jumping mountains

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mnaz
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jumping mountains

Post by mnaz » June 15th, 2011, 5:41 pm

“Jumping Rock” (18)

Mountains jump in Nevada. Literally. They lie still for millennia, build up stress and jump up in one terrible instant on faults between mountain and valley. So you're on a campstool one evening, medicinal chalice at hand, counting ravens or clouds, or mighty corrugations rising, scribbling a disposable manifesto under the influence of silent immense. And then, a sudden rumble of deep energy, a booming locomotive along the base, as the base unzips at shocking velocity down basin and fissures spread closer, spill your drink. In 1915 a sixteen foot gap opened in the sagebrush between Tobin Range and Pleasant Valley in Nevada for more than twenty miles. Not epic as these things go, though plenty fearsome as one might expect in a random hundred-year window on rock time.

Mountains in Nevada have jumped for eight million years. Mere toddlers. Not even a credible foothill on the leading faults; the scarps are too fresh, though savagely beaten. The crust here is a series of behemoths tilting at deep fractures, agitating on white-hot mantle below, the rock engine, which boils up in the cracks and margins, the evil cauldron-springs, and the whole thing is pushing up. Mountains rise about as fast as wind and rain dismantle them, an inch per century. So Tobin Range gained about twenty thousand years when it spilled your drink.

But those are absurd numbers, the type geologists might rattle off, and geologists have no clue about time, tossing out exponential figures mainly to render us a blip on their charts . . . A hundred years of insanity. Six thousand of history. Two hundred thousand of prehistory. Eight thousand thousand year old toddler mountains. And sometimes deeper eons emerge in these rock events . . . as far back as five hundred fifty thousand thousand years, the oldest known rock surface, and yet far short of earth's four and a half billion (four thousand five hundred thousand thousand) years. When Oquirrh Range jumped it lifted remains of sixty million year old "ancestral" mountains. So they say. No time timidity among rock tappers.

And space presents more exponential madness . . . you, a speck on a great sweep of sagebrush, itself a fleck on rock circling a star, itself a speck on the span to that star, itself a particle of space to the next nearest star, itself a particle of galaxy, in turn a particle of near cosmos, in turn a particle of far universe, and all less than a particle of infinity as you zoom out. And what's beyond it all? But that's an old brain tweak from way back, of a trickster sort; don't take space so literally. Odd how you coexist with infinity, similar to how "that which cannot be divided further" coexists with the infinity of you. Or so you imagine. Jeez, not again, oldest Zen trick in the book, everything and nothing from a point on both.

Farther south mountains don’t jump but sink into their own waste, weather down closer to eye level, playful, deadly roundscapes poked by peculiar nubs. And washes drop further into depths of strata, hard passages where the dregs collect and fry, a wasteland where rogue men with wild eyes received the word and railed against idolatry, foretold of cities in ruins, of desolate altars, of dead land and dust and a coming oasis, a river in a dry place, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, in a place where where mountains come to die, naturally. You expect to unearth wisdom in the strata; mostly it is solid rock being wasted.

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sooZen
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Re: jumping mountains

Post by sooZen » June 16th, 2011, 7:25 am

It always amazes me how we humans get so upset at the jumping of mountains, the flooding of flood plains, the twisting of tornadoes, the smashing of meteors, etc. when it has been happening for a good long while (I have a hard time with the numbers) and we and our creations just happen to be in the path.

As usual, a good write M... (Is rock wasted or does it transform?)
Freedom's just another word...



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mnaz
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Re: jumping mountains

Post by mnaz » June 18th, 2011, 4:26 pm

thanks soozen. i think it transforms as it is wasted. and completely normal, humdrum events in the life cycle and time line of rock indeed can be catastrophic to us..

i work a lot with numbers, so they capture my imagination at times. really, i just toy with them... or i should say, they toy with us. like one divided by zero... or the square root of negative one. or pi... ratio of circumference to diameter. we still don't know the exact number (of course, we still can't explain gravity either, so there you go . . .) somewhere there's a super-computer still crunching pi to see if a solution converges and the decimal starts repeating... probably out to a billion decimal points by now. if it ever starts repeating, well, that just might be the end of the world . . .

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Re: jumping mountains

Post by sooZen » June 19th, 2011, 6:40 am

Gosh, you baffled me here but only because, even though I am fascinated by physics and the great scientists now and in the past who posit numbers , that side of my brain that quantifies is basically unlinked somehow to the creative side of my brain (I forget which side is which as I have a hard time with "left" and "right" too!) I admire those for whom numbers are no challenge like yourself. for I have hid out from numbers all my life, trying to avoid them like the plague but there is no avoiding them. My challenge has been to face my fears (of the onesies, twosies) and deal with them head on but I must still say they really don't compute still in this inner sanctum that is my gray matter.

And. like you, they do capture my imagination, I must say. When you start spewing numbers (like your response to me) a shiver runs down my spine. Silly, irrational, I know, but real enough for me. I just cannot fathom something so abstract. Geometry was understandable but Algebra was a fantasy (if you get my drift and prospective?) Like I say, I admire those of you that are able to go where this human can only barely imagine...

Mention black holes or warps in space and I can see it. Mention pi and I think of dessert! lol
Freedom's just another word...



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stilltrucking
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Re: jumping mountains

Post by stilltrucking » July 19th, 2011, 10:58 am

I heard someone say there would be no life on earth if not for
the evil cauldron-
Thank you so much for an exciting momentary diversion from my short term fears.
I did not think of politics once while I was reading and rereading it for at least five minutes.

Perspective, it put my mundane worries in perspective. If that makes any sense to you.

thanks for a very good read

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Re: jumping mountains

Post by stilltrucking » July 21st, 2011, 5:50 pm

This is the driving belief of our time: that "me" and what I feel minute by minute is the natural centre of the world.
http://deoxy.org/media/The_Social_Network_Scam

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mnaz
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Re: jumping mountains

Post by mnaz » October 6th, 2016, 2:39 pm

Good link.

Yes. Have we been assimilated into the machine?...

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