Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" arrived today in the mail. It was a fairly constant refrain in my recent reading, so I wanted to take a look myself and have the luxury of pages instead of screens. I scanned for interesting lines and found one, "Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations." The rest came from that. It's long. Next month, perhaps, the editing will begin on all these pieces. For now, I'm piling up stones.
What the rock wants
1. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. This you do as you feel its weight in your palm and test it for a certain flatness. To balance stone on stone you might imagine the rock aligning its crystalline structures like a spine, but that only serves to turn the rock into you, or you to stone and neither of those makes it easier to make the rock stack higher. Better, you think, to imagine a planet-size boulder cracking, fracturing, breaking its way to smaller approximations of itself. Chips off the block. Not amoebic in its division but a demonstration of some mechanical shattering and smoothing that results, over time, in a sort of cloning. A splitting off, a rubbing away of excess that creates, finally, the approximate unity of the things. A beach of smooth stones, some small enough for skipping over the yielding flatness of water, an act that gives the stone the sensation it seeks—trajectory, movement. The opposite of itself, not falling or standing but flight. Lightness. A gradual smoothing by air. What the rock wants.
2. We try this ourselves the night a truck dumps a pile of jackhammered driveway in the dark back yard. The idea is to turn this cairn into a patio. Poor man’s flagstone. Not, perhaps, what the rock wants. We’re kids too small to chuck the chunks but try it anyway, tipping them from the top, de facto wind or water, wrecking crew to catalyze a breakdown of the jagged mass to powdered concrete and sand, or liquid igneous that eons turn to a cool, flat slab. Or so we make believe. We imagine the mountain leveling itself to bedrock, returning to some kind of stasis, a suburb, barbecue, longed-for cement truck. We imagine the unlikely sensation of flight. We imagine pulling away.
3/22/11
Image by Chris Devers, via Flickr.
