Editorial notes:
This Essay was found as a ‘draft’ entry in Everything2 and is published here with minor changes. BTW, if you are already here, check out the links in the second line of the title, below. Just hovering over them will give you some insight into Shai’s unique way of thinking and expressing himself.
Discovering Geology at the Gariwerd Mountains; or, Thinking about Thinking about Thinking about Mountains.
Gariwerd is the name given to a major geological process of sandstone mountain ranges in southern Australia, which have also been named The Grampians and are part of The Grampians National Park. I was in Gariwerd when I had my Eureka moment and got geology.
I remember getting geology. I was at a lodge at the Grampians, a national park in Australia’s south filled with sublime vistas peppered with monolithic cliffs and threatening peaks. I already knew about plate tectonics thanks to the education system, but I hadn’t appreciated the perspective of it all. It was while reading a book on the formation of the Grampians, at night after dinner after that day’s exploring, that I got it. It wasn’t enough to point to a sandstone boulder and start talking about a process that began on the ocean bed. That implies an understanding that geology describes processes that take time, in fact, lots of time. But it also tends to a thinking mechanic that describes the process A-to-B-to-C as being the story of C. That is in the same way that a book on human biology might describe its formation as being by the process “fertilized egg builds itself into an embryo that ultimately becomes a human being”. Which isn’t wrong, and in the case of a living being whose raison d’etre is its adult self especially useful, but it misses so much. This manner of viewing a thing, whether a mountain or body or any domain of study, believes that it knows the whole story because it could know the whole story.
This is in the same way as someone studying a photograph taken out of a series that is also a film. There is something lost between a movie-still and the whole movie; and it’s not just the story, it’s something more abstract than that, just like the study of painting is not only about their subjet-matters. As I read the book on the Grampians while walking its trails, I focused my Ideas-camera on the time-scale of a million years. By doing so my story disappear, but then so did my species’, and even the story of my primate family could only be told in a few staggered steps because it was such extreme perspective to myself whose interests are so vainly anthropocentric.
