A Gem from “Earth and Reveries of Will,” by Gaston Bachelard

“No underground exploration is necessary in order for the dreamer lithognomically possessed to see a crystallized world in a geode, a world hollowed for the inhabitation of gems. Like [George] Sand with her rock found by the roadside, we have all held a fairy palace in our hands. But we are quickly cut off from what was fabulous in the experience by ridicule of all imaginative elaboration. Deprived of its sense of grandeur, the metaphor will have lost all of its vitality and daring.”

– Earth and Reveries of Will, an Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Gaston Bachelard. [1943] Transl. Kenneth Haltman, 2002. p. 219

J. J. Cohen, Medievalist, Researcher into Stone

“…I write difficult prose about obscure subjects in dead languages. To find that such work resonates with scholars and writers who are for the most part distant from my field and yet who feel energized by what I’ve done, well … I mean, does it get better? Like most of us I conduct my research because I enjoy working with certain materials and questions. They preoccupy me, and it is my good fortune that I am in a profession in which I am enabled to explore them, often with students and friends. Grappling with critical problems and rich texts, coming to some tentative understanding of how things work or might work: that process is sufficiently motivating. Sharing such work to make clear that it’s part of an ongoing conversation is an obligation; and of course we then hope that this conversation will be further invigorated by our contribution, so that we can continue the dialogue. The calculation of professional success is not typically a scholarly motivator, despite the ungenerous remarks one often hears to the contrary…”

from: “The Monstrous Fantastic” (blog post), by J J Cohen - March 26, 2012 -

from Pavel Bazhov’s Malachite Box

“That’s what she’s like, the Mistress of the Copper Mountain. It’s a chancey thing to meet her, it brings woe for a bad man, and for a good one there’s little joy comes of it.” (“The Mistress of the Copper Mountain”, Pavel Bazhov. p. 20)

The ancient and shaky master stone carver, who had taught Prokopich and the other village carvers, to Prokopich’s young apprentice Danilo, about having once seen
work done by the “mountain craftsmen” of the Mistress, ”skilful craftsmen who live in the mountain, and no one ever sees them”: “Our serpents, no matter how good they are, they’re but stone, but this was like as if it was living… They’ve seen the Flower ‘o Stone, they’ve got the understanding of beauty.” (“The Flower of Stone,” Pavel Bazhov. p. 61)

from: The Malachite Casket, Tales from the Urals, Pavel Bazhov.
Translated from the Russian by Eve Manning; illustrated by Viktor Kirillov. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1981. http://lccn.loc.gov/82116829

Spinosity . . . Heroic Efforts . . . Tribal Death

A poetic and mysterious sentence, one of my favorites from the geology books I’ve come across through the years:

“Spinosity in animals is often the prophecy of tribal death.”

Um… could you repeat that??

To be fair, the two preceding sentences do help add some context: “In the Silurian, though they were still common, the trilobites were nevertheless on the decline… and this ebbing of their vital force is seemingly shown in many picturesque forms replete with protuberances, spines, and exaggeration of parts. As a rule, in evolution one finds that when an organic stock is losing its vital force there arises in it an exaggeration of parts, as if heroic efforts were being made to maintain the race.”

Quoted from: A Text-Book of Geology…, Part 2, Historical Geology, by Charles Shuchert. New York, London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1915. p. 605.

Delightful Books . . . Unexpected Gems

• Sainte-Terre, or the White Stone, by Robert Kelly. Woodstock, N.Y.: Shivastan Publishing, 2006. <www.shivastan.com> Printed by Mandala Graphics, Kathmandu. [32 pp] pb, $10. Edition of 250 copies. Poetry.

Albestone, or The White Stone: 1

“And watching / It waits near, / a smooth white stone / no one found / or it is in my hand / weighs, unknown, / waits. A stone / knows how to / Having and knowing / so far apart…”

• Depositions , by Antonio Iannarone. Designed and printed by A. Iannarone and J. Fetter-Vorm, in San Francisco & Brooklyn, NY. Bitter Vetch, c2009. [24 pp.] Craftbound hb $200.00; pb $15. <www.depositionsbook.com> Edition of 200 copies.

from the book: “Deep Time…do we imagine such a dislocating immensity as to put human time out of joint? We rightly fear a yawning from behind us; we peer ever deeper and hear the maddening reverberations of a first static, but we have yet to see a sound beginning. Our research out into space remains a mute stone dropped down a bottomlessness. Deep Time…but already we measure words to it, depose of it, grave out space for it, move away from it. Let us more safely call out: geologic time. Geology: step back from the depths of space, intend to Earth and read in its stratified visage but a symbol of that terrible depth. Still there remains no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end. The primordial exceeds our efforts, yet we fashion a comprehension by rocks…”

Picture Stones / Pietre Dure inlays / “Rain Flower Pebbles”

Pictorial Stones [picture stones + stone inlay: pietre dure]

http://www.spamula.net/blog/2006/05/pictorial_stones_1.html

Hard Stones and [Chinese] Rain Flower Pebbles

http://www.spamula.net/blog/2007/04/hard_stones_and_rain_flower_pe.html

(from the lovely Giornale Nuovo blog)

Dante’s Rime Petrose, Woman as Petra

“The idea of stone and especially of precious stone is naturally fundamental to the rime petrose, which develop as their central motif the idea that the lady is a petra: as hard as a stone, but also as beautiful and as powerful as a precious stone. In Dante’s time, precious stones are believed to have powers deriving from the star or planet that fashioned them. As one might expect, this power is thought of as radiating invisibly from them; it is hidden, but its propagation is nonetheless thought of on the model of light. Dante writes of the influence of the donnapetra as if it were a kind of light proceeding in a straight line toward him from her, against which he has no shield; often it is implicitly or explicitly identified with the lady’s gaze. In “Così nel mio parlar” the metaphorics of light is exchanged for that of combat: the lady’s glance is like an arrow or a spear from afar; in the course of the poem this combat at a distance turns into hand-to-hand combat and finally into the act of love, which culminates in a return to the exchange of glances, this time the prolonged—and ultimately peaceful—mutual gaze of the lovers, finally reconciled, at least in fantasy…”

Source: Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s Rime Petrose, by Robert M. Durling & Ronald L. Martinez. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, c 1990. pp. 32-33.

URL: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/viewdocId=ft8s200961;query=;brand=ucpress