Kane X. Faucher

The Stone “Rockellection” - A Study in Alienation

 

 

For DW

 

“What once was directly lived has passed into representation” - Guy Debord

 

1. STRATA

 

I am sifting through the talus when I should be running my fingers across the strata. I turn over small pieces and chips that have weathered out from the strata and lay in heaps abutting the sheer rise of the banding of that implacable, jutting shelf of limestone. I am seeking the rocky fragments of myself in hardened, compressed sediment, finding the traces of once living fauna that are only preserved in their hardest of parts - much like a human being whose soft and ephemeral moments, the vulnerabilities and experiences that fail to find articulation, can never be preserved in the archive or the epitaph or the spoken summary we all generate for those occasions when we are caught unprepared by the polite interrogative “who are you?” - and we respond, as by reflex, with not who we are, but what we do, as though our value is pegged solely upon the narrow measure of utility and vicissitudes of economy.

           

Or that all that has been lived is replaced by the mineralization process of memory - hard husks. But even these hardest parts, like experience, are not the experiences themselves, but their representations - traces in stone that lay littered on the ground, breaking to pieces, or otherwise pressed flat like leaves between a rocky book with arbitrarily placed covers of top and bottom.

           

I am recollecting myself in the rocks, and though what I find is always a minor repetition of another piece that preceded it, and I know that the next piece may only be a slight improvement on the last, it is madness to think that the same action repeated will result in a different outcome.

           

The clay is soft and slick, filling the tread of my boot and now thickening, making each foot feel as though it weighs five times more... and then seven times, ten times. I am walking with a portable bed of clay that keeps rising, lifting me up, making me taller and less steady. I am collecting memory - my memories or another’s is difficult to discern - by the uneasy tread of my boots’ path. As I grow, I must bend lower.

           

I bring to hand a flake of brittle shale from a lens of a long-extinct coral reef that once teemed with all our articulated ancestors - struggles effaced in time, leaving only the traces by way of bodies tossed about in the turbid waters and vanishing under the steady accumulation of sediment. And so it is, as well, with memory. And so too it is with identity as even the most assiduous record keeper of one’s life - in journals or status updates made public - must resort to playing the biomancer: reading the past through the impressions left by the remains, and attempting to identify a position in the present, and map a micro-geology of our personal future.

 

At once we began as BEING,

And from there we reduced being to HAVING,

And finally we repose, emptily, on APPEARING.

 

I know who I am by virtue of what I once had, and now what just appears. And I know what is a perfect family, career, and all experiences by sifting through the fossilized sediments of what is sold to me. We flash, like signs, to one another - but our beacons are but the glint of pyrite on a fossilized specimen. And so I appear to you; you appear to me - and we all just appear. Screens and dust, sediment and mineralized replacements of soft tissue for hardened crusts.

 

2. BIOTURBATION

 

Traces of frantic movement arrested in clay and mud, now frozen in rock, a petrified memory, a geologic snapshot. There was a storm in the sea of memory, a thing once lived and endured without reflection, just reaction. The worms, wriggling pieces of anxiety and neurosis, burrow down and leave their tubular traces, permanently etching the sediment of self once it all hardens with the press of time.

           

It is something of wonder to reflect upon how what lives on inside us continues to work on us, the subconscious movement of worms and track-tracing fauna. It’s a big bucket, the sort of bucket Linnaeus threw all the unclassifiable things into. A worm bucket, writing, undulating, disturbing the mud.

           

I reflect on the paleo-environments of my own past, how only their traces remain, and that I must deduce the cause by these rocky clues. That which still lives in me continues to writhe and increase the entropy of my collected, sedimentary memory.

 

3. THANATOCOENOSIS

 

I am spending hours in search of the one intact piece of myself, a glittering and pyritized specimen, lodged in a hash plate of assorted dead deposits. A matrix of rock is split with the skillful knock of the rock hammer revealing an assemblage of death. Deposits of experience in the strata, on a digital screen, in the layers of data in a server so many thousands of miles away in a cloud that weighs several tons. All that has been lived has passed into fossilization. Every experience becomes alien, remote, a thing caught in a freeze frame with all the other detritus of past life.

           

And we gather and pick through the death assemblage. We speak of experiences of the past, and try to resurrect them somehow by breathing the life of speech into their hardened and mineralized fragments. We reanimate our many deaths, and yet they do not integrate as a unity, but remain eternally separate and haphazardly deposited by waves into one major assemblage.

           

I am still in pursuit of the one specimen that will complete me, but I am estranged from myself. And when I encounter it, I only grasp the shell of myself once the fleeting satisfaction dissipates. And I am separated from you and everyone else as we are all sifting through the debris and hunting the strata or hard-scrabble for clues to recollect ourselves. And we are all separated from the world by turning our eyes backward in time, while it is only the back of our heads that contemplate a future. But you left it here, whatever it is. You once fully grasped yourself, your connection to others, and the world, but you dropped it somewhere. You’ve been crumbling ever since.

           

There are deposits of us everywhere, pressed hard between accumulating layers, or slowly ejected by erosion. So we dig and crack open pockets in the strata, hauling out more rock and splitting that rock in a pursuit that only results in… traces.

 

4. THE REEF

 

I am now buttressed by enormous piles of split shales and an immense rocky wall. I keep scanning downward, backward in time along the geologic layers. I find myself at the centre of a paleo-ecological, criminal whodunnit. This vast coral reef slowly built some 350 million years ago in shallow seas and temperate climes, once teeming with the benthic creatures so fantastic and now gone - the straight cone-shelled nautiloids, the defensive trilobites that roll up like sow bugs, the fish with their bony jaws instead of teeth, the vermiculating spread of sea moss animals and the clusters of horn corals… Here is what remains of the largest coral reef the world ever knew, and here lies the beginning of their end as trees began to colonize the land, absorbing carbon dioxide, cooling the earth, and the roots disturbing the ground to unleash minerals into the sea. And so began the great anoxic period, a literal choking to death of so much sea life.

           

Was I once so deprived? Starved of oxygen while the chatter of the powerful dominated. Did I engage in the labour of building that vast reef, or was I little more than a vulnerable bottom feeder, a scrounger, a survivor, an opportunist? Did I flower or cower in that time? I am condemned to sift through the record, to find meaning, only to come up with disparate clues. I vainly believe that I can solve the quandary of who I am by collecting the evidence of where I came from. Yet it casts no light on the question any more than a handful of shale can recreate in perfect clarity exactly the environment that was lost. At best, we can achieve a reconstruction, which is just an approximate fiction and representation based on fragments.

 

5. THE SPLIT

 

There is foolish confidence as I wield my trusty rock pick. I mine the past to make sense of the present. It is like those games of accumulation involving blocks that are crafted into other things, only to facilitate the mining of more blocks. Such sandbox irrealities are a desperate attempt to seize the essence of things, assuming a universality of substances. It is metaphysics downgraded into materialism.

           

I trust my tools even if I distrust my own motives. I know at certain rocks I must apply more or less pressure with a strike. There are those rocks that I can pry apart with just my hands, and others where I must exploit a crack facilitated by the forces of erosion. I am guided by the notion that if there is a crack in memory, it must be split and examined.

 

6. BREEZE

 

This is a long metaphysical walk. It is a hunt. It is accumulation for its own sake that yields up no real meaning. I drop my pick and decide to wander. In the process, I shed everything - fear, anxiety, self-perception, societal norms, aspirations inculcated by mass media and filtered through the minds of the many, and anything like a goal. I just walk. The past is as useful as a map of Ohio on the surface of Mars. I have no direction. I unburden myself of the baggage, all of it. I am now nothing but the breeze. I am not the rock, nor what I am can be found in it. I am done with traces, the ichno-ontological sleuthing of the self, and now join the forces that trace. I am the breeze. I flow, flow, stop, and flow.

 

 

 

Kane X. Faucher is the author of the novels The Infinite Library, The Infinite Atrocity, The Infinite Grey, B1T, B0T, and Professor Montgomery Cristo: An Adjunct's Tale, among others. His fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and academic works have appeared in hundreds of places over the years. He teaches propaganda, political economy, and media at Western University, and is a strategic planning consultant for the public sector. He is currently under contract to complete an academic book on social capital as accumulation and alienation.