Stoned

My youngest sons obsessively collect stones. Stones cover the shelves in my 6-year-old’s room, and when I forget to empty pockets before doing laundry, they turn the dryer into a rock tumbler. I understand the attraction. Stones are elemental and can’t be reduced to anything except smaller stones. On the human scale, they represent permanence. Stones are irresistible as metaphors. Consider the obsessive comedy of Beckett’s Molloy and his stone-sucking:

“But deep down I didn’t give a fiddler’s curse about being without, when they were all gone they would be all gone, I wouldn’t be any worse off, or hardly any. And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed…”

Here’s an early Zbigniew Herbert poem, “Pebbles,” as translated by Alissa Valles:

“The pebble
is a perfect creature

“equal to itself
mindful of its limits

“filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

“with a scent which does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

“its ardor and coldness
are just and full of dignity

“I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

“-- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye”

For Herbert, a pebble represents everything a human is not. A pebble is a reproach to human imperfection. Its existence, undivided, is identical to its meaning. It is without guile and readily understood. Spinoza likewise uses stone as a ready contrast to the human. In Part IV of The Ethics, “Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions,” he writes:

“So, if we say a man and a stone only agree in the fact that both are finite – wanting in power, not existing by the necessity of their own nature, or, lastly, indefinitely surpassed by the power of external causes – we should certainly affirm that a man and a stone are in no respect alike; therefore, things which agree only in negation, or in qualities which neither possess, really agree in no respect.”

For Osip Mandelstam, whose first book of poems was titled Stone, stones are the primal building material of human habitation. He likens them to words, the primal building material of poems. A poem is a construction of words, not themes or meanings. Words have an existence of their own and long to be included in a poem, as an affront to the hovering silence. In a poem from Stone, written in 1912, Mandelstam writes, in Robert Tracy’s translation:

“Stone, become a web,
A lace fragility:
Let your thin needle stab
The empty breast of sky.”

Mandelstam always returns to Petersburg – literally, Stone City, built of gray Finnish granite. The city’s name echoes the pun made by Jesus and much loved by Joyce: Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam. (“You are Stone, and upon this stone I will build my church.”) In his essay “Conversation About Dante,” as translated by Jane Gary Harris and Constance Link, Mandelstam writes:

“Black Sea pebbles tossed up on shore by the rising tide helped me immensely when the conception of this conversation was taking shape. I openly consulted with chalcedony, cornelians, gypsum crystals, spar, quartz and so on. It was thus that I came to understand that mineral rock is something like a diary of the weather, like a meteorological blood clot. Rock is nothing more than weather itself, excluded from atmospheric space and banished to functional space.”

And now, the formidable common sense of Samuel Johnson, as reported in Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

“We stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, `I refute it thus.’”