—Wallace Stevens
The work of a rock is to ponder whatever it is,
an act that looks singly like prayer,
but is not prayer.
—Jane Hirshfield
The rock found me. Manganese. A trail along a wooded slope near the Willamette River downstream from the confluence of Middle and South forks. Cascades water. To the mighty Columbia. Willamette Valley was not an inland sea as was the great central valley of California. A sea shelf, bedrock, sedimentation, oceanic rising as the North American plate moved west. Emerging. This rock, a manganese nodule, a concretion encased with the sedimented remnants of old seafloor.
Manganese nodule. Its growth one of the slowest of all known geological phenomena. About a centimeter over several million years. Several. Million. 6 zeros. 000,000. Six-megayears. This rock, a dense core of Manganese and Iron, now weighted in my hand is 6 cm in diameter (2+ inches). 6 cm x several 000,000 = 00,000,000. Years. A year: one Earth-circuit around Sun. The calculation, not the rock, an accident of deepening time.
L'imprécision du temps a besoin, elle aussi, d'etre vécue. Comme l'accrue du mot. / The imprecision of time too needs to be experienced. As the word increases.
—René Char, from his poem Pierres Vertes /Green Stones
Since John McPhee coined “Deep Time” some 40 years ago in his book Basin and Range, the phrase’s easy appearance has spawned a variegated plenitude of modern offspring jostling for attention. Relatives seeking measurability, calculability, appeared: Past-Time, Lost-Time, Real-Time, Dark-Time, End-of-Time, ad infinitum. Time sells. The shadowy “Timeless” does not produce best-sellers. Tao/Dao Time is simply: The 10,000 Things. Ten Kiloyears. A start on the immense journey of Time-Being.
Can it be that ambitions
rest in the indifference of stone?
—Terry Tempest Williams
NOTES
—Wallace Stevens, from Someone Puts A Pineapple Together, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, 1951.
—Jane Hirshfield, from ROCK in Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001
—René Char, from Pierres Vertes / Green Stones
—Terry Tempest Williams, from Ode to Sanity: Desolation Canyon Wilderness Study Area, Colorado Plateau, Utah, in Erosion, 2019, an assemblage of essays.
Addendum1. Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, 2009: People did not bow down and worship a rock tout court; the rock was simply a focus that directed their attention to the mysterious essence of life.
Addendum2. Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time, 1960: I make no apology for my attempt to treat simply of great matters, not to promote that humane tolerance of mind which is a growing necessity for man’s survival.
Addendum3. Rock Art. Manganese figures in petroglyph studies as rock varnish also called desert varnish, rock patina, etc.
Also in some rock and cave paintings, notably the Great Black Bull and the famous (and much discussed) La scène du puits in the Lascaux caverns, below.
Addendum3. Sidenote in GeoPoetics: “Several processes are hypothesized to be involved in the formation of Manganese nodules, including the precipitation of metals from seawater (hydrogenous), the remobilization of manganese in the water column (diagenetic), the derivation of metals from hot springs associated with volcanic activity (hydrothermal), the decomposition of basaltic debris by seawater (halmyrolitic) and the precipitation of metal hydroxides through the activity of microorganisms (biogenic). Several of these processes may operate concurrently or they may follow one another during the formation of a nodule.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule
