The Taste of Rocks
For me, the cycle of the four elements is an essential part of my practice of being in the world. It's the guide that old cultures worldwide have used to help us find our place in the dance of life. The last time I posted, an aspect of water was the key theme. This post continues the elemental theme, since my journey into aspects of the Earth is calling for some words. It reaches somewhat back into my own ancient history, decades ago, an idea which the rocks would chuckle at: for them, a mere twinkle of time has passed since then.
Scratched into the rocks at Twyfelfontein, ancestors drew giraffes and penguins. Far from the coast, they came to the sacred rocks, and honoured what they knew. We had seen penguins recently, on an Atlantic coast that some would have described as barren. But we saw African penguins in the icy water, and evocative grey rocks: up close, shaven of the normal busyness of vegetation, on the edge of the Namib desert, at Lüderitz, the Germans' colonial landing point (Ludicrous as it's sometimes affectionately referred to), a Bavarian village in a moon landscape with chapels sticking out.
It was the dawn of a new millennium and my then-partner and I had spent it in another remarkable place a few kilometres inland, Kolmanskop. For her, it was a reminder of a childhood trip with a geologist father. For me, I was beginning to really feel the mineral kingdom for the first time, still a deep mystery to me today. Around Kolmanskop it looked much more like the desert of the movies: great golden sand dunes, who had moved in on that crusty determination of the first German settlers. Their opulent mansions, possible only by bringing water in from the coast by train, funded by diamonds, have stood empty for a century, Canute-like reminders of an old folly. The slow waves of the dunes retaking these discarded human shells. We dressed up in formal clothes and ate from platters, during one of the weirdest but most picturesque New Year gigs I've ever done.
Hundreds of kilometres inland, at Duwisib Castle, a further tribute to the madness that said "God is Dead So I'll Become Him". A crazy fortress, with furniture, wood for beams and floors, and other materials carried across the sands by slaves in the first decade of the twentieth century, that whiff of Teutonic arrogance birthing something terrible here in the desert long ago - before a first desert genocide to give unholy inspiration to others. The British authorities further south were not exempt from such extravagant architectural madness: Cape Town City Hall was built at the same time not from local quarries but from Bath stone, brought halfway round the world, setting a tone perhaps for today's global trade, harvested in one continent, shelled in another, processed in a third, packaged in a fourth. We have not learnt much.
Of course, today the post-colonial government of Namibia is doing its best to extract maximum reparation tribute from contrite modern Germans, for those desert atrocities on the ancestors - a potential rabbit hole that generally the ex colonial European powers are doing their best to avoid engaging with. The rocks that built the castle were the only concession to locality - red stone, uprooted from that area of the Namib, put determinedly to use, to create a structure so unlike anything else around. The castle was a fascinating thing of cruel beauty, a determination to impose a form rather than listen to what the land might be saying. Diamonds themselves often seem things we have brought cruelty to: the brilliantly tight carbon crystal forms that solidified out from earth's more liquid processes into kimberlite volcanic pipes, and in some fiercely guarded territories (such as the Sperrgebiet north of Oranjemund) abundant from the river bed and the ocean to a degree that could crash economies if released naively, just as Mansa Musa managed to do with gold in medieval west Africa. In a different time and place, where copper was revered, and gold was relatively plentiful - worth as much as truly essential salt to the desert locals, but when carried towards Mecca and gifted generously, it showed up dramatically the imprecision in the financial system. These days we can also, of course, absurdly compress peanut butter or some other carbon form of choice, until it gets squeezed as hard as real 'gem' diamonds but perhaps struggles to achieve the same level of poetry. When in recent years I took trips on the Orange River myself, the kind of gems we had most fun with were fluorite: cracking on the evening fire and giving a miniature display of green sparks.
Back on that millennial trip we saw great dune pyramids of salt north of Swakopmund, further up the Namibian coast, emerging from great pink pans taking tasty minerals from the ocean. There the daily morning ocean mists roll in to water the welwitschias, the giant squid thousand-year old desert plants, but it never rains. And nearby, another modern touchstone: uranium is yanked from the earth and Africa's strip mining has nowhere to be hidden (often under pretty ruthless Australian ownership, the same guys who produce lots of those prosaic factory diamonds).
If the salt was pretending to be a different kind of treasure pile, inland the desert mountains rose with yellow snow on their slopes. (These last weeks Table Mountain has an unexpected new sand scratch itself, after the recent torrents pulled down slides of yellowish soil.) When we drove in towards the small capital, Windhoek, later in our trip, butterflies were bursting from every angle, and the land was verdant: farmers were talking of that rare phenomenon they'd just experienced after early rain, a Green Christmas. We gatecrashed the opening party for the Windhoek Waldorf School, the only Steiner school event I've ever attended with no vegetarian options whatsoever. Local Windhoek restaurants routinely feature such delicacies as crocodile steak. I've met plenty of wonderful Namibians over the years but they sure live in a challenging place to be a soft-skinned human.
Hawkers on the desert dirt roads in northern Damaraland sold agates and other beauties, a crystal harvest that seemed to erupt from the ground, unsullied by the kind of deep mining equipment that surround Johannesburg with its characteristic old dumps, man-made hills climbed by unwary adventurers or converted into suburbs. I'm often reminded of those wide Namibian stone roads we crossed, dusty and potentially brutal on tyres, when driving in the Karoo. However, in the parts of the Karoo I'm most familiar with, the shale is richer, softer than those grey Namibian rocks; a hard task master for those who would grow things or build things, but still more yielding than the true desert, and far fuller of freaky plants.
Every now and then as we crisscrossed those dry lands, mighty sandstone fingers poked out of the landscape, waiting patiently for the elements to cause their final crumbles. On the Skeleton Coast, named for sailing wrecks, we saw a whale vertebrae, the calcium all of us vertebrates take into our bones being returned to the slowly churning mineral soup. And the beauty of an igneous basalt intrusion is so very visible in this world, the striving upwards of some unknown god force that would pummel those distant long-departed generals in no time.
Down at the Sea Point Contact, on the Cape Town Atlantic coast, a young Charles Darwin made an observation for his diaries that the earth was probably older than 6000 years, seeing the ancient intrusions there. I only saw this many years after being in Namibia, for in Cape Town the rock that dominates us all is still surrounded by ocean water and green bush. But here's a heretically creationist thought: who's counting the years? Sure, for us shortlived humans it's a simple solar cycle. Were years always counted like this before we came along? Perhaps in rock years the Earth really is "only" 6000 or so. For if I've learned one thing in my encounters with rocks it's that they're not as "dead" as we might think. Standing above the Fish River canyon in the south, where geological aeons were visible in the way the river gradually loved the rocks into parting, we felt their conscious dance. A part of me senses that with our lives we're just retelling each other the same stories the rocks have been transmitting in some language we can't quite comprehend, far too slowly for us busybodies.
In the North American sweat lodge each hot rock is welcomed in with a greeting: Welcome, Grandfather. The stones teach us something profound about ancestry. Before one such ceremony I performed a visualisation and met an ancestor I'd been excluding - knowing a little of his abuses. He asked me to find a Grandfather and bring him to the lodge, to transmute that energy. A native elder who was conducting a ceremony I participated in declared that with the right acknowledgement and gratitude, new Grandfather stones would always appear, erupting slowly out of the fields to support us. A Namibian German I know, sweat lodge participant, placed a large rose quartz crystal on the very private grave of his own grandfather. A few years later, it disappeared. The native American leader of the ceremonies told him simply, the crystal had done its work. Time for it to move on. These are the mineral world's patient and quizzical reminders to us, perhaps, of the Great Mystery.
Quartz is seen in local spiritual traditions (and elsewhere) as a transmitter, a giver of deeper sight, a clean connector and tuner, worn on ceremonial items, marking out ceremonial spaces. Our digital culture has used it in tinier quantities, like desert sand which is full of it. In some of my favourite Karoo landscapes there are white quartz crystals everywhere; it's like Hansel's pebbles, suggesting routes and markers to us. And then there's granite, full of that quartz stuff. The massive boulders at Spitzkoppe stand out, one more Namibian place to witness the heavens while sleeping out far from the city lights. They also stand out closer to home, at Paarl Rock, the glinting "pearl" on the hillside, so much more impressive than the slightly bizarre apartheid-era concrete monument, on the same hill, commemorating the Afrikaans language. And then there's the granite on the False Bay coast, close to some better known penguins.
In the heart of the Namib there is a space that spits magic, where the morning colours are as vibrant as the most unreal Disney cartoon, the red sands of the dunes hinting at iron, the ghostly vlei filling occasionally to give a weird burst of busier life; Sossusvlei in the early morning was the only place in Namibia our VW Beetle couldn't get to, and we had to hitchhike the last few kilometres in a 4x4, and get out again before the January heat overwhelmed us. Everything about the desert speaks of a resonance with those vast night skies, impossible distances between signs of human life. A nowhere petrol pump on a Sunday, the Christian owners reluctantly making a sale to us. Elsewhere, Kaffee und Kuchen and air conditioning making for a moment like a tiny version of the unreality that is desert-born Dubai, do we participate? Remembering that the Bushmen made their way through such places, looking simply for the tasteless (to us sugar junkies) melons that might be a life saver. Tracking every spoor, every vegetation signpost, absorbing and observing the land, the rocks, the way home. Twenty years ago I still bought the cake.
I imagine other desert dwellers have this sense of geology writ large. In Windhoek, where I flew up to play with the gallantly enthusiastic, if very occasional national symphony orchestra, one member of the woodwind section was the only home birth midwife in the country: even so, women usually had to travel across country to prepare in her special birthing parlour. No way would she reach them in time otherwise. It felt surreal to watch an American president launching another war in another desert, on CNN everywhere at that time in the tiny capital. We met a great jazz drummer from the township, named Siegfried. It's curious which relics of imposed cultures stuck, in the place old South Africans used to call "South West", the largely empty colony of a colony. Except it's not empty: it's very, very full of rocks, and less full of concrete.
New to the Cape back in the nineties, I was greeted at the top of my first hike up Table Mountain by a beach. Sand on top, because the faces of the Cape fold mountains are sandstone, because once they were the seabed, apparently. The continents broke gradually apart, and will push gradually together again, as the earth takes a breath, many aeons long. It's said that zero was discovered first by Indian mathematicians, who gave us the decimal system (and first built with it at Lothal, their ancient harbour). Zero allowed them to extend our minds into the vast numbers of geology, adding zeroes to years so that the length of the creator's breath could be pictured. Perhaps 6000 or so years felt like what was manageable if you had no zero.
Meanwhile in Africa, that foreign attempt to outlast the centuries was a foolish endeavour. Conventional wisdom has it that Great Zimbabwe is a sign of African ability to create grand structures like other cultures. Racist Rhodesian scholars tried to claim it was made under white influence, and progressives everywhere mocked them. Zulu sangoma Credo Mutwa, in his classic "Indaba My Children", turned things on their head. 'Africans must have built such structures under foreign influence, because no true African would be so stupid'. (He even pointed the finger, at a white character in a Namibian rock painting!) Whatever the truth (Mutwa was certainly an expert spinner of stories), the basic point is worth making: 'our lives are so ephemeral: why waste energy trying to outlast the rocks?' Perhaps you'd end up with an awe-inspiring Pharaoh's pyramid, or a Duwisib Castle, and perhaps oppression and insane coercion, mixed with colossally foolish extravagance, would get you there, and the mineral kingdom will always acquiesce. Or perhaps you could just admire the formations the earth has given us already, find your footsteps to a 'sacred place' marked out by the passing seasons of the sun. Places that Dean Liprini has found all over the Cape Peninsula; who knows if they were altered by humans, or provided by gods, or only noticed now; all those anthropomorphic images, which the rocks came up with probably before there were any anthros to imitate (but maybe, like I say, they just gave us a template). The one thing I know is, when we return to the rocks with reverence, we return to a little more of the truth of our story.