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In the banquet hall we are toasting our genius at having winnowed thought from wind, we are making speeches, making deals, getting drunk on the prospects of increased information flow and trade. After a while we step outside to observe this wonder close up: a rickety fence made of sticks, a frail hedge against the whatever-it-is beyond. We can poke our noses through and sniff: something like sea tang, something like wolf-willow funk, and something that seems to belong only to the thoughtless wind.

Does meaning mean most when closest to its edge? You come across a glyph carved into the rock and feel the roughsmooth resistance of the sandstone to this sharp, focussed form of erosion, or you sense the excitement and peril of trusting these angled sticks. Back in the banquet hall we are toasting the hypertext, cheering the end of our indenture to the here and now. Out here, now, we can sense the stone re-absorbing the letters into its many deaths and metamorphoses, their edges losing definition, collapsing inward like the month-old hoofprint of a moose. For A is also for astonishment, that wide-mouthed silence which we occupy, which occupies us as we turn to the immeasurable life of stone.

Basalt

Most igneous of rocks, basalt is black and mafic - meaning heavy with iron and magnesium, meaning loyal to the underworld it oozed or spewed from. Basalt listens to the call of the earth's core, that closed impacted vowel, and does not concern itself much with life on the surface, or life, period. Forced up in rifts and vents, it paves the ocean floor. Its only thought, as it inches toward return, is down. When other rocks are washed with rain or sunshine, they begin to take themselves lightly, and start the process of assimilating. Even ancient granite will glisten and be charmed. Basalt just deepens its sulk. Yet it is thanks to its ancient hexagonal grip that we have a planet with a nice firm crust and not some flabby bag of gas. So when you hear the call of underearth yourself, line your pockets with basalt. Go down with gravity's dark angel.

Crystal

To explain how archetypes dwell in mind as potential, unrealized entities, Jung compares their presence to "the axial system of a crystal which preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own." Since we spend much of our lives in the velvet grip of dreams, we are ready to accept any amount of magic deriving from mind, including the gathering of fierce irresponsible gods out of the very soup of consciousness. But when matter - dumb, brute, supposedly soulless rock - reveals that it too has ontological secrets, that it too is subject to such spiritual seizure, we may well be cast into a condition of empty, symmetrical wonder, as though we had discovered that all the walls in our houses were in fact windows.

Decreation

Decreation: to make something created pass into the uncreated.
Destruction: to make something created pass into nothingness.
       A blameworthy substitute for decreation.
               Simone Weil

Some ideas have deep resonance; they reach back in the memory to bring glimmerings, premonitions, intimations into sudden clarity, as though, with their own entry into consciousness, they had simply supplied the candlepower needed to actually light the bulb. Perhaps Weil's idea also had the effect for me of giving deeper bite to Keats' negative capability, and carrying it beyond the realm of aesthetics. By resembling destruction, by being its dangerous look-alike, decreation helps me identify one of the paradoxes of creativity - how it cozies up to its opposite, how it always seems to call for some form of nykia, some visit to the land of the dead, before it kicks truly into gear. It calls for attention to release its grip on fixed principles, to risk radical not-knowing without succumbing to the seductive currents which go by the name of nihilism.

I found, to my surprise, that I was thinking of decreation when trying to imagine the workings of plate tectonics, especially the subduction of one plate under another. (I live close to a subduction zone on the west side of North America, where its operation, smooth or spastic, directly affects life on the surface.) Generally the heavy oceanic plate is forced under the lighter continental plate, descending to a depth where the heat from the earth's mantle re-melts the rock to magma. This amazing decreative feature of the rock cycle was of course not available to Simone Weil as she wrote about the soul's needful embrace of gravity in the years leading up to World War II, since plate tectonics wasn't generally accepted before the sixties. And surely, I tell myself, the distance between the two realms is too great for any analogy to apply. But such is the deep resonance of these ideas that I still find their reverberations reinforcing one another, insisting against skepticism and the odds that there is an intimate relation between the brief subductions of creativity and the long ruminations of the planet.

Eternity

Neanderthals, it turns out from comparisons of DNA, are not close to us genetically; they are members of a different species, cousins rather than direct ancestors. We know quite a bit about them because they buried their dead, along with flint tools and meat to use in an afterlife, and so created optimal conditions for their preservation in the fossil record. But of course the last thing the Neanderthals were concerned with, as they interred their lost ones, was being remembered by the aggressive, invasive, technologically advanced species that was going to shove them into extinction. Rather they were making the one gesture that, more than any other, serves to reduce the corrosive power of endless time. The idea of eternity domesticates infinity, nudges it firmly in the direction of place and makes it habitable. "Where Will You Be In Eternity," the sign asks, implying, as did our Neanderthal cousins, that even the worst of us will be somewhere.

Fault

Terra Infirma. It isn't just the fear of earthquakes that makes the idea of a fault zone frightening, but the evidence it gives that earth forms and re-forms itself, that its basic m.o. is slow catastrophe, not calm. One response to a map of the planet during the Permian, with the enormous landmass of Pangea sprawled across it, is humour. This, it seems, is pretty low-grade sci-fi. Another, following by a nanosecond, is horror. What violence has occurred to those dear features, the Mediterranean like the mouth's warm cave behind the pursed lips of Gibraltar, the plump praying mantis of Newfoundland, the Aleutians like a trailing cedar bough? Geologically a fault is any surface along which rocks have moved and broken; imaginatively, or geopoetically, it is any fissure through which infinity leaks into history.

Geopoetry

When Harry H. Hess published his decisive contributions to the new and controversial theory of plate tectonics in 1962, he had to ask his readers - other geologists - to concede many suppositions in order to entertain the idea that seafloor spreading, driven by magma rising continuously from the mantle, accounts for both the movement of plates and the surprising youth of the ocean floor. Following the practice of an earlier theorist, J.H.F. Umbgrove, Hess called his speculations "geopoetry" as a concession to skeptics. Now that it no longer has such defensive duties to perform, and no one needs to be asked to suspend disbelief for the sake of the tale, we might be inclined to let it melt away along with the snows of yesteryear.

But should we? What better term for those moments of pure wonder when we contemplate even the most basic elements of planetary dwelling, and our words fumble in their attempts to do them justice? What else but 'geopoet' should we call Xenophanes, as he stands with the fossil of a sea shell in his hand, in his mind the wild notion that the quarry he stands in once lay under the sea? What else should we call you as you watch the creek tug another bit of clay from the cutbank and feel a similar tug on your life? Or, for that matter, myself, trying to cobble together this strange sign system out of the varieties of our dumb astonishment?

History

The history of jazz, the history of Canada, local history, social history, clinical history, natural history, earth systems history, a brief history of time. The strain on the poor word, which displays itself dramatically by the time we get to Stephen Hawking's paradoxical title, has begun to show up, for me, at any rate, when we reach 'natural history.' I think it's because history really is intimately as well as etymologically connected with 'story,' and 'story' always means human events - human events which unfold in a shapely manner. They have beginnings and ends we can count on; they create little homesteads for us that, whether inflected comically or tragically, colonize flux.

But when we turn to any event in the 'natural world' - a wave on a beach or a snowfall on a street - the safety of story is under constant threat. At any moment, we realize, this fragile structure can open out into the continuous metamorphoses of deep time, the implied camera chucking the responsibilities to its supposed subjects to skinny dip in the cosmos. A natural historian has to trot quickly through phrases like "in only a few million years" and "the mass extinctions of the Permian," lest the reader pause too long and begin to sink in her own wonderment. All historians, we might say, have to cope with rogue elements which threaten to invade the narrative. But the natural historian puts herself in harm's way; she can't remain safely within the stockade, but must venture out among the bears, the lichens and the aeons, risking geopoetry at every turn.

Infinity

There is a concept that corrupts and upsets all others.
I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics;
I refer to the infinite.
           Jorge Luis Borges

If n: are all fears, at bottom, fears of endless uninflected time? That is, fears of being subject to a temporality we are unable to enfold in a human scheme? Is infinity not so much a vexatious mathematical concept as a name for the terrible frisson we feel when some familiar structure begins to quake?

In Jose Saramago's All the Names, the protagonist, Senhor José, is a Kafkaesque archivist who works at the Central Registry. Here all the data controlling social existence is housed and dispensed, an emblem of absolute bureaucracy. But beyond the orderly files which govern the living, the registry reaches back into long shelves of files for the dead, recesses where no one ventures, where the order frays into heaps of documents, weighty and mysterious, like the anonymous strata in a formation of shale. Here is how Saramago describes the fear Senhor José feels as he breaks the rules and ventures among them:

... it was as if the spaces around him had suddenly
grown larger, freer, stretching to infinity, as if
the stones of the registry building were just the inert
material from which they were made ...

Senhor José is experiencing the vertigo which can afflict us when stone suddenly and unexpectedly reverts to rock, when we are not simply astonished, as in moments of geopoetic insight, but petrified.

Jaws

Big fish have not always eaten little fish, since they have not always been equipped to do so. The appearance of jaws in the late Silurian must have shocked the oceans of the day even more severely than the release of Jaws shocked filmgoers and bathers in the mid-seventies. How did jaws come about? From the evidence of shark fossils, it appears that they evolved from the skeletal structure that supported the gills, so the passage of life forms into serious predation - the rhythm of chasing and escaping which determines so much of our existence as mammals - involved the shift from a breathing apparatus to a biting one.

This is mysterious enough, but not the end of it. Who, trapped in an endless meeting (departmental, political, familial) has not - heartlessly, traitorously - reversed evolution to imagine the jaw folded back into the gill, and dreamt of those speechless reaches of Ordovician, the Cambrian, even the Proterozoic with its mute prokaryotes?

Katabatic Wind

A katabasis, as the word comes down to us from the Greek, is a retreat following a defeat from the interior of a country to its coast, like the retreat after the Greeks' defeat at Cunaxa. Katabatic winds follow roughly the same route, forming at the centre of an ice sheet where the air, cooled and made dense by constant contact with the ice, falls down the slope of the glacier toward its extremities, picking up speed as it goes. E.C. Pielou, in After the Ice Age, points out that katabatic winds must have been constant at the edge of the retreating glaciers, much as they are now at some Antarctic stations, where the mean windspeed is around 156 km. per hour.

To experience such wind is to feel the full weight of winter, winter so profound it has broken from the other seasons and no longer even registers their absence; it is to understand winter as a regime rather than a phase. A katabatic wind speaks directly to the bones, passing through flesh quick as an x-ray. Sometimes it speaks one of the dialects of arthritis, and sometimes in that seductive numbness that persuades the lost trapper to lie down in the snow, to forsake the one-thing-after-another struggles of seasonal life and embrace his own eternal stillness.

Limestone

I imagine quite a few people have heard waterfalls or rapids break into speech, and some of us have even heard ourselves addressed by name. I recall one occasion when, camped by a portage on the Goulais River, I woke to hear a throng of excited voices all shouting at once, and though I couldn't understand the language (Algonkian? Urdu?) it was clear that an important discovery had been made and that I should get up to join the general jubilation. Every so often, out of the hubbub, my name would appear, inflected by the accents of the mystery language, its vowel hollowed out and lichened with strange diacritical marks. This was not the first time the tent had worked like a magical ear, but knowing this did not prevent me from stumbling outside and making my way to the river's edge. By the time I could see their white curls in the darkness, the rapids had shifted back into their old protomusical purl and rush - very beautiful in itself, but not even remotely addressed to me, or anyone. Such experiences may have to do with dream mind bleeding into waking mind. Or it may be that, since we are doggedly linguistic as a species, our brains naturally process any continuous sound as a language. And since we are also, as a species, lonely, we are primed to hear ourselves called by name. Just the same, the illusion - if that's the word - was compelling, and the sense of loss, when the rapids reverted to ordinary water music, was acute.

So what does all this have to do with limestone? Why does this memory come to mind when, browsing along a limestone cliff or outcrop, I happen upon fossils embedded in the rock? I think it's the sudden emergence of a coiled symmetry, an apparent artfulness that calls across the eons, a compelling visual equivalent to being summoned out into the cold air of northern Ontario by one of its middle-sized rapids. Perhaps the appearance of the brachiopod or trilobite is even more dramatic because limestone usually seems so, well, bland, so pierre ordinaire. In Auden's poem in its praise, limestone is mutable stone that "responds"; it endorses the basic fabric of human life, and does not confront us with mythic extremities, as granite does, or lava, "whose blazing fury could not be fixed." So, when you come across a fossil, it seems a visual anomaly, a form as compelling as a signature in the grey matrix of the rock; it's as though you'd been spoken to, or called. And even though you know, as fact, that limestone is formed from the shells of many crustaceans compacted and fused over the millennia, the truth of this preposterous notion may only register when you trace, with your own sceptical finger, the elegant spiral of an ammonite whose shape has persisted among the pulverized, anonymous, remains of its fellows.

Magma

"Molten rock" - an oxymoron, surely, and perhaps no less impossible, no less a breach of common sense after we have watched a lava flow on film or visited Iceland to see for ourselves. We need something besides observation and explanation to help us cope with the vertigo produced by this conceptual dissonance, something that allows the paradox its truth, that is alive to its resonance with other aspects of our difficult dwelling amid flux. As a companion to the geology textbook I propose the fragments of Herakleitos, the sage who, it might be said, injected axiomatic language with the live air of the koan.

The ordering, the same for all, no god or man has made, but ever was and will be: everliving fire, kindled in measures and in measures going out.

Nunatak

During an ice age, sheets of ice that are miles deep fill in the valleys and cover most of the mountains. But some peaks - nunataks - poke through, while the glacier inches past carving out amphitheatrical cirques and fanged arêtes, ploughing V-shaped valleys into U-shaped ones. Because of this experience the vision from a nunatak is different from those engendered by the summits of either romanticism or religion, on which the poet or prophet has generally transcended time to experience an epiphany, and generally in a single visionary flash. Nunatak visions are by contrast quantitative, requiring a commitment of twenty thousand years or so, and, rather than transcending or compacting time, tend to impress us with its corrosive power and conspicuous inattention to the design of humans, or those of any other mere life form. One year more snow falls than melts, followed by another and another, ice filling the valley, encasing your Toyota and carrying it off with the other erratics. Two thousand years ago we drank the last of the coffee. Wasn't there some story about a girl who got carried off to the underworld and - what comes next? Anything?

Oblivion

When it comes to selecting an afterlife for oneself, almost no one chooses oblivion. But then no one is really one, either, and there's a real possibility that different parts, or aspects, of the self would choose different modes of final repose. The soul, we can safely assume, chooses eternity in one or another of its guises. The persona, probably, elects to live on in history through the agency of the name it went by, which survives on a gravestone, and maybe, if the persona has managed to store up fame or funds, in books.

But the spirit's choice isn't so obvious. Jack Gilbert observes that, though the soul is lodged, firmly, under the ribs, the spirit comes and goes. And, I would add, when we're lucky enough to be favoured with a visit, there are some unwritten rules we need to keep in mind. One is that neither it nor the moment should be named; another, that we should never ask, like some anxious parent, how long it plans to stay this time, nor lay heavy trips about its infrequent letters.

That's when it comes. When it goes, I'm guessing, it goes to the rivers no one knows; it goes to the mountains that have not been named. It chooses oblivion.

Philosopher's Stone

- and when, after I've wasted a lifetime looking,
picking over eskers, browsing beaches, rock shops, slag,
when, after I've up and quit, you suddenly
adopt me, winking from the gravel of the roadside
or the rip-rap of the trail
or the jewels of the rich;
when you shed your wilderness and move in,
living in my pocket as its sage, as my third,
uncanny testicle, the wise one,
the one who will teach me to desire
only whatever happens;
when you happen in my hand as nothing
supercooled to glass, as the grey
watersmooth rock that slew Goliath or the stone
no one could cast; when you come
inscribed by glaciers, lichened, mossed,
packed with former lives inside you
like a dense mass grave;

when you cleave,
when you fold,
when you gather sense as omphalos, inukshut,
cromlech, when you rift in the stress
of intolerable time;
when you find me
as the moon found Li Po
in his drunken boat,
when you speak to my heart
of its heaviness, of the soft
facts of erosion, when you whisper in that
tongueless tongue it turns out,
though it can't be,
we both know -

Quick

Is there a word better fitted to its sense? The tough anglo-saxon syllable chirps into the air, wren-like and plosive, itself 'an indication of the presence of life.' We have all been touched to the quick at one time or another, and some of us have been quick with child: if all words worked this well we might do without metaphor.

But, to state the obverse of Yogi Berra's aphorism, when it's over, it's over. Either we're quick or, so it seems, we're dead - a word which stops down sounds as surely as its opposite snaps it into being. It is against this duality, I think, that poetry has always struggled, seeking after pause, the place where the quick of existence and the blank duration of infinity are held in equipoise, perhaps - can we believe it? - even listening to each other. Adam Zagajewski says that poetry allows us "to experience astonishment and to stop in that astonishment for a long moment or two." Poetry is the pause where we turn toward stone, the breathless room where, by stratagems of language and mind, the quick and the infinite meet.

Rock, Stone

What is the difference between a rock and a stone? Had we been proceeding logically, this issue would have come first. Many will say there is no difference. But if we ask a geologist, the answer comes out pat: a stone is a rock that's been put to use: stone hammer, rip-rap, gravel, wall, paving stone, tombstone, milestone, statue. Now, a geopoet, I surmise, will give the same answer, but where the geologist snaps a lid shut, the geopoet opens Pandora's box. What happens between rock and stone is simply everything human, from the modifications necessary to make homes to, at the other extreme, the excesses of ownership and exploitation which submit all ends to ours. So another answer might be: rock is as old as earth is; stone is as old as the superfamily Hominoidae.

Terrane

When I walk along the deactivated logging road that borders Loss Creek at the south end of Vancouver Island, I am also walking along a seam in the planet known as the Loss Creek - Leech River Fault. On the south side of the creek lies the bunched mafic muscle of the Crescent Terrane, a seamount formed from volcanoes erupting under the ocean, then carried by its underlying plate into a collision with North America. Most of B.C. is formed by such exotic terranes - twenty of them - crashing into the continental plate, and the Crescent Terrane is simply, at forty million years ago, the most recent. Before all these immigrants landed, the continent ended, and the Pacific began, at Calgary. Of course each collision altered the terranes which had collided earlier, like cars crashing into the wreckage of previous car crashes.

On the north side of the creek lies the Pacific Rim Terrane, which had arrived (the rather understated term is 'docked') only fifteen million years earlier, and so had little time to settle down before it was rear-ended by the Crescent Terrane. In outcrops and roadcuts you can see how the impact forced its beds into the air, and metamorphosed them into schists and argyllites. They actually do look alarmed, startled and vulnerable. Between the two terranes, there is rubble from each, large and small basaltic rocks mixed with the wafers of schist, all of them continuously licked by Loss Creek, which is persisting in the work begun yesterday in the ice age. But that's another story.

When you add time to rock, so I read, you shift from the rigid solid we know so well to the condition of viscous liquid. As I sit beside Loss Creek, a round piece of basalt in one hand, a flat disk of schist in the other, I'm sensing some such shift in myself. What I recall, specifically, is sitting by a campfire during a canoe trip in northern Quebec and being told (truthfully) that our twelve-year-old arses were resting on the oldest rock on the planet. That was, as I think back to the black lake reflecting the cold innumerable stars, with the same cold seeping up from the bald rock, to be overwhelmed and reassured at once. Though probably, the way things looked, we would one day die, the Precambrian granite which cupped the lake was unmoving, fixed, eternal.

But the absolute is not what it was.

Unconscious

When it comes to dream, it is difficult to tell the truth in prose. The narrative carries the dream reluctantly, like a butler required to serve tea to a gypsy, a gypsy who - oh dear - is claiming to be his mother. He looks offstage, mutely, at the writer. Is this really necessary? You can feel the narrative-butler losing faith in the project, embarrassed by the bad taste - the petticoats, the décolletage, the expressionistic lipstick - then embarrassed at his own dismal performance, his dereliction of duty in keeping up the pretense, and then a further, perhaps final embarrassment at the growing suspicion that she really is his mother and he's been behaving like a pompous ass.

Reading about even great dreams (and I'm thinking in particular of an amazing dream in the philosopher's stone genre) I feel sorry for the prose. It's not necessarily poetry that I'd bring to the rescue, and it's certainly not stream-of-consciousness, that sad mime. What's needed is more like chat, especially one of those post-dream breakfast conversations, with lots of coffee and something out of the ordinary - pancakes, eggs benedict, huevos rancheros. It's story-telling, not story, that serves dream best. And not public, mythic story-telling, either. Dream needs, and you know what, and then all of a sudden it wasn't a train but some sort of a raft with no side rails, and you, you bastard, were trying to shove me off into the ocean.

So: I wish I'd either dreamt the great philosopher's stone dream or been to breakfast with its dreamer, so I could talk it over hot from the unconscious. Here's how it goes in prose, as recorded in June Singer's Boundaries of the Soul:

I am walking with a woman slightly older than myself along a mountain path. It is a glacial idyllic scene by moonlight. I am also somehow watching myself. We come to some huge gray boulders. They are blocking our path. We stop, and she turns to me and looks at me. We are engaged in pleasant conversation. Suddenly she turns extremely ugly. Her face takes on a greenish colour and she turns suddenly very old. I realize there is only one way to help the situation and that is to have intercourse with her. My penis enters her vagina then goes through her body and into the rock behind her. Then she disappears and I am alone, having intercourse with the rock.

Of course there is no difficulty for the Jungian interpreter in seeing the anima guiding the dreamer into the bedrock of an eventually integrated self. But I'm thinking of lots of questions that would surface in that imagined breakfast chat (not to mention exclamations) and responses from my own bank of memories. How the granite of the shield, polished by waves and glaciers, often seems to be playing erotic variations on mammal form, with lots of emphasis on hip and breast, reaching toward us, while suggesting that there are plenty of other evolutionary paths that mammals might have taken. How it seems that the unconscious may be the one place we can meet rock without it turning, at our slightest touch or glance, into stone. When you make love to the rock, I'm guessing, it stays rock. It's you that changes.

Varves

Alternating layers of coarse and fine sediment that have
accumulated in an ancient lake and hardened into rock.
The coarse layers accumulated during the summer months
as streams carried silt and sand into the lake; the fine layers
formed each winter when the surface was covered with ice,
so that only slim grains of clay could settle to the bottom.

As I approach the high sandstone cliff with its stacked, individual, terribly numerable varves, I think of George from group, who was unable either to stop collecting newspapers or to throw them out. He would describe - not without some pride, or at least amazement at his own extremity - how his basement, then living room, then bedroom had over the years become filled in with stacks of the Globe and Mail, The Sun and the Glengarry News, all layered sequentially until he was reduced to living in middle parts of his hallway and kitchen, his life all but occluded by sedimented public time. Unlike George's collection, (which of course I saw only in my mind's eye) the cliff's is open to eroding elements, so that bits have fallen off to form a talus slope of flat, wafer-like platelets at its base. This one in my hand has been clearly imprinted by a leaf - simple, lanceolate, probably an ancestor of our ash or elder. Published but vestigial, gone like an anonymous oriental poet, its image still floating on the coarse grains of summer.

On the flip side, winter. Under the eyelid of the ice. How often I thought of writing you, but the pen hung over the page. All the details on the desk too shy to be inscribed. To settle, to hesitate exquisitely, at last to lie, zero among zeroes. Much listening then, but no audience. Rhetoric elsewhere. Language itself has long since backed out of the room on tiptoe.

Sometimes we believe that we must diagnose the perils of the winter varve, and so do our talk show hosts and shrinks, who number its shades and phases as though it were pregnancy renversé, with suicide at the end instead of a baby. As though death were really death. As though the unspoken were failure. Having misread even the newspapers. Having been deaf to the music of the beech leaves, who will cling to their branches until spring, their copper fading to transparency, making a faint metallic clatter.

Word, Walk

"To find a stronger word for love, a word that would be like wind, but from under the earth, a word that doesn't need mountains, but enormous caves in which it houses ..." So Elias Canetti articulates our deep longing for oracle, the wind from the earth, the wind within the rock. We long for such a word as lovers, but also as language users; the desire takes us to that moment when words - which have always been so full of their own energies, so juiced on the buzz of abstraction - turn, with a sense of their insufficiency, toward rock.

Walk comes to the aid of words here. The rhythms of walking, whether it's a hike, a pilgrimage, or a stroll, let language be in the body, give it access to physical being. They mediate between the anxious, inadequate words in our heads and the silent, oracular, earth. As Margaret Avison puts it -

To walk the earth
is to be immersed,
slung by the feet
in the universe.

Will this produce a "stronger word for love?" Maybe not. But it helps us to realize, on behalf of our faithful words, that they are never more eloquent than when they fail.

Xenophanes

Xenophanes of Colophon (sixth century B.C.E.) is known for his attack on the anthropomorphic gods of Homer (if cattle, horses, and lions had hands, they would draw gods like cattle, horses, and lions) and his contention that, on the contrary, there is "one god, greatest among gods and men, in no way similar to mortals either in body or in thought." That is to say, I think, that whatever god or gods may be, they are inaccessible to myth, or, indeed, language. And perhaps more telling still is his view that human knowledge is restricted to what seems to be, and that "No man knows, or will ever know, the truth about the gods."

Besides this chastening of anthropomorphism and curbing of the extent of human knowledge, Xenophanes is credited with being the first palaeontologist. Observing fossils of seaweed and fish in a quarry near Syracuse, and either observing or hearing about others at Malta and Pharos, he inferred that the earth had been configured differently in times past, and that it must undergo cycles of wet and dry periods. It was during a passage of relative wetness, when the world was covered with mud, that the ancient shells and impressions had been left. Usually this fragment is taken to show the early use of evidence to support theory, another small step on the way to Aristotle and the birth of science.

But suppose we think of Xenophanes as a geopoet rather than as either a proto-scientist or a naïve cosmologist. It is certainly true that poetry was his medium, and that he used the Homeric hexameter to, among other things, dispute the Homeric world view. Suppose we also credit Xenophanes with the poet's capacity for wonder and decreation; suppose that, in the quarry with the fish fossil at his fingertips, he is not only astute but astonished. Isn't it likely that, having sensed the power of undomesticated time, he would naturally go on to remove the projection of our image onto gods? And, having seen its assumptions shattered by a fish swimming in limestone, insist on the strict limits of our knowing?

Yoni

All over the world, caves - including the famous ones at Lascaux - have been connected in the mythic imagination with wombs, and yonic symbols (cleft, downward pointing triangles) carved at their entrances by stone age people. These must be among the most eloquent of human signs: they name the earth as mother, and declare an intimate analogue between her body and ours. To carve one of these was a powerful, yearning, anthropocentric act.

Standing at the other end, perhaps, of artistic complexity, is James Joyce's use of the symbol in the "Oxen of the Sun" sequence in Ulysses, where its mundane representation (if you can hypothesize such a thing in the midst of the baroque clutter of the piece) is the triangle on a bottle of Bass beer. This humble, very Irish, symbol might be said to ground the vertiginous accumulation of references to procreation, gestation, and birth, structured on the nine months of pregnancy, which are rendered as successive styles of English prose from early translations to current American slang - current in 1904, that is. No one, including A.M. Klein, the great poet who first "broke the code" of the sequence, could fail to be impressed by Joyce's virtuoso variations on the symbol. But is his achievement, at bottom, any more brave, or daring, or hopeful than that of our stone age ancestor carving the feminine glyph into the rock?

Zero

Nothing is absence under the auspices of eternity; zero, on the other hand, is absence which slides into mind because it has intimations of infinity - intimations that are undomesticated by arithmetic. The nothing that comes of nothing, as Lear learns to his pain, is tragedy - that is, ruin cut exactly to the dimension of the human.

But zero is a moon without metaphors.