This is a syllabus for people who pick up stones. Like most collections of found objects, it is personal, partial, and incomplete, the result of searching and happenstance.

I am no expert on rocks, but my window sills are lined with pebbles. Most are unremarkable. Some round, some oval, most gray or brown or white; lots of quartz. Few are empirically special in any way, and when I die, I doubt anyone will see any reason to keep them. They are tied to my experiences—each one marks a day, a place, a serendipitous noticing, a greedy impulse. But beyond my flimsy meanings, each one is embodied time, the result of a specific aggregation of geologic events.

Rocks speak, but I do not know their language. When I pick up a pebble, even when I can identify what it is and how it came to be wherever I found it, I feel like I am holding a mystery. Perhaps this is why it is so hard to set them back down.

Besides looking for rocks wherever I go, I also keep an eye out for stony things—bits of writing, pieces of art. Here is a collection of those fragments for you, to pick up and contemplate, or arrange on a window sill.

What is a stone?

1.
Some people say the difference between a rock, a stone, and a pebble is scale and use; rock is large and immoveable, stone is a piece of rock humans have chosen or shaped or used, a pebble is merely a small stone. But this line of thinking scrambles itself. Pebbles most often form through natural processes, not human ones. They are more akin to small rocks, but then, rocks cannot be small. 

According to Merriam-Webster, all three are stones:

pebble 
1: a small usually rounded stone especially when worn by the action of water
2: transparent and colorless quartz : ROCK CRYSTAL

rock
1: a large mass of stone forming a cliff, promontory, or peak
2: a concreted mass of stony material
_____also: broken pieces of such masses
3: consolidated or unconsolidated solid mineral matter
_____also: a particular mass of it

stone

1. a concretion of earthy or mineral matter:
   • a: (1) such a concretion of indeterminate size or shape
     __(2) ROCK
   • b: a piece of rock for a specified function

2.
Samuel Johnson, in a fit of irritation, famously kicked a rock to prove that the world was real and not merely the result of our ideas and perceptions, as theorized by the philosopher George Berkeley. This is a logical fallacy now known as the argumentum ad lapidarium or “appeal to the stone.”¹ 

Some two hundred years later, Richard Wilbur commented on the incident in his poem, “Epistemology”: 

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones:
But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.²

3.
Meister Eckhart: “The stone is God, but does not know it, and it is the not knowing that makes it a stone.”³

Seeing stones

1. 
Across Asia, particularly in China, Japan, and Korea, there are rich traditions of stone appreciation. Stones are mounted, conjuring mountains, waterfalls, gardens, and clouds; they are sliced and polished to reveal delicate landscapes. Gongshi are respected stones, and shipu “are books of description, art, or poetry dedicated to stones.⁴” 

The literati of China, who began collecting the geological wonders known as “scholars’ rocks” over 1,000 years ago, developed an aesthetic of the found object which regarded nature as an artist whose work was an extended self-portrait in miniature. Nature made art in its own image, an eccentrically evocative fractal of itself. Bringing this art to light required the connoisseurship of human recognition and, at times, human collaboration in the form of sculptural interventions so subtle they are often indistinguishable from the rock’s natural configurations. In an act of Song Dynasty postmodernism, these assisted ready-mades became both original and simulacrum, simultaneously.⁵

*

Like a landscape painting, the rock represented a microcosm of the universe on which the scholar could meditate within the confines of his studio or garden.⁶

*

They are not fixed in meaning, the way we are used to art being fixed. The principal thing is to take a rock—which is the most common thing in the world—and to transform its image, through looking, beyond a rock, into something uncommon.⁷

2.
The stones that make me most acutely aware of the stoneness of stones are not stones at all. Between 1977 and 1982, Vija Celmins made bronze casts of eleven stones she collected in northern New Mexico, painstakingly painting them to resemble the originals. These made stones are presented alongside the originals. She has said that, “Part of the experience of exhibiting them together with the real stones was to create a challenge for your eyes. I wanted your eyes to open wider.“

It is a work of art that cannot be understood from an image; in a photo, it merely looks like a clever and skillful illusion. In person, while the replicas are startlingly accurate, it is absolutely and immediately apparent that they lack rockness. When I saw it, I surprised myself (and the museum docents) by laughing out loud with delight. It felt peculiarly heartening to be presented with evidence of the ordinary marvelousness of rocks—these things we cannot create or replicate. Roger Caillois writes:

Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They attract through an intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error, and excess. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation. For a stone represents an obvious achievement, yet one arrived at without invention, skill, industry, or anything else that would make it a work in the human sense of the word, much less a work of art. The work comes later, as does art; but the far-off roots and hidden models of both lie in the obscure yet irresistible suggestions in nature.⁸

Temptation

1.
In 1970, the Italian artist and poet Luigi Lineri began a rock collection, bringing home specimens from the banks of the river Adige and classifying them by shape. According to his website, he regards this project, which has continued for more than fifty years, as “his most beautiful piece of poetry.”⁹

2. 
In 2012, Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr began a project called “Bad Luck, Hot Rocks” cataloging the more than 1200 “conscience letters” and accompanying pieces of pilfered rock sent to Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. Many letter writers believe that stealing the rocks brought them bad luck, but the returned rocks cannot be placed back into the park, for fear of disturbing research sites, so they are stacked in a “conscience pile” alongside a gravel access road.¹⁰ 

3.
On September 1, 1885, The New York Sun published a story on ghosts in Connecticut that included the following anecdote:

Over near Middletown is a farmer named Edgar G. Stokes, a gentleman who is said to have graduated with honor in a New England college more than a quarter of a century ago…He owns the farm on which he lives, and it is valuable; not quite so valuable though as it once was, for Mr. Stokes’s eccentric disposition has somewhat changed the usual tactics that farmers pursue when they own fertile acres. The average man clears his soil of stones; Mr. Stokes has been piling rocks all over his land. Little by little the weakness—or philosophy—has grown upon him; and not only from every part of Middlesex County, but from every part of this State he has been accumulating wagonloads of pebbles and rocks. He seeks for no peculiar stone either in shape, color, or quality. If they are stones that is sufficient. And his theory is that stones have souls—souls, too, that are not so sordid and earthly as the souls that animate humanity. They are souls purified and exalted. In the rocks are the spirits of the greatest men who have lived in past ages, developed by some divinity until they have become worthy of their new abode. Napoleon Bonaparte’s soul inhabits a stone, so does Hannibal’s, so does Cæsar’s, but poor plebeian John Smith and William Jenkins, they never attained such immortality.

Farmer Stokes has dumped his rocks with more or less reverence all along his fields, and this by one name and that by another he knows and hails them all. A choice galaxy of the distinguished lights of the old days are in his possession, and just between the burly bits of granite at the very threshold of his home is a smooth-faced crystal from the Rocky Mountains. This stone has no soul yet.¹¹

4.
At Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, Jim and Helen Ede’s remarkable collections are on display in the house, just as when they lived there, including serene arrays of beautiful pebbles presented in sculptural whorls and pretty baskets. After a visit with the Edes, Ian Hamilton Finlay wrote “KETTLE’S YARD ENGLAND IS THE LOUVRE OF THE PEBBLE,” a phrase that was inscribed on a rock and added to the home’s permanent collection.

5.
Tacita Dean collects startlingly round stones and many-leaved clovers. The rock collection began with specimens her father gave to her as a child; she says they were never quite round enough for her, though. These collections require two attributes that she says are essential to her work as an artist: “I see a great connection in it, allowing luck and chance to intervene in what I do. You have to be open to things happening.”¹² 

Mysteries

1.
Some stones sing. Thomas Rex Beverly visited Ringing Rocks Park in Pennsylvania, recording strikes made with large and small hammers on igneous diabase boulders; you can listen here. No one understands quite why the stones ring, and stones removed from the site won’t sound.

2. 
Some stones might speak. In Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolf’s hectic novel of his struggle to become himself, he writes: 

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

Roger Caillois thought that some stones embodied the traces of a lost language: 

I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.¹³

3.
Some stones are special for inscrutable reasons. Byrd Baylor’s 1974 book Everybody Needs a Rock offers ten rules for finding a rock. This is not one of the ten rules, just general guidance:

If somebody says,
“What’s so special 
about that rock?”
don’t even tell them.
I don’t.

Nobody
is supposed 
to know
what’s special
about
another person’s rock.

“I wish to be a thinking stone”¹⁴

Under the definition for “cairn,” in Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape, Linda Hogan notes that “one stone atop another says a human being was here, feeling, thinking.”

Here is a small cairn of rock-themed writing well worth reading:

Marcia Bjornerud, Geopedia: A Brief Compendium of Geologic Curiosities.
Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones.
Clarence Ellis, The Pebbles on the Beach.
Hettie Judah, Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones.
Jon Larsen, In Search of Stardust: Amazing Micrometeorites and their Terrestrial Imposters.
Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities.
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain.
Adalbert Stifter, Motley Stones.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_stone ↩︎
2. Richard Wilbur, https://voetica.com/poem/1606. ↩︎
3. Meister Eckhart, quoted by Eliot Weinberger in “A Calendar of Stones.” The Ghosts of Birds, pg. 53, New Directions, 2016. ↩︎
4. Rebecca Robertson, “7 Astonishing Chinese Scholar Stones That Look LIke Monsters and Landscapes,” ARTnews, 5/26/2014. ↩︎
5. John Mendelsohn, “Chinese Scholar’s Rocks: Simultaneously Original and Simulacrum,” artnet, 8/26/1996. ↩︎
6. Robert D. Mowry, quoted in “Collecting Guide: Scholar’s Rocks,” Christie’s, 11/22/2015. ↩︎
7. Sculptor and scholar stone collector Richard Rosenblum, quoted in “Rocks of Sages,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 2/6/1998. ↩︎
8. Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray. University of Virginia, 1985. ↩︎
9. The website of Luigi Lineri, http://www.luigilineri.it/english/index.html. ↩︎
10. Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr, Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Rocks from the Petrified Forest, The Ice Plant, 2014. ↩︎
11. The Best Ghost Stories, Joseph Lewis French, ed., Modern Library, 1919. ↩︎
12. “PODCAST: Artist Tacita Dean and Her Many Mediums,” Getty, 2/6/2019. ↩︎
13. Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray. University of Virginia, 1985. ↩︎
14. From “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” by Wallace Stevens, 1918. ↩︎