Liquid Like Glass
The laws of superposition and being a son
If you were to pinch, between thumb and forefinger, a pane of stained glass in some ancient cathedral, first at the top and then the bottom, it is possible to detect a change in thickness.
Each pane thicker at its base. An accumulation, a slump of matter, indicating a gravitational flow within the solid structure of the glass.
It is this same mobility of solids that allows rock to turn and rise in convection, driven by the heat of the earth’s core, driving the shift of continents. The folding and stretching, deformation and renewal of a solid-as-rock structure.
It is all just a matter of viscosity.
Fore/Cast Into Stone
Limestone now, rhyolite
later,
good.Metamorphic giving way to
igneous intrusions in the
west northwest,
uncertain.Porphyritic now, sand
later.Chance of isolated pockets
of slate,
fair.Carboniferous, Silurian,
Quaternary, turning
Ordovician.
Cambrian.Subducting in the east,
giving way to mantle by
dawn.Outlook for all areas west
of Old Red Sandstone;
fair turning Quartzite
later.Crust, clastic, sill;
intrusive,
fair to good.All areas experiencing
superposition by dawn,
schist later.Granite, gabbro, garnet,
good.Waterhouse
I, along with a handful of others, chose to study geology as an additional subject at GCSE. Our school was not the kind to have the module in the syllabus but thanks to Mr Waterhouse, we had the opportunity to spend a couple of hours after school each week studying for an extra letter in our results.
He was a large, bearded man, given to small rants and confusing-to-a-fifteen-year-old anecdotes. He was curmudgeonly in an affected way, belied by his willingness to give up his evenings to us. He approached education with the same encompassing surety and regard as he approached the resonance of shifting rocks and continental plates. His remaining spare time was spent volunteering on a steam railway line, working in the gift shop, correcting visitors’ pronunciation of nougat (lose the o, double the g, flatten the a and leave the t in the throat; we’re in Keighley, not France).
We didn’t have access to the latest textbooks, relying instead on a dull yellow stash he’d saved from being thrown out decades before. They were out of date, and we had to amend them, by hand, to reflect a newer truth. He loved to tell us how it was only recently that the theory of continental drift (the crackle-glazed surface of the Earth, grinding and subsuming, atop a shifting mantle) was accepted as the likeliest explanation for the geological evidence before us.
Sit down.
Shut up.
You look like
a bloody idiot
with your tie like that.
Do it up.
Do it UP!
No, not like
that.
This.
Like this, see.Forget all that
crap.
That shit
they feed you.
This is the truth of it,
the root
of it
all.
To understand this
is to forget the rest.