One early morning in Tokyo, in 2005, the anthropologist Hugh Raffles was shaken awake by an earthquake.
His hotel room overlooked an office building; through long windows, he saw people standing frozen in place, arms outstretched for balance. He noticed he was standing in the same position, in an identical limbo.
“I realized then that something happens to space in an earthquake,” he writes in “The Book of Unconformities.” “In that moment we were all together, suspended inside the thrusts of energy coming through the Earth, all together in an unstable and intimate energy-space, a space filled with the fact and possibility not just of mortality, but of imminent death.”
It’s a tidy metaphor for life itself — as well as for Raffles’s latest work. “The Book of Unconformities” is a consummately “unstable and intimate energy-space,” and among the most mysterious books I’ve ever read — a dense, dark star. It’s the biography of a few notable stones, including a 20-ton chunk of pockmarked meteorite, mica prepared in Nazi concentration camps, the layer of marble running under Manhattan. Between these narratives flickers the devastating story of Raffles’s two sisters, who died within months of each other in the mid-1990s. His youngest sister, Franki, hemorrhaged as she gave birth to twins. His eldest sister, Sally, killed herself, leaving four young children.
“Soon after, I started reaching for rocks, stones and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored,” Raffles writes, “ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than my own, stories that started in the most fundamental and speculative histories — geological, archaeological, histories before history — and opened unmistakably into absences that echo in the world today.”
Grief memoirs frequently take displacement as their form. “Missing me one place search another,” as Whitman wrote. Books about mourning have doubled as obsessive studies of Virginia Woolf, mushroom-gathering, training a young hawk. Raffles’s book is different. His sisters remain spectral presences, and he reveals nothing of his pain. In six, rain-soaked chapters and as many pilgrimages around the world, he gazes upon beaches of black volcanic sand, ancient crags, lonely monuments, not in contemplation of his own grief but the grief of others — cosmic grief, the mass slaughter of animals, genocide.
Raffles’s previous studies of the natural world include “In Amazonia,” a history of the rainforest, and “Insectopedia,” a puckish abecedary of the insect world. He was drawn to insects, he wrote, because they are the most numerous creatures on earth and yet we ignore them, kill them without compunction. They exist outside our realm of moral concern even as they swarm (see?) our lives, language, thinking.
Why write about rocks? In “Annals of the Former World,” a survey of North American geology, John McPhee posed the question to himself with amusement: “Like all writing, writing about geology is masochistic, mind-fracturing, self-enslaved labor — a description that intensifies when the medium is rock. What then could explain such behavior?”
Rocks allow the contemplation of scale — “deep time,” in McPhee’s words. They allow Raffles to tell the story of Manhattan, for example, from its very formation — “a jeweled paradise,” with its fat veins of minerals. They also testify to a particular seam of human history, one of resource extraction, rapacity and systematic abuse. An “unconformity” is the geological term for “a discontinuity in the deposition of sediment,” in Raffles’s words. Put another way, it’s a physical manifestation of a gap in time. The stones in this book tell strikingly similar stories — stories whose contours we might know, but whose details and particular, individual impacts have been lost or blunted.
There’s a trend for nonfiction to make large claims of how some phenomenon or another “makes us human” — language, cooking, navigation, even animals. Raffles, however, traces how influence works in the opposite direction, how human behavior transforms the natural world. There’s no narrative here that is not also an account of human avarice. In one chapter, Raffles travels to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago whose beaches comprise a grisly memento mori, covered with “blubberstones” — gravel mingled with rendered fat, vestiges of the mass killings of seals and whales.
How lucid this book sounds in summary. In fact, Raffles is serenely indifferent to the imperatives and ordinary satisfactions of conventional storytelling. Character, coherence, a legible and meaningful structure — these are not his concerns. The organization of the book feels profoundly random. There are no attempts to suture together the various stories, no attempts to enact something “learned” by the author. The photographs accompanying the text are dim and blotchy, and Raffles favors slabs of prose unbroken by punctuation. I intend all this as praise.
The epigraph, lines from Seamus Heaney, prepares us: “Compose in darkness. / Expect aurora borealis / in the long foray / but no cascade of light.” There is no great dawning of understanding; clarity arrives in sudden shafts — and any coherence is for us to supply. Raffles makes us sift for meaning; how do they connect, these juxtaposed narratives about Indigenous history, whaling, his sister Franki’s photographs of women at work?
We’re called to engage in that signal human activity: interpretation. What intuition the book requires, what detective work — and what magic tricks it performs. Stones speak, lost time leaves a literal record and, strangest of all, the consolation the writer seeks in the permanence of rocks, in their vast history, he finds instead in their vulnerability, caprice and still-unfolding story. In Svalbard, he regards the jagged coastline — one wreck companionably observing another. He quotes the painter Anslem Kiefer: “A ruin is not a catastrophe, it is a beginning, the moment when things can start again.”
"book" - Google News
September 22, 2020 at 09:25PM
https://ift.tt/33TKD32
Grief and Geology Both Take Time in ‘The Book of Unconformities’ - The New York Times
"book" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Yv0xQn
https://ift.tt/2zJxCxA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Grief and Geology Both Take Time in ‘The Book of Unconformities’ - The New York Times"
Post a Comment