Kim Laybourn

>>If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil of pleached and intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest, the seclusion of the spot, and your marvel at the thick unbroken shade in the midst of the open spaces, will prove to you the presence of deity. Or if a cave, made by the deep crumbling of the rocks, holds up a mountain on its arch, a place not built with hands but hollowed out into such spaciousness by natural causes, your soul will be deeply moved by a certain intimation of the existence of God. We worship the sources of mighty rivers; we erect altars at places where great streams burst suddenly from hidden sources; we adore springs of hot water as divine, and consecrate certain pools because of their dark waters or their immeasurable depth.<< >>De siger at sten bliver til svaler i regnen, og til sten igen når det klarer op.<< Quotes: Seneca, A god doth dwell, but what god know we not - Moral letters to Lucilius, Letter 41, On the god within us, 65 CE. Eliot Weinberger, Tu Fus liv, 2024.

>>The surrounding nature only perceives us momentarily, as we notice a fleeting scratch on the elbow. The sand barely notices our presence, only as a manageable obstacle, as it blows with the wind, like tiny streams of running waters, about to merge into creeks and soon grow into devastating and flooding rivers. By then, we are no longer an obstacle. Does there exist anything more terrifying, facing the inhuman, than being reduced to nothing. Robbed one’s agency and identity. To be regarded as an unremarkable object.<< >>All matter does have a history, but it doesn’t remember it. So, in the beginning, at the big bang, there was basically just protons hydrogen. Then the first generations of stars began manufacturing in their cores through fusion, heavier elements. The matter that now makes up the Earth, was around for that, its taken many forms, but if you could ask, any given electron, about that history, it would not have any information. It looks like all other electrons. Its only when we have, more complex entities, or populations of entities, where there is a memory of history. No earth rock remembers, the bold composition of the solar nebula anymore.<< >>An encounter with the stones, with the grains of sand, the dust particles, is an encounter with a strange non-human understanding of time. An abyssal time. Inconceivable to us. Our history is written, like writing in water, but the grains remain, all the way to the end.<< Quotes: 1: An unremarkable object. 2: Deborah Stratman, Last Things, 2023. 3: All the way to the end. Images: 2: Deborah Stratman, Last Things, 2023. 6: Deborah Stratman, Last Things, 2023.

>>The regulated speech of poetry may be as close as we can get to such things —to the stilled voice of the inanimate object or insentient standing of trees.<< >>You’re an animal, […] You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.<< >>One way to stop seeing trees, or rivers, or hills, only as “natural resources” is to class them as fellow beings—kinfolk. I guess I’m trying to subjectify the universe, because look where objectifying it has gotten us. To subjectify is not necessarily to co-opt, colonize, exploit. Rather, it may involve a great reach outward of the mind and imagination. What tools have we got to help us make that reach?<< Quotes: 1. Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things, 2012. 2: Becky Chambers, A psalm for the wild-built, 2021. 3: Ursula K Le Guin, Late in the Day, 2016. Images: 1: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Woman in the Dunes 砂の女, 1964. 4: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Woman in the Dunes 砂の女, 1964. 6: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Woman in the Dunes 砂の女, 1964.

>>So hills and valleys into singing break, And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue, While active winds and streams both run and speak, Yet stones are deep in admiration.<< >>Jordens største frygt er ensomheden. Det mørke, der dannes af skyggerne fra utallige sammenpressede korn, er skræmmende nok i sig selv, men i det mindste er man aldrig ensom i dette delte mørke. Engang var de helt alene. De drev ingen steder hen, flød uden retning, gennem universets enorme og endeløse tomrum. Dér i mørket mellem stjernerne, mistede de al selvfølelse, al fornemmelse af tilhørsforhold. Dette er et mørke af en helt anden art - ikke vævet af de kastede skygger fra alt for mange væsener samlet på ét sted, men derimod et mørke bestående af ​​fraværet af alle ting, på alt for meget plads. Her faldt de, kun ledsaget af en uudgrundelig overflod af tid. Falder du længe nok, bliver du følelsesløs. Falder du længere endnu, bliver sindet stille.<< >>The Worm-men comforted the Empress, telling her, That the Earth was not so horrid a Dwelling, as she did imagine; for, said they, not onely all Minerals and Vegetables, but several sorts of Animals can witness, that the Earth is a warm, fruitful, quiet, safe, and happy habitation; and though they want the light of the Sun, yet are they not in the dark, but there is light even within the Earth, by which those Creatures do see that dwell therein.<< Quotes: 1: Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans (The Flint Sparkling), 1650. 2: Flintstenens beretning. 3: Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, 1666. Image: 6: Nehemiah Grew, Saline Chymistry of Plants,  Anatomy of Plants, 1680.

>>the strange feeling that the megaliths themselves were the source of the pulsing sound, singing out at sunrise like the colossal statue of Memnon seems to do at ancient Thebes. I have heard it. Shortly before dawn there is an insistent hum. A chest, rather than a throat, sound which emanates from the stone and rises in tone as the statue is struck by the first rays of the sun. […] This property […] of silicon, is what lies at the heart of our whole electronics industry. It is what makes transistors and microchips and semiconductors possible. […] all stone, which is after all largely crystalline, should be seen as a sort of macrochip. A natural, if somewhat haphazard, electronic system capable of storing energies and, given the right circumstances, playing these back later.<< >>A unison electric humming rises from the rock. You recall accounts describing how stones are thought to be superconductors, capable of gathering, store, and release energy—such as solar energy and radioactive radiation—accumulated in their bodies as data. The very same radiant energy can be heard as it is released or held back during the night. You listen to their unanimous song, flowing like a constant wail of echoes through the cave passage. Countless as they are thrown about in the bottomless gorges and the narrow shafts and fissures. So many that they overlap, making them sound like a constant loop of dissonance. Soon the harmonies tune themselves into a uniform resonance. A tone that can contain the passage of ages. They sing of the stones’ journeys in perpetual circulation, of species arriving, their doings and dealings, of their branching out and their disappearance. A testimony, a witness-song.<< >>It has neither language nor speech, but creates tongues and hearts through which it feels and speaks.<< Quotes: 1: Lyall Watson, The nature of things - the secret life of inanimate objects, 1990. 2: 3: Georg Christoph Tobler or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Natur, 1828. Images: 3: Stone Whistles from the Ardennes. Renée Louise Doize, Sifflets Ardennais en Pierre, Bulletin de la Société Royale Belge d’Anthropologie et de Préhistoire, 1938.

>>Geological history shows that clay first appeared – as silicates leached from rocks – just at the time biomolecules began to form into protocells – cell-like structures, but incomplete – and eventually membrane-enclosed cells. The geological events matched nicely with biological events.<< >>They settle down, one stratum upon another, into a mud composed almost entirely of themselves, a mud that hardens and becomes stone again. They are restored to the immutability they once renounced. Now, even though their shape may still occasionally be recognized in the cement where they are embedded, that shape is no more than a cipher, a sign denoting the transient passage of a species.<< >>If I am stone, I am some kind of shoddy crumbly stuff like sandstone or serpentine, or maybe schist. Or not even stone but clay, or not even clay but mud. And I wish that those who take me for granite would once in a while treat me like mud. << Quotes: 1: Clay May Have Been Birthplace of Life, Cornell University biological engineers report in the Nov. 7 online issue of the journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature Publishing, 2013. 2: Roger Caillois, L’écriture des pierres ( The Writing of Stones), 1970. 3: Ursula K. Le Guin, Being taken for granite, 2004. Images: 2: Enter life; belemnites, Roger Caillois. 1970. 4: Cave of forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog, 2010. 6: The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, Arwen Curry, 2018.

>>Thought is poised on a knife-edge between two abysses, into the unfathomable depths of which she is for ever peering, till her sight grows dim and her brain reels in the effort to pierce the thick gloom that closes the vista on either hand. Yet we understate the mystery that compasses about our little life when we speak of it as if it were only twofold, the mystery of the infinitely great and the infinitely small in space. […] Thus our metaphor of thought poised between two abysses needs to be corrected and expanded: not two, but four infinities, four gulfs, four bottomless chasms yawn at her feet; and down into them some Tempter -or is it some bright angel? -whispering at her ear, perpetually lures her to plunge, only, it would seem, to beat and flutter her ineffectual wings in the impenetrable darkness. Yet even here, unappalled by the apparently insoluble nature of the enigma, the human mind refuses to acquiesce in these manifold antitheses.<< >>What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.<< >>Only when the construct falters do I reach what it could not accomplish.<< Quotes: 1: James George Frazer, The Worship of Nature. 1926. 2: Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, 1873. 2: Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., 1964. Images: 2: Paysage aux rochers, près de Royan, Odilon Redon, 1875. 4: Les rochers (Rochers en Bretagne), Odilon Redon, 1875. 6: La Pente rocheuse, Odilon Redon, 1875.

>>When man began seriously to reflect on the nature of things, it was almost inevitable that [they] should explain them on the analogy of what [they] knew best, that is, by [their] own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Accordingly [they] tended to attribute to everything, not only to animals, but to plants and inanimate objects, a principle of life like that of which [they] was [themself] conscious, and which, for want of a better name, we are accustomed to call a soul. This […] philosophy is commonly known as animism. It is a […] interpretation of the universe in terms of man.<< >>For Kant, it is hubris if we imagine the way humans perceive things as the only possible way of relating to things, neglecting the ways that a bat, a whale, a tree, or a mechanical watch otherwise interact with their world. […] Kant urges us to understand that what we perceive the thing to be is never the thing-in-itself, but rather our relationship with the world.<< Quotes: 1: James George Frazer, The Worship of Nature. 1926. 2: Tsaiyi Wu, A Dream of a Stone: The Ethics of De-anthropocentrism, 2020. Image: 6: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, A Halo of Moons, 2004.

>>The investigator of Nature should take heed not to reduce observation to mere notion, to substitute words for this notion, and to use and deal with these words as if they were things. How difficult it is, though, to refrain from replacing the thing with its sign, to keep the object alive before us instead of killing it with a word.<< >>It takes a while to learn to talk
the long language of the rock.<< Quotes: 1: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colour, 1810. 2: Ursula K. Le Guin, A Request, Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems 1960-2010. Images: 2: Rabanus Maurus, De gemmis, De rerum naturis, 842-847 AD. 6: Dog-headed merchants on the island of Angamanam, Livre des merveilles, 1410–12.

>>SIA: Man kan med rette hævde, at mange af os mennesker er sjæleblinde, når vi ikke ser og anerkender planter, træer og dyrs sjæle. Som jeg læser din bog er det en af dine underliggende pointer, at vi, som art, mister vores sjæl, når vi ikke kan se, at verden er sjælfuld og at sjæleblindhed er et centralt problem i verden i dag. EK: Vor tids etiske praksis bunder i at styrke denne form for opmærksomhed. Bogens helt store ønske er, at tage en skovrig tænkning tilbage: Igen at lære at tænke med og som skove. Det handler ikke om at “tage ned til de indføidte, der har forstået det hele,” men derimod om at finde frem til den tænkning, der foregår overalt omkring os og inden i os, gøre krav på denne tænkning og kultivere den. SIA: Hvad er en ‘skovrig tænkning’ (sylvan thinking)? EK: En skovrig tænkning er en tænkning, vi deler med andre levende væsener. Den billedlige, ikke-symbolske tænkning, som symbolsk tænkning er indlejret.<< Uddrag fra samtale mellem Sofie Isager Ahl og Eduardo Kohn, Sjæleblindhed, 2016.

>>When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver. But I did not fall. From nape to heel I discovered my self bound to earth. I felt a sort of appeasement in surrendering to it my weight. Gravitation had become as sovereign as love. The earth, I felt, was supporting my back, sustaining me, lifting me up, transporting me through the immense void of night.<< >>Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?<< Quotes: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand And Stars, 1939. N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season, 2015.

>>The word for human is living soil.<< >>”we” are made of the same elements as is the planet. We are “walking, talking minerals,” redistributions of “oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, phosphorous, and other elements of Earth’s crust into two-legged, upright forms.” Like wind or river, human individuals and groups are geologic forces that can alter the planet in countless and […] game-changing ways.<< >>Soils are in many ways like living tissues and may have habits we have only just begun to fathom.<< Quotes: Sofie Isager Ahl, Regeneration, 2023. Jane Bennett, Earthling, Now and Forever?, 2012. Lyall Watson, The nature of things, 1990.