THE WRITING OF STONES
Roger Caillois's imaginary logic
Marina Warner (2008)
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/29/warner.php
Magical thinking in the nineteenth century consequently involved rational attempts at decipherment; its underlying impulse towards intelligible, cogent meaning paradoxically moved it into the traditional terrain of the occult, of sorcery, and shamanism; all its wealth of ingenuity in coming up with irrational measures remained directed at turning the world into a sign system. To the triad of signs set forth by C. S. Peirce—index, image, diagram—a fourth form of picturing could be added: the cipher or enigma. In order to decode such signs, various magical principles come into play: a trust in chance as a revelatory organizational tool (a throw of the dice); a belief in microcosmic-macrocosmic relations, which holds that underlying unifying forces impart significance to the appearance of marks and patterns in nature, in phenomena such as cloud formations, figured stones, and "spontaneous" images; and thirdly, the view that these forces enjoy a different relation to time itself, a magical relation which creates coincidence across time and space, and meaningful correspondences. All three principles return in the twentieth-century aesthetic of organic natural symbolism.
As Nature abhors a vacuum, so does the mind resist meaninglessness; it invents stories to explain haphazard incidents, and to provide reasons and origins; the amorphous, the inchoate, the formless, have beckoned irresistibly to the shaping powers of thought and imagination. Humans are polyglot creatures of language; signs attract meanings, and symbols stick to forms, verbal and visual. Pattern, design, system, significations—meaning has accrued to every sort of natural phenomenon. The Rorschach test represents the most common and familiar—scientific!—use of icasms [figurative expressions], applying for medical ends the idea that the human mind can make sense of forms without inherent meanings, and that the signification the observer discovers there conveys genuine insight into the observer's own character and fate. Here the seer's role plays back and forth between the two people involved: the patient reads the signs, and the doctor then interprets the import of the reading and projects the interpretation back on the interpreter.
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Throughout Pierres, Caillois writes in a heightened poetic prose, and he discovers an alter ego in the eccentric Taoist painter and governor, Mi Fu, who in the twelfth century found ecstasy in caves filled with stalactites and stalagmites and neglected his duties (a Chinese Prospero) for this secret knowledge, this art which could render initiates immortal. Like Mi Fu, Caillois develops a passion to collect stones that are then arrayed in three different but proximate categories—bizarre, insolite (unusual), and fantastique. Like the Taoist, he discovers in stones "not beauty ... but lasting standards and the very idea of beauty, I mean the inexplicable and useless addition to the complexity of the world." By the end, Caillois has surrendered to the objects of his study: the ideal state is to "let Nature pass into you." By dint of his enraptured thinking on stones, he feels that he is more alive than ever, chased by the wind of his passionate responses. But he has himself also turned to stone, he feels—and he delights in his metamorphosis.
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see https://doorofperception.com/2013/11/roger-caillois-the-writing-of-stones/ for some examples of Caillois' stones
http://50watts.com/The-Writing-of-Stones
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https://www.dataisnature.com/?p=1990
Surrealist and Sociologist Roger Caillois was known for his writings on biomimicry, especially within the insect world, pareidolia and lithic scrying. His latter interest provided us with The Writing of Stones, a book in which he unravels the 'unfathomable graphic madness' etched onto the rocks contained within the ‘archives of geology'. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to a species of rock — in each he channels ever increasingly dense, extravagant, and at times morbid tales from the authorless inscriptions each stone contains.
...As the book goes on, the inspection and introspection shift from empirical references to more outlandish ones, his isomorphisms eventually dissolve discretion and to gravitate towards the morbid. Uncensored geopoetic beautific reveries are gradually displaced by grotesque fantasies - petrified mutilations and putrefactions. Caillios invites to us dwell on 'muscles laid open in their cavities of bone ... lopped off breasts ... gnarled phalluses ... frogs crucified by galvanic currents ... eruptions of boils or buboes on an infected skin ... intestinal worms glistening with the biles and juices digesting them ... rotting shell-less molluscs ... gobs of spit and knuckle bones softened by acid'. We enter a 'a mauve and lunatic life, proliferating without law or limit, feverishly breeding goiters; a ravenous, shifting universe in which details are so clear it is almost endless'
In one section Caillois identifies Cubist structures reflected in one particular stone and shows that its our contact with the works of Braque and Picasso that forces us to see these patterns accordingly. So the lithic pareidoliac must rely on her database of memories to make sense of these patterns and forms.
'To be moved by the patterns one needs to know already the secret it unveils or recalls, one needs to have learned from scientific works of the thousands of patterns which this one brings together, and without which it would remain what it is really is — chance curves providentially assembled by another chance and randomly colored by metallic deposits'
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https://sensatejournal.com/an-introduction-to-caillois-stones-other-texts/
An Introduction to Caillois' Stones & Other Texts
Donna Roberts
Stones, then, is in some way a personal homage to Mi Fou. It expresses his rapport with the significance of stones within Buddhist practice and to the meditative, philosophical, and also modest way in which stones figure in the artistic, intellectual, mythical, and sacred realms of historic Chinese culture. In Stones, as in his other writings on natural phenomena, Caillois follows a conviction that human art—in no way proffering exceptionalism to the species—is but a weak branch of nature's genius. The reference at the very end of Stones to Chinese artists signing slabs of marble is an acknowledgement of how, long before it became a theorized intention of modern European artists, non-European cultures had a highly nuanced sense of natura naturans, of working in the spirit of nature rather than vainly attempting to copy it. It is also, however, a rather cheeky innuendo that disparages the legendary reputation of his compatriot, Marcel Duchamp, and the conceit of the Occidental avant-garde in thinking that one of their own was the first to sign an object he had not himself made.
...Caillois was also drawn to the ways in which stones seemed to provoke an imaginative response in humans which in some way made them difficult to conform to strict systems of classification. Caillois' writings on stone are nourished by the lyrical tendencies of natural histories which reflect the wonder and confusion of classical and early modern scholars in the face of the hallucinatory pictographic forms of stones and their convergence of the brutal, energetic laws of nature with the play of chance. Throughout Stones, Caillois reveals his love of these kinds of paradoxes, defining stones as a ubiquitous and yet utterly marvelous phenomena. He explores how, through history, stones have fascinated human minds with their host of ambiguities, seeming at once animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, mineral and vegetal, useful and useless, the stuff of poetic reverie and cultural symbolism as well as raw material, the access to which marks the technological advance of human civilization. Stones for Caillois are both an ancient source of human ingenuity and unchained imagination, both finalized by accident during some inhumanly distant epoch and forged according to certain inflexible laws of nature.
...Caillois maintained an understanding of the poetic and imaginary as objectively grounded within deep and fixed relations between mind and world. "Nothing is a stranger to anything. Meaning, that the laws which govern the mind of man are not fundamentally different from those which determine the graphic structure of stones, etc. These laws are the same: simply, they adapt differently to the order—mineral, vegetal or animal—to which they belong."
Caillois' turn to stones as his main preoccupation in older age can, then, be read in a number of ways. One way to approach his mineral fascination is to underscore how it relates to his life-long interest, nurtured by his encounter with surrealism, with the idea of a system of encyclopedic knowledge that could incorporate what science and positive analysis necessarily leave out: the poetic, mythical, sacred, emotional, unconscious, oneiric, vertiginous, and imaginative.
...Caillois doggedly rejected the anthropocentric view of human preeminence and exceptionalism, declaring in Le Fleuve Alphée:
Man can less and less doubt that he is only an excrescence of nature, with which he remains co-substantial and to the laws of which entirely submitted. Yet he has been so successful in domesticating the energies within reach that he is naively persuaded that nature belongs to him, while he knows very well that it is he who belongs to nature and that he is an extension of it, far from having been parachuted in by some God.
...Writing in The Octopus: Essay on the Logic of the Imaginary (1973), Caillois—like a kind of Captain Nemo of the imagination—claimed to be pursuing the "grid of established analogies and discreet connections which constitute the logic of the imaginary," asserting: "If mystery affects us, if the unusual enthralls us, if poetry is possible, it is only because of the complex and disconcerting correspondences which disperse the unity of the cosmos."
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http://substancejournal.sites.lmu.edu/home/roger-caillois-mineral-collection
Caillois's opening words in The Writing of Stones provide a portal through which to enter this virtual gallery.
"Just as men have always sought after precious stones, so they have always prized curious ones, those that catch the attention through some anomaly of form, some suggestive oddity of color or pattern. Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They act 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" (The Writing of Stones, 1-2).
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Author: Roger Caillois
Date: Aug. 1, 2005
From: Diogenes(Vol. 52, Issue 3.)
Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd. (UK)
I speak of stones that have always lain out in the open or sleep in their lair and the dark night of the seam. They hold no interest for the archaeologist, artist or diamond-cutter. No one made palaces, statues, jewels from them; or dams, ramparts, tombs. They are neither useful nor famous. They do not sparkle in any ring, any diadem. They do not publicize lists of victories, laws of Empire, carved in ineffable characters. Neither boundaries nor memorials, yet exposed to the elements, but without honour or veneration, they are witnesses only to themselves.
Architecture, sculpture, intaglio, mosaic, jewellery have made nothing of them. They belong to the planet's beginnings, have sometimes come from another star. So they bear upon themselves the distortion of space like the stigmata of their terrible descent. They come from a time before humans; and when humans came, they did not leave on them the mark of their art or their industry. They did not work them, intending them for some trivial, luxury or historic use. They perpetuate only their own memory.
They are not carved in the effigy of anyone, man, beast or fable. The only tools they have known are those that were used to uncover them; the hammer to reveal their latent geometry, the grindstone to display their grain or awaken their dull colours. They have remained what they were, sometimes fresher, more legible, but always in their truth: themselves and nothing else.
I speak of stones that nothing has ever changed except the violence of tectonic crushing and the slow erosion that began with time, with them. I speak of gems before cutting, of nuggets before smelting, of the hard frost of crystals before the stone-cutter gets to work.
I speak of stones: algebra, vertigo and order; of stones, anthems and staggered rows, of stones, darts and corollas, dream's margin, ferment and image; of this stone curtain of hair opaque and straight like the locks of a drowned woman, but which does not flow down any temple where in a blue canal a sap becomes more visible and more vulnerable; of these stones uncrumpled paper, incombustible and sprinkled with uncertain sparks; or the most watertight vase where there dances and finds its level again behind the only absolute walls a liquid before water, to preserve which a series of miracles was needed.
I speak of stones older than life that remain after it on cooling planets, when it was fortunate enough to unfold there. I speak of the stones that do not even have to await death...
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https://www.transphormetic.com/Essays-in-Print
In his classic work of lithic scrying, The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois suggests that the pareidoliac's interpretation of a stone's pattern depends upon her own personal internalized database of stored images, a database defined by the cultural stock of mediated imagery forged and embellished by personal memory, emotion and psychical topography. For Caillois, "the vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it with the treasures of memory and knowledge." Caillois's own database was one defined in a pre-digitized, barely computerized world. His meditations on Agates, Jaspers and Septaria evoked for him a world of grotesque pathologies, fantastic creatures and mythological landscapes devoid of digital allusions. Like the results of a Rorschach test, the imagery he conjured reveals the emotive secrets hidden in the recesses of his own mind. A post-digital re-reading of his stones might invoke entirely new kinds of narratives. By reinterpreting Caillois's stones in relation to the aesthetics of digital simulation, algorithmic visualization can be used as decryption device to decode and unravel new fictions'
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http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2008/07/roger-caillois-among-nonhumans.html
Caillois stresses throughout his analysis that even though this art seems embedded within what is dead, immobile, and unchanging, what in fact fascinates is the active connection between stone and world, evident in the unbearably slow formation of its artwork, and evident as well in the participation it demands from its environment - including the human observer. Gazing upon a sheet of scaled jasper he writes "Even while I am reducing things to their chemical constituents I cannot help descrying swathes of arctic light shining meagerly on inky lichens, struggling vegetation exhausted by rough winds and burned by frost" (64). Such reverie is not human projection, but a participation across kingdoms (animal, mineral) activated by the beauty common to both. Sometimes in stone we behold forms once living: wispy fossil tracing of leaves, petrified bones of animals whose ancient bulk troubles the imagination to body forth again. Sometimes we behold natural resemblances to such recurring forms. Often we witness the preservation of a past that did not endure: "life's mistakes, to remind nature of its monsters, its botched jobs, its blind alleys" (81). Or perhaps in this abortive past we behold a future that includes ourselves, observers made of more stone-stuff than we care to acknowledge:
[These 'monsters'] somehow announce the coming, in the distant future, of a species that makes mistakes ... They presage new powers, imperfect but creative ... They seem to be manifestations of what I have ventured to call a natural fantasy ... a lasting and inalienable collusion between this series of fertile abortions and their ultimate beneficiary (82-84).
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http://www.diptyqueparis-memento.com/en/agate-odyssey/
The vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it out with the treasures of memory and knowledge with all that is put at its disposal by experience, culture and history, not to mention what the imagination itself may, if necessary, invent or dream. So the imagination is never at a loss when it comes to making something rich and compelling out of a subject that might almost seem an absence of all life and significance.
A stone represents obvious achievement yet one arrived at without invention, skill or 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. These are subtle and ambiguous signals, reminding us, through all sorts of filters and obstacles, that there must be a pre-existing general beauty vaster than that perceived by human intuition, a beauty in which man delights and which, in his turn, he is proud to create. Stones – as well as roots, shells and wings and every other cipher and construction in nature – help to give us an idea of the proportions and laws of that general beauty about which we can only conjecture.
Quotes by Roger Caillois are from his book The Writing of Stones.
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https://sonialevy.net/stones.html
Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They attract through intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable or 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.
— Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones