Writing

Rolling Stone Drift

Find a small stone in an urban area. Ask the stone if it will play with you. If it agrees, gently nudge or kick the stone along the street, observing where it goes and how it moves. Stop when the stone escapes.

When I was about seven, I walked to and from my primary school in the outskirts of Glasgow four times a day. I’d often spend one of the walks – on my way home – kicking a small stone I’d chosen along the pavement, trying to stop it escaping into a drain or rolling somewhere inaccessible. I talked to the stones. If I managed to keep the same stone with me all the way home, I put it with the other stones I’d collected in a hole in the concrete where the gatepost of my house had once been. And then I forgot it. Returning the next day, I couldn’t tell which were ‘my’ stones, which had escaped, and which had found their own way into my stone sanctuary.

Recently, I’ve again been kicking stones around cities. I’ve felt a similar attachment to the stones I’m kicking, and a similar investment in stopping the stones escape. I’ve been thinking about why I might feel this momentary lithic connection. Kinship? Perhaps through the stony matter of my body: my bones and teeth? A sense of ownership? I’ve claimed the stone as mine and don’t want to let it go? Or is it competition between me and the stone?  Can I prevent the stone from rolling somewhere unreachable? (The answer is ‘no, I can’t’.)

Kicking the stones, I find myself paying close attention to the lithic skin of the city streets: concrete; tarmac dotted with white chips of marble; paving blocks of various sizes, set in diagonal or rectilinear grids; red slabs with protruding bumps that act as tactile markers of a crossing-place; cracks, scars, patches, and potholes; undulations, sometimes where tree roots warp the pavement; high kerbs of granite, and dropped kerbs… I think about how, unlike the outer membranes of plants and animals, this lithic skin hinders penetration by water and traps heat. This lithic skin makes climate-related problems of flooding and rising seasonal temperatures more severe.

The sounds of the pebbles change as they skitter over ‘natural’ and human-made rock, iron inspection-hatch covers and gratings. Sometimes there is a resonance: a hollow, higher-pitched tinkling, like the sound of ice skimming across a frozen pond. Here there are cellars, tunnels, or other excavated spaces beneath the pavement.

I think about the geological maps I have looked at where different lithic strata are marked and categorised. The keys to the maps list categories of ‘unconsolidated matter’- previously known as ‘drift’. And they list categories of ‘made’ and ‘artificial’ ground: strata created by humans through mining, quarrying, and tunnelling, or through landfill and deposits from demolition. I think about where the lithic materials of the city have come from; how they were extracted or created, shaped, and installed; how they travelled to be here; and who and what were involved in these processes.

On busier streets, my focus shifts to other people: trying not to get in their way, nor to inadvertently kick stones at them. I think about what the people I pass might be doing, where they are going, and who or what led them to be here. Mostly, I avoid eye contact and wonder if they notice me, a sixty-two-year-old, white, Scottish woman, intently kicking a small stone along the pavement. At a pedestrian crossing, the green light changes to red and my stone is stranded in the middle of the road. A man heading in the opposite direction gently nudges it to the safety of the kerb.

I think about the cityscape as at once geological and architectural: an ongoing negotiation among human and other-than-human forces. I wonder if the geological landscape beneath and within the architectural one is often, intentionally, left out of public conversations about cities and urban planning. In whose interest is it to omit information about mine shafts beneath peoples’ houses in Glasgow? Or about unclassified landfill materials used to make local parks in Madrid? Or about the conditions of quarry workers in China, from where some of Glasgow’s granite paving slabs are sourced? (I have been told that pieces of human finger have been found in consignments of Chinese granite.) Less troubling, perhaps, to focus on an image of architectural landscape as something that is largely inert: designed, regulated, and managed by humans. Easier to pave over the unruly, other-than-human forces that can erupt within the urban fabric. Better not to dwell on the consequences of humans’ own lithic interventions: the carbon footprint of making anthropogenic rock like concrete; the legacies of toxicity and subsidence from ‘made’ and ‘artificial’ ground; and the obscenely exploitative conditions of global mineral extraction, rooted in colonialism. More comforting, perhaps, to forget that the geological landscape predates and will outlast humans’ intentions and control.

No. We really need to remember all of this.

But maybe I am getting carried away. What does kicking a stone around a city street have to do with inequitable urban planning decisions, global extractivism and colonial legacies, or the persistent and catastrophic belief among the Global Minority that we humans are more important than the other stuff of the Earth? Maybe it is just kicking a stone.

Quarry Drift (Glasgow)

Borrow a rock from the site of a former quarry on the outskirts of Glasgow. Walk with the rock to a building in the city where stone from the quarry was used in its construction.

The tendons in my forearms are starting to ache. I’ve been carrying this piece of blonde sandstone for about three hours, swapping it from hand to hand as I walk. Maybe I should have walked with a smaller rock? I met the piece of blonde sandstone that I hold in my hand at the site of one of several abandoned quarries on the outskirts of Glasgow. I visited the quarry this morning. It doesn’t look much like a quarry now: overgrown with grass; quarry stones jumbled with human-made rocks like concrete, with rubble and other rubbish. Signs warn me to keep out. I don’t know if the stone I am walking with was quarried here, or whether it was dumped on the site after the quarry closed. But I noticed it, and it was the one I asked to accompany me on my walk to the city centre.

When I talk to stones, I don’t really think that they understand. I don’t think that this rock in my hand either gave or withheld its consent to come with me. But I speak to stones and call them collaborators as part of my practice as an artist. I do this as a tactic both to face up to, and to trouble, the deep-grained ways of being and thinking that I have grown up with, as a white, middle-class, Scottish woman: part of the Global Minority. I speak to rocks in an attempt to unsettle these ways of thinking and being: the belief that humans are exceptional among living things; the categorisation of stuff as either animate or inanimate; and the treatment of other-than-humans as resources to be extracted, consumed, and exploited. I recognise arguments against this kind of strategic anthropomorphism: that by attributing human characteristics to other-than-humans and addressing them using human language systems it perpetuates human exceptionalism and reinforces unequal power relations. (I extracted the rock from the quarry site whether or not it consented to come with me. What, after all, is consent for a rock?) But I have also read the thoughts of others – notably Indigenous people, or people from the Global Majority – who don’t perceive the world according to binaries of human/nonhuman, or animate/inanimate, and who advocate for relationships with other-than-humans that are reciprocal and not extractive. I hope I might learn something from those ways of thinking and being. I talk to the stones to see what it feels like, to try to countenance their liveliness and agency, and to face up to my implication in human exceptionalism.

As I walk with ‘my’ stone, I think about the term ‘geological drift’, once used by geologists as a category to describe unconsolidated lithic matter: sediment, rubble, pebbles, and sand that has not formed into solid masses. I think about the city of Glasgow and its buildings as strata of geological drift: constellations of partly consolidated matter, still drifting. I think about how I am participating in this drift by walking with a piece of sandstone.

I feel the soft, moist, crumbly texture of the rock in my hand: sand particles loosening and sticking to my fingers. I remember the large chunk of sandstone that fell, some years ago, from the façade of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, within sight of where I then lived. (The stone fell, thankfully, at a time when no one was standing below.) The Mitchell Library façade has since been renovated – reconsolidated – in the ongoing (human) endeavour to stall urban drift. I wonder what it would feel like to live with more day-to-day awareness of drift in cities: of the liveliness of the lithic? Lithic liveliness is, I presume, much more present in places prone to the violent drifts of earthquakes, sinkholes, and landslides. Perhaps the figure of rock as stable and solid is specific to the kinds of environment where I grew up? Cities built from stone promoting an illusion of permanence. A distraction from the inevitability of being outlived by the lithic? I walk past a graveyard, past headstones of durable, sharp-edged granite and of weathering sandstone.

Heading towards the city centre, the stone and I pass by many of its kin. I notice tenement housing blocks and public buildings, dating from the nineteenth century or earlier, that are built from blonde or red sandstone. I’ve read that Glasgow’s blonde sandstone buildings are older than the red sandstone ones. (Like the sandstone itself: I was told that this blonde sandstone formed around 350 million years ago, while the younger red stone dates from around 290 million years ago). The softer, less resilient, yellowy sandstone was quarried in and near to the city and could be transported locally by canal and road. The innovation of rail travel allowed red sandstone to be freighted from more distant quarries in Dumfries and Galloway, in southern Scotland. Now, stones used in the urban environment are likely to be global imports: granite from China or Brazil.

Someone told me that the sandstone used to construct one of Glasgow’s oldest buildings, the city’s twelfth-century cathedral, had been quarried only 300 metres from the site of the building. I picture an underground void in the shape of the inverted cathedral: negative architecture. I wonder about the consequences of building local?

When we pass a blonde sandstone building, the rock and I stop to take a selfie: the rock posing with its cultured kin. As the rock and I pose beside the yellowy sandstone columns of the Gallery of Modern Art I think about how, for decades, I didn’t question the source of the wealth that funded much of Glasgow’s grand eighteenth and early nineteenth-century architecture. I know now that the Gallery was built as a townhouse for William Cunnighame, a merchant made hugely wealthy through trading in tobacco and sugar produced by enslaved people. I think about the word ‘inhuman’ and how it was used to categorise not just rocks and minerals, but also people: specifically, black, enslaved people. And that this categorisation acted as a conceptual and political scaffolding for the treatment of both the geological and the (black) human as resources for exploitation by the Global Minority.

As we walk through the city centre, I notice a change in how I think about my companion rock. I notice how many large windows and glass surfaces there are in this part of Glasgow. I think about rocks and glass. Until now, I have considered the rock as a companion and collaborator. Or as a building block. I’ve imagined it as part of a geological drift. And I’ve felt it as a burden that makes my arm ache. But now, it takes on another role. Walking through Glasgow city centre, on a Friday evening, the rock becomes a potentially destructive tool. I wonder if anyone notices the rock in my hand and is having similar thoughts? In George Square, Glasgow’s civic centre, I carefully place my rocky companion on the steps of a building that was once Glasgow’s General Post Office. The GPO building was, I have read, built from sandstone quarried at the site where I met ‘my’ stone this morning. I wonder, is it OK to leave this stone – this unattended weapon – here? I thank the stone and say goodbye. The stone stays silent, I think.