Object Poems

Anna & Leo Daedalus
Portland, Oregon

Ten Rocks with Their English Translations

In 1977 an amphibolite boulder was found in Tanzania which has, thanks both to its size and composition, proven particularly difficult to translate. While this is hardly rare in the field of petrolinguistics, this rock, known as the Archaean Sibyl, has yielded tantalizing glimpses of an extraordinary disquisition. If the Sybilists are right, the boulder treats of the language of rocks itself. Translated fragments touch on rock syntax and grammar, on relationships of scale and proximity (whence, for example, volume-archipelago theory) and on principles of geoetymology.

I remember coming across the Archaean Sibyl as a boy, in an issue of Lithoglossia. The journal was all but impenetrable to me but what I gleaned about the Sibyl ignited a lifelong passion for the mysterious and beautiful language of rocks. Since that time, little conclusive progress has been made on the Sibyl, but the range of its promise has expanded. Scientists (and amateurs like myself) continue to hope that the notorious “Rosetta Stone Migmatite” discovered in the Scandinavian craton in 1907 will prove more than just a geological inside joke. Maybe it will point us to the key that unlocks the enigma of the Archaean Sibyl and, ultimately, the entire mineral Library of Babel that we inhabit.

In the meantime, the Sibyl is only the most salient outcropping in a vast quarry of controversy and contention. Last year the argument about the meaning of sand, normally not a matter of popular interest, crashed into the mainstream when Dr. Per Engström’s “semantic prions” set off an out-and-out brawl at the Ankara Convention. Now, I enjoy an academic donnybrook as much as the next guy, and I follow the research with interest, but for me the unresolved mysteries are the richer delight by far. Anna and I take endless pleasure in listening to the lively poetic murmur of a rocky beach, now that we know what to look for. Our literal understanding remains tenuous, but with attention we can follow the ebb and flow of the larger conversation. In Ten Rocks with their English Translations, we have sought to share the metamorphic wonder we savor in our humble mineral eavesdropping.

* * *

It merits acknowledging that while Borges seems to have discovered his memorious Funes from atop the shoulders of John Locke, I got my first good glimpse of Locke in the rocky distance of a coastline that I have explored, at length and most unsystematically, in the eloquent footsteps of Borges.

Leo Daedalus
October 23, 2011

Handsewn pamphlet in printed jacket. Printed using an Epson Stylus Photo R3000 printer with archival inks on acid-free Moab, Canson, and Strathmore papers. 2011. Edition of eight copies, each with unique cover and corresponding rock.

$75

To purchase, please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

About the Artists

Polyvalent artist Leo Daedalus does things in writing, video, performance, music, comedy, dada/fluxus activity, and other nonsense. He collaborates regularly with his wife, Anna, especially on artist's books under the imprint Disposable Books. In Portland since 2005, projects have included multimedia lecture-opera The Theory of Love with John Berendzen, Anna Daedalus and David Abel, and Parallaxis, a concert of video and live music co-produced with FearNoMusic. Leo speaks seven languages, keeps four chickens, and is proud to have made a thorough fool of himself MC’ing the Richard Foreman Mini-Festival of performance art at Performance Works Northwest in Portland, in October, 2011.

A longtime Pacific Northwesterner, Anna Daedalus holds a B.A. in Spanish Literature from Reed College, and was a student and teaching assistant at the Chicago Photography Center. A multi-disciplinary artist, she works primarily in photography and performance and frequently collaborates with poets, writers, and videographers on such things as artist’s books, video work, film festival curation, and absurdist performance in a Dada/Fluxus vein. She has shown her large-scale photographic prints in Portland and Seattle. Anna’s work can be found in various collections, including the John Wilson Special Collections at the Multnomah County Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale University.