Description
Flesh would become stone and stone would become flesh, and someday they would meet in the mouth of a bird.
-Louise Erdrich
How does it feel to speak through aeons, to be solid, to be composite? Stones have fascinated writers since they first began carving words into them: they are silent, animate, enigmatic, charged with history both human and non-human. We’ll spend our first session looking closely at various texts by writers like Louise Erdrich, Keri Hulme, Cixin Liu, Roger Caillois, Wislawa Szymborska, John McPhee, and others. We will form a web of concepts and definitions to get us going, and each participant will receive a stone to write with for homework. In the second session, we’ll begin to explore connections between stones, language, and writing. We’ll try to find the self in the stone, as well as looking a bit more at the nitty-gritty science of rock to develop and undertake a series of prompts together that are inspired by different formative processes in Geology.
Session 1 (June 11th)
Thoughts and notes that came up via reading Louise Erdrich's The Stone:
existence as "a concatenation of things" (le Guin)
the act of naming (or not naming) things
the origin of minerals/metals/etc. -> the Big Bang
thinking about the Golden Record on Voyager 1 - made of gold, collected and inscribed here, sent back out into the universe to find its origin/life/something...
Concept of "strata"...
Podcast: "Ambient"
The Swan Book by Alexis Wright
Event next year: Poetic Inquiry Symposium 2024 @ AUT
"My Aquatic Uncle" (story)
Sorawit Songsataya - look into most recent exhibition
Amelia Barikan - Sound Fossils, Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction
Chris Bradock - Animism (book)
Session 2 (June 17th) - Unfortunately missed this session as I was sick
Look at the stone for at least three minutes straight, going beyond the point of boredom and distraction. Without taking notes, simply contemplate. Hold it, examine from various angles, feel the space between you.
Writing through the lens of the stone, inhabit a particular moment from the expanse of time in which it has existed (or will exist in future). Is it a period of formation? Coming apart? Is it the development of something that grew on its surface, or a mineral it accumulated? Is it a particular spot in the ocean where it lived, or where a particle within it lived? (We did this part for 5 minutes, but I think it could be 10-15).
Finally, write for 10 minutes as the stone gazes back at YOU. What does it know about you? What does the attention refracted back on you feel like in your senses? Don’t just describe what it sees, but what you experience when its gaze is on you. Allow your viewpoints, the stone and your own, to shift and blur - it’s okay for language to go beyond making sense. If you feel confused, write into that.
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