GRGR(19) - Temporal Bandwidth

[David Morris]

I finally found it: extremely large temporal bandwidth
- the consciousness of stone.

``Felipe is kneeling out in the sun, making his
noontime devotionals to the living presence of a
certain rock back in the wasteland of La Rioja, on the
eastern slopes of the Andes. According to an Argentine
legend from the last century, Maria Antonia Correa
followed her lover into that arid land, carrying their
newborn child. Herders found her a week later, dead.
But the infant had survived, by nursing from her
corpse. Rocks near the site of the miracle have since
been the objects of yearly pilgrimages. But Felipe's
particular rock embodies also an intellectual system,
for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a
form of mineral consciousness not too much different
from that of plants and animals, except for the time
scale. Rock's time scale is a lot more stretched out.
`We're talking frames per century,' Felipe like
everybody else here lately has been using a bit of
movie language, `per millennium!' Colossal. But Felipe
has come to see, as those who are not Sentient
Rocksters seldom do, that history as it's been laid on
the world is only a fraction, an outward-and-visible
fraction. That we must also look to the untold, to the
silence around us, to the passage of the next rock we
notice - to its aeons of history under the long and
female persistence of water and air (who'll be there,
once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?), down
to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral,
are most likely to cross....'' Pynchon (1973, p.
612-613).


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger.
http://im.yahoo.com