The lithic turn

This began as a claim, that stones are microcosmic ruins. (“Rocks” would have worked better alliteratively, but in my professional jargon there’s a precise definitional difference: rock becomes stone at the quarry face, and anyway there’s a nice consonance with the nasal finishes of stones and ruins. I don’t mean that you can smell them, but of course under the right conditions you can.)

 That stones are microcosmic ruins. And not because the classic ruin is built of stone (though reinforced concrete is an up-and-comer), but because all the temporality is condensed. You’ve got the human-made thing, you’ve got the visible signs of impermanence, you’ve got impermanence that nevertheless outstrips any single mortal lifespan, usually.

 The basic Latin word for stone is lapis. That evolved into Italian lapide, which usually means a tombstone.

 What got me thinking about it was walking down the street, across the piazza, all paved with a greenish-grey and softish stone that I don’t know well yet*, having only recently arrived in Pisa; and it’s recommenced raining here today, so all the pitting and the concavities worn by the passage of feet are accentuated, playing the role of a thousand dirty mirrors. *(It’s so-called pietra serena, the stonecutters’ term for a variety of macigno, which was formed about 23 million years ago.)

 What got me thinking about it was a book review I’m behind in finishing, a review of a book about stone. Actually, those are both excuses: I’m almost always thinking about stones and time. Rocks and time. Unless it’s pots and time. World enough and.

 But reviewing this particular book, I was called to read again, for the umpteenth time, with newer but not younger eyes, a passage from the elder Pliny (HN 36.166): tofus aedificiis inutilis est mortalitate mollitia, “tuff is useless for construction because of its mortality, its softness.” Latin mortalitas, even if rare classically, is the ability and the necessity to die, mortality. Even a rock can die. Because of its softness, mollitia.

 Tuff can die; but it can also be born. Vitruvius (2.6.1) et ibi quod nascitur tofus exsurgens, “and the tuff which is born there rising up”- sure, nascor can have the sense of “arise, be produced, be found,” but its basic meaning is to be born.

 All rocks are born, all rocks will die. The softer tuffs are one of the rare examples where both can happen at a more-or-less human scale. There are softish stones, like the Pisan pietra serena sandstone pavers that got us started, that can be visibly eroded by human passage, but they took much longer (maybe hundreds of thousands of years) to become stone. Or there are lavas that can harden during a single day’s eruption. The streets of Naples are largely paved with hard, resistant blocks from flows like these from Vesuvius that reached the sea.

 Both in Pisa and in Naples, pavers bear the linear marks put there by stonecutters to keep you from slipping, chiseled in, tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap (I don’t yet know what sound the Pisan pavers make when cut), but they wear away. You wear them away. These are tallymarks in reverse: you can keep a sort of time by noting their disappearance. Actually, that’s not true. You can’t keep time.

 

 Postscript

Walking home, I passed the Tower, and the Cathedral, and the Baptistery, all done up in their (mostly) marble. Marble is a harder rock, and these are harder stones, not local: in the middle ages, with their fleet, the Pisans commandeered great quantities of marble from the ruins of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber. Of course, the marble was scarcely local to Ostia, either, and for some of it shipping up to Pisa was a sort of homecoming, to just about within eyeshot of the great white scars in the mountains about Carrara, above the ancient town of Luna that gave its name, for a time, to the stone. But in geologic time there is no homeland, no moment of origin. Quarrytime is just a rite of passage, wherein rock is turned to stone. The marble around Carrara “formed”—a temporally-fuzzy coming-into-being—a very very long time ago. A slow process that turned those ancient, ancient seabeds first into limestone, about 200 million years ago and then, with pressure, into marble, about 20 million years ago. And the ocean then is the ocean now.