And so it is that we flow along this enchanted path, for immediately after a scene extricates itself from the broader environment to anchor a wandering soul, another scene is introduced by an articulate combination of pine, rock and path. All of this takes place upon a naturally handsome exposure of rock and cover addressed at once to the transparent sky and the coupled ridge in the distance. The placement of erratic boulders guides us until the bush-lined path ranges upon a more massive set of rock pillar sediments that have been fractured and set apart from the rest of the ridge. Even the cover upon its surface is isolated into its own sky-island niche. The pillar’s capitals have been removed and the roof collapsed to form the floor we now stand upon, thrusting out a wedge-shaped protrusion above the talus and trees below. As if to fashion a final point of return for those who are not appropriately readied for the rest of the initiation, the angular platform points backwards to the direction that we have arrived. For those that journey on, the protruding island ledge forces the path inland for a span, whereupon it offers a personalized sitting rock made circular beneath a benevolent little pine. The trail then returns to the ledge, now highly fractured into much larger masses situated on a cluster of fragmented islands. Massive blocks begin to pile up on angular pillars hoisting flat-topped and polished surfaces at various inclines. Here the floating masses take on the air of a monolithic arrangement.
In the monolith, all expression becomes distant and our being becomes dispersed once again— this time, however, it wanders into long stretches of time instead of the welcome intimacy of place. Time is drawn into this region, even with the casual glance. Upon passage, something stays in the soul that is distant, separate, completely impersonal and disinterested, yet entirely at one with the deepest reaches of our being. Rather—we might say, it is not our being that feels a distant kinship with the deeper reaches of time— it is being itself, stripped of all “my”, for which we are but an after-thought, in the literal sense of the term.
In Philosopher’s Stone — we infused human style vision into geologic time— the deep time of the Gunks formation, until the moment of the great glaciers. But although it is precisely the glacial erratics and polished surfaces that solicit the greatest measure of heightened consciousness upon Gertrude’s Nose Trail, we should remember that the large fractured surfaces, bold talus debris fields, and collapsed footing were all given their broken and disjointed forms long before the glaciers did their final surface arrangements. The 420-million-year-old conglomerate sediments had already been created by cementing the quartzite and silicate roots of an ancient mountain range that had eroded to form the delta depositions for a broad inland sea when millions of years later the Acadian and Appalachian Orogeny deformed and angled the strata. It was those events that warped and stretched the top surface of the irresolute conglomerate, forming cracks that ice and weather further wedged. Thick deposits of older Martinsburg shale underneath the conglomerate cap rock became exposed to the elements in places that the stretched conglomerate wore away or dove underground from buckling. Once exposed, the shale rapidly crumbled, dismantling the footing for the heavy conglomerate cap to fracture off massive blocks in vulnerable places. All of this occurred hundreds of millions of years before the great sculpting events of mile-high glaciers.
ON ICE
All in all, the outwardly thrusting and exposed nature of Gertrude’s Nose lends palpable intrigue to the conceptual fact of glaciation. As one looks out from the fractured cliffs of Gertrude’s Nose, it is absolutely sublime to remember that during the height of the last period of glaciation, these cliffs would have lay fully encased and barren, rising less than half way to the top of the creeping behemoth dragging debris and ice to scour the land.
It is a common experience, (as for example, when we conceptualize the much older geologic formation of the Gunks), to infuse an envisioned scene into the fabric of real vision — thus imparting a human perceptual system into a primordial time that had not a human seer. Much later however, during the formation and melting of glaciers, Paleolithic peoples would have indeed looked out upon a tundra-like expanse with fully human eyes, alongside a cacophony of water cascading into hanging valleys filled with oak, jack-pine, and spruce-fir forests. And though it is possible that they utilized the northeast-southwest axis of the Gunks’ ridge system as a navigational hunting corridor to spot the movement of caribou, mastodons and mammoths above the wet lands below— it is clear that Paleolithic people would have already possessed the quintessentially human trait of symbolic representation. They possessed the same “symbol-mongering mind’ that we possess, as described by the late philosopher Susanne K. Langer— complete with a superfluous compulsion to stand apart while remaining simultaneously mired in an animated horizon represented to a seer— over and above the reflexive mandates of organic survival.
The fashionable rendering of the Paleolithic experience as driven exclusively by a functional toolkit handed down is wholly inadequate. Precisely because they had need to address the extreme hardship and discipline of survival in a functional manner, Paleo people were embedded in a truly mythical, perceptually rich world— not in the manner of a rudimentary and false attempt at understanding causality, but in the sense of a world teeming with intentionality and animate forces. We know by their superior survival and hunting skills that they did not have a deficit in causal thinking. When the survivalist profession is highly polished, there is little motivation to bring to flower other technological arts in rapid sequence, unless or until environmental and social pressures require a firm answer. Yet even a cursory glimpse at the cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet France from 15,000 to 30,000 years ago reveals a capacity to invoke mythical experiences with a highly evolved grace and a paired-down potency that even Picasso could never improve upon. Cave drawings are already highly evolved forms of representation, not in the manner of the agenda-provoking or sense-embellished decorations we employ today. A great deal of today’s art is deployed as either a conceptual device for uneasy social critique housed in an artistic vehicle, or, at the other pole, a decoration to foster unconscious ease of the senses. By contrast, Paleolithic cave paintings were saturated living experiences invoked afresh with each revelation, in the same manner that the generations of artisans or shamen who created them were saturated with the awe of a teeming world of forces and creatures amidst their own budding world of consciousness, and its mysterious, unknown borders.
Some have argued that the Lascaux and Chauvet caves might have been experienced in complete darkness to reveal and invoke, and not just symbolize, a kind of womb for all animal life, perhaps even deployed in sympathetic magic ritual. No matter the details of the applied rite that was invoked, Paleolithic individuals, though filled with the same compulsive species-defining impulse for representation that we exhibit today, inhabited their world through a rich perceptual density that was still present to their representations— whereas our minds are skewed decidedly towards the conceptual extreme.
Contrary to how the subject is often introduced, symbolic thinking in the manner of representing and conceptually assisting the fruition of a perceptual life was not a “learned tool” passed down, like that of writing, agriculture or other new technologies. It was a deep and fundamental proclivity of a productive and highly recursive mind that had achieved the capacity to plant its own seeds of evolution— to foster a robust and parallel cultural evolution that would eventually lead to writing, agriculture, science and technology as indicators for that kind of re-presentational power. This capacity was not merely a set of invented tools handed down to usher in modern humankind. Tools have no relevance for a mind that is not readily inclined to see according to their manner. Aside from their functional application, symbolic experiences also constituted, as Ernst Cassirer had described, a rich mythological tendency in parallel with the disciplined attitude that led to science. Myth as the experience of an animated world of forces, beings, and presentations, was not a primitive attempt at science. Myth and science were both living niches for a mind so endowed. An animated world of other beings and presentations required also a mind that was capable of extracting itself and its individual goals from the immediacy of an all-enveloping horizon that was all being— without clear boundaries between the seer and the seen. Such a mind extracted itself as an individual through the creation of a representational complex equally alive as that all-enveloping world from which it learned to abstract and manipulate intrinsic features. It was not simply the so-called “big-brained” or reasoning mind that nourished the fertile ground of creative evolution in humankind— it was the capacity to add another whole level of processing— to wholly inhabit our representational complexes hovering virtually above and amidst the perceptual world by means of a cyclical momentum that enriched cognition. The very material that the perceptual soil had already stabilized beneath this kind of emergent mind began to transition and build-up sediments from both a conceptual realm and alterations to the underlying perceptual world that were imparted to it from the new conceptual realm. All of this was not simply thought about from a distance— it was, as it is in a different manner today, fully inhabited. It became living culture coevolving with a novel mind. For humankind, culture now took the lead role in nature’s show. Still, culture itself is no less a feature of nature’s show than is the force of gravity. Both are natural phenomenon through and through. Our own representations, however, no longer retain one foot rooted deeply in the perceptual soil presented to the formative senses. Rather, they have become seemingly detached. Such is the dry realm of conceptually-driven sensation. The niche that we now occupy and savagely fight for is today the fundamental domain of The Idea.
