"geology" (latest take)

[mnaz]

"Geology" (19)

Jumping rock? The hymn said, "build your house on the rock.” Turns out the rock is unstable too . . . compressed and folded, pushed up, worn down and washed out, deposited, buried, compressed and lifted again, fluid and fallible rock that goes on forever. And the rock tappers, those rebels, have no shortage of theories. "Geology" is interpretation of a planet's eternal grind, in which the big rock picture must be detected and inferred from its tiniest visible fractions, even if 99 percent of the big picture has been devoured, as John McPhee captured in "Basin and Range," his best known rock story of the Great Basin, for which the New York Times named him "rhapsodist of deep time." Time spent in the basin and range reveals mountain rhythms across space, but deep time therein could reveal mountain rhythms across time, a profound shift in consciousness.

In that eternal shift one imagines life cycles of the immovable and immortal, the rise and unimaginable fall of mountains, the wander and demise of continents, and all instantaneously on their time lines. And to describe deep time, language will try to bracket that which annihilates its range. History is a fly swat to the hills, and the hills a fly swat to rock. To a mountain we're a blink, but rock laughs at a mountain, plays cards with it for a few eons before the hill is too worn to hold snow. People want snow on their peaks. They have millenniums and empire, and the mountain farts them in its sleep. The mountain always sleeps. Still, you hear of rare events when the earth grumbles and things fly off shelves, and a sandstone wedge breaks loose and hangs for a thousand years before toppling in 1941, somewhere in the enchanted canyons.

As McPhee noted, on Great Salt Lake oolites are forming now, amidst five hundred million year old dolomite scattered from Stansbury Range. Farther west, welded tuff at the Nevada line tells of a fiery holocaust thirty million years ago that buried a large region. Higher on the next range, in the road cuts of Interstate 80, is hundred million year old granite, and rock at Pequop Summit is four times that old. But again, these are absurd numbers, and many folks scoff at fantastical notions of deep time, however rigorously applied, as no more than inferential hocus and heresy. After all, we are the species who broke through in God's image, at the center of consciousness . . . Geologists prattle on about epochs, sorting the Cretaceous from Cenozoic and such, as if that meant anything, as if we'd consider the possibility of our cosmic inconsequence. Genesis is much more compelling than deep time. The earth is six thousand years old, when rock emerged from the void, decreed the Pope, and that settles that.

The first rock tappers, in the seventeenth century, didn't push their luck with the Church, but deep time became more of a dust-up in the next century, as rock's age was imagined to ever wilder spans. When early temporal rebels such as de Maillet published their numbers, the Church simply edited decimals to the left, which later infuriated the likes of Lamarck and Darwin. All part of a long-running conflict, the mysteries of origin. Imagine the first nineteenth century cowhand, on his rolling red soil dotted with blackbrush and juniper, as the herd trudges into a dusty monotony of peace and mystic overflow. Until it drops away. His canyon is sudden; no slow revelation. What happened here? He could climb down and touch strata of epochs, but more likely he looks skyward with a prayer; the heavens are preferred to rock and soil. Which could explain why astronomy was so ardently pursued for so many centuries while rock was ignored. Rock was our stage, and nothing more.

Lately a few clever folks have merged deep time with Genesis by supposing the Six Days as metaphoric of four and a half billion years. But the obvious question here would be, how exactly to split up such an eternity? If the full span were split up equally six ways, the earth forms all day Monday, into Tuesday, with "life" arriving at Tuesday noon. At 4 p.m. Saturday the dinosaurs finally appear, only to vanish five hours later, and at 11:57 or so man appears. Christ shows up at a quarter-second to midnight, and the industrial revolution at one fortieth of a second to midnight . . . Yes, a fun exercise, but it solves nothing. All of the greatest works compressed to a fraction of a second? Wholly unacceptable to any proper species with an ego.

Suppose we go with the myth of deep time on earth for now. Unfathomable, yet not unlike cosmic time they say. By contrast, earth space is but a cosmic particle at best. Like sixth grade solar system analogies. The earth is a peanut or some speck, and the sun is out thousands of feet, twenty feet high. You marvel at how its rays cross the void with energy. And that is only one unremarkable star. Galaxies finish you off in riddles; uncountable suns beyond pathetic description. And some galaxies fit inside little pins of light in the night sky. How does one stand a chance against that span? So the study of deep space, like deep time, must proceed from a type of poetic vision of incomprehensible meter, and what better place than the tip of forever?

You could watch buff strata lay out, living rock and ageless atmosphere, each strain, fold, rift and current a potential storm within calm. Strata are motionless and fluid, filled with tall geo-tales, the advance and retreat of oceans, laying up of rich mineral beds, colorful layers pushed high by the rock engine, never far from fire as welded tuff testifies; vast regions entombed in hell-born heavy crystalline rock flecked with feldspars, a rain of fallen angels. You see its serrated edges slip peacefully into the desert, their terror only sensed. Strata slip peacefully as a rule, violent only when the land must be remade. Like old footage of power poles snapping in those early nuke tests. Tension resides in the strata at all times, between pressure and release, equilibrium and fire.

And like deep time and space, deep quiet also confounds. At the end of a road from nowhere to nothing. Which is also how Ambrose Bierce defined "philosophy" in his sardonic Devil's Dictionary in 1882. Like 140's wander out from Winnemucca, that self-generated thread into multiple rock universes parallel to a bleached dash. You hunted philosophy there but settled on rock, immortal and forever troubled, deeply silent. And when air currents pause, silence is total. Quiet can exist anywhere, even in the lull of a city, a whir and wash of things, but silence is uncompromised, where even the slightest act seems a loud intrusion. If your ears are up to the task.

Flook Lake is at the end of a two-track rut from a ranch road with no ranches in far-gone Oregon. Pronghorn antelope race you out of boredom when you roll into the sun, white alkali dust plume behind, and it is here you realize your noise problem, once you shut off the engine. Silence drops. No air movement, no airplane above, no insect. Only "soul shattering silence," as the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote of the interior mountain west. You're no match for soundless immensity given past sins, lately the engine's long hum and blast of dry air through the cab, not to mention all that damned rock 'n roll. Steens Mountain and its June snowcap sit some sixty miles east, unaware of ringing ears. Maybe the playa will show mercy and return the wind. You never imagined peace so tinged in witness; better to focus on inexhaustible horizon. Dry air will be along soon to soften skull-bound noise, though already your ears seem to be calming. And then what?

You're not fit to hear silence nor equipped to fathom deep time, though you might catch a moment in the flow, a still eye inside perpetual scour on open rock that seemed too exposed to entertain stillness, where space is more open to suggestion. From atop Chloride cliff, Death Valley was a salt-streaked underworld, and the view seemed to draw closer as the wind died, which is rare in springtime on a naked mountaintop. Ceaseless wind might enforced the scale of the place, but wind ceased, spared silence only by the uneven roar of your breathing. Each ledge fell to ten others, and salt flowed past chocolate flecks, close at hand and impossibly removed, as we worked on theories of eternity.

[Steve Plonk]

According to my theory of "deep time", G-d's day is between one & a half to
two billion years...We live on a borrowed earth on borrowed time and we
don't know many of the minute details of G-d's plans for us as a species.

We share this planet with a myriad of plants, animals, etc. and fault lines
in the earth. Our continents are drifting, yet we only found this out for
sure about 50 years ago...G-d is not just great, G-d is awesome!

[mnaz]

thanks steve. it occurred to me that a little more context might help here, since this is a chapter taken from my book (which i keep re-writing). so i posted the chapter just before this one-- "jumping mountain" -- which leads into this one.

also, i added a brief summary here of the friction between rock tappers and the religious establishment in the 18th- 19th centuries in particular...

(added passages in italics)

[sooZen]

I think it is interesting that we think "modern man" is the most evolved he has ever been and will continue to be and yet when you look at something like the ancient builders of Chaco Canyon, you must take pause and wonder. http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/guides/moccguide.pdf

Your descriptions took me to that solitude and place where the stars zoom in on you and the moon and the sun hold sway. So forgive me if I digress from your cogent writing...

They say, or speculate, especially the Native Americans do, that the builders at Chaco Canyon, who had immense and almost unbelievable astronomical skills, learned how to control nature and that power corrupted them. When they abandoned their cities, they did it with care and respect, walling up the doorways and burning the kivas and sacred spaces and walked away.

"They" also say that if you visit, and are tuned in and aware, you can feel the dark forces that eventually led to the downfall of a culture whose skills we still cannot fathom without using our precise instruments and even then have no idea how they did what they did.

Makes me wonder, it does, knowing there is lightness and darkness in our universe and if we were able to control the forces of Nature, would we be any more successful, especially since we are not nearly as spirit oriented as they? I think not...

Well Mark, you tripped me out!

[mnaz]

thanks soozen. i trip myself out sometimes. last time i passed chaco way, i planned to explore the place, but it was raining felines and canines and the clay-laden dirt road was slicker than a politician, so i turned around and kept rolling down the highway . . . i had heard about their well-honed astronomical skills, but never studied it in depth. maybe next time . . .

still a lot of places out in the elemental solitude i haven't gotten to...

[sooZen]

Chaco is high on my bucket list...