  In the hub, the centre – the warm heart of the house – was the fire.  We can conclude, from later customs and superstitions, that important taboos were attached to this –the fire was never allowed to go out:  they believed it was the heart and life of the house, not just emotionally, but magically and hence in literal truth.   Similarly, in Ancient Rome, the Vestal Virgins tended the Sacred Fire on the Capitol Hill – it must never go out on pain of their deaths.  For if it did, the city would fall to its enemies.

The House –  metaphorically — is the Mother = it signifies and provides protection, care, love, belonging, safety, privacy, peace, rest, healing, recuperation, the centre & origin of life, of children.  It is almost an image of consciousness itself, since the latter is the place one looks from without being overlooked, the place from which one sees but into which no other consciousness can see.   As for ‘belonging’, C. G. Jung advised one of his patients to buy a plot of land somewhere, so he would belong somewhere.

But these homely values could be reversed in, for instance, the Celtic Curse, reported by folklorists in Ireland and Scotland.  I’m not sure one should tell people how this was done, but so long as you promise not to believe in magic …?  Clear out the fire from the centre of the house, replace it with a heap of stones.  This was called The Fire of Stones. Then proceed widdershins (tuathal) – that is to say counterclockwise, for that is the ill-fated direction — around the house cursing your enemy, and saying that this curse will continue as long as the stones fail to burn – and as long as they are not reassembled.  Then take the stones and throw them away into bogs, down mountainsides, out into lochs, so they’ll never be found.  Be careful, though.  A curse, once pronounced, must fall in some direction.  If you curse someone unjustly, it will rebound on your own head.

In Ireland and Scotland  until quite recently, Luck Stones & Cursing Stones used to be found at the foot of crosses, or in natural depressions on rocks.  People used them, and maybe still do.  Speaking of which, there is a flat stone with 4 depressions on it somewhere on the island of Islay, though I shall not tell you precisely where.  The woman to whom we paid entry at a historical site on the island told us she’d wished on this stone when expecting a baby.  The wished-for son had duly arrived.

Caves

Many caves are still inhabited in parts of Spain, Turkey, India, etc.  What was the “first house”?  We think of the cave as being one of its kinds.   It’s again an image of the womb, the mother.  In some ancient mythologies the cave is the origin of all living things:  the first animals, the first people are born underground among the rocks, and emerge into the light blinking.   They were literally (it was thought) born in the womb of the goddess, Mother Earth.

For the Romans, certain caves were entries to the Underworld, where the River Styx, the ferryman Charon, the dog Cerberus, and Hades and the Elysian Fields were all to be found.  There were several ways in, one of which I remember visiting in Sicily, which was also the place where the Earth-Mother’s daughter Persephone was kidnapped by Pluto, God of the Underworld.   This kind of belief survived into Christian times, and there’s a place in Northern Ireland known as “St Patrick’s Purgatory” where people used  to enter into an underground cave to meditate, or “face their own future death”, or “experience visions of the Next World”.  Pilgrimages are still made by modern Catholics to this place, which is to be found on an island in a loch.  No doubt in preChristian times this place had been used for the same kind of purpose.

Caves are also places of terror.  Think of the cavern in the Odyssey, belonging to the one-eyed cannibal giant the Cyclops.  If you go to Sicily, you can see the rocks in the sea off shore.  They’re the rocks that the blinded giant threw at Odysseus’s ships.

The cosiest cave of all is the Hole of Bilbo Baggins the Hobbit in the novels by Tolkien.

‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.  Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat:  it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.’

It’s thought that some early peoples believed the sky (yes, the night sky itself) was a huge cave with millions of little glittering stars fixed into its roof – so that the whole of the world is inside the Cave of the Universe.  This would have explained why, from time to time, objects fall from the sky – meteorites – they’re stones falling from the cave roof.

Of course these meteorites were sent by the Gods.  Several ancient temples possessed one, which was worshipped as an invaluable sacred gift from Pallas Athene, Artemis, Apollo, or whoever the local deity was.  The Temple at Troy for example had ‘the Palladium’;  there was a meteoric stone at Delphi.  In Asia and North America, they worshipped meteorites too.   Their fall from the sky is of course spectacular:  smoke, a huge noise, sparks and light:  it was all obviously supernatural.

In Europe in years gone by, the prehistoric stone axe-heads which keep turning up here and there in the countryside, were called ‘thunderstones’ because it was thought they had fallen from the sky during thunderstorms:  i.e. they were thunderbolts, i.e. they were the lightning.

I can’t help thinking of another mystery – the small round prehistoric stones about the size of tennis balls, hundreds of which have been found, mainly in Scotland³ they’re supposed to be about 4,000 years old.  What were they for?  A bolas?  Why is this one from Towie so elaborately ornamented?  Were they oracles?  Were they passed from hand to hand in council, giving the right to speak to whoever held them?   Or did they have magical powers?  I incline to think the last explanation is the best, for ancient Irish luck- and cursing-stones were often elaborately decorated.⁴ One could easily imagine that a particularly beautiful stone ought to have particularly effective powers, and that one could make it magical by carving it.

Petrifaction

Lots of ancient stories involve people being turned to stone.  But the image retains its power, and was used again in Star Wars. Take the folklore attached to prehistoric standing stones.   There are many stories about young women who went dancing on a Sunday;  so the local saint punished them by turning them to stone, so there they still are, in a circle in a field, petrified.

The peak of Clachnaben, in Scotland, is said to be the Devil’s Wife turned to stone.  But of course in her case, the stony peak of the breast-shaped mountain was seen in prehistoric times as sacred:  a manifestation of the pagan goddess.   For the name Clachnaben means ‘The Sacred Stone(s)’.  We might compare what was traditionally known as the Drinking Hall of the goddess Medb (Maeve) on the flat top of the hill of Knocknarea near Sligo (a drinking hall  where souls would continue their customs after death).  This was the goddess’s palace.  From below, from the right distance, the hill looks exactly like a woman’s breast. Only in this case the nipple is actually a huge prehistoric grave covered with stones.  It has never been excavated, for it is impossible to see where the entry might be.

In Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando there is a winter so cold that some unfortunate travellers through Derbyshire are, first, frozen to death, and then ultra-frozen — to stone!   When the thaw comes, local farmers use them as milestones, millstones and drinking troughs.

But then, remember Ötzi, the prehistoric man (3300 BC), found frozen solid & thus perfectly preserved, up on a mountainside in the Alps, with a stone knife in his pocket and a stone arrowhead in his back, and with the key locations for acupuncture tattooed into his skin.

In the ‘City of Brass’ story in the Arabian Nights, there are (among lots of other fantastic characters, such as dancing robots, a brass horseman, a magic ring belonging to King Solomon, and so forth)  there are people who have been turned to stone from the waist down.  There is, it seems to me, something particularly nasty about this.

The Converse:  Stones which come, or are, Alive

In Mozart’s opera, when Don Giovanni mockingly invites the statue of the Commendatore to dine with him, his soul enters into his statue, and accepts the invitation.  The stone statue will duly arrive at his appointment, grasp Don Giovanni’s hand and take him down to Hell.

In Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille, the bridegroom inadvertently places his wedding ring on the left hand of the statue of Venus;  so on his wedding night the jealous statue visits him in bed, and to the terror of his young bride chokes him to death in front of her.

Pierre-Jakez Hélias the Breton story-teller tells the tale of a master of drystone walls:  the man who could hear the stones talking.  He is kept awake one night by a stone which has been placed in an uncomfortable position in the wall – and is weeping.

There used to be (is there still?) a beach in Hawaii which produces stones that are said to be of two different sexes.  If you put a pair together in a cloth, they allegedly propagate a third stone, which then grows to full size.⁵

Standing stones were seen by our prehistoric ancestors as alive.  Folklore tells of stones which (at night, when everyone’s asleep) go down to the loch to drink.  In one place, when the clock strikes midnight, the standing stone runs round the field.   In many places, you can’t count the stones:  no two attempts ever produce the same total.  E.g. Callanish on the Isle of Lewis.  Or else, however many stones there are, people used to say ‘There are nine.’

Standing stones had supernatural powers:  thus, it was part of the marriage ceremony in parts of the Celtic world for the couple to join hands through a hole in the standing stone.⁶It was a “stone wedding ring.”    They were also (in a period when there were no doctors) much used for healing.  If it was large enough, small children would be passed through the hole in the stone     At the Applecross Stone Circle, people about to leave on a journey used to put their heads through the hole in the central stone to see if it would be successful.  Indeed it seems they were not allowed to leave unless they had done so.

I’ve often wondered if our ancestors used to dress standing stones in robes at key seasons of the year.  Some of the stones at Callanish look like unnaturally tall people dressed in white robes.

There are two strange stones on the island of Gigha:  the old man and the old woman:  an bodach & an cailleach. Presumably these had in ancient times been seen as images of the pagan gods, for passing sailors used to draw their boats up on the beach below, and anoint the stones with butter  (which is just how modern Indians worship their gods.)   But superstition is not dead.  The modern islanders of Gigha have now bought their island, and they invite tourists to visit the stones and make a wish!

An bodach and an cailleach are quite small;  they are natural, uncarved, though very strangely shaped.  Stones connected with the old religion in Britain are never carved, always natural.  I am reminded of the German tribesman quoted by the Roman historian Tacitus, and who explained that sacred stones were not carved to resemble human beings, because ‘We do not know how our Gods look.’

Groups of standing stones often used to be called ‘The Auld Kirk’ in parts of Scotland.  Churches were often founded on such sites.⁷ It may not have been orthodox to believe that supernatural power passed across the boundary, from the old religion to the new;  but plainly many thought so.  And in this context I am reminded of the Temple of an ancient Greek goddess at Syracuse, barely altered from 2000 years ago, but transformed by its décor into a Catholic Cathedral.  As I entered its doors I felt shivers down my spine.

Stone still speaks to the supernatural.  Last summer at the church in Fontfroide Abbey in the South of France, there was a young woman singing, every note of her voice echoing on for seven seconds, as these echoes filled the huge ringing acoustic chamber of the church, soared upwards to the roof and exited into the sky through a stone lantern – specially constructed – so that up in heaven God can listen to the music in the church below.

Stones as Supernatural  Communication

Remember the slabs of stone with the Ten Commandments inscribed on them by Jehovah, given to Moses.  We have this phrase ‘Written on tablets of stone.’  But remember, Moses broke the first set of stones in a rage, and no-one will ever know whether the commandments on them were the same as the later ones.

St Columba, in the monastery he founded at Iona, is said to have slept on a stone pillow.  This suggests either his acceptance (as a holy man) of suffering, or else (what is almost the opposite) his supernatural power over nature.

At Tara in Ireland, in preChristian times, when the High King was about to be inaugurated, he had to drive his chariot through the narrow space between two stones.  If they magically parted to allow him through, and if the Stone of Destiny (the Lia Fáil) screamed aloud, then he was the rightful king.   Some say (though I do not) that the Scottish Stone of Destiny  (which you can these days visit in Edinburgh Castle) is the one that used to be at Tara.

It doesn’t scream these days.

There’s another royal stone at the top of Dunadd Fort near Crinan in the West of Scotland.  This small prehistoric fort is reputed to be the  early “capital” of the Kings of Dalriada.  At its top there is a flat stone with runes on it;  a wild boar traced into it, a goblet embedded in it, and also a footprint carved into the stone.  When the King was to be inaugurated, he took his boot off, placed his bare foot in the footmark, and thereby made contact with the sacred earth of Dalriada, which was a woman, that is to say a goddess, the goddess of the sacred motherland.

As you can see, modern figures like “Britannia” or the French “Marianne” are a sadly reduced shadow of the old territorial Goddess.

As for stones and words, remember the myth of the Tower of Babel, where we (allegedly) lost our common language.  But we should remember also the opposite of that:  the Rosetta Stone, where we got a lost language back.  The Rosetta Stone was found in Egypt, with three languages carved on it:  Greek, Egyptian demotic and Egyptian hieroglyphic.  Deciphered by Champollion, it allowed us for the first time to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics, and begin to understand therefore the civilization of the Pharaohs.  You can visit it in the British Museum.

Gravestones

These little stone boxes where you wait for the AfterLife are a bit like someone waiting for his connexion in a train station.   Or perhaps they’re boats like the stone boat the Viking is buried in at King’s Point on the Isle of Arran.   Gothic cathedrals are stone boats too, but upside down.  The word “nave” of course means “ship”.

In the Valley of the Boyne in Ireland, there are three huge burial mounds:  Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth.  They’re all big, but Newgrange⁸ is enormous, over an acre in area, built of stone and earth, covered with grass, with a kerb of  97 carved stones right round it.  These carvings are mysterious, unsymmetrical, abstract, their meanings barely to be guessed at.  The tomb was  said to be the palace of Aengus Og, God of Love.  Newgrange dates from 500 years before the Pyramids.  At the winter solstice, the rising sun shines straight down the passageway to the very centre of the hill, gloriously illuminating the central tomb.  This was a marvellously precise piece of calculation by the astronomers of 3,200 BC.  This is no doubt the moment of rebirth for the dead waiting deep in the earth.   (Compare that much smaller tomb, Maes Howe in Orkney.)  This event reminds one intriguingly of the Near Death Experience which has been so often reported in recent years  that one can only suppose it is a universal experience of mankind – the passage after death along the dark tunnel, the glorious supernatural light of eternity at its far end.⁹ I’m inclined to guess that the prehistoric passage graves were deliberately built to simulate the Near Death Experience.

Here is an extraordinary detail:  when the archaeologists were restoring Newgrange, they found thousands of white quartz stones lying on the ground in front of it.  The archaeologist in charge assumed that they had used to be on the front of the monument.  So he replaced them there.  Newgrange now glitters once more, pure white in the sunlight, as it did 5000 years ago.

Maybe our ancestors thought of quartz as stone-become-sky, death-become-life.

More than three thousand years later, in the 7^th Century, one of the founders of Christianity in Northumbria, St Wilfrid, built himself a special tomb under what is now Ripon Cathedral.  He had it built to very precise measurements:  the exact proportions of Christ’s Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.  Why?  Clearly it’s Wilfrid’s personal  resurrection machine: in the Holy Sepulchre, the perfect vehicle had been designed for Christ to make his journey to the Sky;  so Bishop Wilfrid must have one too, exactly the same, and then he too would be guaranteed to arrive safely in Heaven.

In the Roman Cemetery in the Alyscamps in Arles, there is a gravestone to a little 4-year-old girl, who died in the fourth century AD.  The epitaph is an outpouring of the most unbearable grief from her bereaved parents.  If you can read Latin, you’ll be reduced to tears.

The Smith

In the Celtic tradition, the smith wasn’t merely the expert with metals;  he was a magician.  Doubtless this was because he knew how to turn stone into molten metal, and therefore possessed magical powers.  Nobody would dare steal from his forge.  In Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica, it is related how, until recently, if someone was ill, the smith might be asked to ‘drive out the demon’.  He would proceed to absolutely terrify the patient, threatening them with red hot irons.  This was of course a charade, and it was not heat but, unseen by the patient, freezing cold water that he applied to her back.  This did sometimes / often work, due either to faith in the smith, or else (and it’s highly likely, this!) the salutary shock to the patient’s nervous system.¹⁰

The Challenge

Stone is useful, but hard to master & shape.  As such it’s a challenge.  Stones & mountains resist us, and we resist them.  We say ‘No’ to them.  One might almost compare this to the baby’s first “No!” – the great word of power, when you’re one year old.

Stone forces us to use our strength, and so reveals our strength to us.  Mountains do the same:  mountaineers, asked why they climbed such and such a peak, are supposed always to reply, “Because it’s there.” I.e. the mere fact of this powerful, dangerous, life-threatening, snow-covered monster, the mountain, is a challenge issued by Nature to this particular climber – who feels the challenge personally.

You might say that the stone of the mountain is a mirror of the climber’s courage.  It is often compared to “a sexual conquest”, and the climber to a “conqueror”.

We haven’t always felt like that about mountains.  Up to the 18^th century it seems people found mountains frightening, hostile, dangerous, inhuman, UGLY.  Now we find them wonderful, inspiring, exciting, BEAUTIFUL.

The struggle with stone is expressed a different way in the Ancient Greek Myth of Sisyphus. When Sisyphus died, he was condemned by the Gods (for some sin or other) to push a huge rock up a mountain till he reached the top.  But always just as he reached the top, the stone would escape his grasp and go bounding down the hill again;  and all his labour had to start all over again.  Now this was supposed to be an endless, eternal task, a punishment.  But the French philosopher Albert Camus argues that this is just an image of life:  we act, we impose our power on things, Sisyphus feels his strength and can be proud of it in the struggle up the hillside:  ‘Next morning the sun rises, we wake up, start living and working again.  In other words, all’s well –not that ends well – but that begins well.’¹¹ And Camus ends with the words, ‘We must think of Sisyphus as happy.’

The Incomprehensible Nature of Reality

But we’ve spent far too long in Europe.  Let’s pay a visit to China so I can tell you about Peculiar Stones.   A peculiar stone is one that’s weirdly, impossibly shaped.  It’s bewildering, beyond description, requires hours of wordless  contemplation.

Here then is the story of Mi Fu (1051-1107).  Having passed his Chinese government exams, his first official appointment as a civil servant was to a distant place in the provinces which was a cultural desert.  There was absolutely nothing of interest there, save one thing:  a famous Peculiar Stone.  On the first day of his arrival,  Mi Fu dressed up in his court attire so as to introduce himself to his immediate superior, the local Prefect, and commence his official duties – when it suddenly occurred to him that there was, nearby, that famous rock with a fantastic shape.  So Mi Fu changed his mind.  Instead of visiting the Prefect (that mere bureaucrat),  he ordered his carriage to take him to the rock.  He spent all day there contemplating it.  And to this day Chinese artists continue to paint ‘Mi Fu Bowing to the Stone’.  This shocking act of rebellion did his official career no good whatever, but Mi Fu will have thought, “Which of the two is more important, the jack-in-office or the rock?”

The rock is:  reality in all its ineffable, incomprehensible strangeness.  You see such stones (though on a smaller scale) in Zen Gardens.  For what one is witnessing here is the Ineffable – that is to say the inexpressible mystery of the Universe made present and visible in strangely shaped rocks, outlandishly twisted trees, incongruous patterns in the sand.  The real world is too much to comprehend.   The human mind is unable to reduce its infinite strangeness to something graspable by reason.

To the Chinese, art’s very purpose is the evocation of this sense of the inscrutable mystery of being, without which one cannot properly be in tune with the strange world we live in.  It being inscrutable, there are no words for it.  So it comes about that, to the Chinese artist, a painting is not merely shapes, and a poem is not merely words.  It is what is suggested between the words or the shapes:  it is their interaction which evokes qi , which is in Chinese philosophy the vital breath of the universe itself.¹² Finally we must ask

Are Stones Solid? And reply It’s a Matter of Time & Temperature

All mountain chains are of course in movement.  They’re waves of stone artificially stilled, caught by the camera of Cosmic Time at a particular moment. The Alps, the Andes or the Himalayas are temporal cross-sections of waves, driven onwards and upwards by the movements of the Earth.

The Incas of ancient Peru built massive stone buildings.  But because the Andes suffer from frequent earthquakes, every stone in these huge buildings is a different shape – and they each lock exactly into each other like the pieces of a  jigsaw.  All this was done, incredibly, with stone tools.  (Although in discussion with Dorian Wiszniewski, he wondered – for the Inca religion was very strange – whether there might be some social or religious explanation.)

And of course, scientifically speaking, solids are only solids because of the temperature they at present, on our planet, happen to undergo.  Every substance, every element becomes liquid if it’s warm enough, solid if it’s cold enough;  and every substance turns to gas if it becomes hot enough.

And again, scientifically speaking, for quantum physics, every solid object in this room – and indeed in every room and on every planet –actually consists of 99% empty space and 1% matter.  This table seems solid to us only because we’re made of mostly empty matter just like it.

Hardness & Eternity versus Softness & Fire

SO — We think of STONE under our feet as Solid, Dependable, Trustworthy, Mother Earth, The Bedrock.   Stone contradicts us, silences us, it doesn’t feel, it is the essence of unconsciousness.   It is the incarnation of motionlessness. And of Emotionlessness.

BUT — Earthquakes & eruptions are stone’s other face.  Think of Haiti and Chile last year, and Japan this.  They are reminders of the Universe’s terrible power, its mixture of destruction & creation — as Mount Etna is to the Sicilians.  Destruction and rebirth — for the gross, monstrous outpourings of that particular volcano are unfailingly fertile!  Not only does it grow crops, wonderfully!  But it also makes Sicily grow, expanding into the sea, as the inflamed carbuncular outboiling of Etna swells and pours out.  Etna has already created at least one quarter of the island’s mass.  In Iceland (another volcanic island) I’ve seen a film of the Icelanders shaping the molten lava as it cools, shaping it into a harbour wall.

There are many places on Earth where you can climb the mountainside (feeling the heat mounting through your feet) towards the sulphurous smoke rising above, and gaze at last deep into the heart of the Earth – the burning, boiling, seething lava.  A frightening and uplifting experience.  It’s said of the philosopher Nietzsche (who went mad, as you know) that ‘He looked into the abyss.  And the abyss looked into him.’  It was of course a spiritual /mental abyss he had gazed into;  but I think of it always as the gaping crimson maw of a volcano.

Conclusion

Finally I’ll leave you with Magritte’s Château des Pyrénées.  And invite your own (I hope, multiple) interpretations of it. [1]   For my part it offends my sense of gravity, weight, etc.,, and therefore is a reminder of an aspect of ordinary experience which we are aware of only when it’s drawn to our attention.  And that is true whether one sees the rock as a huge rock or a tiny pebble.  Does it perhaps give one a sense of vertigo?  Note too how the castle is painted as if it were carved out of the rock itself.   This questions what the scale might be:  huge rock or tiny pebble?  True castle in the air?  The French for ‘castle in the air’ is ‘castle in Spain’ but then the Pyrenees are half in Spain anyway.  In English the term is ‘castle in the air’;  so is this rock, as it were, ‘a cloud’?   On the other hand there are all those Cathar Castles in the Pyrenees or close by (Quéribus, Peyrepertuse, Puylaurens, Montségur), the sites of the savage massacres of the 13^th Century Albigensian Crusade.  In several cases  they seem to grow out of the very rock on which they stand, so that you gaze at the mountain crest and can hardly make out what is rocky pinnacle or tower or castle wall.

But I shall leave us all wondering, for this talk was after all an invitation to the imagination.

 

© Graham Dunstan Martin
First given at Dept of Architecture, University of Edinburgh, Jan 2010

 

1. Lakoff & Johnson p 98, p 69 ff.  I find the argument about causality quite convincing.  However, in some respects they go over the top:  we don’t think of ‘breath’ every time we use the word ‘spirit’, for despite the word’s origin as a metaphor we can understand it abstractly. When I ‘understand you’, it doesn’t mean I think I’m standing under you.  Our words may have started as metaphors, but that’s no longer how we see or comprehend them.   (Compare the fact  that we started life in the womb – but that doesn’t mean we’re still in it.)  Nonetheless as examples of the way we project ‘quasi-human’ attitudes onto the outer world, their evidence is suggestive. [↩]
2. Iron Age [↩]
3. Towie, Aberdeenshire;  Skara Brae. [↩]
4. Wood-Martin, pp 63-4. [↩]
5. Wood-Martin p 68. [↩]
6. Odin Stone on Orkney. [↩]
7. E.g. St Vigeans. [↩]
8. Dwelling place of the god Angus Óg.  200,000 tonnes of stones. [↩]
9. C15 picture by Hieronymus Bosch:  ‘Ascent into the Empyrean.’ [↩]
10. Op. cit., p 604. [↩]
11. Bachelard 1948, p 194. [↩]
12. Simon Leys in his discussion of Chinese aesthetics in the first chapter of The Burning Forest. [↩]