The Writing of Stones

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ISSUE29 SLOTHSPRING2008

The Writing of Stones

MARINAWARNER

Roger Caillois (19131978), polymath, aesthetic philosopher, historian of

science, and social analyst of ritual and belief, was friends with Andr

Breton and a fellow Surrealist; but in 1934 they parted over the Surrealist

commitment to mystery for its own sake: Caillois was an investigator of a

more empirical temper. Cailloiss disagreement with Breton arose when the

two men were shown some Mexican jumping beans: beans that will

suddenly twitch and take a leap into the air. Caillois conjectured that there

was a worm or larva inside them, and he wanted to dissect one to find out;

Breton objected roundly, denouncing Caillois as a low-grade positivist who

refused the marvelous and defaced the poetic by wanting explanationsinother words, Caillois was of the party that wants to unweave the rainbow.

For Breton,hasard objectifobjective chance or unpredictabilityadmirably

disrupted the harmonious patterns of reason and delivered the mind-

expanding stimulus of disorder: convulsive beauty. Caillois wrote a lettre de

ruptureto Breton, which confirmed the depth of his quarrel with

Surrealism, declaring that he wanted research and poetry together. He

went on, I want the irrational to be continuously overdetermined, like the

structure of coral; it must combine into one single system everything that

until now has been systematically excluded by a mode of reason that is still

incomplete.1

Three years after he quarreled with Breton, Caillois became one of the

founders, alongside Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, of the so-called

Collge de Sociologie in Paris, which was dedicated to exploring the nature

of the sacred in society. Though none was a follower of any particular faith,

all three believed in the sacred as a system that exceeded current

understanding of reason and psychologythey were experimental mystics,

mostly renegades from Catholicism. Two years later, Caillois published an

important study of the topic, called LHomme et le Sacr(1939). The three

men were fascinated by magical processes, by cosmology, and by storiesthat anthropologists were bringing back from the four quarters of the

globe. The journals and other publications they createdsuch as

Minotaure, Documents, and Cailloiss own Diognereveal a restless and

sometimes prurient probing of other cultures, especially their members

intimacy with altered consciousness, magic rituals, and mysteries of

knowledge. A desire to discover stratagems to accede to worlds beyond the

senses fired their passion for the votive art, dances, and music which

constituted the presence of the sacred.2

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Episode from Ludovico Ariostos Orlando Furioso, painted on stone. Museo Opificio

delle Pietre Dure, Florence.

Tuscan ruin marble. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

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


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technologies of the individual self. But Caillois made a different rationalizing

move out of this impasse. In the preface to LeMythe et lHomme in 1938,

he identified two fundamental attitudes of the mind, shamanism,

displaying the power of the individual who struggles against the natural

order of reality, and manism, showing the pursuit through self-abandon of

an identification of self and non-self, consciousness and the external

world.3This is a very neat linguistic rhyme from two altogether different

roots: shamanfrom Russian Siberian nomadic culture, and manafrom the

Maori concepts of the holy, are both terms introduced into Europe by

nineteenth-century ethnography. For Caillois, the aggressivity and power-

hunger of magiciansand religious leadersbelong to shamanism,

whereas mysticism and poetry belong with manism. He further

characterized these different modes of magical thinking as Satanistthe

shamansand, on the other hand, Luciferian, after the angel of light who

wanted knowledge.

Caillois, insisting on cutting open the jumping bean and striking out in his

Luciferian empirical quest for knowledge, was mounting a rescue

operation of magic from the realm of irrational, human imagination,

resisting the inward turn of the uncanny, and relocating magical thinking

out there. There were strong motives for turning magical thinking towardcontemporary scientific inquiry, as discoveries and inventions detected and

harnessed new, impalpable powers. For one thing, Caillois has his

precursors, such as conjurors who early on grasped the potential of new

scientific instrumentsnot least magic lanterns, camera obscuras, and

microscopes. In his letter to Breton, Caillois insisted on the marvellousness

in science: he remonstrated that the newly discovered theories of the atom

had collapsed all earlier thinking about nature; here was a form of the

Marvellous that absolutely required a new philosophy (writing in 1934, he

was being prescient). A little while after the incident with the beans, when

the conflict had acquired a certain moment and fame, Breton explainedthat Caillois hadnt understood him. He would not have been opposed to

cutting one open, he said, but he was determined that all the possibilities

that the mystery offered for reverie, dream, and wonder should be

exhausted before doing so.4

It does not follow that the scientific spirit of empirical inquiry runs against

dreaming, and Breton was wrong to think Cailloiss investigative methods

opposed wonder. Material mysticism led Caillois back to magical thinking,

which he expanded further than the Surrealist interest in chance and

coincidence as he probed for insights into the order of things. Caillois wasequally, perhaps even more, fascinated with magic than the Surrealists, but

he wanted to probe what might exist as phenomenally marvelous, beyond

the subjective selfhe was a scholar of the sacred, and from the episode of

the jumping beans onwards, he looked for its character and its workings in

actual phenomena. In this sense he was more of a believerthough not in

a personal god or a religion. Where Breton exalted the perceiver, Caillois

wanted to go beyond these anthropocentric limits. But the distinction

cannot be held hard and fast as a standoff between subjectivity and

objectivity. As Peter Galison has commented on the Rorschach test, prime

trophy of Surrealisms long reach, no account of Rorschach subjectivity

(how we characteristically perceive our world) would be possible without a


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concomitant characterization of objectivity (how the world is without that

distortion). We therefore need ajointepistemic project addressing the

historically changing and mutually conditioning relation of inside and

outside knowledge.5Caillois spent his thinking life trying to work out this

position.

The quarrel with Breton throws light on the survival of ancient wisdom

within the newest scientific processes developed probing and analyzing

matter. Caillois is in fact not the sole participant in this twentieth-century

aesthetic turn of the oracular tradition. His writing grows gradually ever

closer to the precise observation, combined with lyrical delirium, that is

found in the prose and poetry of Paul Valry as well as the poetic

phenomenology of Francis Ponge. Valry, responding to the discovery of the

electromagnetic field, had also found in material phenomena the proof of a

secret, metaphysical order. These new frontiers of knowledge influenced

psychic research, in symbiosis with the invention of new communications

systems.

An eye agate from Uruguay. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

Approaches to the hieroglyphic universe found in the new science of the

seventeenth century offer a perspective on the modern science of the

twentieth, when divination changed direction but did not lose momentum.

Divining processes help define the character of magical thinking: first,

because their prime goal is knowledge, especially of events and outcomes

hidden in timemagical thinking yearns to overcome human limits,

especially the contingencies laid upon us by the physical constraints of the

here and now. Secondly, they posit some power that orders and patterns


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phenomena and freights them with significance, if only they could be

rendered legible, scrutable; this order obeys a unifying energy in the

cosmos, which aligns the particular incident or being with a general and

universal order according to a correlation between microcosm and

macrocosm. This kind of system also finds expression in another magical

system, the network of natural correspondences, wrought in a variety of

ways (pictorial resemblance, synaesthetic relations, verbal punning), as in

Baudelaires famous sonnet, influenced by Swedenborg:

Nature is a temple where living pillars

Let sometimes emerge confused words

Belief in invisible lattices of significant meaning leads to a third pillar of

magical thinkingthat some individuals are uniquely gifted to interpret

encrypted messages. Such people are gifted to tune in to the imperceptible

transmissions emanating from phenomena, to sense the presence of hidden

aquifers, pick up the ominous aura in a room before a disaster, or scry the

floating of an egg yolk in water for news of ships at sea. But this third

principle, while warranting the importance of seers, clairvoyants, magi,

sibyls, mediums, and channelers, is not indispensable to the penetrating,

oracular optic: sometimes, like the guard on the battlements of Elsinore,anyone and everyone can see the ghost and hear its dreadful warning.

Materialist mystics, among whom I count Caillois, do not search for self-

knowledge, nor for foreknowledge of their destiny, the sirens secret; but

they emphatically investigate hidden meanings and scan the deepest

horizons of time into infinity: the world turns into an inexhaustible book

written in hieroglyphs. They apply the occult wisdom of Renaissance

Neoplatonists and their magical cosmology, linking microcosm and

macrocosm according to principles which inspired Romantic metaphysics,

above all in Germany: Goethes anti-Newtonian critique and his counter-

Enlightenment conviction that the superstitions and folklore of a culture

contained intimations of deep knowledge have gained rather than lost

ground. Superstition, wrote the German poet, actually only seizes false

means in order to satisfy a genuine need. It is therefore neither so

reprehensible as it is considered, nor so infrequent in so-called enlightened

ages and among enlightened people.6He continued, We all walk in

mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know

nothing at all. We do not know what stirs in it and how it is connected with

our intelligence. This much is certain, under particular conditions the

antennae of our souls are able to reach out beyond their physical

limitations.7The new horizons of geology, biology, and, above all, physics

and mathematics beckoned to literary imaginations, where ancient ideas of

magical correspondences, action at a distance, and fields of energy were

re-activated and refreshed.

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. Peirceindex, image,


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diagrama 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.

A septarian stone from Germany. From the collection of Roger Caillois.

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 beckonedirresistibly 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 familiarscientific!use of icasms,

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 observers own character

and fate. Here the seers role plays back and forth between the two people

involved: the patient reads the signs, and the doctor then interprets the


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import of the reading and projects the interpretation back on the

interpreter.

The subjectivity of scrying raised a specter of fallibility, and a struggle

consequently began taking place to free the processes of decipherment

from this debateability; science, as ever, seemed to offer the hope that

there might exist a stable field of meaning, a language of things, beyond

human error and contingency.

Visiting London in 1894, the young poet Paul Valry was excited to a state

of frenzy by his readings in the new physicsespecially James Clerk

Maxwells Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. Scientific discoveries of

the nineteenth century were refashioning the perception and the very

concept of the physical world: the invisible hand behind the signatures was

identified with a difference, and the effect was indeed electric: in Maxwells

revelation of invisible lines of force, Valry recognized a key metaphor for

the role of imagination in poetic vision, which could also allow phenomena

that cannot be directly perceived to come into being and combine together

as objects of mental contemplation. For Valry, this work needed an

understanding of mathematics: he wanted to perform in poetry a kind of

linguistic algebra that would render intelligible the elusive and impalpablegeometry of reality. The study of my imagination he wrote in his

London notebook, has led me to considerations of mechanics and

geometrics, which is hardly astonishing or hypnotizing. It is sometimes

possible. Role of time, of space, of mass.8This movement of Valrys

exultant thought, as it follows the lines of forces in the electromagnetic

field to the physical architecture of space-time and mass, led him to posit

a logic of the imagination which attunes human consciousness with

phenomena according to deep symmetries that remain invisible and

impalpable in the ordinary order of thingslike sound and radio waves, like

the interior of the nucleus.

The same thought returns in the ecstatic prose poetry of Roger Caillois two

generations later, as he contemplates rocks and stones, meteorites and

crystals. He called stones lore du songethe shore of dreamingand he

amassed a wonderful collection, which he left to the Museum of National

History in Paris where you can go and look at them; he also wrote two

luminous books about stones. These are not about precious stones such as

diamonds and rubies but about dendrites, agates, Chinese scholars stones

pebbles and rocks that look like nothing much at first but can open up

wonders under contemplation. Pierres(Stones) from 1966 is a Valry-like

prose poem, intense and rhapsodical. They lead him to understanding the

physical make-up of the world, its algebra, vertigo, and order.9He exults

in their inscrutability and their lack of affect, their silence, their sheer

stoniness. When Caillois reads the writing of stones, when he pores over

the whorls and swirls in an agate, he ponders the revelation of cosmic time

they grant him. They provide moreover, taken on the spot and at a certain

instant of its development, an irreversible cut made into the fabric of the

universe. Like fossil imprints, this mark, this trace, is not only an effigy, but

the thing itself stabilized by a miracle, which attests to itself and to the

hidden laws of our shared formation where the whole of nature was borne


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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 butlasting standards and the very idea of beauty, I mean the inexplicable and

useless addition to the complexity of the world.12By the end, Caillois has

surrendered to the objects of his study: the ideal state is to let Nature

pass into you.13By 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


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things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in

so puny a being, of a universal syntax.15With this principle, Caillois

expands on how a cluster of certain natural circumstances, proclaim, or

illustrate, more spectacularly than is usually the case, but at the same time

in a manner almost obligatorily reticent and cryptic, the existence of

fundamental constants which ensure the latent continuity of the tissue of

the world. Then the object makes a sign, becomes sign. It attracts onto

itself that exact imagination, which reveals the object more than inventing

it.16

The marvelous in nature offers given or found works of art, such as stones,

which then shape and lead human aesthetics (we would now say

consciousness is hard-wired to respond) from delight to horror, desire to

repulsion. He concludes, Philosophers have not hesitated to identify the

real and the rational. I am persuaded that a different bold step would

lead to discover the grid of basic analogies and hidden connections which

constitute the logic of the imaginary.17

Oddly, this perception offered by stones returns us to ancient metaphorical

visions of the cosmos; in Ovids Metamorphoses, inorganic and organic life,stone and flesh, do not stand as opposite poles but flow and fuse along the

continuum uniting all things. Valrys impulse to find a literary analogue

operating with language for the new physics vision of nature doesnt

disrupt poetrys endeavor or twist it from a long-established orbit. The

search for metaphor can march with the experimental method of science,

as Roger Caillois the manist believedand practiced in his writing and his

thought.

A different version of this text appeared in English and Italian under the

title The Language of Stones / Il Linguaggio delle pietre in the recent

book Joan Jonas, ed. Anna Daneri (Milan: Charta, 2007).

1 Roger Caillois, letter of 27 December 1934 to Andr Breton, in Claudine Frank,ed. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader(Durham, NC, and London:Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 8486. 2 See the fine exhibition catalogue by Dawn Ades, Simon Baker, CarolineHancock, and Denis Hollier, eds., Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille andDocuments(London: Hayward Gallery, 2006).3 Denis Hollier, introduction to Anatole Lewitzky, Shamanism, in Denis Hollier,ed., The College of Sociology, 19371939(Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1988), p. 250.4 Roger Caillois, Intervention Surraliste, in Cases dun chiquier(Paris:Gallimard, 1970), p. 211. 5 Peter Galison, Image of Self, in Lorraine Daston, ed., Things that Talk(NewYork: Zone Books, 2004), p. 292. 6 Ernst Grumach, Goethe und der Antike(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1949), quotedin Gloria Flaherty, Shamanism and the Eighteenth Century(Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, l992), p. 168.7 Goethe, letter of 23 July 1820, quoted in Flaherty, Shamanism and theEighteenth Century, p. 173.8 Paul Valry, in Florence de Lussy, ed., Carnet indit dit Carnet de Londres(Paris: Gallimard, 2005), p. 114.9 Roger Caillois, Pierres(Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 8. My translation.10 Ibid, p. 117. Shared formation here translates Cailloiss phrase lancecommune, literally shared thrownness, which evokes the working of clay on a

potters wheel. My translation.


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2008 Cabinet Magazine

11 DArcy Wentworth Thompson, Growth and Form(Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1942), p. 1027.12 Caillois, Pierres, p. 88. Translation used here is drawn from Jean Burrell,

Extracts from Stones, Diogenes, vol. 52, no. 3 (2005), pp. 9192.13 Ibid., p. 103. My translation. 14 Roger Caillois, The Writing of Stones, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville:University of Virginia Press, 1985), p. 100.15 Ibid., pp. 103104.16 Roger Caillois, La Pieuvre: Essai sur la logique de limaginaire(Paris: La TableRonde, 1973), p. 229. My translation. 17 Caillois, Pierres, p. 230. My translation.

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