(Re-post, with bits and pieces added here & there-- Yeah, I know it's too long, but what the hay day)...
Geology is instantaneous interpretation of a planet's grinding eternity, the tiniest visible fractions of it, a deep shift in consciousness as John McPhee captured in "Basin and Range", his geologic ode to the Great Basin, for which he was named "rhapsodist of deep time" by the New York Times. Time spent in the basin and range reveals a mountain rhythm across space. Deep time spent therein may unveil mountain rhythms across time. In that eternal shift it is possible to imagine the rise and unimaginable fall of mountains, the life cycle of immovable and immortal, and it all must be imagined instantaneously.
To a mountain we're a blink-- a reality of some comfort and unsettling as well. I don’t want to feel so ephemeral and weightless! It seems religion helps tame that yearning in some ways, not only in placing disproportionate gravity on certain of our multitude of answers to a lifetime of questions, but in bending the time frame down a bit. To Michael, the earth is 13,000 years old. He had little use for geology. Nor do I, except it could blow a poet’s mind.
To a mountain we're a blink, but the earth laughs at a mountain—okay not laughs, but plays cards with it for a while over lunch break or a few eons, or maybe hires it for a photo shoot before it’s too old and worn to hold snow. The people want snow on their peaks. They don’t know what to look for. They have their millennia and empire and the mountain farted them in its sleep. The mountain always sleeps. Still, you hear of those rare encounters when the earth yawns and things fly off the shelves, or a giant sandstone wedge breaks loose and hangs for eight-hundred years before toppling over in 1941 somewhere in the bleak, enchanted canyons of New Mexico.
The earth time signature is incomprehensibly deep, though earth is microscopic in space. Remember those solar system models from beginning physics? The earth is a golf ball or a peanut or some such speck, and the sun is out thousands of feet at that scale. I marvel at how so much energy could traverse so much of the void. And that is only one star. The galaxies and constellations finish you off in pure consciousness, out in plain sight. How does thought stand a chance against that span? So then, the study of deep space, like that of deep time, must proceed from a type of poetic vision, or grasp at incomprehensible meter.
Geology must see a larger picture even if 99 percent of it has been devoured, lost to eternal grind. A geologist “does to words what endless eons have done to his rocks”, and language will be stretched and folded to try and bracket that which annihilates its range and scale of life. In the cut and fill of I-80 west of the Wasatch, as McPhee noted, oolites on the Great Salt Lake are forming now, upon which scattered dolomite from Stansbury Range is 500 million years old, and tuff at the Nevada line has been welded for thirty million years and the granite beyond is a hundred million years old and rock at Pequop summit is four times that, and it is all just what the faults "happened to throw up". Geopoetics begin to mesh with philosophy.
Philosophy? Ambrose Bierce, in his sardonic Devil's Dictionary list, circa 1882, once defined philosophy as "a route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing", akin to 140's strange sage wanderlust out from Winnemucca, that blessed, self-generated thread stretched into a virtual rock universe or several, parallel to a bleached yellow dash. I hunted philosophy there but settled on long-suffering rock, which is beautifully intractable, blissful, threatening and quiet... silent sometimes. Quiet exists even deep in the city, set to soft appliance whir or rhythmic wash of nearby thoroughfare, but silence is not compromised.
On a two-track rut from the end of a ranch road at the end of a thick, bright dust plume lays Flook Lake playa in upper nether Oregon. Pronghorn antelope raced me out of boredom when I tried it, and it was there I became aware of a noise problem, once I'd shut off the engine. Silence came down hard. No airplane, no motion. Not the smallest air movement. Steens Mountain and its July snowcap sat unaware some sixty miles east of ringing ears and I was no match for that soundless immensity given past sins, that “soul shattering silence", as the physicist Freeman Dyson once wrote of the high desert mountain interior. Perhaps the playa would show mercy and return the wind. I never imagined a peace so tinged in witness—better to focus on its inexhaustible horizon. Dry air would be along in time to drown out skull-bound noise.
I'm neither fit to hear silence nor equipped to fathom deep time, but I might catch a moment in the flow, or a still eye amidst perpetual scour on open rock that seems too exposed or indeterminate to entertain stillness. Space is more open to suggestion at such a moment. Witness Death Valley from atop Chloride cliff, the area's first mining camp. Nothing is known of James McKay, whose grave lies in a vale beneath a ridge from which the view is just as spectacularly unknown.
I saw a salt-streaked underworld, and the view shrank as wind ceased, which is rare in springtime. Ceaseless wind might have enforced deep scale from a naked mountaintop but wind was quiet, spared silence only by uneven roar of breathing. Each ledge fell to ten others and salt flowed past dark chocolate flecks, close at hand and impossibly removed. Ruined, marbled slopes fell to an indeterminate matrix of pause in a land of plenty. Someone was working on a theory of eternity.
"Geology" (revised)
Thankya mucho Arcadia y Cecil. Looks like this one will make the first book-- yes, that one. The one I've been trying to get out for all this time. Yeah, just about there now. No, seriously!
Maybe I'll make another scale model of the solar system. I did that as a kid once. Interesting exercise. And lots of perspective.
Maybe I'll make another scale model of the solar system. I did that as a kid once. Interesting exercise. And lots of perspective.
-
constantine
- Posts: 2677
- Joined: March 9th, 2008, 9:45 am
Fun facts: If you made the earth about 1-3/8” diameter, the sun would be 12.5 feet in diameter and Earth would be a quarter-mile out. Jupiter would be 15 inches and 1.32 miles out. And Pluto? Well, Pluto—that discredited former planet—only a quarter inch diameter at ten miles out… And if you made the sun about 3/8” diameter, you could fit the whole model on a roll of toilet paper—though I’m not sure how you’d show Pluto at that scale (0.00065 inches)…
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/
http://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/solar_system/
Who is online
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest