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Introduction: Stories of Stone
- University of Minnesota Press
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1 IntroduCtIon Stories of Stone Three Geonarratives 1. Like a Rock Bereft of family, home, and health, Job wonders how to survive the world’s catastrophes. “My strength is not the strength of stones,” he laments, “nor is my flesh of brass.”1 Rocks and hard metals hold an endurance no mortal flesh can own. Nothing like stone, Job submits to sorrow and speaks a story of unbearable humanity. A vertiginous perspective shift unfolds when God intervenes, invoking geological time and demanding where Job was when the foundations of the earth were laid (Job 38:4). Does Job know the thunderous activity of the elements: rain that cascades for no witness, ice that hardens like stone, stars that course the heavens, the secrets of the whirlwind, the yawn of the submarinal abyss? Can he discern the force of the inhuman world, the long sweep of its eons? Job’s complaint is rebuked through the invocation of a scale that diminishes him, reducing the human to its vanishing point. A rock’s endurance is not Job’s. Yet Adam was fashioned “de limo terrae,” from mud or clay (Genesis 2:7). Like stone, human flesh mingles dry earth with binding water: an unsettled union of wet and dry, cold and warm, fire and tears. Stone’s materiality belongs equally to Eve (created from bone, 2 Introduction the lithic within the corporeal) and to Job’s unnamed wife, who suffers just as profoundly but without full story. Through God’s breath men and women have a living soul (“animam viventem”). That difference perhaps makes Job’s lithic inheritance irrelevant, even as it renders his complaint more complicated: he is in fact suffused with stoniness. By the thirteenth century, moreover, the philosopher and scientist Albertus Magnus had to refute the idea that stones possess souls, so lively do rocks appear when examined not simply in comparison to humans but in their native thriving. Stone is primal matter, inhuman in its duration. Yet despite its incalculable temporality, the lithic is not some vast and alien outside. A limit-breaching intimacy persistently unfolds. Hurl a rock and you’ll shatter an ontology, leave taxonomy in glistening shards. 2. Like a Mountain In a seminal work of environmental theorizing Aldo Leopold introduced to the ecological lexicon the resilient phrase “thinking like a mountain.”2 Leopold begins with a wolf’s howl, an “outburst of wild defiant sorrow” that reverberates in sonic progression down a wooded slope. To deer the cry is a warning of mortality; for pines, an augury of blood upon snow; to scavengers , an announcement of the feast to arrive; for ranchers the bay is loss; for hunters, the call of prey. The wolf’s bonds to each human and nonhuman are varied and deep, constituting a knowledge both aeonic and recondite: “Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf . . . mountains have a secret opinion about them.”3 Leopold learns of this withdrawn relation when, dreaming a huntsman’s paradise, he shoots a wolf and her pups. The peak without its pack quickly becomes a barren expanse. The deer proliferate to devour every leaf, impoverishing the ecosystem . Eventually the “starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much” join the denuded undergrowth.4 Because a mountain persists so much longer than pines, wolves, bucks, and people, its rocky expanses hold the profundity of a long past. A meshwork of connection, the mountain entangles every struggling life and imbues even stone with vitality. At the summit, perspective. Leopold performs a rhetorical move familiar in environmental writing, employing a strategic anthropomorphism [44.223.70.167] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:09 GMT) 3 Introduction to deepen human sensitivity to ecological precariousness. “Thinking like a mountain” stresses the stabilities achieved by diffuse biomes and the dangers of their disruption. Yet Leopold’s range is too small. A mountain is something more than an allegory for Edenic nature, a figure in a human story of balanced inhabitance and expansive earthly interconnection.5 Relations do not create things like rocks and mountains; things like rocks and mountains are what enable relations to flourish.6 Writing in the twelfth century, Marie de France labeled such inhuman agency aventure, futureladen “arrival” or “adventure.” In her lays Guigemar and Yonec she describes women imprisoned in towers of cold marble. Escape into a wider world arrives only upon the hurling of the self out from stony enclosure and into...