by J J Cohen
Writing lockdown continues (today is day seven). But I realize I could use some feedback on this portion of my "Time" chapter, which makes some claims I'm a little bit uncertain about. Let me know what you think.
Lithic Time
In his Latin poem Vox clamantis (“The Voice Crying Out”), the polyglot English poet
John Gower states that Scripture veteris
capiunt exempla futuri, “old writings contain examples for the future” (1.Prol.1). Two
centuries later, when William Shakespeare brought the fourteenth-century poet back from the dead in the prologue to Pericles,
he has “ancient Gower” declare Et bonum quo antiquius, eo melius, “The older a good thing, the better.”
This chapter explores a space between these two Gowerian declarations, wondering
how far back “old writings” might through stone’s storied matter extend; probing
whether writing necessitates words, or if lithic architectures and other nonverbal
petroglyphs (including the fossilized remains of various life forms) might
convey messages across vast sweeps of time; and tracing the temporal knot
formed whenever distant history is imagined, since to place the past into narrative
forms addresses the present moment and calls into being possible futures. Neither
abstract nor simply given, time is a challenge relentlessly posed by stone’s
aeonic materiality, inviting a geologic contemplation of history, and extension
of temporal scale far beyond human durations.[i]
Thus the Parisian philosopher Jean Buridan wondered in the fourteenth century
why through erosion every mountain had not yet been flattened, why engulfing
water had not rendered the earth a smooth and aqueous sphere.[ii]
His solution was to imagine that as rock diminishes on some parts of the earth
mountains rise above the ocean on the other, an intricate global balancing of lithic
weight that grants to stone its ceaseless motion. This world in its immense geographical
and temporal frame Buridan does not imagine as existing for a human observer. It
simply exists, and thereby triggers dynamic narrative.
For Christian writers like John Gower, ancient
writings buttress the religious certainty of believers. Yet stone also opens
alternate modalities, rocky paths along which the world unburdens itself from
reduction into human contours. Whether its invitation is to
contemplate a temporal extension of thousands or millions of years, eternity or
infinity, the lithic offers a sharp reminder of the mundane heterogeneity that
inhabits all segments of the temporal scale: brief humans and perdurable
elements admixed. In mingling Genesis
with petrogenesis, biblical with geological epochality, this chapter goes against an impressive critical literature
arguing that the discovery of geological time in the eighteenth century engendered
a decisive epistemological break, with modernity arriving on its nearer side. Thinking
the earth in spans of millions to billions of years is utterly disorienting, and the difficulty of comprehending ecological
activity over immense durations and spatial extensions is likely behind our
severe troubles in discussing climate change and the arrival of the Anthropocene,
the geological era in which human activity is readable in through the imprint
its has made on stone. Yet the millennial spans into which medieval writers
divided the past do not exactly hold comfort. Such eras are neither as securely
apprehensible nor as tidily diminutive as has often been implied by those who
argue for sharp historical periodizations, for a decisive entry into modernity
propelled by recent geology. Medieval texts are just as capable of epochal
foundering and the envisioning of lost worlds. Their stories of stone and time
are not our own (our stones are composed of atoms not elements; divine eternity
has been replaced by cosmological infinity), but their genre and structure have
often been quietly absorbed into contemporary techniques of narrating the
distant past.
For both
medieval and modern thinkers, stone’s temporal extensiveness unsettles narration,
stretching materiality inhumanly forwards and backwards, limning history with catastrophe.
Because of its exceptional endurance stone is time’s most tangible, reliable, and
elemental conveyor. Stone hurts, and not
just because rocks so easily become hurled weapons. Geologic scale diminishes
the human. Yet temporal expansiveness
is paradoxically almost impossible to comprehend without arrangement along a human
calendar: disanthropocentrism requires a measure of anthropomorphism. The Book
of Genesis translates creation into the tidy progression of a seven day week.
Carl Sagan famously condensed cosmic history into a solar year, with the Big
Bang on the first day of January, the Milky Way arriving May 1, earth’s oldest
rocks October 2, and dinosaurs thundering across the continents on Christmas
Eve to depart four days later. Modern humans make their belated appearance on
New Year’s Eve, with mere minutes separating the Crusades (all of them) from
the first manned flight to the moon.[iii] To
perceive time’s challenge requires the measurement of abyssal depths in familiar
terms. We parcel eons into generation-like segments, as if nonhuman immensity
could be expressed in the life-units of mere organisms. Science, religion and
myth humanize time through reduction into accustomed spans. When the biblical Methuselah endures for an extraordinary 969 years, almost to
the Flood against which his grandson builds an ark, he becomes a figure for
impossible longevity, subsuming temporal extensiveness into a human frame. Yet Methuselah
dies just short of the thousand year mark. Despite translation into myth and
metaphor (techniques as central to the geologist's narration of the primordial
as to medieval imaginings of the distant past), rendering the millennium a
conceivable unit of measure is not all that easier than parceling geology’s
million year spans into apprehensible units. Exceeding a human lifespan,
centuries are difficult enough. Millennia are easier to grasp only in relation
to the procession of epochs that form what geologists call deep time, “the
unimaginable magnitudes of the prehuman or prehistoric time scale.”[iv] The
Cambrian era is remarkable for its proliferation of multicellular creatures,
but its watery lifefields did not contain anything like human beings, so we
have trouble thinking of the period as distinguishable from the Permian,
Jurassic, and Cretaceous. Painting a caveman into our portraits of dinosaurs is
nearly irresistible, even though we know such creatures never coexisted.
Although temporal extension is better measured through the lives of rocks than
of animals, we yearn to insert a familiar observer to make their depths more
intimate, to render time a persisting, living and knowable impingement rather
than a distant and dissociated realm. We employ whatever conceptual tools we
have at hand in this process of fashioning a convergence for human and inhuman
scales, inevitably finding ourselves challenged by time’s profundity to the
invention of new story, a frustrated but relentless geologic embrace.
To touch stone is to place a hand upon a substance
alien to human duration. Medieval writers trained in the study of the bible knew
this fact with the same certainty as contemporary scientists and philosophers. The
thirteenth-century philosophical synthesizer of petric lore Albertus Magnus
considered stones to be mortal, in that they could perish when viewed within
their indigenous temporality. Because lithic time proceeds so much more slowly
than that of living beings a great many years must pass before a human will
realize a stone has lost its vitality:
For minerals in their own way suffer death just as
animals do; but the loss of their essential being is not noticed unless the
change is very great. For a ‘dead’ saphirus
still retains its colour, transparency and shape just like a ‘live’ one …
but after a long-draw-out change it grows dull and begins to disintegrate … And
the same terms, ‘live’ and ‘dead, are applicable to gold, silver, and other
minerals.[v]
Geologists
tell us that stone was the earth’s first solid, the planet’s most venerable denizen
– but none of that primordial rock remains, having met its death through forces
like subduction, the drowning of stone in sea and fire as the earth’s plates
grind over each other. In the Hebrew bible dry earth appears on the third day
of creation, humans arrive on the sixth. After their expulsion from perfect Eden,
these ambulatory latecomers will take some time to overspread their new
terrain. They are compelled to begin their colonization anew after the purging Flood.[vi]
The story is ancient: history is allied with the restless, noisy and often
ruinous flux of water and fire. Stone, however, is the only material that
sometimes endures: not indifferent to cataclysm but marked by its force, carrying
narrative through perilous spans of time.[vii]
Recent volcanic creations aside, stone’s origins stretch back hundreds of millions
of years according to cosmological reckoning. An origin date of 4004 BCE for
the earth is the most famous calculation based on the Genesis narrative, but
this was the number derived by James Ussher in the seventeenth century. The
biblical literalism associated with Protestant fundamentalism is not a
widespread medieval technique for interpreting scripture; most medieval
exegetes stressed the symbolic, the allegorical, and the typological. Medieval
reckonings of the earth’s age therefore varied widely. The fourteenth century
poem Piers Plowman has creation take
place “seuene thousand” years ago, while the Middle English Gospel of Nicodemus places the span at
5500 years. Bede calculated the time between Adam and Jesus as 3852 years;
Eusebius and Jerome placed the number at 5198. Nor was it necessarily the case that
the seven days of creation were interpreted as human days, especially because three of these days preceded the
creation of the sun, and divine time was unlikely to coincide with mortal
reckonings. Though Genesis was the primary narrative through which the writers
of the Middle Ages understood their earliest history, a coexisting tradition
deriving from Hesiod and Boethius described a Golden or Former Age. Like Eden,
it was both better than the current era and irremediably lost. Some
Aristotelians like Jean Buridan in the fourteenth century conceptualized the earth,
like heaven, as eternal rather than finite.[viii]
Scholarship on deep time and geohistory takes as a
founding assumption that the nineteenth-century discovery of the vast prehuman periods
that were to be measured in stone rather than flesh marks a “time revolution.”[ix]
On one side of this chasm stand those whose relation to prehistory is
comfortably mediated by myth. On the other are the moderns whose awareness of
temporal extension alienates them from history, troubles their relationship to
the world they inhabit, and activates their imaginations. Thus Martin J. S.
Rudwick, the foremost historian of the mapping of deep time, stresses that in
the discovery of geohistory science and religion were complicated partners. Yet
he provides as his illustration for life before geological time’s challenge to
human self-assurance a moment in the seventeenth century when Thomas Browne nonchalantly
declares that “’Time we may comprehend, ‘tis but five days elder than
ourselves.’” Rudwick contrasts Browne’s glib assertion of time’s brevity to a prehistory
that we now know stretches almost infinitely backwards. Our imaginations are
strained as we are called upon to envision remote epochs filled with extinct
monsters, the vagrancy of continents, and an oxygen-deprived world in which
“comets or asteroids crashed catastrophically into our planet” (Bursting the Limits of Time 2). Although
Rudwick does not observe this, science cannot describe the deep past without a
narrative structure and a vocabulary derived from biblical myth and, as we
shall see, medieval romance. Yet science also seems confident that everything
changed once the truth of fossils was revealed as dinosaurs, once secular facts
explosively replaced biblical dreams. Though irresistibly quotable, Thomas
Browne’s incurious flippancy is unusual and cannot stand for preceding history.
Contrary to any “rupture narrative” (as Kellie Robertson labels overly enthusiastic
and impossibly tidy historical periodizations), medieval conceptions of
prehistory were never so casual, never so unperturbed.[x]
Temporal frames may have stretched back thousands of years rather than eons,
but the primeval was envisioned through rich and multiplex narratives filled
with lively, often startling content. Time’s vastness was capable of taxing the
medieval imagination in ways anxious, innovative, and uncannily familiar. Every
historical period works with the conceptual tools it inherits but is never
bound by that heritage to mere replication of that which is already known.
Living before the scientific and social revolutions Rudwick details, medieval
people did not populate their prehistory with pterosaurs and mammoths, but they
knew well through these creatures’ bones the archaic lives of dragons and
giants. The author of the Book of John
Mandeville writes of the port of Jaffa in the Holy Land:
And ye shal understonde that hit [it] is the
yldest toun [oldest town] of the worlde, for hit was makyd byfore Noeis floode
[made before Noah’s flood]. And ther beth [are] bones of gyauntes [giants] sides
that ben [are] fourty foot long.[xi]
Medieval
authors may not have imagined extinction by asteroid-propelled fire, but they were
enraptured by the watery cataclysm of the Deluge and an apocalypse of flame to
come. Noah’s flood was still readable in the fossil record, replete with the
bones of those giants that Genesis asserted had walked the early earth.[xii]
Even the universalizing and supposedly short chronological framework of the
Genesis story has its textual strata, fossils, provocations to dreaming the
inhuman, and unexpected depths.[xiii]
Geology and Genesis differ profoundly in their historical
scales. They do not offer two versions of the same story, even though the
former has absorbed much of its narrative structure from the latter. One is cut
from restless infinity, the other bounded by eternity’s stillness. Both,
however, share deep affinities, including inassimilable temporal vastness and arrangement
around punctuated catastrophe. Both convey the primordiality of stone and its astonishing
perseverance. Something potentially combustive therefore unfolds within both
frames at the moment of contact between mortal flesh and lithic materiality: the
advent of a disorienting realization, no matter how inchoate or dimly
perceived, that stone’s time is not ours, that the world is not for us. We grasp
the antediluvian, figuratively or literally, and realize that we are fleeting,
that this place supposed to be a home is too ancient and enduring for comfortable
domestication. The earthly residence of many stones extends, according to
geologists, to billions of years. Medieval writers, too, saw in lithic depths a
glimpse of the earliest moments of creation. Albertus Magnus writes that
“stones are not far removed from the elements” and their materiality has “very
little altered” (Books of Minerals
1.1.5). To palm a rock is to press flesh against the first moments of time. Albert
therefore associates the production of stones with cold, and espies in their primeval
purity a frozen elementality. In a simple gem is condensed inestimable temporal
protraction. For a medieval author, a ruby or emerald might compact a history that
stretches to Eden. The Sloane Lapidary describes emerald with the sentence “It
is greene & it cometh from the Streame of Paridis” (English Mediaeval Lapidaries 121). For most readers of this book, diamonds
and amethysts compress an epochality that demands the imagination of prodigious
monsters and migratory continents indifferent to apes to come. Biblically
derived and geologic temporalities share an inhuman immensity of scale.
As solitary years accrete into eras, the still earth
becomes vibrant, inhabited by impressive materialities that are also forces
that move and create. That which was static springs into life. Rock slides,
seeps, grinds, infiltrates, engulfs, transforms. Rising as mountains, gliding
as continents, stone accrues into aeonic strata, tumbles with glaciers, plunges
deep under the sea in sheets and ascends later as peaks veined with marine
souvenirs. Mineralizing what had been organic life, compressing traces of
multiple times into heterogeneous aggregates or metamorphic novelties, rock
also bends like plastic so that ephemeral humans may sculpt a lithic whorl or
devise a temple of a thousand years’ duration. Such durable building projects
are possible only through human-lithic alliance, which intensify the
architectures that geological forces fashion on their own. The baleful Green
Chapel of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
may or may not be the work of human hands. Perhaps a decrepit church or ruined shrine,
its description also suggests a pre-Christian holy place, possibly Thor’s Cave,
a limestone cavern in Staffordshire used in the late Neolithic for burials, or
Lud’s Church, a mossy gorge that also possesses a long human history.[xiv]
In a way it does not matter if human builders or geology fabricated the
haunting structure since humans and rocks have a habit of imitating each
others' work, of creating homologous and shared spaces. All stonework is a collaboration
between human hands and inhuman forces. Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight is a poem obsessed with landscapes, animals,
and other manifestations of the nonhuman. No wonder then that the Green Chapel
is at once a dire mound or hillock where the grinding of a lethal axe echoes, a
crag or cave where red blood trickles onto white snow, and the climactic locale
where terror at the prospect of impending death yields to an invitation to
celebration and the affirmation of humane connection. “Make merry in my house!”
Bertilak declares once Gawain has completed his testing (2468), and the verdant
half-giant reveals himself also to be an ordinary man.
[i]
Jonathan Gil Harris gets at the
provocation posed by time as active force and matter as agential when he
observes “relations between matter and temporality have been largely occluded
in recent scholarship on objects, which has tended to transform the ‘material’
of material culture into a synonym for ‘physical’ – thereby freezing not just
the object in time but also time in the object” (Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare 7).
[ii] On Buridan and his Aristotelian bent (enabling
him to think about the world and infinity together), see Joel Kaye, “The
(Re)Balance of Nature” (95). Robert Bartlett examines the problem a spherical
earth composed of four elements of differing weights caused for some other
writers, who likewise had to struggle with the possibility of globe covered by
water as the earth’s natural state in The
Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages 44-50.
[iii] This “Cosmic Calendar” was famously calculated by
Carl Sagan in his book The Dragons of
Eden, 13-16.
[iv] Martin J. S. Rudwick takes the phrase “deep time”
from John McPhee’s Basin and Range,
remarking upon its analogy to astronomical deep space (Scenes from Deep Time 255). He also employs the earth science term
geohistory, “the immensely long and complex history of the earth, including the
life on its surface (biohistory), as distinct from the extremely brief recent
history that can be based on human records, or even the somewhat longer
preliterate ‘prehistory’ of our species” (Bursting
the Limits of Time 2).
[v] Albertus Magnus, Meteora 4.4.7, as quoted in Mineralia
trans. Dorothy Wyckoff 2.1.4 n7.
[vi] The best recent account of the work of the Flood
myth in the Middle Ages is Daniel Anlezark, Water
and Fire. Anlezark empathizes the intimacy of mythic modes to dreaming
prehistory and their adaptability over time. He argues that the Flood serves as
an “archetype of the human experience of catastrophe,” mixing a hope of human
endurance with “the fear of collective extinction” (7). Anlezark also
demonstrates the parallels among and ultimate medieval convergence of
classical, early Germanic and biblical flood stories.
[vii] For a contemporary version of water and fire
conveying time’s restless, garrulous multiplicity while stone endures in
silence, see Michel Serres’s provocative account of elemental, auditory fury
and the challenges posed by such sensuous disorder in his book Genesis.
[viii] See
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain 22; Stephen A. Barney, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman volume 5, p. 69; Martin J. S.
Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time 116-17;
Joel Kaye, “The (Re)Balance of Nature” 95.
[ix] “Time revolution” is the phrase used by Shryock
and Smail in Deep History to describe
the abandonment during the 1860s of a biblical “short chronology … in which
history and geology are coeval” (Deep
History 5-6).
[x] Kellie Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A
Manifesto” 108. Robertson is speaking specifically of the chasm that is
supposed to separate the Middle Ages from the early modern period, but her rich
essay is generalizable beyond this specific focus. See also the work of Daniel
Lord Smail, who traces how the Middle Ages and the Paleolithic are both put to
work to maintain such unnecessary gaps.
[xi] Ed. Kohanski and Benson, 32. Most versions of the
“Defective” text contain a paradoxical assertion that Joppa is antediluvian and
yet founded by Japheth, a son of Noah. The giants’ bones are no doubt to be
associated with the Flood itself.
[xii] Not that medieval authors alone found stories of
the flood in the fossilized remains of giants: see David R. Montgomery, The Rocks Don’t Lie 82-88.
[xiii] As Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail point
out, these short chronologies are also not true to the bible itself, which does
not contain calendar dates. Later interpreters “retroactively imposed” such a
frame to harness the narrative to differently organized contemporary
chronicles, giving the Genesis story a “brittle precision” that snapped in the
nineteenth century (“Introduction,” Deep
History 6).
[xiv] See Ralph Elliott, “Landscape and Geography” 116.
Elliott writes that the cave was once called Thurse Cave, “the giant’s cave.”
The poem does not locate its action precisely, however, suggesting that the
location is a composite of several architectures and landscapes.
