Waking The Greeks knew the world was round. Every day there were fig leaves and eye sockets and curved letters. They had hard evidence, just not final evidence. And so did everyone else, more or less, which is why it’s impossible to say how a flat Earth theory invented for a nineteenth century novel about Columbus could come to be treated as credible history. Easy for the incredulous, maybe. No European medieval astronomers thought that, flat. Lithosphere is also a nineteenth century invention using two words from the Greek, lithos meaning stone or rock plus sphaira, meaning sphere. The hard evidence included the simple fact that the world bends, that ships go below the horizon, that land does not rise up forever but recedes downwards. Hence the need for landmarks. And songlines. The strength of the Earth resides in the lithosphere. Hard and seemingly without a language of its own, hardly moving over ages, it bears us and is our one home. Here between the airlessness of the outside universe and the fires not far below where we walk abroad, there is a maze of desire in our bodies, a search for patterns going on under our skull caps. Some call it the mantle. The lithosphere, it is all before us, so hard to love but all we have. To be lived with, by and by, understood through tedium and ecstasy. We live with tedium and ecstasy.
Dreaming But the Waking definition is so mundane, we think, even for a miracle. The lithosphere is waves of evidence. Condensation and precipitation leave everything in their trail. Great fogs and miles of trees give way to morning light and ploughed fields. Their ripples and touches and atmospheres and reflections rise above the lithosphere like thoughts that will be thought. So various and multiform are these presences, no one language contains them and efforts to do so sound all Greek to me. Whether from the plane porthole or eyesight at ground zero, the horizon is blur and colour, bending ever so. The lithosphere is that inexorable stone and grit we stare at as if our final home. We wish to rise above it, like fog and trees and ocean. We are dust, we are red earth. Words falter forth like some painter alone at his easel of ease. The lithosphere is all aboriginal (small a-, big A-, both) to us. It’s all it is.
Lithosphere, 2013 (Philip Hunter)
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