The Migration Habits of Stones

Today we bring you the second instalment of In Other Tongues, our series about learning to listen to the myriad other voices beyond the human. Inspired by the three-day creative summit held this summer in Dartington, UK, we invited six contributors – artists, writers, academics, poets, performers – to explore the ways in which language and culture are influenced by the non-human, and more-than-human, voices that permeate and shape our world. The series continues with poet Alyson Hallett on the migration of stones.

 

Alyson Hallett is a prize-winning poet and Hawthornden Fellow. Besides publishing six books and pamphlets of poetry, Alyson has also written drama and an audio-diary for BBC Radio 4; an essay on Chalk for BBC Radio 3; drama for Sky Television and a book of short stories.
It’s August, 2001. Six months since my nan, Hilda Hallett, died. I loved my nan. She lived in a terraced, red-bricked house in Bridgwater, Somerset. We used to watch the wrestling on a Saturday in front of a gas fire and eat the cake she had baked for my visit. Chocolate cake, coffee cake, cherry cake. All of them delicious. Her house was the centre of our lives. The door was never locked. There was a plastic curtain swishing in the hall to deter flies from coming in during the summer months when the door was left open. My nan polished the brass strip at the entrance to her house, she also swept her bit of pavement, and sometimes the stretch of road outside her door. Seven children in one small house and you value the way private space spills into public space. The expansion this gives. The way private and public are stitched together.

I had 26 aunts and uncles and 57 cousins: but when my nan died, she left a gash in our lives the depth and height of Cheddar gorge.

Six months after we took her body to the crematorium in Taunton, my nan appeared in my dreams. You need to go and climb Cader Idris, she said. When I woke up her voice was ringing in my head. I knew that Cader Idris was a mountain in the Snowdonia range in North Wales, but I also knew that I didn’t climb mountains, I was busy and had no intention of doing what a voice in a dream had told me to do. I decided to ignore it, to assume that it would just dissolve, as most dreams do.

How wrong was I?

Night and day Nan’s voice haunted me. It seeped into everything. It was ink in water. Sugar in coffee. The buzz of a trapped fly. Go and climb Cader Idris. Go and climb Cader Idris. In the end I cancelled work, hired a car, threw a tent and a sleeping bag into the boot and set off for Wales. On the long drive there, my mind was febrile. I had no idea what I was doing. Was I mad to be following a voice in a dream? Had I lost the plot altogether? If only I’d had this quote from Anaïs Nin, I might have been a bit more gracious in my surrender. She says:

The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

I pitched my tent by a river. Slept badly. Woke early and laced up my boots. Before entering the foothills, I lit a candle and incense and asked for permission to climb. Rituals are important to me. They ground me. Centre me. Allow me to knock on a door and begin lacing together different levels of reality. And as the poet Homer notes, all gods and goddesses love to come down and feast on perfumed incense smoke. That morning at the base of Cader Idris, I was almost hoping to hear the word no, so that I could pack everything up, go home and return to a way of being that I thought of as normal. But no didn’t come. And so I set off, up the stony path, up the steep and stony path that wound its way to the summit.

I was out of my mind. I was in it too. I was a confusion of thoughts. I was walking a stony path. Walking into moss, into the tumbling stream, into the gnarled bark of old oaks that fringed the stream. W.G. Sebald says:

work gets done in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he’s looking for.

I was listening to my animal self, my uncivilised self, the lizard that still inhabits the core of my brain. I was like the dog following its nose, only this time I was following a dream with my feet. In the foothills of Cader Idris, I lay down on a low-lying branch of an oak and dissolved.

‘Foothills Girl, Cader Idris

I’m a dedicated foothills girl
dreaming where the stream runs fast
and trees screech towards the sky.

At home in the crook of an oak
watching moss-skinned stones
while the mountain climbs behind me.

no-one else stops here but me, seduced
by low-life greening and the perfume of pine.
Nothing here is mine and I’m madly in love –

thinking of proposing marriage to a mountain
if you’re allowed to do such a thing.
Love, honour and obey – I’d stay faithful

to this rock more easily than any human.
We’d live out our mutual passion day by voluptuous day
until the floods came or we both melted with the sun.

I continued to climb the mountain. Halfway up I came across a boulder by the side of the path and stopped to stare at it. It looked out of place, as if it didn’t belong. I saw a man approaching from a distance. As he came nearer, he said hello then stopped to talk. He asked why I was looking at the boulder. I’m wondering where it came from, I said. It’s an erratic, he said. A what? I said. An erratic. A stone that broke away from its motherbed and travelled inside a glacier. Really? I said. The man nodded, then told me he was a geologist.

I stared at the boulder – it had travelled hundreds of miles across the country, the glacier making gorges and valleys as it sawed through the ground with its icy prow. And all the while the little boulder inside, like a baby, or an eye, waiting for the sun to warm up, for enough heat to melt the ice and release it.

It took a moment or two for the geologist’s words to sink in. Stones moved. They migrated from one place to another. They did not stop for borders or boundaries. Solid as a rock / written in stone – suddenly everything I knew about stones flipped on its head. They weren’t just fixed in one place; they were travellers.

And that was it. The moment when a seed was planted and took root in the disturbed soil of my mind.

I continued to the top of the mountain, said goodbye to my nan as the mist curled around us and black mountain crows made their strange and eerie sounds.

Over the following four months, the seed continued to root and grow. I became obsessed with travelling stones. With the different ways they moved. Erratics. Ballast in the empty hold of a ship. Pebbles picked up from beaches and taken home. Emeralds, rubies, opals worn around our necks and on our fingers. The way plesiosaurs swallowed stones to stop them from rising when they swam underwater. Animals and birds that swallow stones to aid digestion – chickens, crocodiles, ostriches, penguins, seals, whales.

I applied for an Arts Council Grant to explore the migration habits of stones. I never for one second thought they’d go for it, which meant I had great fun applying. I had an idea that I’d make a piece of public art, that I’d collaborate with a stone carver and site a stone with words carved into it in a public place. I’d done this once before, and I liked the radical democracy of placing words in stone in public spaces – work that existed for anyone and anything.

(Aside: I grew up in the town of Street, home of Clarks shoes. The Clarks family were Quakers and philanthropists. Next to the factory entrance was a Henry Moore sculpture, Sheep Piece. Every day when I walked up and down the high street to school, I passed this sculpture. From an early age, then, it was obvious to me that art was placed in the community; it was for everyone; factory workers, children walking to school, people driving by. Art lived in the open air, it was democratic, it was essential.)

When the grant application form asked about the demand for the work I wanted to make, I wrote a long, philosophical essay about how it was a mistake to think demand could be established before work was made. I talked about creating work that would be given as a gift, quoted the anthropologist Marcel Mauss, argued that my work would be a gift to a planet that had already given me the biggest gift of all, the ground upon which I live my life.

As a mirror to their bureaucracy, I also made an accompanying booklet detailing how they should read my application, and at which point they should reference the relevant notes and attachments. I believed they were never going to fund me and so, I had nothing to lose. In response to the questions about audience, I argued that my audience couldn’t really be counted if I made work that was sited out of doors as it included insects, birds, breezes, people, rain, sunshine, the moon, thunder, lightning. How do you count the rain? I asked. In response to a question about duration, I suggested that if I had words carved into slate the probable length of the piece of work would be around 300 years.

I’ve always been a dreamer, an idealist. And, all those years ago, this was something the Arts Council valued. They said yes, and gave me an Individual Artist’s Award that was enough to live on for a year.

I have been curating this project, The Migration Habits of Stones, for 16 years now and it’s not over yet. I’ve made five stones with words carved into them by the letter carver Alec Peever and sited them in different places around the world. I’ve made an audio-diary for the radio about a stone I took to Australia. I have even talked at the Geological Society, the heart of geological science, about this work. It was here that Bryan Lovell, who was president of the Society at that time, took me to one side and confided that science could take us so far in the understanding of rocks and stones, but it was poets who could take us further, who could take us into the hearts of them.

And stones moved silently…

‘The mode of perceiving nature, under the rule of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical degradation of, nature.’ – Marx and Engels

And stones moved silently across the world
hurled into an empty ship’s weightless hold
folded into a glacier’s freezing mound,
quick-pocketed by tourists and children
with an eye for things shiny and round.

Bound for other lands stones sailed without papers
traffickers in freedom crossing borders
with no regard for guards, guard dogs
or guns. Dumb as the tongueless
their acts alone sounded the long, low cry.

Each stone carried centuries of weight
and meaning. Ballast from Bristol belly-up
in New York’s East river, erratics paused
on the slopes of Cader Idris, fingers of quartz
startling my window sill – all of them travelled

from the place where they began, where we might
have said they belonged. Migrating past line,
border, boundary, their movements a constellation
of questions; where is home, what is home,
and who in this world can claim land as their own?

Exif_JPEG_PICTURE
Migrating stone number 4′, carved by Alec Perver. Photograph by Alyson Hallett. Iona.
AH-85 (1)
Migrating stone number 5′, carved by Alec Perver. Photograph by Peter Stone. This stone is currently located in Los Angeles where it will begin to migrate from person to person.

 

Notes:

1 – For further information about my work please visit thestonelibrary.com
2 – Both poems in this blog are from The Stone Library, published by Peterloo Poets
3 – The quote from Anaïs Nin is from her Diary (Vol. IV)
4 – The quote from W.G. Sebald is from The Emergence of Memory, Seven Stories Press (2007)
5 – This blog is an extract from a keynote talk that was delivered in five chapters. This is based on Chapter Two. The full talk will be published by Triarchy Press later this year.

Comments
  1. I love the thought that stones travel – it’s a deeply calming one for me. I read the blog of Jackie Morris, the artist, and she puts gold leaf symbols onto stones and leaves them on the beach for humans, non-humans or the sea to find and take or just to leave where they are. What wonderful stories those stones could tell!

    1. wow, this is such powerful stuff for me…. amazing that you say that the artist Jackie Morris puts gold leaf symbols onto stones and leaves them on the beach for other beings to find.

      Would you believe it that I found a stone that looks like someone put a goldleaf symbol on it, near where I live. It was put there by nature and the gold colour occurs throughout the stone. It was found following a powerful journey in my imagination that was connected to stones and spirit totems. It has being a possitive part of a painful and difficult time in my life.

    2. ho amazing to hear about this – i have one stone with what appears to be a fragment of gold leaf on it. I wonder if it’s one of Jackie’s?

  2. Judging by the amount of pebbles and rocks I have amassed over the years from different places, stones DEFINITELY do travel :)) Bon voyage to all of them…

  3. Like just about everyone else, I collect pebbles and bring them home, to be added to the piles by my pond or the pile by my front door, or little piles on my window sills. I have been impressed by erratics too; and by the travelling stones in Death Valley that slide along the ice. I read in a book about the science of the seashore that specs of sand made from the dust of rocks take about a million years to get from their mother rocks on mountain tops to the beach.

    Beautiful essay, thank you.

  4. Cader Idris is a powerful place. It’s lake is the coldest water I’ve ever swum in. One has strange dreams there.

  5. Thank you so much for this beautiful awareness of all things not human. Yours is one of the voices I honor for speaking for the rocks and the mountains and all beings lost in the shuffle of our consumerists cultures

  6. Beautiful and inspiring piece of writing, Alyson. Thank you. I always visit your stone on Iona when I’m there (in addition of course to searching for the finger-drawing greenstones in the southwest corner of the isle)

  7. “In general, rocks aren’t living in the same way or at the same pace that we are. But you can find a rock, maybe a big boulder, maybe a little agate in a streambed, and by looking carefully at it, touching it or holding it, listening to it, or by a little talking and singing, a small ceremony, or being still and quiet with it, you can enter into the rock’s soul to some extent and the rock can enter into yours, if it’s disposed to. Most rocks live a long time. They’ve lived a long time before we pass them, and they’ll live a long time after. Some of them are very old, grandchildren of the coming to be of the earth and sun. If there were nothing else to be known from them that would be enough, their long age of being. But there is much other knowledge in rocks, there are things that can be understood only with the help of rocks. They will help people who handle and study and work with them with pleasure and respect, with mindfulness.”
    -Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Always Coming Home’.

  8. “And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer—the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.”
    -Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”

  9. “The love of stone is often unrequited.. An intimacy of long unfolding fails to be apprehended, and the story concludes in familiar solitudes, human exceptionalism and lithic indifference. Withdrawal and remoteness are inevitable themes within any romance of stone, since rock outlasts that which it draws close, that which draws it close, that to which it is strangely bound. Humans respire, reproduce, invent, desire and dream. The lithic inhabits the secret interiors of the earth. What could be more cloistered? Inorganic, nothing like the familiar animals we conditionally welcome into community, an everyday material that surfaces blunt rebuke to assimilation, stone remains aloof. Yet a mutuality is always possible, some narrative of companionship and concurrency. This essay maps geophilia, a pull, a movement, and a conjoint creativity that breaches ontological distance. Even if born of a general principle of matter, geophilia’s mobility and clasp possess their own rocky effects, in the quadruple sense “effects” carries of aftermath, agency, production, and belongings. An elemental geophilia surely exists outside human experience. Yet to us nonlithics, its force will be most evident in the relations that enmesh us over long scales of time and in the “storied matter” these confederations of the human and inhuman divulge . . . . Stone is a catalyst for relation, a generative substantiality through which story tenaciously emerges.This elemental agency is likely shared with all materiality, but its plots, structures, tempo, and denouements are its own. To stone belongs sweeping romances of scale, time, memorialization, creation, cataclysm, a relentless tectonicity (from tektōn, a carpenter or builder). Stone speaks differently from its sibling elements of air, water, and lightning-swift fire. Its injunction is always to step out of the breathless rapidity of anthropocentric frames and touch a world possessed of long futurity and deep past, a spatial expanse that stretches from the subterranean to the cosmic verge. Stone’s stories foreground the inhuman in its danger, dispassion, and forcefulness, but they offer as well strange amity, queer fellowship, precarious but enduring cohabitation.”
    -Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Stone. An Ecology of the Inhuman”

  10. Cader Idris is not only powerful, as Darkhorse says, it is weird. It has been years since I visited that part of Wales, but that mountain always stays in my mind.
    I once took three young boys up there for a day out and we found something quite peculiar – actually, totally impossible, unless we were on the borderline between worlds.
    We caught the bus from Barmouth to Dolgellau, and got out somewhere at the foot of the mountain, where a footpath led up through fields onto the steep slopes and up to the lake. Entering one field we found a tiny stream running down along the edge. Following the footpath up to the corner of the field, we found that the stream turned at right angles to again run along the edge.
    But that edge of the field also gently sloped up to the corner. We looked at it in silent puzzlement. We turned and went back to the beginning, walking up the side of the field beside the stream running down. At the corner we turned and walked down the next side beside the stream running up.
    We all agreed the stream was running uphill. We all agreed we could see no rational explanation for what we were looking at. So we went on up the mountain where, due to the jolly activity of three happy lads I nearly got taken into the next world by a rapidly migrating stone. But that’s another story.
    Thank you, Alyson, for reminding me of that wonderful place and of my own migrating stones, two of which have been with me since I was a child.

  11. Don’t overlook several boxes of rocks that somehow, 50-odd years ago, made their way from the Moon back to Earth. Apparently, that need was satisfied, and no more such journeys need be made.

  12. Thank you for this beautiful work. Here is a poem I wrote:

    And I am.
    Carbon and quartz and heavy matter,
    Onyx and agate.
    Always alone,
    Stoically stone.

    Once ground down and down
    Into the glowing fire beyond the sound.
    And then again out and around
    the green and growing ground
    Where I was found.

    I am open and eternal,
    I am closed and of this instant.
    And I breathe,
    Once every cycle,
    Twice every heartbeat.

    Into the ether,
    Out into the bone.
    Always alone,
    Stoically stone.

Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *