Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Geology is instantaneous interpretation of a planet's grinding eternity, the tiniest visible fractions of it, a deep shift in consciousness as John McPhee captured in "Basin and Range", his geologic ode to the Great Basin, for which he was named "rhapsodist of deep time" by the New York Times. Time spent in the basin and range reveals a mountain rhythm across space. Deep time spent therein may unveil mountain rhythms across time. In that eternal shift it is possible to imagine the rise and unimaginable fall of mountains, the life cycle of immovable and immortal, and it all must be imagined instantaneously.

So then, geology proceeds from a type of poetic vision. One must see a larger picture even if 99 percent of it has been devoured, lost to eternal grind. A geologist "does to words what endless eons have done to his rocks", and language must be stretched and folded to try and bracket that which annihilates its range and the scale of its life. In the cut and fill of I-80 west of the Wasatch, as McPhee noted, oolites of the Great Salt Lake are forming now, upon which scattered dolomite from Stansbury Range is 500 million years old, and tuff at the Nevada line has been welded for thirty million years and the granite beyond is a hundred million years old and the rock at Pequop summit four times that, and it is all just what the faults "happened to throw up", which sounds suspiciously philosophical....

joel is your geo-logical word mate on this
wonder if we will hear from him
a spiritual voice
who knows that
6,000 years ain't enough time

why i look up at the sky when i leave for work early
and 14 hours later step back into the front yard
small worlds and microcosmic intimacies
a sleeping cat on the back of the couch
i will open the window as the afternoon warms
while i read and hunt and peck and listen to the radio
democracy now and howard zinn's implorings
too-timid congress avoids impeachment hearings
and somewhere far away by earthscale
the dark lord grunts on the toilet
as
eternal vastness beckons us into mystical visionary calm
beyond conciliation and caution
why mnazz goes into the dezert
and lrod muses

There is rhapsody, and rapture here Mnaz.
Your writing is astoundingly good and even gets better than that!
Always a treat to read you.

H

Thanks all... L-rod, jimbo, hest...

Made myself start reading McPhee's Basin and Range, and it sparked.... It is heavily laced with fairly sound geologic science and language, so I had been hesitant... but the blending of science and poetry... "geopoetry".... was intriguing. Yet the language cannot truly describe its subject, the conceptual immensity...

L-rod...

"a hundred million years the earth takes just to wash its face"...

very nice line. I like the stepping backward into the cosmos...

I wish I were a rock
thrown out into the face of time
to experience
without asking why

McPhee's not a bad writer. And one should have some respect for the tradition of Lyell (and Darwin). But neither a McPhee-- nor a Melville--could really capture the great basin geomorphology in words. Perched on the summit of White Mountain at dusk, turning from the Minarets and young sierras, the inyos, and gazing east across Nevada, noting the Ruby ridge, Wheeler Peak, to the Utah ranges: dat's Great Basin spacetime.....

an excellent little read, mnaz. perhaps a part in your book..?

Toten... true. Really no way to fully capture that immensity, time shifting or not.

Cec... yeh, I just can't seem to finish it, though maybe now... at last...