Andrew Joron
On Quasha's Axial Stones
Thinking of George Quasha's Axial Stones project, I am reminded of the long tradition of poets handling stones, in both the figurative and literal sense of "handling." Stones want to be touched both by the poet's words and by the poet's hands. Touch me—two words that summarize the aim and origin of art. Stones especially tell words that they have weight. Some stones cannot be moved by human hands alone. Are there words like this?
Some stones seem to float in midair. The Earth is one such stone, hanging over an infinite abyss. Every stone stands for the entire Earth, just as words stand for things. The weight of a stone results from the attraction of all other stones (the weight of a word, from all other words).
Quasha's axial stones stand in precarious balance. They present an exquisitely fine moment in time: they are about to fall, but they have not yet fallen. To be alive is to inhabit that moment. The axial stones conduct gravity: they guide it to the point where its hold on stone is made visible. We can watch the fingers of gravity playing—wondering, momentarily baffled—at the precise point where the two stones meet. In time, gravity will pull the stone down. But it has not yet figured out how to do so.
Quasha has written a fraction in stone, challenging gravity to solve it. The top stone is the numerator, the lower the denominator. If the denominator were zero—as it sometimes is—the solution would be infinity, where the numerator-stone, the Earth-stone, falls forever into the void. Kant, who had no idea of the expanding universe, considered a static cosmos in which the stars must be poised perfectly, the attraction of each canceling out that of the others—if this were not the case, the stars would gravitate toward one another, collapsing in a universal conflagration. Quasha's stones stay, even as they say, even as they perform the way a thought holds at bay, this cosmic collapse.
Gravity-defying stones are represented also in much of Paul Celan's late poetry. As Jason Groves points out in his essay "'The Stone in the Air: Paul Celan's Other Terrain'," Celan's frequent referencing of stones works, paradoxically, against the solidity and stability that stones imply—work against, indeed, the premise of referential language itself. Celan's poems
not only do not mimetically strive to achieve for their language the material properties of stone (earthiness, density,
durability, thingyness, etc.), properties in which a poetic language, cognizant of its own porosity and insularity, could
seek refuge from the play of the textual; moreover, the poems disallow themselves to even imagine stone as possessing
those properties in the first place. They dwell, rather, on the air in stones and stones in the air.
As Celan writes in The No-one's Rose (1963),
The bright
stones travel through the air, white ones,
the light-bringers.
They want
not to descend, not to crash,
not to make contact.
The "absent ground" in Celan's poetry receives figuration as a stone in the air. Likewise, Gustaf Sobin's 1984 poetry collection The Earth as Air consciously extends Celan's trope of aerial stones. Sobin's poetry of erasure and dispersal imagines substance—the earth itself—as precipitating out of sound-vibration: "that the earth be but the dark, sparkling residue of that blown emanation.” Once again, earth or stone is held poetically to participate in the qualities of air.
Of the four elements, earth has always been—compared to air, water, fire—considered the least susceptible to change and motion. This prejudice can be corrected by zooming out to longer timescales at which mountains flow like waves. (Whitehead's line, "A rock is a raging mass of activity,"[i] appears as the epigraph of one of Quasha's recent poems.) Heraclitus did not exempt earth from his dictum that "everything flows." Such timescales are locked inside every stone. Quasha's axial stones not only allude—as signs—to these different levels of time, they act upon time, stretching the instant to accord with the "long now" of the stones' interiors.
Quasha's axial stones stand there as impossible objects, their balancing act almost a violation of nature. They are caught in an instant of precarity that strains time to the breaking point. Like us, they are always already about to fall.
*
A word about the implications of standing stones for poetic form: it was known to prehistoric peoples that setting up stones in defiance of gravity was a way of amassing power. Such earth-magic is also felt in the bourrie constructions of southern France: dome-like stone huts built as agricultural storehouses in the Middle Ages (one is depicted on the cover of Sobin's Earth as Air). These huts have held their shape for centuries, yet their stones are held together not by mortar but by the weight that each stone exerts upon every other. Similarly, in a poem, the weight of each word presses upon the presence of every other word, making—out of the gravity of meaning—a perpetual-motion machine.
Hence Quasha will write "Sequence is a pressure from outside time" in his book Verbal Paradise. Or in the same book: "If you knew what the poem is you'd stone it." The direct address here is likely not only to a society that would judge and punish poetic transgression, but as well to the poet's own making, attesting to the act of poiesis as something as primordial as the infall of cosmic stones that created earth.
WORK CITED
Groves, Jason. "'The Stone in the Air: Paul Celan's Other Terrain'.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (June 2011): 469–484.
[i] Epigraph to "Verbal Paradise Is Not a Turn Away," Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 16.
Thinking of George Quasha's Axial Stones project, I am reminded of the long tradition of poets handling stones, in both the figurative and literal sense of "handling." Stones want to be touched both by the poet's words and by the poet's hands. Touch me—two words that summarize the aim and origin of art. Stones especially tell words that they have weight. Some stones cannot be moved by human hands alone. Are there words like this?
Some stones seem to float in midair. The Earth is one such stone, hanging over an infinite abyss. Every stone stands for the entire Earth, just as words stand for things. The weight of a stone results from the attraction of all other stones (the weight of a word, from all other words).
Quasha's axial stones stand in precarious balance. They present an exquisitely fine moment in time: they are about to fall, but they have not yet fallen. To be alive is to inhabit that moment. The axial stones conduct gravity: they guide it to the point where its hold on stone is made visible. We can watch the fingers of gravity playing—wondering, momentarily baffled—at the precise point where the two stones meet. In time, gravity will pull the stone down. But it has not yet figured out how to do so.
Quasha has written a fraction in stone, challenging gravity to solve it. The top stone is the numerator, the lower the denominator. If the denominator were zero—as it sometimes is—the solution would be infinity, where the numerator-stone, the Earth-stone, falls forever into the void. Kant, who had no idea of the expanding universe, considered a static cosmos in which the stars must be poised perfectly, the attraction of each canceling out that of the others—if this were not the case, the stars would gravitate toward one another, collapsing in a universal conflagration. Quasha's stones stay, even as they say, even as they perform the way a thought holds at bay, this cosmic collapse.
Gravity-defying stones are represented also in much of Paul Celan's late poetry. As Jason Groves points out in his essay "'The Stone in the Air: Paul Celan's Other Terrain'," Celan's frequent referencing of stones works, paradoxically, against the solidity and stability that stones imply—work against, indeed, the premise of referential language itself. Celan's poems
not only do not mimetically strive to achieve for their language the material properties of stone (earthiness, density,
durability, thingyness, etc.), properties in which a poetic language, cognizant of its own porosity and insularity, could
seek refuge from the play of the textual; moreover, the poems disallow themselves to even imagine stone as possessing
those properties in the first place. They dwell, rather, on the air in stones and stones in the air.
As Celan writes in The No-one's Rose (1963),
The bright
stones travel through the air, white ones,
the light-bringers.
They want
not to descend, not to crash,
not to make contact.
The "absent ground" in Celan's poetry receives figuration as a stone in the air. Likewise, Gustaf Sobin's 1984 poetry collection The Earth as Air consciously extends Celan's trope of aerial stones. Sobin's poetry of erasure and dispersal imagines substance—the earth itself—as precipitating out of sound-vibration: "that the earth be but the dark, sparkling residue of that blown emanation.” Once again, earth or stone is held poetically to participate in the qualities of air.
Of the four elements, earth has always been—compared to air, water, fire—considered the least susceptible to change and motion. This prejudice can be corrected by zooming out to longer timescales at which mountains flow like waves. (Whitehead's line, "A rock is a raging mass of activity,"[i] appears as the epigraph of one of Quasha's recent poems.) Heraclitus did not exempt earth from his dictum that "everything flows." Such timescales are locked inside every stone. Quasha's axial stones not only allude—as signs—to these different levels of time, they act upon time, stretching the instant to accord with the "long now" of the stones' interiors.
Quasha's axial stones stand there as impossible objects, their balancing act almost a violation of nature. They are caught in an instant of precarity that strains time to the breaking point. Like us, they are always already about to fall.
*
A word about the implications of standing stones for poetic form: it was known to prehistoric peoples that setting up stones in defiance of gravity was a way of amassing power. Such earth-magic is also felt in the bourrie constructions of southern France: dome-like stone huts built as agricultural storehouses in the Middle Ages (one is depicted on the cover of Sobin's Earth as Air). These huts have held their shape for centuries, yet their stones are held together not by mortar but by the weight that each stone exerts upon every other. Similarly, in a poem, the weight of each word presses upon the presence of every other word, making—out of the gravity of meaning—a perpetual-motion machine.
Hence Quasha will write "Sequence is a pressure from outside time" in his book Verbal Paradise. Or in the same book: "If you knew what the poem is you'd stone it." The direct address here is likely not only to a society that would judge and punish poetic transgression, but as well to the poet's own making, attesting to the act of poiesis as something as primordial as the infall of cosmic stones that created earth.
WORK CITED
Groves, Jason. "'The Stone in the Air: Paul Celan's Other Terrain'.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (June 2011): 469–484.
[i] Epigraph to "Verbal Paradise Is Not a Turn Away," Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 16.