"Lines and points"
Posted: April 19th, 2010, 7:07 pm
Past the winged atomic waffle house and casinos on the outskirts, the road opens up. It’s why you came. Basin and range. The map shows only a wandering pen stroke through blankness to the next circle, but knows nothing of rugged ephemera en route, dotted black with beef, grazing the edge of snow-tip mountains, nor power poles stretching like a picket fence, nor dirt roads that meander to scrub valleys and bluffs with no end. Must be something out here; some fantastic ruin or lost marker to a lost vein of gold. Something in the span itself over the end point; journey over destination and such. But the map is noncommittal. So you get a better map; one that shows windmills and hundred-year-old jeep trails, and you see that nowhere is never quite nowhere.
As you gain speed the pace slows; you’ll never outrun mountains. It’s why you came: inexhaustible hum and span. Beyond one ridge more ridges appear, dimensionless, adrift, standing alone like freighters on the open sea, and your wandering ribbon has no end. The map disagrees. Almost wish you hadn’t looked. Twelve, twenty, maybe a hundred mountains off, people in thick institutions inevitably deconstruct things and split hairs. Like the atom. Or lately, super-collided protons. Or innumerable poetic quarks, even bits of Shakespeare, all in search of a God particle, the indivisible truth, or maybe a good cliché.
The mountains jump here. Literally. They lie still for untold millennia, build up tension and jump up in one terrible instant, on faults between mountain and valley. So you’re on a camp stool one evening, medicinal whiskey chalice at hand, counting ravens or clouds, or weather-weary mighty corrugations rising far above, or scribbling some disposable manifesto under the influence of arid light. Soundless immensity coming down. Then a sudden rumble of deep energy, a booming locomotive along the base as the base unzips at shocking velocity down basin, fissures spread closer, and you spill your drink. In 1915 a sixteen foot gap opened in the sagebrush between Tobin Range and Pleasant Valley in central Nevada for more than twenty miles; not spectacular as far as these things go, though fearsome as one might expect in a random hundred-year window.
Mountains have jumped here for eight million years; mere toddlers by the geologic clock. No foothills on the leading faults; the scarps are too young. Profoundly battered, but fresh. The crust here is stretched and broken into mountain-sized behemoths, tilting at deep fractures, agitating white-hot mantle below, the rock engine, which boils up in unholy cauldron-springs at the margins and cracks. “Build your house on the rock,” as the hymn says. And the rock is alive and unstable: compressed, folded, lifted, beaten down, washed out, deposited, buried and compressed again. Mountains here rise about as fast as wind and rain dismantle them; an inch a century. So Tobin Range gained about twenty thousand years when it spilled your drink.
Time to reflect on time. The last sixty years of insanity. Six thousand years of fuzzy history. Three-hundred thousand years of prehistory. And eight-thousand thousand year old toddler mountains. Fluid and fallible rock. And what comes up when the ranges jump? Untold further eons, in mishmash bits; five-hundred-fifty-thousand thousand more years. Meaningless spans. Deep time. And that’s only the tip of the planet’s range. When Oquirrh Range jumped, it lifted remains of sixty-million year old mountains, parts of which bear scars of “ice age” cycles. These “ancestral” mountains, born of colliding rock, had their day before deep time took them down. And their constituent rocks spanned so far in time that they came from south of the equator! Build your house on the rock! The rock drifting on deep time, catastrophically at turns, spanning oceans and hemispheres, powered by eternal, hellish convections deep in the mantle and core, where mountains come and go like seasons.
Time to reflect on scale; a speck on a boundless sweep painted in pointillist sagebrush; in turn a fleck on the planet and its unimaginable trek around a star; in turn a molecule on the span to the nearest star; in turn a particle on the nearest galaxy; in turn a particle on this particular particle of the universe; in turn, less than a particle on infinity. You can’t accept that. Except you exist in equilibrium with infinity, presumably similar to the equilibrium in which the God particle, or “that which cannot be divided further,” the essence itself, lives in equilibrium with the near infinity of you. And not only here do such conundrums arise. Simple probability says there are eyes out in the flicker, looking back, wondering the same things in reverse.
As you gain speed the pace slows; you’ll never outrun mountains. It’s why you came: inexhaustible hum and span. Beyond one ridge more ridges appear, dimensionless, adrift, standing alone like freighters on the open sea, and your wandering ribbon has no end. The map disagrees. Almost wish you hadn’t looked. Twelve, twenty, maybe a hundred mountains off, people in thick institutions inevitably deconstruct things and split hairs. Like the atom. Or lately, super-collided protons. Or innumerable poetic quarks, even bits of Shakespeare, all in search of a God particle, the indivisible truth, or maybe a good cliché.
The mountains jump here. Literally. They lie still for untold millennia, build up tension and jump up in one terrible instant, on faults between mountain and valley. So you’re on a camp stool one evening, medicinal whiskey chalice at hand, counting ravens or clouds, or weather-weary mighty corrugations rising far above, or scribbling some disposable manifesto under the influence of arid light. Soundless immensity coming down. Then a sudden rumble of deep energy, a booming locomotive along the base as the base unzips at shocking velocity down basin, fissures spread closer, and you spill your drink. In 1915 a sixteen foot gap opened in the sagebrush between Tobin Range and Pleasant Valley in central Nevada for more than twenty miles; not spectacular as far as these things go, though fearsome as one might expect in a random hundred-year window.
Mountains have jumped here for eight million years; mere toddlers by the geologic clock. No foothills on the leading faults; the scarps are too young. Profoundly battered, but fresh. The crust here is stretched and broken into mountain-sized behemoths, tilting at deep fractures, agitating white-hot mantle below, the rock engine, which boils up in unholy cauldron-springs at the margins and cracks. “Build your house on the rock,” as the hymn says. And the rock is alive and unstable: compressed, folded, lifted, beaten down, washed out, deposited, buried and compressed again. Mountains here rise about as fast as wind and rain dismantle them; an inch a century. So Tobin Range gained about twenty thousand years when it spilled your drink.
Time to reflect on time. The last sixty years of insanity. Six thousand years of fuzzy history. Three-hundred thousand years of prehistory. And eight-thousand thousand year old toddler mountains. Fluid and fallible rock. And what comes up when the ranges jump? Untold further eons, in mishmash bits; five-hundred-fifty-thousand thousand more years. Meaningless spans. Deep time. And that’s only the tip of the planet’s range. When Oquirrh Range jumped, it lifted remains of sixty-million year old mountains, parts of which bear scars of “ice age” cycles. These “ancestral” mountains, born of colliding rock, had their day before deep time took them down. And their constituent rocks spanned so far in time that they came from south of the equator! Build your house on the rock! The rock drifting on deep time, catastrophically at turns, spanning oceans and hemispheres, powered by eternal, hellish convections deep in the mantle and core, where mountains come and go like seasons.
Time to reflect on scale; a speck on a boundless sweep painted in pointillist sagebrush; in turn a fleck on the planet and its unimaginable trek around a star; in turn a molecule on the span to the nearest star; in turn a particle on the nearest galaxy; in turn a particle on this particular particle of the universe; in turn, less than a particle on infinity. You can’t accept that. Except you exist in equilibrium with infinity, presumably similar to the equilibrium in which the God particle, or “that which cannot be divided further,” the essence itself, lives in equilibrium with the near infinity of you. And not only here do such conundrums arise. Simple probability says there are eyes out in the flicker, looking back, wondering the same things in reverse.
gracias for sharing it!