On the Place of Rocks

One of the most powerful ways that place works is as a form of categorization. Things get categorized according to where they are, or, more often, where they should be. A place for everything and everything in its place. This was the basis for my PhD thesis and first book, In Place/Out of Place: Ideology, Geography and Transgression published way back in 1996. This basic function of place in human thought has stayed with me through all my work since. Here I want to think about this use of place in relation to the seemingly most inert of things – rocks.

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The Dominican Friar and teacher of Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, was a scholar of place. Informed by Aristotle and the Arabic texts of Avicenna and Averroes, he wrote De Natura Loci (The Nature of Place) around 1850. Albertus was also fascinated by rocks. He wrote a whole book on them called The Book of Minerals (De Mineralibus). In it he wrote that

“the specific form of individual stones is mortal, just like humans (mortalia sicut et homines); and if [stones] are kept for a long time away from the place where they are produced [extra loca generationis], they perish” (2.1.4)

In this reflection on the “death” of stones he suggests that stones flourish when they are in the right place and, essentially, die when they are moved.

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A while ago I was fortunate enough to visit the archipelago of Svalbard as part of Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland project. As the project involved digging up soil and rocks from an island recently revealed by retreating ice and then shipping it back to the UK to make a scale model of the island, we were led to reflect on moving rocks. The land that makes up Svalbard, which is now a little over 1000km south of the North Pole, was once (about 800 million years ago) very close to the South Pole. On its journeys, it crossed the equator (about 400 million years ago). If you visit Svalbard, and are inclined to look, you can see red rocks that look as though they belong in Arizona or Alice Springs. This is red Devonian sandstone and was formed when Svalbard was approximately where Morocco is now.

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Thanks to the more recent travels of us humans, rocks have come and gone from this place on the edge of the world over the last 400 or so years. They have been used in the ballast of ships. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Ernest Mansfield, an eccentric English capitalist mined marble from a quarry at Ny London (New London) believing it would make him rich(er). The marble from Svalbard, he surmised, might compete with the marble from Italian quarries and furnish the kitchens do Mayfair mansions. The marble, cracked and shattered by freeze and thaw, fell apart on its voyage home to England and had to be thrown into the sea. Coal is still extracted to fire the industries of Russia and Scandinavia. Dotted around present-day Svalbard there are bits and pieces of bricks from the Netherlands (yellow) and England (red) left by explorers and adventurers.

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In the natural world a rock out of place is referred to as an “erratic” – it is usually possible to trace its origins and account for its travels in the ice of a glacier or in the water of a stream or river. The cracked marbles of Ernest Mansfield and the yellow and red bricks left by explorers on the islands of Svalbard are also erratics, carried by us. Anthropocene erratics.

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Poets like erratics. The poet Alyson Hallett, for instance, was “bewitched” when she learned of glacial erratics on the slopes of Cader Idris in Wales.

I felt as if a door had opened onto a different way of seeing the world. Instead of being eternally fixed in place, stones were suddenly fellow travellers and movement was an essential part of their natures. I thought not only of erratics but also of the stones we place on graves, the pebbles that we bring home after a day at the beach. Was it possible, I wondered, for that pebble to want to be picked up and taken away as much as I wanted to pick it up and take it with me?^[1]

Part of Hallett’s poetic practice has been to collect stones, engrave then with the words, “and stones moved silently across the world” and move then to sites around the world including near Bristol, at a retreat centre in Massachusetts, in Wollongong, Australia, and on the isle of Iona in Scotland.

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The word “erratic” is etymologically derived from the 14^th century Middle English word erratik which is, in turn, derived from the Latin errāticus which means “wandering”, “roving” or “straying”. Errare, meanwhile, means “error” – to make a mistake, which is also “to wander”. Thus, the physical act of wandering – particularly aimless wandering – was essentially to make a mistake. The original “error” was an unpredictable movement that would lead you, or a rock, to be “out of place”. It was not until 1849 that the word “erratic” was used to describe geologically transported boulders.

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Albertus Magnus’ treatise on place was an early form of environmental determinism. In it, he classified different human groups according to the climates they inhabited. This was a foreshadowing of the logic that would eventually lead to the invention of “races” which went hand in hand with European colonial projects. People, like rocks, had their “proper place”. Outside of these places, following this logic, they became “erratics” – vagrant wanderers – errors.

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^[1] https://www.thestonelibrary.com/the_stone_library.html