Stone: an ecology of the inhuman

374 Pages·2016·3.752 MB·English

by  Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome

Stone
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Stone
An Ecology of the Inhuman
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis • London
Portions of “Geophilia: The Love of Stone” were previously published as “Time out of
Memory,” in The Post- Historical Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 37– 61, and as “Stories of Stone,” postmedieval 1 (2010):
56– 63, reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan. Portions of “Time: The Insistence
of Stone” were previously published as “Pilgrimages, Travel Writing, and the Medieval
Exotic,” in Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English, ed. Elaine Treharne and
Greg Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 611–2 8, reprinted by permission
of Oxford University Press, and as “The Future of the Jews of York,” in Christians and
Jews in Medieval England: Narratives and Contexts for the York 1190 Massacre, ed. Sarah
Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 278– 93, reprinted
by permission of Boydell and Brewer and York Medieval Press. Portions of “Force:
The Adventure of Stone” were previously published as “The Sex Life of Stone,” in From
Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe, ed. E. Jane Burns and Peggy
McCracken (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 17– 38, reprinted by
permission of the University of Notre Dame Press, and as “Queering the Inorganic,” in
Queer Futures: Reconsidering Normativity, Activism, and the Political, ed. Eveline Killian,
Elahe Haschemi Yekani, and Beatrice Michaelis (Farhnham: Ashgate, 2013), 149– 64,
reprinted by permission of Ashgate, and as “Green Children from Another World, or
The Archipelago in England,” in Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago,
Island, England, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 75– 94,
reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
Copyright 2015 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome.
Stone: an ecology of the inhuman / Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8166-9257-6 (hc)
isbn 978-0-8166-9262-0 (pb)
1. Nature—Religious aspects. 2. Stone—Miscellanea. 3. Ecology—Philosophy.
4. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. I. Title.
BD581.C64 2015
113—dc23 2014045916
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ContentS
Introduction: Stories of Stone 1
Geophilia: The Love of Stone 19
Excursus: The Weight of the Past 67
Time: The Insistence of Stone 75
Excursus: A Heart Unknown 127
Force: The Adventure of Stone 131
Excursus: Geologic 187
Soul: The Life of Stone 195
Afterword: Iceland 253
Acknowledgments 259
Notes 265
Bibliography 321
Index 355
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IntroduCtIon
Stories of Stone
Three Geonarratives
1. Like a Rock
Bereft of family, home, and health, Job wonders how to survive the world’s
catastrophes. “My strength is not the strength of stones,” he laments, “nor
is my flesh of brass.”1 Rocks and hard metals hold an endurance no mor-
tal flesh can own. Nothing like stone, Job submits to sorrow and speaks a
story of unbearable humanity. A vertiginous perspective shift unfolds when
God intervenes, invoking geological time and demanding where Job was
when the foundations of the earth were laid (Job 38:4). Does Job know
the thunderous activity of the elements: rain that cascades for no witness,
ice that hardens like stone, stars that course the heavens, the secrets of the
whirlwind, the yawn of the submarinal abyss? Can he discern the force of
the inhuman world, the long sweep of its eons? Job’s complaint is rebuked
through the invocation of a scale that diminishes him, reducing the human
to its vanishing point.
A rock’s endurance is not Job’s. Yet Adam was fashioned “de limo terrae,”
from mud or clay (Genesis 2:7). Like stone, human flesh mingles dry earth
with binding water: an unsettled union of wet and dry, cold and warm, fire
and tears. Stone’s materiality belongs equally to Eve (created from bone,
1
Introduction
the lithic within the corporeal) and to Job’s unnamed wife, who suffers
just as profoundly but without full story. Through God’s breath men and
women have a living soul (“animam viventem”). That difference perhaps
makes Job’s lithic inheritance irrelevant, even as it renders his complaint
more complicated: he is in fact suffused with stoniness. By the thirteenth
century, moreover, the philosopher and scientist Albertus Magnus had to
refute the idea that stones possess souls, so lively do rocks appear when
examined not simply in comparison to humans but in their native thriving.
Stone is primal matter, inhuman in its duration. Yet despite its incalculable
temporality, the lithic is not some vast and alien outside. A limit- breaching
intimacy persistently unfolds.
Hurl a rock and you’ll shatter an ontology, leave taxonomy in glistening
shards.
2. Like a Mountain
In a seminal work of environmental theorizing Aldo Leopold introduced
to the ecological lexicon the resilient phrase “thinking like a mountain.”2
Leopold begins with a wolf’s howl, an “outburst of wild defiant sorrow” that
reverberates in sonic progression down a wooded slope. To deer the cry is a
warning of mortality; for pines, an augury of blood upon snow; to scaven-
gers, an announcement of the feast to arrive; for ranchers the bay is loss; for
hunters, the call of prey. The wolf’s bonds to each human and nonhuman are
varied and deep, constituting a knowledge both aeonic and recondite: “Only
the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a
wolf . . . mountains have a secret opinion about them.”3 Leopold learns of
this withdrawn relation when, dreaming a huntsman’s paradise, he shoots
a wolf and her pups. The peak without its pack quickly becomes a barren
expanse. The deer proliferate to devour every leaf, impoverishing the eco-
system. Eventually the “starved bones of the hoped- for deer herd, dead of
its own too- much” join the denuded undergrowth.4 Because a mountain
persists so much longer than pines, wolves, bucks, and people, its rocky ex-
panses hold the profundity of a long past. A meshwork of connection, the
mountain entangles every struggling life and imbues even stone with vitality.
At the summit, perspective. Leopold performs a rhetorical move famil-
iar in environmental writing, employing a strategic anthropomorphism
2
Introduction
to deepen human sensitivity to ecological precariousness. “Thinking like
a mountain” stresses the stabilities achieved by diffuse biomes and the
dangers of their disruption. Yet Leopold’s range is too small. A mountain
is something more than an allegory for Edenic nature, a figure in a human
story of balanced inhabitance and expansive earthly interconnection.5 Rela-
tions do not create things like rocks and mountains; things like rocks and
mountains are what enable relations to flourish.6 Writing in the twelfth
century, Marie de France labeled such inhuman agency aventure, future-
laden “arrival” or “adventure.” In her lays Guigemar and Yonec she describes
women imprisoned in towers of cold marble. Escape into a wider world
arrives only upon the hurling of the self out from stony enclosure and
into rocky mobility: a leap through an open window, the trying of a door
thought bolted, a wandering from immurement across companionable
landscapes. A road plunges deep into a barrow and emerges at a city fash-
ioned of silver. A crag sought for suicide is where a ship awaits, conveyance
to a distant life. A grandiose tomb offers not tiresome instruction in human
brevity but an invitation to an unexpected future, to changed story.
Climb a mountain to seek a vista and its native prospect will give you
ontological vertigo. To think like a mountain requires a leap from ephem-
eral stabilities, from the diminutive boundedness of merely human tales. In
the geological frame within which mountains exist, pinnacles rise and fall
in fearsome undulations. Peaks ascend when tectonic plates push against
each other, crumble as water wears granite to dust and carries to estuar-
ies silt for the making of new rock. Continents smash against each other
then break to wander the sea. Blunt and inscrutable, stone does not offer
itself as metaphor for natural harmonies, for systems in lasting balance. The
tracks of living creatures are the barest of archives, their howls and speech
the most fleeting of traces. “Thinking like a mountain” extends the ambit
of critical inquiry by yoking two figures neither settled nor fully known:
a geologic formation that does not remain still and a creature of unstable
history, easily undone.
3. Like a Rolling Stone
Bruno Latour writes of the objects that crowd laboratories, rain forests, cit-
ies, and houses, their compliance or resistance when humans form alliances
3