Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Stone Story part 11 (part review)


Our four stone friends probably would have summarized the events of the past few days in this way....

The Squire (a squarish stone) and Rhonda ( a roundish one) while making their way down the side of a hill (slowly) to join other stones being assembled by humans in a dry stone wall being built in the valley below were waylaid by Myron ( an unusual pyramid-shaped stone) who persuaded them to divert their trip temporally and follow him to see a wall not made of stones and not held together without glue or mortar, which he was worried was built in a way that would soon be replacing the proper dry stone wall method, which had always been the traditional way of building walls in that area.

They began their journey in that direction, and then after being assembled by a stranger who had stopped to balance them, tried to attract another passerby to notice them in that configuration and be impressed enough to carry them off, hopefully in the direction they needed to go, only to be thwarted in their endeavors. Instead, they were apprehended by two trail workers, bundled into a cargo bag with some other rocks and flown by helicopter to the north side of Scafell Pike and dropped there. Along the way they had picked up Michael ( a flattish rock) who had only recently regained his influence over humans to be 'picked up', after having been unable to do so for many years.

Now the Squire peered over the fells and the hills towards the east.

Though rocks don't attach a lot of weight to issues of ancestry and breeding the Squire was quite familiar with lower parts of this country, through the connection of his being 'descended' from bedrock in the vicinity. Although he wasn't of the specific family of volcanic rocks that originally inhabited Scafell Pike, his beginnings were associated with the nearby granite deposits formed millions of years ago, at this their geological origin - 'orb earth', not far from Scafell Pike. He was somewhat amused to find himself back on his 'turf' so to speak, but other than it being a coincidence, he connected no earthly importance to it.

In fact, rocks find it quite puzzling how much emphasis humans place on knowing where they come from. 'They' being both humans themselves and also rocks. Apparently not just their own species (and all the other varieties of things) but even rocks come under their inane scrutiny.

"It is crazy" thought the Squire, " that they try to make sense of something so scrambled and ultimately unimportant; endlessly hypothesizing and speculating about geology, trying to determine the 'lineage of rocks', rather than making the more important connection, that of the 'alignment of rocks', which is simply determining their best configuration in the present"

"Is there any point to trying to decipher every swirl in a 'marble cake' ?" he wondered. "It's just like them to miss the point entirely. All the scientific knowledge contained in books and charts that they've ever come up with, showing the supposed 'past' ages and periods of geological development, with every far-fetched configuration of plate tectonics imaginable, amounts to very little" he thought, "compared to the wisdom contained within a single rock, existing in all its potential, right here and now."