Song of Stone

On the Hard Nature of the Human

I have been away from Substack for a while due to a concatenation of circumstances (some better than others) that have swept over me like a shower of stones since mid April. Endless thanks to my paid subcribers for supproting me despite my lack of productivity in this period. On top of my usual job, I had to change flat and urgently move, revise and resubmit a whole book, do piles of paperwork and travel to give lectures.

I will not bore you with details but suffice it to say that I feel as heavy as stone (though not at all stoned, despite living in Prague) and my body is craving for rest. Aside from forgetting things constantly (yesterday I left a bunch of important documents on the till in the supermarket but fortunately recovered them later) and breaking several cups and plates that my hands happened upon during and after the move, I managed to mix up a box of books for a box of clothes and ended up bringing laundry to the library.

In moments like these I find poetry a soothing balm for the aching body and soul. An old poem about stone came to my mind for the first time since elementary school so I decided to translate it into English and make it the starting point of this article.

The Lamentation of Stone¹

Return me into blocks, into cliffs, into the soaring mountains,

My virginity into the laws of eternity.

Throw me back into seas, into oceans, give me over to thunder.

Rulers of the Earth, give me peace and dream.

Let your armies not ring with hooves.

Do not let the tears flow.

Take me out of your sidewalks and your streets,

from the thresholds of your dungeons and your cathedrals

Let the lightning and the wind strike me, and the stars crown me.

And you, hand raising the chisel, do not give me the life of a man,

deny me a heart and reason and eyes to see.

Return me into seas of marble, into dreams and mists.

Rulers of the Earth, give me peace and dream,

and you, hand raising the chisel, do not wake me,

do not give me eyes to see your crimes.

Jure Kaštelan wrote this beautiful poem, no doubt inspired by the karst landscape of Dalmatia and the mountains rising above the Adriatic Sea and the river Cetina where he was born. Few remember this poet, even in his native Croatia. I could not even google any of his collections of poems, let alone the complete works online, only snippets from the larger opus. (in the end I found an old edition on Z library)

The canyon of Cetina River, just before it flows into the Adriatic Sea at Omiš, Croatia

Classicists spend whole lifetimes studying the fragments of Pindar and Sappho but the truth is there is so much beautiful poetry out there that is publicly available, but lies unappreciated and untranslated.

Kaštelan focuses on the materiality and innocence of stone, personifying it and letting it speak for itself. The speaking stone asks to be returned into nature so as not the see the crimes and acts of humans, including their art and culture. His living stone is a powerful cry against human abuse of nature but also a reminder that all matter is in a way sentient as it takes part in the network of life.

Stones are usually seen as dead matter, unable to move, let alone speak or protest its manipulation at the hands of humans. But in a larger sense, stone is a part of us and a part of so many other organisms. We cannot live without minerals which make our bones and spine. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues in his book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, stone is not merely inert matter passively awaiting human use but part of a larger ecology that exceeds the human. Mountains, cliffs and minerals exist on temporal scales vastly older than our civilizations and preserve traces of worlds that came before us (and that will stay on after us). People build monuments in stone to capture their fleeting existence in a less transient form.

Stone may appear dead because it moves too slowly for us to perceive its transformations, yet it shapes landscapes, bodies and histories alike. Human beings themselves are geological creatures: our bones contain minerals and the architecture of our cities emerges from quarried rock. The speaking stone of Kaštelan’s poem longs to escape the violence of human history and return to this deeper material existence, to the inhuman peace of mountains, seas and storms.

This reminds me of the great Roman epic of change, the Metamorphoses, in which Ovid collapses the boundary between the human and non-human, personal and geological.

DEUCALION AND PYRRHA

Deucalion and Pyrrha are the only human couple to survive the universal flood, a Greek version of the story of Noah. Left alone on a desolate world still full of water, they they pray to Themis, the goddess of justice, to restore humankind. A voice from her temple responds:²

Leave this sanctuary, cover your heads and ungirdle your garments,

then cast the bones of your mighty mother behind your backs.

They were both confused and tried to work out the meaning of the words of the deity. Finally Deucalion hit upon the solution:

Unless my wits are awry and sorely deceiving me,

oracles must be holy and never command what is sinful.

Our mighty mother is Earth. I believe what is meant by her bones

are stones on her body, and these we are bidden to cast behind us.

Ovid describes the transformation of stones into humans: ³

…They both distrusted the oracle’s bidding,

but saw little harm in trying. Proceeding down from the temple,

they covered their heads, ungirdled their robes and, stepping out boldly,

scattered some stones behind their backs, as the oracle ordered.

Who would believe what ensued, if it wasn’t confirmed by tradition?

The stones started to lose their essential hardness, slowly

to soften, and then to assume a new shape. They soon grew larger

and gathered a nature more gentle than stone. An outline of human

form could be seen, not perfectly clear, like a rough-hewn statue

partially carved from the marble and not yet properly finished.

But still, the part of the stones which consisted of earth and contained

some moisture was turned into flesh; the solid, inflexible matter

was changed into bones; and the veins of the rock into veins of blood.

In a moment of time, by the will of the gods, the stones that were thrown

from the hands of a man were transformed to take on the appearance of men,

and women were fashioned anew from those that were thrown by a woman.

And so our race is a hard one; we work by the sweat of our brow

and bear the unmistakable signs of our stony origin.

Peter Paul Rubens - Deucalion and Pyrrha

Ovid derives parts of the human body from elements of the environment, the earth and its fluids turn to flesh, the solid stones into bones, and the veins of the rock into veins of blood. The world of the Metamorphoses is a fluid cosmos in which human and non-human matter intertwine, mix and overlap. “All things are in flux” as Ovid has the wise Pythagoras say in the final book of this great epic.

But this vision of the fluid interconnected cosmos is also unsettling. As Giulia Sissa argues:⁴

Ages, seasons, natural phenomena and the vicissitudes of history show the mobility of life. The migration of souls produces a network of kindred beings. The ecosphere is an inclusive, affective community. This may well appear to create a welcome state of affairs, until it turns into a horror story. Since changeability does not involve the annihilation of whatever undergoes change, when it is a human being that loses its shape – and this is the case in almost all the episodes of the Metamorphoses – then a vestige of humanity might still be lingering in a non-anthropomorphic body. New bodies are hybrids. Since human morphology has become invisible, replaced by a new appearance, the nagging suspicion that a cow might also be a woman (or a god), remains precisely that – a supposition, a source of anxiety, never a certainty.

The transformation of stone into human beings implies that matter itself is alive with hidden potentialities and that the boundary separating human from non-human existence is fragile and permeable. Ovid’s cosmos is one in which identities constantly dissolve and reform: women become trees, men become dolphins, stones become flesh.

Cohen’s ecology of the inhuman illuminates Ovid’s world of metamorphosis because it invites us to admit that humans are never fully separate from the material environment that sustains them. We are, in a sense, only one temporary form assumed by the earth itself. On the scale of deep time, we are elements of the Earth that have become conscious of themselves.

Roman fresco depicting Prometheus creating man in the presence of Athena, from the arcosolium of a tomb near the Basilica of St. Paul, 3rd century AD, Museo della Via Ostiense, Rome. Shared under Creative Commons licence

Ovid brings this lesson home at the very beginning of the epic, before the great flood. The Titan Prometheus shapes humans out of clay, which he gets by mixing the earth with raindrops:⁵

Maybe the earth that was freshly formed and newly divorced

from the heavenly ether retained some seeds of its kindred element –

earth, which Prométheus, the son of Iápetus, sprinkled with raindrops

and moulded into the likeness of gods who govern the universe.

Where other animals walk on all fours and look to the ground,

man was given a towering head and commanded to stand

erect, with his face uplifted to gaze on the stars of heaven.

Thus clay, so lately no more than a crude and formless substance,

was metamorphosed to assume the strange new figure of Man.

The creation of humanity from clay recalls the etymology of the Latin word humanus, (which gives the English ‘human’) from humus (earth, ground). We are earthlings, creatures of our planet Earth. Similarly, Adam, the first man in the Biblical book of Genesis derives from the Hebrew word adamah, meaning earth or ground. As earthlings we can only realize our full potential in relation to the Earth that created us. To realize the hard nature of our earthly origins is to perceive the divine likeness that Ovid speaks of.

These stories return us to a world in which the boundary between the human and the non-human is fluid rather than fixed. Rivers, stones and mountains are not passive scenery surrounding human life but active participants in the making of identities, memories and histories. Modern industrial society often imagines itself as detached from the material world it exploits, yet climate change, pollution and ecological collapse remind us with increasing urgency that the Earth is not inert matter awaiting mastery. The ancient myths explored here preserve a different intuition: that humans are deeply entangled with water, stone and animal life, temporary formations within a much older and larger web of existence. To remember this may not solve the environmental crises of the present, but it may help us imagine more humble and reciprocal ways of inhabiting the world.

1. The poem in the Croatian original:

Jadikovka Kamena

Vratite me u gromade, u klisure, u spletove gorja.

U zakone vječnosti moje djevičanstvo.

Bacite u mora, u oceane, gromovima predajte me.

Vladari zemlje, mir i san mi dajte.

Neka vojske vaše ne zvone kopitima.

Neka suze ne teku.

Izvadite me iz pločnika i ulica, iz pragova tamnica i

katedrala.

Neka me munje i bure biju. I zvijezde da me krune.

I ti, ruko koja dižeš dlijeto, ne daj mi život čovjeka.

Ne daj mi srce i razum i oči koje gledaju.

U mramorna mora, u sne i magle vratite me.

Vladari zemlje, mir i san mi dajte.

I ti, ruko koja dižeš dlijeto, ne budi me.

Ne daj mi oči koje gledaju zločin.

2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.383-4. Translation by David Raeburn, Penguin Classics.

3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.396-415. Translation by David Raeburn, Penguin Classics.

4. Giulia Sissa, “Cuncta Fluunt: The Fluidity of Life in Ovid’s Metamorphic World” in Francesca Martelli, Giulia Sissa, (eds.) Ovid's Metamorphoses and the environmental imagination. Ancient environments. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

5. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1.80-88. Translation by David Raeburn, Penguin Classics.