The insects and the miller / The krycket & þe greshope

From the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt.

by KARL STEEL

(oops! as I was writing this, Jeffrey was writing a post himself, which you should read NOW).

Here's a macaronic, presumably late 15th-century poem from Peniarth MS 356b, which I ran across yesterday in Robbins' Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (2nd. ed), p. 104.

The krycket & þe greshope wentyn here to fy3ght,
With helme and haburyone all redy dy3ght;
The flee bare þe baner as a du3ty kny3th,
The cherubud trumpyt with all hys my3th.

Salamandraque cicada domitatum perereterunt,
Galiaque cum lorica presto se parauerunt;
Musca vexillum portabat vt miles egregius,
Scarabius buccinauit totis suis viribus.

The hare seyte a-pon þe hyll & chappynd here schone,
And swere by the knappes wich were þer a-pon,
That scho wowld not ryse ne gon
Tyll sche se xx howndes and a won.

Lepus super montem se ipsum collocauit,
Et suos sotulares laquitissinauit,
Et per laquitissos ipsequen iurauit
De lustro surgere nec ire voluit
quousque vigenti canis vnum videret.

Þe myler sedet o-pon the hull
and all þe hennes off the town drew hym tyll;
The mylner sayd, 'schew, henne, schew!
I may not schake my bage for you.'

Molendinarius super montem sedebat,
gallinarum ville ad se copia currebat;
Molendinarius inquit, 'sco, galina, sco!
Meum saccum pro uobis vrcillare non possum.'

I love this little poem, written in the end--I think--of a grammar, and therefore, perhaps, intended for children (at least per Nicholas Orme, "The Culture of Children in Medieval England," Past & Present 148 (1995): 48-88 [82]).

I couldn't tell you much more than what you see here. Crickets and Grasshoppers go together, as in this children's natural history, or in this recent nature poem by Dan Beachy-Quick ("The poetry of the earth never ceases / Ceasing" &c., which edit I'm chagrined to have to be reminded, is a play on a little poem by a not-exactly-minor poet by the name of John Keats, as David Hadbawnik had to remind me), and also in scripture, Leviticus 11:22, although not in any version of the Bible, so far as I know, that would have been known in fifteenth-century Wales (Vulgate here; Wycliffite here, for example).

In the absence of any criticism, in the absence of being able to consult the manuscript online, and therefore in the absence of much of the needed cultural context, what can we do with this poem? On twitter, I called it "A great little macaronic poem of manuscript marginalia come to life" (a point, minus the "great," already made by Douglas Gray), and that might be enough, alone.

If we want to take this as a children's poem, and still respect it for all that (and why not?), and if we want to take this as a kind of nursery rhyme, with many of the features of the genre, we might observe the close relationship of children and insects, the very small, and the nervous (the hare awaiting the 21 dogs). Children work at a different time than we adults (presuming on my audience!), and a different scale. They're more vulnerable, smaller, faster, with time moving more slowly (my birthday comes around so quickly these days). My wife recently introduced me to Delmore Schwartz's "Dogs Are Shakespearean, Children Are Strangers," whose first line is just that, and whose entirety you really, really need to read if you don't already know it.

We might take this little poem, in its bizarre resistance to interpretation, as just that, a stranger.

Or we might do more with it, paying attention to its language, form (why the five-line stanza in the middle?), and vocabulary. What, if anything, would you do with it?

(on children and animals, see Jeffrey's ancient blog post, since turned into an article, most recently reprinted here. And for more on Villard de Honnecourt, see Haylie Swenson's essay in postmedieval 4.3)

Stories of Stone, an Epilogue, and Iceland

by J J Cohen

[don't miss Mary Kate's awesome Game of Thrones Day post!]

Well, I did it. My book Stories of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman was due to U Minn Press on Feb. 1, and I actually made the deadline, pressing the SEND button mid afternoon. It's a relief to have a project over which I've spent so many years agonizing out of my life for a little while. It will be back: though it's under contract (look for it in spring 2015), an evaluator must sign off on this final version ... and of course there is the copyediting and so forth to come. Still, this is a major milestone.  

Eventually I will write a cautionary blog post about the Writing Lockdowns I used to complete this project, and the very real toll that this labor took on my health ... but for now, I am happy to have the thing gone. As I posted on FB, I completed the book during a run, when I scooped a stone into pocket to remember a phrase that had come to me about textual effects and lithic materiality ("Because of its ardor for unconformity, stone sediments contradiction, there to ignite possibility, abiding invitation to metamorphosis"). And I'll repeat here what I said there: Thank you, everyone, for your support during the long process of composition. I could not have accomplished this without you. Finally concluding the book has been a moment to think about the many, many people who have sustained the project, and I want you to know that I am grateful. This applies to EVERY reader of ITM, whether you ever commented on any of stone blog posts or not. Just knowing that this work had readers was sustaining.

Here, for anyone who is interested, is the book's conclusion.

Epilogue:

Iceland

I. Needful Stones

Stones, wrote Bartholomaeus Anglicus, are the “bones of the earth.”[1] They grant the globe stability and prevent its lands from pulling apart . Without stone we would possess the barest of lives. The lithic arrives in so many species and shapes, holding so much power to sustain diverse relations, that through alliance  we transform every ecology into which we step. Bartholomaeus describes stones as “profitable and nedefulle” for the building of houses, walls, pavement, and bridges. Guide and matter of transport, refuge against tempests, rock conveys and protects, a shelter against the predation of enemies, wolves, and “evil beasts.” The substance of the inhabited world, the materiality through which hearths, homes, towers, and cities arise, stone “helps and heals” bodies beset by sickness and founds the courts of kings. Through stone and with stone we fashion monuments that endure.

Or so we tell ourselves, because our histories are small.

II. Divergent Tectonic Plate Boundary (MAR)

To journey in Iceland is to traverse a landscape thick with story, a topography known already through medieval sagas: an enormous boulder that Grettir once lifted, a hill where Aud the Deep-Minded set a cross, a glacial river where Njal’s sons ambushed their enemy. Guidebooks often describe the feel of the island as primeval. Shaped by recent volcanoes, ongoing tectonic shift, and frequent glaciation, its expanses are however geologically young. Iceland sits upon the mid-Atlantic ridge. As North America and Eurasia pull away from each other, the island grows at about a centimeter a year, along a rift just below where the assembly known as the Alþingi used to meet. A þing is a gathering, a convocation where frictions surface and force is exerted, a making of the real through deliberation and debate. Bruno Latour points out how extraordinary it is that thing, this “banal term we use for designating what is out there, unquestionably” should be the inheritance of “the oldest of the sites in which our ancestors did their dealing and tried to settle their disputes.”[2] Þingvellir, the fissured expanse where the Alþingi was convened into the eighteenth century, is now a World Heritage Site. Tourists wander the rift valley in search of human history, while below their feet tectonic plates diverge, liquid rock rises from the mantle, and the seabed spreads.

I travelled to Iceland to finish this book. Some of the island’s geography resembles the Irish Burren [Boíreann, “rocky”], a landscape rich in lithic art catalytic to the project’s commencement. Yet Iceland holds nothing like the standing stones, barrows, rings and dolmens of Ireland, Britain, France. Human trace is more recent. Except for the occasional remains of a farmstead’s hearth, fire and stone collaborating still to send story forward, the landscape holds few lithic communication devices. Stone is everywhere entangled with the aqueous: volcanic fields scraped by errant glaciers, marshes where lava penetrated an ice shield to form pseudo-craters, turbid rivers of melt that plunge into the earth, rock and water in constant terraforming partnership. In the polychrome valleys of Landmannalaugar, where vibrant rhyolite shifts beneath your feet as you hike, blue, green, pink and white mountains rise. Steam drifts from geothermal vents. Bartholomaeus described Iceland as place so full of ice [perpetuo glacie in Latin, “alwey ise and glaas” in Trevisa’s translation] that water has become stone. Its mountains, he wrote, are hardened snow, while its ice petrifies into beautiful crystal.[3]

Iceland reminds that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.

III. Moody Beach

In Maine (another place where this book that keeps beginning commenced) my brother Mark asked me about Iceland. I told him its lesson of impermanence. I began my long study of stone seeking something that endures. Yet rock moves like any liquid, restless and ephemeral: sedimented, recycled, engulfed, pulverized, melted, metamorphized, eroded, rebirthed. We think stone persists only because it outlasts. We trust stone as archive and monument, but we may as well write on water. The fossil record is scanty, its gaps enormous, its lacunae inscrutable. Stone promises futurity but provides only a brief and fragmented recordation. Particles will in the end remain. We will be readable from atomic traces, not from the architectures we build, not from bodies or machines or the stories that we tell. The music of the spheres is the whirl of these bits and specks, objects of the smallest scale. Boulders, cliffs, mountains, sea floors, bones, continents, plates, planets: stone's destiny is the cosmic dust that once it was, carrying some new chemicals perhaps, betraying to someone’s instruments the telltale signs of organic life that needed stone to burgeon, dwell, and thrive -- but particles all the same, fragments that near silence.

IV. Lithic Gravity

In writing this book I have been drawn constantly back to the stones that companioned its composition. Geologic collaborations are like the slow movements of tectonic plates. You don't necessarily get an earthquake to announce that alignment has shifted. Forceful action is invisible. Yet sometimes in looking back with enough perspective the wandered landscape reveals a past rather different from what had been thought. Ground's drift is relentless, a quiet friction that is a drive towards strange conjunction, perilous continuity across vast spans. In the company of archaebacteria, dinosaurs or humans, volcanoes erupt, continents wander, the ocean floor rises and falls. The geological strata upon which we walk and build, foundation both literal and epistemological, is full of shift. The desert was a seabed, the whalebones top a mountain, the past is never what we thought, and every object is full of strange relation. Stories of Stone is built around such truths, and written in the conviction that medieval writers meditated upon inanimate matter and came to rather similar insights, expressed within differently sympathetic modes. Rock communicates something nonhuman and yet weirdly creaturely, queerly vital, even to writers who supposedly had all the answers they needed in theology, science and received history. Trekking the ashy wastes surrounding a volcano (Hekla, which last erupted in 2000, and in the Middle Ages was described as Hell's Gate); standing where the Alþingi once unfolded, the pull-apart where the island rifts and new stone emerges; finding rocks that mark the hearth of a tenth-century homestead; walking atop the glacier Langjökull, on the move and taking us with it, filled with moulins down which melt swirls, secretly afraid that Alex or Katherine might vanish because all lives are limned by catastrophe: these experiences were material reminders of something I knew already but perhaps needed Iceland to feel.

Too sentimental, I suppose, to write such things. Too personal. There is something uncomfortable about losing stony detachment. Yet better rocky than secure. Glimpsing landscapes known from medieval texts, hiking land shaped by abiding inhuman force, was a reminder that we dwell between catastrophes, between fire and ice. Geology is a perilous science. To write of stone is to know despair. Yet when Hekla spews its flame, when the earth shudders and ash drifts cold air, the people of Reykjavik climb into jeeps and drive to watch the red of molten stone at twilight. They drink beer and watch rock in fiery motion -- not without apprehension at what this flow discloses, companions in sudden yet abiding community, in stories composed with stone.

---

[1] See John of Trevisa’s translation of De proprietatibus rerum, 16.74. In describing stones as the bones of earth’s body, Bartholomaeus is directly following Ambrose, but the trope is ubiquitous.

[2] “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” 233.

[3] On the Properties of Things book 15.173. Only polar bears (“white beeres mooste huge and moost fers” seem strong enough to break through this frozen landscape to reveal the floe of water – and fish – nearby. Bartholomaeus describes the generation of crystal through freezing at 16.30.

Winter is ...oh, never mind.

by Mary Kate Hurley

First, read Jeffrey's icy reflections on his trip to Winnipeg, and don't forget to help Eileen and Karl's new project as it gets underway. 

One of the things that I took for granted in New York was that I had access to colleagues at more universities than I ever bothered to count, all a mere train ride away.  So it has been particularly wonderful that the last two weekends have involved travel to see colleagues in Knoxville, TN, and Columbus.  I'll write more about my wonderful visit to the Marco Institute for the yearly manuscript workshop they host soon, but first I wanted to share my story from this weekend.  I took the hour and change trip up US-33 yesterday to visit Ohio State University, and participate in Game of Thrones Day, a remarkable event hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at OSU that combined Renaissance Faire-type revelry and hands-on demonstrations with scholarly papers by academics from across the country.  I was invited by Travis Neel, a graduate student in English at OSU (who blogs here) to participate in a roundtable discussion with Laurie Finke (Kenyon College), Travis himself, and Haylie Swenson, a graduate student at GW.  Each of these three speakers made fascinating contributions to the discussion at hand, which was "Getting Medieval(ish):  Locating Our Enjoyment in the Middle Ages."  Haylie spoke eloquently to the assemblage of human and animal involved in the work of animation in Dragonheart; Travis gave a whirlwind tour of the problem of time in medievalism and Dolce & Gabbana's amazingly "medieval" fall fashion line; Laurie led us carefully through a consideration of what medievalism and nostalgia are, and raised a question I'd never thought of before, which is why we root for the aristocracy in the series -- the Starks aren't really all that much better than the Lannisters, are they? Wonderful and serious discussion followed.

To these ruminations I added this little bit of fun that I worked up on two of my favorite things: some rather amusing musicians known as Paul and Storm, and ideas of temporal heterogeneity. There was an accompanying slide show, but I think just viewing the video will give you  most of the stills you need to enjoy the paper.  I should say this is a bit indulgent, and somewhat tongue-in-cheek (I'm aware, of course, of the ritual nature of this apology, because I have read my Dinshaw).  But as I devoted a few stray hours to simply close-reading a video I'd seen multiple times, I was surprised at how much I was able to find in it.  I hope you enjoy reading the paper as much as I enjoyed writing it.  And so without further ado:

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again..." 

One of the ongoing debates surrounding George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the sheer length of time that this text is taking, and has taken, to come into being.  Unlike the stories I normally study – Legends of Arthur in medieval French, Beowulf, the Life of Saint Swithun (no, trust me, it’s great) – this admittedly gargantuan work can be a strange experience for scholars used to not simply a work but an oeuvre, and an entire LIFE being complete not years but centuries before anyone ever thought to write about it.  As an Anglo-Saxonist, however, I’m somewhat familiar with works that are unfinished, even incomplete, in ruins. The analytical difficulty of the incomplete work, when combined with the idea of the “medieval” that permeates critical responses to A Song of Ice and Fire, is irresistible for this medievalist – and, it would seem, to parodists as well.

Prompting a response from the master of Sci-Fi/Fantasy himself (Neil Gaiman – who forced its creators to apologize to Martin onstage at ComiCon), the song that I will analyze today relies, for the most part, on a ludic idea of what the “medieval” can be.  Written by that dynamic duo of the “nerd rock” genre – Paul and Storm -- Write like the Wind is something of an anthem for fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, especially those who are simultaneously enthralled by Martin’s work and all too acutely aware of the sheer amount of time that work is taking to come to fruition.

It’s worth watching in its entirety, so – enjoy.

What I’d argue about the video – fun as it undoubtedly is – is that it also creates a layered temporal effect, whereby we can recognize in Martin’s story of infighting and intrigue a dim reflection of the modern age, made palatable by its very remoteness.  The medieval in the video, as in our lives, has always been there, waiting to be released – whether by an insatiable addiction to George R.R. Martin’s books or our fury, potentially violent, at their taking “so goddamn long.”

The first intimation of Paul and Storm’s personal “inner-medieval” is the brief flash at 0:39, when they both appear in pseudo-medieval outfits.  These are the kind of Renaissance Faire outfits that will gradually take over the main narrative of the music video. The moment is nearly throw-away in its brevity, but the importance of these frames that picture the duo in Ren-Faire attire, juxtaposed with their normal-life, performance outfits, is symptomatic of the layering of time that this video creates.  A “Medieval” version of Paul and Storm – fighting in their fantasy oufits – exists contemporaneously with the “modern” singers who perform the song itself, and these two realities are layered one on another, until finally, we can’t really tell where the lines delimiting performance and life begin and end.

The video is interspersed with footage of “medieval” Paul and Storm running wildly through the countryside on their way to a “final” confrontation – footage I think is meant to be reminiscent of the now-famous “Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli running” scenes of The Lord of the Rings, another medievalism-filled movie.  The effect is undeniable – the two singers rush toward one another just  they also rush towards their inevitable fate vis-à-vis Martin’s books – the “seed” that grows “into an addiction that held me right down to my bones.”  At 1:15, the knight’s helmet that Paul wears as they rock out to “please give us boiled leather, and sigils, and steel” marks another moment where the duo cross over the fantasy/reality line – he wears the helmet with  normal clothing, based on Storm’s attire in the admittedly brief scene.

 

The presence of Jeff Lewis, who wanders in and out of scenes, plays various instruments, and – most importantly – reads the mock-up version of A Dance with Dragons throughout the video, intimates a sense of the ubiquity of this fantasy life.  He does not involve himself in Paul and Storm’s “medieval” antics, but any astute observer will recognize the intertext of the moment. Lewis’s previous starring role was in a hit music video for nerd-girl Felicia Day’s web series The Guild, “Do You Wanna Date my Avatar?”, which was itself a parody of the medievalism inherent in games like World of Warcraft. Note the number of times he appears between the singing duo:  at the outset of the video, as they introduce their theme, he looks at both of them impassively.  At 1:03, he holds his guitar somewhat uncomfortably, not ready to join in their refrain (perhaps because he is still too exhausted from the reading he completed at the beginning of the video?). A mere six seconds later, he reappears, coming between Paul and Storm as they sing, and wandering through the background paging through the tome; at 1:16, he joins them to play a dice game that seems reminiscent of Dungeons and Dragons, and in his next scene, he again throws the dice himself for another game– these two moments, taken together, seem to mark an entry into the world that Paul and Storm are creating in their medievalism.  At 1:53, he eats that ubiquitous sign of a “real” medieval faire – a turkey leg.  He joins the duo in a toast at the two minute mark, following directly on the line about Shakespeare’s artistic production rate.

Following Lewis through his journey towards the medieval is interesting, but it’s hardly the most important part of video’s medievalism.  In the second verse, the melding of medieval and modern continue, with nods both to medieval tropes and the medievalists who write them.  Both J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (an Anglo-Saxonist and Middle English specialist, respectively) make the list of fantasy greats who have written their stories in less time than Martin.  Importantly, the overlap between science fiction and fantasy medievalism is hinted at in the list – George Lucas, after all, took “nearly three decades on Star Wars, and we all know how that one turned out in the end.”  As Lewis wanders (again!) through the background of the video, Paul and Storm reach the crux of their argument for haste: “If you keep writing so slow,” they tell Martin, “you’ll hold up the HBO show.”

Martin’s glacial pace in writing the series was well known for fans of the fantasy books.  However, the pace of the books’ production was never quite so ubiquitously problematic until Game of Thrones became a runaway hit on HBO in 2011.  Bringing the work to the attention of non-self-identifying nerds became the impulse for a much more widespread dissatisfaction with Martin’s pace of writing.  Regardless of how HBO resolves this matter (most probably by departing from the series more than they already have), the fact that this show was such a hit underscores the implicit argument of the video itself – while they do so in parody, Paul and Storm create a convincing argument for the way that non-traditional “nerds” find the medievalism of the series so appealing.  They love it, because it’s already a part of them.

By the end of their video, medieval Paul and Storm are engaged in a contest that ends in a stalemate. Tossing aside shields, they draw swords, then bigger swords, then multiple swords, a gigantic axe, a pistol, a semi-automatic rifle, and finally a lightsabre, before Storm pulls the ultimate victory of medievalism – that turkey leg.  With it, he manages to knock out Paul, winning the erstwhile battle.  The final scenes include mock fighting, head injuries via turkey leg, some rather lame dancing, and finally Storm having embraced his new, victorious role, sitting in a mock-up of the iron throne.  He earns that throne as a result of the victory he just won over Paul; however, if you remember the beginning of the video, you’ll also remember that vacancy sign on the iron throne from the very first scenes in the faux-medieval layer of the video.  Our protagonist, it would seem, has finally come full circle.

The allegory – if you’ll permit me a medievalist-ism -- is clear: people who are not traditionally “nerdy,” and who may very well never have heard of Martin before the HBO series premiered, find the medieval only in its last iteration – that is, in the television series. And yet, it has in fact been there waiting for them all along.  These two “nerd rockers” – “cool” singers with guitars who open for Jonathan Coulton --  have all the while harbored a desire for another time, when they were knights doing battle.  In this, they stand in for everyone, nerds and non-nerds alike.  They were prepared for this other time because it’s co-extant with their own – Martin’s medievalism, or at least a real-world parallel to it, exists in counterpoint with modern time. Time, layered in reality and fantasy alike, has always been heterogeneous, with elements of the medieval – real and unreal – coexisting with our technological modernity.  We’re always already medieval – medievalists, and medievalism-junkies – especially, it would seem, when Winter is Coming.

Far North

Winnipeg airport at dawn

by J J Cohen

I'm in Minneapolis for an hour, in transit back to DC, after a great visit to the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. My trip was sponsored by the Group for Premodern Studies, in the persons especially of Roisin Cossar and Heidi Marx-Smith. I thank them for their gracious hospitality: I've never felt so well taken care of on a visit. I also congratulate the GPS for the deep collegiality they've cultivated among faculty and students. Really inspirational.

At dinner the night I arrived we conversed about community and how to sustain it. I arose the next morning with the topic on my mind, and so composed this little FB status update (which I share here because I realize that many ITM readers are not, with very good reason, on Facebook):

After watching a pink, orange and blue sunset behind snowy Assiniboine Park (and noting that the bike paths along the river become skateways), the gracious Roisin Cossar and Heidi Marx-Wolf took me to a delicious meal -- where the waiter had read Medieval Identity Machines in a religious studies class last year. Weird, small, beautiful world. At dinner we spoke about many things, but I woke up thinking most about our discussion of the spaces where we do our intellectual work. It's too easy to keep conference space (for example) confined to the fifteen minutes of the read paper, the ten of the Q&A, the ninety of the total session, a parcelling of time that does not foster much in the way of even ephemeral community. That's why lately I've been trying to push at those boundaries: sessions with many short pieces so that the emphasis is on discussion rather then delivery. Or GWMEMSI at Kzoo this year ('Impossible Words"), which has an Official Session on Thursday, but a Rogue Session in a non-conference space (either a brewery or a bus, I'm trying to work it out) the preceding evening. My NCS "Ice" Roundtables include a hike to Sólheimajökull to spend some time trekking with a glaciologist before we speak about ice's life. The overloaded 13 project "Scale" panel at BABEL UCSB will, if I can pull it off, be preceded by an outdoor "collaboratory" in the Channel Islands. Just as importantly, outside of all this making and refiguring of physical spaces for thinking has been the carpentry of electronically mediated social spaces. Archiving what effervesces in such spaces (in the form of a book, typically) has become less important to me as time goes on. What matters most is the impress that the coming into being of even a shortlived community can have on thoughts and projects that might arrive long after. Community doesn't have to endure or be official to possess consequence. Recordation and recognition may even be a vibrant community's death. An antidote to the long range strategic planning and assessments of success demanded by the corporate university, these fleeting encounters and transient unities matter profoundly.

In an essay I read by Alphonso Lingis on the plane ride this morning called "One's Own Voice," the philosopher calls such ephemeral communities "small friendships," and speaks of how by releasing trust into the world these amities intensify possibility. Travel, Lingis asserts, is predicated upon such little intimacies, acts of interpersonal confidence, a secular assertiveness in the face of the "black wall" of death. (And I should note that the reason I was reading this essay is because Heidi, in an exemplary act of "small friendship," gifted me a copy of Mosaic that contains the Lingis piece).

The next day we had a lunchtime discussion of social media and its relation to community formation and publicity for scholarly work and groups. After a brisk tour of the campus during which I came to realize that the gap between -4 and -27 is not as great as I'd supposed, I delivered a talk drawn from my forthcoming book, Stories of Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. I've been working on the project for seven years now, and delivered the completed manuscript to Minnesota exactly a week ago. For the first time it seemed strange to be speaking about the lithic, as if I should be placing everything in the past tense. I take that as a very good sign. The Q&A was vigorous and fun. I'll share with you a truth I confided about the project when I was asked -- as I am inevitably asked -- about its origin. I have a series lies I deploy to describe why I would write a book about stone. Sometimes I tell people it's because when I was very young my parents refused to buy me a Pet Rock, declaring the fad a waste of money, and that this book is my revenge (take that, mom and dad!). Sometimes I talk about the glacial erratic on a hill near my childhood home that my friends and I used to imagine was a portal to another world. I've linked the book's genesis to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, which holds an extensive collection of minerals (and where I used to go for some moments of peace during my graduate study). Another origin story links the book to the rocky coast of Maine, and another describes catalysis in an encounter my son had with Barber Rock at Avebury. Or I might admit that I've always been a geophiliac, collecting stones wherever I travel. Still more stories are about Berlin, Barcelona, the Grand Canyon, or my aborted career as an astrophysicist. I might narrate my search for things in this world of loss that endure. All these stories are lies. They are also all true. Who knows why any project we undertake grips us?

We might not be able to explain lucidly why we do the work we do, but I left Manitoba convinced once more of this: our projects cannot be lonely. Yes there are moments of research that require isolation, or at least the giving of oneself over to companionships with inhumans. My own little moments of insight come sometimes from conversations and dialogues (as when I present work, or when I ask someone else about their own work in my office or over a drink), and sometimes from the "small friendships" I form with rocks, an aurora borealis that would not reveal itself in the Winnipeg sky, a brisk frigidity in the Far North's windblown whiteness. Work emerges through wide community. The worst kind of book is the magisterial tome that attempts to leave silence in its wake: so perfect, so right, so self-enclosed that it aims to leave nothing more to say. What hubris. Better to write towards the opening up of conversation, to instigate or deepen an exchange that will leave your contribution intensified, perhaps even absorbed and surpassed -- and what could be better than having had a hand in such an act of collaborative creation?