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Episode from Ludovico Ariostos Orlando Furioso, painted on stone. Museo Opificio
delle Pietre Dure, Florence.
Cailloiss difference from Breton expresses very richly a fissure that runs
through magical thinking and becomes more important in the last century
and perhaps this one. The Mexican jumping bean harbors a larva which, by
springing into the air and landing elsewhere, helps to propagate its host.
This marvel belongs to natural as opposed to supernatural magic, but it
possesses the kinetic unpredictability of oracular devices: like the twitching
of a dowsers hazel wand, the quivering intestines of a sacrificed bird, the
Ouija boards sliding glass, even the Chinese fortune-telling fish that curls
up in the palm of your hand to show how passionate you are, it moves to
forces in the universe imperceptible to human senses, and consequently
seems to illuminate a particular destinythe truth-seekers fate. Bretons
uses of enchantment tightened the bond between the self and chance:
Surrealist practices such as automatic writing, projective imagination, and
cadavres exquis doodles enhance subjectivity; these are magical
along.10
How did the circles in the stone grow therelike tree rings, like ripples in a
pond? Lines of force exert their power uniformly through space-time at any
scale, no matter how small, or how vast. As DArcy Wentworth Thompson
expressed it in On Growth and Form:
We are apt to think of mathematical definitions as too strict and rigid for
common use, but their rigour is combined with all but endless freedom. The
precise definition of an ellipse introduces us to all the ellipses in the world.
We discover homologies or identities which were not obvious before, and
which our descriptions obscured rather than revealed: as for instance, we
learn that, however we hold our chain, or however we fire our bullet, the
contour of the one or the path of the other is always mathematically
homologous.11
The writing in the rock is the signature of time itself, captured as Valryan
forms in movement, displaying their growth and articulation over eons in
the stilled swirls of their inner core, the camouflage stripes and fault-lines
of their structure, their veins and cells; it is possible to see clearly,
vertiginously, in these sections through a pebble or a rock the flow of
organic matter as it took shape and petrified.
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 categoriesbizarre, 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.12 By the end, Caillois has
surrendered to the objects of his study: the ideal state is to let Nature
pass into you.13 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 feelsand he delights in his
metamorphosis.
He too recognized in his feeling for stones the operations of a logique de
limaginaire: this logic of the imagination is rooted in the laws of space and
time, light and color, evolution and decay, naturally evolving shapes and
naturally occurring rhythms, and it provides the underlying structure of
aesthetics. Caillois praises especially the kaleidoscopic metamorphosis of
phenomena such as flames and waterfalls.14
In his second work focusing on stones, LEcriture des pierres (The Writing
of Stones), written towards the end of his life, Caillois struggled to
formulate his credo about where his decipherment might lead: The tissue
of the universe is continuous, he proposed. I can scarcely refrain, from
suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of