On World Poetry Day, Recalling a Search for Meaning Within Stone

This image is not taken from the Space Station.

Dali stone, Bill Atkinson

In 2004, I was one of a batch of writers, including Diane Ackerman, John Horgan and Dorion Sagan, invited by a publisher to pen short prose or rhyming musings to pair with Bill Atkinson’s remarkable landscape-like, close-focus photographs of cut and polished stone surfaces.

Here’s what I wrote for the image above (there are more below):

Humanity is etching its signature across its earthscape: diverting waterways, extracting essentials, transforming the air, scratching pathways. The advance is as inexorable, and natural, as that of rust on iron or microbes on a plate of agar. We till that which can be tilled, and therefore must be tilled, until our outward press meets sterile soils. But as we gain a global view, and regard our transformed sphere, we now ponder an unavoidable question: What next?

Atkinson is best known as one of the founding engineers at Apple Computer, where he was the main designer of the graphical user interface, MacPaint and other innovations. But he’s long applied his technological brilliance to photography, as well, using sophisticated lighting, lenses and printers to create mineralogical magic.

The book, called Within the Stone, is still around and I’d encourage you to find a copy. It’s mesmerizing.

Within the Stone

This was one of the oddest, and most liberating, assignments I’ve ever gotten. Given that it’s Unesco’s World Poetry Day, I thought it worth sharing a couple of my missives. Here’s Atkinson’s image of a cross section of Munjina stone, one name for a silicified shale from the Chichester Range in Western Australia.

Munjina stone, courtesy of Bill Atkinson

Here’s what it brought to mind:

Perhaps we tamed fire. Perhaps fire tamed us. Certainly we are still seduced by that glowing dance of a thousand roseate veils, whether in the shimmering heat of the hearth or the growl of the V-8. While water soothes and nourishes, fire empowers. The astonishing magic of controlled combustion, facilitated by Earth’s just-right atmosphere and ample stores of fuels, has allowed humans to transform from scattered gatherers into a gathering global force.

Fire transports us, and in return we transport fire. Together, for better and worse, we have made the world our own.

What do you see?

In the photograph below, of Pietersite from Outjo District, Kunene Region, Namibia, I saw the eternal battle between water and rock, which rock seems to win at any given moment as you watch waves break on a coast. But just wait awhile. Now it brings to mind Erica Gies’ wonderful book, Water Always Wins - Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge. If you missed our Sustain What chat, click here: Water Always Wins, But That Doesn’t Mean We Lose.

Pietersite, Bill Atkinson

Here’s my riff:

We tend to recognize and give weight to agents of change mainly if they operate within our frame of reference, an attention span calibrated to the rhythms of human life—to hours and days, maybe years, rarely decades. Waves are no such thing. They are fed by forces as near perpetual as the sun’s rays and the Earth’s spin. They know nothing of time, despite their metronomic manner. They roll until impeded.

It is the waves that break when surging seas collide with rocky shores. Thus is born the impression that water is weak and rock a bastion.

But it is the human eye, of course, that is weak. Handicapped, really. Shortsighted in the most profound way.

Below I’ve included “postcards” of the mini essays and images. Feel free to share them.

What poetry comes to mind for you these days?

Poetry matters

I’ve featured poetry on the Columbia Climate School Sustain What webcasts many times. Here were two fantastic sessions.

Dear Vaccine, a poetry slam celebrating the emergence of vaccination in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, was organized by David Hassler, director of the Wick Poetry Center and Tyler Meier, executive director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center:

Earth Stanzas was an intergenerational series of readings, reflections and musical performances examining humanity’s turbulent, wondrous, fast-forward planet. It’s a project of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University and the Center for Earth Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University.

Here are the “postcards.”