Stones are persons
Stones are persons. They have identity, individuality, and biography.
Integrity
Stones are whole; when you pick one up, all the parts move together.
Form
Stones have a distinct form.
If you turn one, it coherently
shifts its appearance.
It looks the same at the end
as at the start.
Shaped by time
Time gives stones smooth contours
and simple integrated form
because all the parts of a stone
share a common history and
have been shaped by the same forces.
Rocks
are still raw fragments of
their parent material,
with rough contours and ragged form.
Time will make them stones.
But some rocks
never become stones;
they are too incohesive,
too weakly unified.
Erosion shatters them.
True stones cohere
and weather together.
Individuality
Stones vary in being
dense or light, dark or bright,
mottled or monotone, rough or smooth,
hard or soft, and simple or complex
in form and composition.
Even from the same parent material
with very similar histories,
no two stones are alike.
Biography
Stones are storytellers.
They narrate their histories
through their form and composition.
Deer Isle granite
originated in an island arc of volcanoes
off the shore of Protogondwana land,
around 800 million years ago,
near what is now North Africa.
Called the Avalon Terrane,
these plutons accreted to
the Laurentian shield,
around 300 million years ago,
forming what is now coastal Maine.
The volcanos' magma bowls cooled slowly,
yielding pink granite with large crystals.
Bras d'Or granite
originated about the same time
in another island arc of volcanoes
off the shore of Amazonia,
forming what is now Cape Breton.
Like dancers,
the Miramichi-Bra d'Or and Avalon terrains
slipped sideways and moved toward
the Laurentian shield
as the Iapetus Ocean closed.
Erratics
are immigrants carried by glaciers.
This one was silt, then buried,
then siltstone, then fractured,
and the faults filled with quartz.
Quartz is harder than siltstone,
wears more slowly,
and leaves a ridge around the stone.
Some erratics are very hard.
Tumbling in the surf
gives them a shiny polish.
They are delightful to hold and rub
between thumb and forefinger.
Pumice
is flash-frozen stone foam,
molten rock bubbling with gas
cooling suddenly.
This is from Mount Erebus,
on the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf
in Antarctica.
This pumice is from south-western Iceland,
where the earth recreates itself.
Upwelling lava pushes
the African plate east
and the North American plate west
forming the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Sometimes stone records what is happening
at the moment it is formed,
more like a journalist
than an autobiographer.
This late Carboniferous sandstone is
from a beach near Joggins, Nova Scotia.
It reports the action of the waves
on a sandy beach 300 million years ago.
When is stone stuff not stone?
A prototypical stone has integrity;
has a form that is distinct, smooth, and simple;
and derives the coherence of the whole
from the shared history of the parts.
It helps if the parent material is hard
with consistent internal structure;
igneous rock make better stones
than sedimentary rock.
Weathering and erosion
liberate the constituents of stone as
free, pure, elemental essences:
sand, silt, and clay.
These essences lack
identity, individuality, and biography.
They are produced by the dissolution of stones,
and their death as persons
and are also the material for their rebirth.
Firing Clay
Potters take shapeless clay
and give it form.
Firing clay in a kiln
is a weak substitute
for the pressure and heat
that form true stones.
The heat does not last long enough
to thoroughly melt the clay and
allow its elements to self-organize.
The clay becomes more stone-like;
it gains integrity; a distinct form; and coherence.
But it lacks the cohesiveness of natural stone
and is as brittle as glass.
Fine China.
Potters prize
the white kaolin clay of China
for its smooth, fine texture and
the strength and hardness
it achieves when fired.
It is an honor to be stone-like;
the best ceramics are called stoneware.
Stone Soup.
Stones organize themselves.
Their component elements arrange themselves
reducing tension and letting that energy go.
In stone, as among humans,
calm is order
peace allows the emergence of coalitions
slow cooling coordinates best of all.
Quartz
Quartz is a nation-state among minerals, a single ethnicity of SiO2. It is homogenously composed of silicon atoms surrounded by tetrahedra of oxygen atoms linked together; each oxygen atom is shared with an adjacent tetrahedron. Quartz strives to achieve an ideal crystal shape of a six-sided prism terminating with six-sided pyramids at each end. Usually, randomness frustrates its striving and produces sprouts of twinned crystals instead.
Granite
In contrast, granite and most other kinds of stone are weak empires composed of contending minerals each seeking to establish its own alternative structure. Think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, and Italians each establishing their own cultural system in their domain. In granite, the mix is of feldspar, quartz, mica, and amphibole forming an interlocking matrix. If the parent magma cools slowly, the minerals more thoroughly segregate and form larger crystals.
Labradorite
Labradorite self-organizes into lamina separated by a distance shorter than the wavelength of ultraviolet light. This structure gives it ghostly golden planes and blue starbursts shimmering deep in the translucent stone. Most natural iridescence is a property of surfaces (e.g., oil slicks, butterfly wings, and soap bubbles) but labradorescence comes from the heart of the stone. It glows from within.
Gneiss
Gneiss makes up the crystalline basement of the cratons at the core of tectonic plates; formed usually during the Archean Eon more than two and a half billion years ago. Starting either with igneous (orthogneiss) or sedimentary (paragneiss) protolith, the rock is heated and squeezed under miles of crust. It is commonly found where the Archeon cratons have become exposed, sometimes in domes that have emerged where tectonic plates rift apart.
Indian penisular gneiss.
The heat and pressure do not melt the parent protolith, but instead cause it to recrystallize and transform; it is the highest grade of metamorphic rock. Its distinctive banding reflects its reorganization under stress, the mafic minerals appearing as dark bands and the felsic ones as light ones, forming perpendicular to the direction of greatest pressure. They are the sleds tectonic plates ride on as they glide around the globe.
Character and history
In sum, different stones have organized themselves according to their original temperaments (their starting set of elements) and their subsequent histories. They have the same ordered complexity as human persons. They bear family resemblances to other stones sharing their ancestry and experience, but each is individual.
They are persons.