"geology" (revised)

[mnaz]

Not sure how rock fit space, or space enfolded rock. Deep space and consciousness, watching each other out of the flicker, which now looks like colorful star clouds and other bizarre formations, seen by the powerful space eye, and all made of rock and sky, into their escapism. And fire. And curved and uncurved space. And matter, and dark matter. Anti-matter. And other unresolved scientific matters on the cusp, none of which have any bearing on a torrid desert sundown on rock. And you can't spend any length of time on rock without picking up shapes and layers, and how they are arranged, tilted, juxtaposed. To you these things transcend science, though science proves impossible to ignore as well.

The problem with rock: it annihilates the range of our existence-- unacceptable on many levels. Rogue rock tappers (geologists) sort the epochs, the Cretaceous from the Cenozoic, as if it meant something, as if we'd allow the possibility of our cosmic inconsequence. Also, this idea of fluid and fallible rock-- the hymn said to build your house on the rock. But rock is unstable too-- pushed up, folded, worn down, washed out, compressed and lifted again-- until the fire burns low and wandering continents lock in place, mountains no longer rise and it all wears to sand, epochs from now. Which is eternity to you and me. Yes, time is the problem. History is a fly swat to the hills, and the hills a fly swat to rock. To a mountain we're a blink, but earth laughs at a mountain, plays cards with it for an eon or two before the summit is too worn to hold snow. So they say.

We have our centuries, and the mountain farts them in its sleep. The mountain always sleeps, except to make an occasional point. Hurl some hell. And things fly off the shelves, a sandstone ledge breaks and hangs in the bleak canyons for a thousand years, and falls in 1941. Millenniums barely exist . . . There is a scarp east of Death Valley where twelve-thousand year old rains from the valley floor lie trapped in a hundred mile limestone chamber, and now surface in a meadow marsh not like any other, where thirty species found nowhere else exist in a weird temporal back eddy. The place is a bit pallid-- tan salt grass on white soil, with odd bent-leaf sunflowers, dwarf screwbean mesquites and leatherleaf ash crowding the springs. Tiny pupfish subsist on algae blooms in one of them. And only in that one hole . . . An incredible story, but what is twelve-thousand years? Rock tappers insist earth is four and a half million thousand years old. Poor, misguided fools.

So we have a time problem, or rather, deep time. Get the distinction. Time spent in the basin and range reveals mountain rhythms across space, but deep time reveals mountain rhythms across time, their "geneology." In that eternal shift one imagines life spans of the immovable immortal, the rise and unthinkable fall of mountains, the eternal grind, pieced together and inferred from its surface remnants, 99.9 percent of it devoured. And it all must be imagined in the span of a blink . . . You can see it on any desert road. For example, oolites form on Great Salt Lake amid scattered five hundred million year old dolomite, while farther west into Nevada welded tuff tells of a fiery tribulation thirty million years ago, which buried the realm in hell-born crystalline rock flecked with feldspar-- a rain of fallen angels. Serrated edges slip quietly into the desert, their terror vaguely sensed.

In the Grand Canyon's depth there is a "great unconformity" between two layers, where 1200 million years of rock is missing. Simply gone. A good chunk of earth's unfathomable existence-- gone. These folks are insane. No, beyond insane, when you put it against what transpires in even a hundred million years-- the birth and death of mountains on traipsing continents, the advance and retreat of oceans laying up mineral treasure, and red strata pushed high again by the rock engine, never far from the fire that made it all.

You could hike down and lay a finger on true disconnect . . . Or you could watch buff strata lay out. The living rock and wind, each strain, rift and flow a potential storm within calm. Sit and take notes, follow the contours, and your words could merge with the beaten rims and light, but what are words in a silent language? Or against the unmeasurable? But no, that's not right. Everything has age, and origin. Nothing exists unaccounted for, and we'll get to the bottom of it. Even your empty, indeterminate desert has dimensions, like a coiled Panamint Red one foot wide on a cracked center stripe, or shocking crunch of footsteps on a withered salt flat four miles wide-- all subject to numbers, although the desert was always more mystical and terrible than its math.

Imagine the first stray dog to the rim. Maybe John Wesley Powell, or maybe some cowhand on the rolling red dirt, blackbrush and juniper at the margins, as the herd trudges into overflow. Until it drops away. His sudden canyon on the shore of time. He could climb down and touch the epochs, but instead he looks to the sky, which is preferable to what lies beneath dirt-- go up and not down. Which might explain why astronomy was pursued for centuries and rock ignored. Rock was our foundation, our stage and nothing more. And Genesis was more compelling than mumblings of mortal mountains, fallible rock and deep time, or other such inferential hocus-- the tale of when rock emerged from the void, suddenly according to divine providence and intent, the outset of a great plan. We are the ones who broke through in God's image after all, and for thousands of years it all orbited us. But what are thousands of years?

Go ahead, rehash the deep time problem, a relatively harmless exercise. Good for a dose of vital humility if nothing else . . . Earth is six thousand years old, decreed the Pope, and that is that. Anything longer and we lose track of bloodlines. The first rock tappers didn't push their luck with the authorities, but as rock's age was theorized to ever wilder sums, deep time became more of a dust-up. When time rebels like de Maillet published their wild numbers the Church simply edited decimals to the left, which of course infuriated folks like Darwin. But we have little use for deep time; it doesn't seem to fit, irreverent and irrelevant. It doesn't register with us, as we don't register with it-- an understandable quandary.

Lately some clever types reckon Six Days as metaphoric of 4.5 billion years. And the obvious question: how to split it up? . . . If it were split six equal ways the earth would form until Tuesday, with life arriving at noon. The dinosaurs would appear after dinner on Saturday, only to vanish at ten, and at 11:57 something man-like would appear, and Jesus at a quarter-second to midnight. Yes, the greatest works all smashed into a split-second. Completely unacceptable nonsense . . . So the study of deep-time-space must come from a poetic sense of incomprehensible meter, or a touch of madness, and what better place than on the tip of forever, well-positioned about halfway through?

The closest you'll come in real time is deep quiet, which also confounds. You find it on a road from nowhere to nothing. Which coincidentally is how Ambrose Bierce defined "philosophy" in his sardonic Devil's Dictionary in 1882. Like 140 out from Winnemucca into self-generated rock universes parallel to a bleached dash. Hunted philosophy for awhile but settled on rock, deeply silent, troubled and immortal. And when air currents pause, silence is total. Quiet can exist 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.

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 comes down. No air movement, no airplane nor insect. Only "soul shattering silence," as the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote of the interior. And you're no match for soundless immensity given past sins, most recently the engine's long hum and blast of dry air through the cab, not to mention 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 the horizon. Dry air will be along to calm the silence.

You are not fit to hear silence nor equipped to fathom deep time-space, 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 have enforced the scale of it, 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, impossibly removed, as we worked on theories of eternity.

[still.trucking]

deep silent soul shattering thought on road from nowhere to nothing

beautiful writing mnaz
thanks for the chance to read it

[mnaz]

thanks jack. yeah, i like this chapter a lot. i could never match the heavyweight naturalist writers in describing the great wide open, but i definitely strive to "weave in" the most mind-tweaking ideas and phenomena. i guess i'm a "hybrid" scribe of sorts--- spiritual musings, whiskey-soaked irreverence, a bit of natural science and "cosmic" mumblings as well....

i'm finally almost done (again) with this friggin' first book of mine. there's a lot more in it now than the first edition. hopefully, not too much . . .

if you can, check out "the ideal particle and the great unconformity," an essay by reg saner, naturalist author. he is a bit long-winded in some places, but he really does write brilliantly, and with great insight. the essay is in his book, "the four-cornered falcon"--- that's where i found it.

[myrna minkoff]

Thanks for the link.

Going to put it on my wish list along with your next book

Googled my butt off trying to read some of but most of google hits scholary journals, places like JSTOR and the JHU press don't give much away. I did find one of his poems here

[mnaz]

"hand in a fin, eye in a tree, fistful of stone" . . . yes.

i owe much of paragraph 6 to saner, and paragraphs 5 and 7 to both saner and john mcphee (from "basin and range")-- my own capture, of course. saner uses a different earth time analogy in his essay-- time as a human body, from feet to head. and we've pretty much arrived only somewhere in the scalp ...

the other paragraphs, 1-4, and 8-10, are mostly my musins' ...

thanks for the poem.

[still.trucking]

Sorry about the impulsive use of the sock puppet I was thinking of this

The apocalypse is at hand! Take up the cause, seek your balance of theology and geometry, and engage in the literary labours of one John Kennedy Toole.
Theology and Geometry: Seduced by the language of Ignatius Reilly

[mnaz]

thanks for the link, jack. i posted the latest version--- i think it's final.

and i posted the chapter directly preceding this one-- the "jumping mountain" muse--- but i wrote in some brief descriptions of my trek into the desert to see the jumping mountain (tobin range) firsthand (i did this in 2010) . . .

interesting weekend--- i actually talked to reg saner by telephone on saturday-- discussed his essays on the grand canyon's great unconformity, and on oppenheimer, los alamos and the bomb-- the latter which not only adeptly addresses the enormous moral and survival questions associated with nuke weapons, but provides a pretty thorough biographical sketch of oppenheimer's life.

i asked mr. saner not to sue me for plagiarism re: the 19th century cowhand "discovering a grand canyon out of nowhere"-- which i thought was such a great image and thought that i took it. (and a couple other things). he said he wasn't concerned . . .