Friday, October 08, 2004

Minerals and Memory

Over the Labor Day weekend, I visited the Michiana Gem and Mineralogical Society show in downtown South Bend. Like many kids, I went through a rock hound phase, and I still have a few tumble-polished pebbles I collected on the rain-swept British beaches of my youth. If you went beach-combing early at the sea-side town of Aldeburgh, translucent pieces of Baltic amber would glow orange as sunlight angled across the beach. On the sandier, south east coast of Dorset, you’d find shells and chalky pebbles. By my teens, though, my enthusiasm for rocks had waned, and my tumble polisher was abandoned in the basement.

So, my trip to the gem show had an archeological dimension. As I wondered from booth to booth, I found myself digging up the names of minerals I’d long forgotten: there were rosy clumps of rhodochrosite, apple-green chrysoprase and glistering cubes of pyrites, fools’ gold. Several booths specialised in fossils. Along with delicate ferns traced in carbon, there were trilobites, and flies in amber. There were shiny ammonites, whose spiral shells had gradually been replaced by iron ores, to make a perfect metallic cast. As the vendors opened up tray after tray of specimens to show me, they talked about each acquisition, and told stories of calcite-dripping caves, travel and barter, their faces still illuminated by the same geeky enthusiasm I once shared.

Later that day, I unwrapped our spoils on the dining table. Nestled in crumpled newspaper, between the headlines of today’s crises, were chunks of rock and fossils from the depths of geological time. Two time scales converge. There’s a quarter-inch thick disk of agate, a slice through the petrified trunk of an ancient tree fern. All the vessels where the living sap once coursed are perfectly preserved, but turned to stone. There’s a trilobite, looking like a giant pill-bug in body armour, at once familiar and yet quite alien. Considering this fly in amber, I wonder what impulse it was following when a smothering drop of resin rolled over it, and preserved it for all eternity. What small, archaic ambition does this pebble hold, in its golden freeze frame?

When the hurricanes peeled the roofs off people’s homes in Florida, exposing the inner chambers of their lives, the TV cameras were there, too, to capture them permanently on film. What will future archeologists make of such imprints of long-gone lives? What lives will they imagine coursing between those walls?

There’s something about the idea of preserving ourselves that’s seductive. We compile photographs of our children into albums, build up sediments of paper ephemera: movie ticket stubs, old menus, concert programmes. The discarded toys of grandchildren are deposited on those left by long-gone children in parents’ basements. Personal web-pages become electronic shrines to the cult of our own personalities, not subject to mortal decay. By building up these protective carapaces, these layers of souvenirs and mementos, we hope our own version of things will outlast us.

But, as Ariell, the unreliable spirit of Shakespeare’s Tempest, reminds us, nature will transform what we leave behind, and remake us in ways we might never have imagined. Of the father whom Ferdinand believes drowned, Ariell sings:

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich, and strange:
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
Hark now I hear them ding dong bell.

Broadcast by Louise Collins on October 08, 2004
Customs & Rituals • Nature & Outdoors • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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