et in Utah ego: Geologic Time in the Postfrontier West

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!et in Utah ego*

Geologic Time in the Postfrontier West !Eitan Freedenberg History of Nature

Prof. Stewart Weaver Fall 2013

Freedenberg - Geologic Time in the Postfrontier West ��1

* Was I but a shadow in a plastic bubble hovering in a place outside mind and body? Et in Utah ego [I am present in Utah]. I was slipping out of myself again, dissolving into a unicellular be-ginning, trying to locate the nucleus at the end of the spiral. Robert Smithson, 1970 1

!This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we per-ceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreck-age and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. Walter Benjamin, 1940 2

!Introduction !1968: In January, an itinerant park ranger named Edward Abbey publishes Desert Solitaire,

Walden-by-way-of-Moab, a lonely, insightful, anti-industrial polemic set in Arches National

Park, an infinite intimacy just outside the frame of John Ford’s mythic West. In March, six thou-

sand ranch sheep suddenly drop dead. Their tufted carcasses end up “scattered across an area

stretching 14 miles downwind from the Dugway Proving Grounds, a restricted U.S. Army chem-

ical, biological and radiological research center in western Utah.” And in July, a polymathic 3

New Jerseyan artist, Robert Smithson, visits the Great Salt Lake and decides to lay a petallike

spiral of stones on the shallow shoreline, just miles from where the transcontinental railroad’s

“Golden Spike” was pounded into the ground a century earlier. Spiral Jetty, he would call it—a

self-indexing name suggestive at once of motion, stillness, anticipation. Along with Smithson’s

revolutionary writings on the deconstruction and “decentering” of art’s exhibitional spaces—

away from the white cube of the gallery and toward locales and unpeopled “non-sites” of geo-

! Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1

1996), 113.! Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Han2 -nah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 257.! “Toxicology: Sheep & the Army,” TIME, April 5, 1968.3


graphical intrigue—Jetty pushes the Land Art movement into the public consciousness, with the

American West as its “site and spirit.” 4

This historical moment appears to me as a pivotal one in the history of popular concep-

tions of the West, dovetailing with the early years of what historian Michael L. Johnson calls the

West’s “postregional” modernity: a place of “both deepening ecological pessimism and ever-

resurgent technological optimism.” With Spiral Jetty in particular, Smithson engages that vein 5

of pessimism, erecting the sculpture in view of abandoned machinery and other industrial detri-

tus. He also inures his oceanic irruption with a clocklike functionality. Traces of geological time

accrete on a grand scale just barely perceptible to human visitors, as salt crystals amass on the

Fibonaccian swirl and the lake’s torpid agency slowly effaces Smithson’s onetime authorial pres-

ence. For more than thirty years, rising water levels hid the Jetty from tourists visiting by foot,

but left it visible to those crossing northwestern Utah by air.

1968, and more broadly the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, also seems a pivotal moment in the

history of geological representation. When geological timeframes are invoked in memoir, art,

and literature, they are invariably invoked as chronotope. This term, invented by Russian literary

critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his essay collection The Dialogic Imagination, describes the transub-

stantiation of temporal rhythms and geographical features into the lexicons, syntaxes, and narra-

tive frameworks of a text: “Spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-

out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; like-

wise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” 6

! This phrase comes from the title of a chapter in Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of 4

the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 103.! Michael L. Johnson, Hunger for the Wild (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2007), 292.5

! Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 85.6


Bakhtin notes that the chronotope emerged as early as Greek romance, in which excursive,

“empty adventure-time . . . leaves no traces anywhere, no indications of its passing” ; and ma7 -

tured almost fully by the time of Renaissance novelist François Rabelais, in whose Pantagruel

time is “a unity, no internal categories segment it; there are no individualized, internal beginnings

or dead ends; its moments follow sequentially one after the other.” 8

In this essay I examine a variant of the chronotope, something we may call chronotopog-

raphy. Through analyses of several texts and objects, including Desert Solitaire and Spiral Jetty,

I articulate a small trend in Western—specifically Utahn—art and literature: an effort, on the part

of scientists, memoirists, filmmakers, and artists, to depict time and history as having “thick-

ened” into the “flesh” of the desert West’s topographies. Chronotopography, however, is not an

intensional literary technique in the sense that space and time would inhere into the rhythms and

structure of the text itself. Rather, it is an extensional technique, a mode of analysis that sees the

fluxes of human history reified in the physiography of the landscape.

At the onset of political and cultural postmodernity—the post-Fordist era, whose sub-

jects, in Fredric Jameson’s estimation, “inhabit the synchronic rather than the diachronic”—the

batholith’s explicit display of time’s signature, in the form of delimited strata, offers an alterna-

tive to the volatile, ephemeral, and abstract temporalities of the everyday. Reading geology, in

other words, becomes a means of re-anchoring the postmodern subject to a more definitive and

durable sense of time. This effort begins around the 1940s, reaches a critical apex in the late ’60s

and early ’70s, and continues to manifest to this day, albeit less noticeably so. Chronotopography

has political import within the context of the environmental movement. The texts and objects in

! Ibid., 100.7

! Ibid., 240.8


this study all argue for more conscientious longterm thinking about our place within nature. But

more broadly—though not more importantly—they effect (or reflect) a fundamental change in

our historical consciousnesses. The geotectonic model of cultural historiography marries scientif-

ic rationality to historical materialism, and in doing so, geological truth to humankind’s radical

potentials. Thus the literary and artistic figures who produced these texts and objects are not un-

like Walter Benjamin’s famous metaphor vis-à-vis Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, “irresistibly pro-

pelled” by the storm of progress toward a violent and uncertain future— eyes facing the oncom-

ing winds, while “the pile of debris before [them] grows skyward.” 9

!!Frontier Nostalgias in the “Regional” and “Postregional” West !Let us first consider the 1940s-cum-Mesozoic Utah of John Ford. An easterner—born in Cape

Elizabeth, Maine and raised in nearby Portland—the prolific director gifted the world with an

indelible, and problematic, vision of a static West. Close your eyes and you can almost surely

reconstruct his Monument Valley mimetically. At the modern-day border of Utah and Arizona,

the deeply auburn “Mittens” butte erupts from the conical bedrock; the erect “Totem Pole,” an

earthen minaret, towers over bands of Permian sediment; civilization’s warhorses and wagon

trains traffic across its five square miles, casting early evening shadows across the siltstone val-

ley. This place is, iconographically, Ford’s territory as surely as it is, politically, the Navajo Na-

tion’s. It is not surprising that the famously nostalgic director returned to it six times between

Stagecoach (1938) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Its primordial contours, a merger of forebod-

ing openness and triumphal summitry, rekindle the dream of an only partially conquered West,

! Benjamin, “Theses,” 258.9


one defined by these words of Frederick Jackson Turner’s controversial thesis: “In spite of envi-

ronment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a

gate of escape from the bondage of the past.” 10

To understand the role geologies play in the representation of a changing West, we must

first understand why, and how, that West was changing. The most common misconception about

Turner’s 1893 lecture at the American Historical Association is that he declared the frontier to be

“closed,” suggesting potential for its reopening, when he had in fact declared it definitively

“gone.” It was, rather, “the first period of American history” that had closed. Turner’s is a linear

historicism that nevertheless sees cultural and political change rather in the way that Marx did: as

an ongoing series of crises and ruptures. The onset of what Marshall Berman describes as fin-de-

siècle cultural “modernity” had engendered just such a rupture:

Modern environments cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology; in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity. It pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and con-tradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. 11

! Pace Turner, the forms of democracy and liberty developed in the crucible of the Ameri-

can West had tumbled outward, in fragmented and diluted forms, into the whole of national cul-

ture. And the “West,” in turn, had passed from the noumenal to the phenomenal; from a

hermeneutic that through its carriers attached itself to certain physical spaces, to a real cluster of

sites, subject to the common law, demarcated by sign and boundary. In other words: a region,

adrift in a broader modernity. If the 1850s Mormon wagon and its intrepid drivers’ slow creep

! Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” public domain ebook.10

! Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 15.11


across the plains were the iconic vehicle and durée of the “frontier” West, the transcontinental

railway and its one-week sprint were those of the “regional” one. The frontier was “gone” not

necessarily because the ideals that had defined it had been invalidated, but rather because those

ideals were assimilated into the broader culture, and the technics that had defined it were lost to

obsolescence.

Turner’s thesis in Frontier, that the whole of American identity is a product of frontier

“movement” and “energy,” has been alternately criticized and reaffirmed throughout its 120 year

history. Richard W. Etulain, longtime director of the Center for the American West, has lamented

Turner’s elephantine status in Western studies. Yoking itself to Turner and thus ignoring “western

subregionalism, comparisons among western, southern American, and Canadian cultures, and

linkages between western and national American cultural trends,” the discipline has essentially

arrested itself in a perpetual 1893. But the historiographical theme of Frontier—that of irre12 -

versible rupture—remains vital to our understanding of the “regional”/“postfrontier” (roughly

1900-1960) and later “postregional” (1960 to present) West.

It was precisely at that moment of rupture when the frontier began to be eulogized

through a diffuse set of cultural practices. Richard Slotkin notes: “Faced with the choice of ‘liq-

uidating’ the concept of the Frontier or ‘renaturalizing’ it, Americans chose the latter.” By mod13 -

ernizing and selectively reinterpreting the frontier myth, they were able to recuperate those quali-

ties still considered valuable—“wildness,” self-sufficiency, the occasional panoramic vista—

! Richard W. Etulain, “Research Opportunities in Twentieth Century Western Cultural History,” in Re12 -searching Western History: Topics in the Twentieth Century, eds. Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 148.! Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 13

1800-1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 531. Cited in Johnson, Hunger, 190.


while embracing the hygienes and technologies of modernity. Conservation of certain Western

spaces, most notably the Grand Canyon, did become a national concern during this era, but the

urge to sequester and venerate certain spaces as untamed “wilderness,” as William Cronon points

out, was a myopic approach born of elitism, and ultimately “came to reflect the very civilization

its devotees sought to escape.” 14

The practices employed to combat postfrontier anxiety could be broadly construed as

“nostalgic”: Wild West shows, rodeos, scout organizations, even the election of Theodore Roo-

sevelt. The immediate postfrontier era also saw the origins of heroic “fakelore”: “supercow15 -

boy” Pecos Bill, farmer Febold Feboldson, and that great “product of American advertising,”

Paul Bunyan. These new icons accompanied the declining prosperities of actual cowboys, 16

farmers, and loggers due to the rise of national and industrial agriculture. It was only at the mo-

ment of their physical obsolescence that such bodies entered the domain of the aesthetic. In all of

these practices and idealized frontier masculinities we see a desire, in the face of dissolutive

! William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon 14

Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 78.! An early example, fittingly, took shape at Chicago’s World Colombian Exposition, just blocks from 15

where Turner first delivered his controversial lecture. William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s immersive Wild West shows provided an opportunity for “a nationalistic public to escape momentarily from its urban-in-dustrial world.” At the show, audiences encountered a “small army” of re enactors, shuttled to Chicago via freight train: “one hundred former U.S. Cavalry soldiers; ninety-seven Cheyenne, Kiowa, Pawnee, and Sioux Indians; 180 horses, eighteen buffalo,” more than three dozen other animals, and a “young woman with a penchant for guns” nicknamed Annie Oakley. On Chicago’s famous Midway, they enacted what has recently been called “a postmodern West in which performance and history were hopelessly inter-twined.” Cody’s fictionalized frontier was erected beside the exposition’s “White City,” a self-consciously futuristic Euro-American architectural utopia. There is a critical consensus, expressed most cogently by Joy Kasson, Richard Slotkin, and Reid Badger, that the proleptic nostalgia of the White City and the analeptic nostalgia of the Wild West show were mutually constitutive. Cody's simulacrum, and its vision of a West canonized in perpetual premodernity, could only be embraced once that West could no longer be proven firsthand to be a contrivance. As Baudrillard famously noted: “When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.” For more detailed and enjoyable assessment of this topic, see Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (New York: Vintage Books, 2003).! Richard C. Poulson, The Landscape of the Mind: Cultural Transformations of the American West (New 16

York: Lang, 1992), 30.


modernity, to maintain the ontological separation of civilization and etherealized wilderness. The

“frontier” was no longer a specific site or set of ideologies, but rather a situational theme that

could be activated anywhere via certain sense-experiences.

What does it mean to say these practices were “nostalgic”? Here, and throughout this es-

say, I do not use this term generically—to simply describe an individual or collective ache for a

past event, idea, object, or “structure of feeling” that never existed in the manner idealized. Nos-

talgia, in Svetlana Boym’s recent analysis, may be divided into two tendencies: restorative,

which “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps,” and reflective, which

“dwells . . . in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance.” Restorative nostalgia, in

particular, functions most frequently as a response to industrialization and secularization. Its

practitioners commit to “total reconstructions of monuments of the past.” The restorative nos17 -

talgic aims to seamlessly reintroduce obsolete objects, symbols, and practices to the context of

the present. This act of reconciliation must appear natural, coherent, and culturally or politically

necessary. Certain anxieties hang over such a project. Principally, the nostalgic worries that by

recuperating the outmoded, he will actually exaggerate the fissures between past and present.

The nostalgic is thus validated when the contrived semblance of continuity—the wobbly bridge

between past and present—is absorbed unquestioningly into popular historical narrative.

Returning to Ford, consider how his investment in a moment of perceived human-geolog-

ical equilibrium in the Utah desert indicates a project of restorative nostalgia. His later films are

informed by the scientific context in which they were made: the early atomic age. In 1942, mid-

way through his (unofficial) Monument Valley series, miners discovered uranium ore in the val-

! Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 80.17


ley’s Oljeto Creek and “prospecting, mining, and production of uranium ore” increased steadily

for several years thereafter. 6,000 to 7,000 foot thick deposits of Precambrian sediment, undis18 -

turbed save for natural erosion for more than 300 million years, became a resource whose ulti-

mate value lay in the infinitesimal instant of atomic explosion.

Ford’s post-WWII valley films, including the O.K. Corral flick My Darling Clementine,

post–Little Big Horn drama My Darling Clementine, and the Texas-Indian War classic The

Searchers are not “updated” Westerns but rather orthodox cowboys-and-Indians dramas. Like

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, which had by the end of its run begun to memorialize itself as

much as its iconized “West,” Ford’s later films could be read as nostalgic for the pre-atomic val-

ley of his earlier ones. Ford continued to employ the supreme apparatus of technological moder-

nity, the motion picture camera, and its own logic of temporal immediacy, to transport audiences

to a preindustrial West long after such a project became self-evidently ironic. These films traffic

in a multiplicity of tempos: the longue durée of geological time, the ramshackle rhythms of pre-

modern life on the range, and the “death 24x a second” of cinematic experience. 19

Ford effaced and smoothed over a significant moment of rupture—the urgent uptick of

extractive industry—in the mode of restorative nostalgia. With the arrival of the prospectors,

miners, and enrichers, the valley’s potential to symbolize a more innocent mode of human tri-

umph over nature was in danger of losing out to the civilizational death drive. But by continuing

to use the valley’s geological features as a theater of myth, Ford projected a false continuity onto

! W. D. Grundy and E. W. Oertell, “Uranium Deposits in the White Canyon and Monument Valley Min18 -ing Districts,” in Guidebook to the Geology of the Paradox Basin, eds. Albert F. Sanford, Frank Peace, M. Dane Picard, and W. Donald Quigley (Salt Lake City: Intermountain Association of Petroleum Geolo-gists, 1958), 197.! Here I borrow the title from Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).19


the land. To read Ford’s late films, notes Richard Hutson, we must invoke the fetish’s formula of

disavowal: “This narrative . . . could have never taken place, but even so.” 20

Their narratives, just like those of the pre-uranium films, unfold half a century or more

before Monument Valley became a hunting ground for the military industrial complex. We may

interpret these films, in their topological depictions if not fully in their plots, as expressive of

anxieties about the newfound destructive potential of Ford’s beloved setting. In The Searchers

(1956), for example, he exhausts the range of cinematographic vantages to show human and val-

ley as mutually contingent, against his audiences’ certain knowledges to the contrary. Ford alter-

nately portrays the brushy wasteland disappearing the human protagonists (fig. 1) or—as in the

film’s most iconic shot—enshrouded by a numinous domestic space (fig. 2). A rocky equilibri-

um, rather than the wholesale extermination of the valley’s geological numen.

Figure 1. Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and company disappear into the landscape in The Searchers.

! Richard Hutson, “Sermons in Stone: Monument Valley in The Searchers,” in The Big Empty: Essays on 20

the Land as Narrative, ed. Leonard Engel (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), 203.


Figure 2. Monument Valley is enshrouded by the domestic in The Searchers’ most iconic shot.

! While The Searchers’ valley is shot through with political, racial, and familial melodra-

mas, its Triassic outcroppings—“purplish-red arkosic sandstone” —bear no intimations of their 21

toxic interiors.

In the 1940s and 50s, the West and its geologies entered a crisis of symbolization. As es-

tablished by globally broadcasted images of the “Trinity” test, New Mexico’s northwestern and

Utah’s southwestern wastelands were the chronicle of a death foretold; they were both the labo-

ratory of destruction and an avatar of what the world might look like in its wake. What started as

a mushroom-clouded instant stretched on for a decade. The Manhattan Project begat more than

ten years of above-ground atomic testing over the skies of northwestern New Mexico and south-

eastern Utah, including Monument Valley. As Utahn environmentalist and memoirist Terry Tem-

pest Williams notes in Refuge, the human fallout in the surrounding areas was just as severe as

! Grundy and Oertell, “Uranium,” 198.21


the radioactive kind. “Fear and inability to question authority,” she writes, “ultimately killed rur-

al communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons.” 22

But America’s nuclear ambitions were just one of many industrial and exploitative trends

consuming the region. The mountain and desert West had been a site of pilgrimage and settle-

ment for miners and prospectors for more than a century before the discovery of uranium. But

“boomtown” had been quickened, in a surging instant, to “boom.” From the mid-1940s through

the late 1960s, many desert environments in the four-corner states (Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and

New Mexico) were turned to Swiss cheese by uranium, oil, and natural gas contractors. Michael

Johnson eloquently assesses the feel of the post-WWII geophysical West, which was by then the

nation’s center of hydraulic infrastructure and extractive industry: “After 1945 the West as oil

field, dammed reservoir, military and industrial laboratory, graveyard for technological mistakes,

dump for the wastes from progress, all that ugliness, was the price exacted by the devil’s bargain

of Western ‘growth.’” 23

And around that new geophysical West, a multiplicity of other ones: virgin cities and

sprawling suburbs, “ecological pessimism and ever-resurgent technological optimism,” commer-

cial hubs and survivalist outposts, desultory idyll and evacuated wasteland. Again we turn to

Johnson, whose vision of the fractured “postregional” West echoes Gilles Deleuze and Felix

Guattari’s “anti-Oedipal” notion of the schizophrenic subject: “globally interdependent, cultural-

ly decentered, illocal, hybridized, palimpsestic, abstract, artificial, virtualized, militarized, pol-

luted, Indianized, computerized, Ralphlaurenized, feminized, Disneyfied, improvisational, con-

! Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (New York: Vintage, 22

1992), 286.! Johnson, Hunger, 278.23


flicted, confused.” Above all, perhaps: secularized, in the sense that (John) Fordist faith in the 24

frontier’s eternal return had been entirely disabused.

By the time Billy (Dennis Hopper) and Wyatt (Peter Fonda), the protagonists of Easy

Rider (1969), arrive at Monument Valley, it is nightfall. A windy, pitch-black chill has settled

over the land, voiding the rust and ochre strata—insignias of a complexly accreted history—of

their testimony. The polymorphous features Ford once captured in blazing daylight are flattened

into an enigmatic black (fig. 3). Three shadowy figures climb atop a serrated outcropping, their

own forms blending into the rocks—a visual conjugation of the ambivalent postmodern drifter

and a despoiled landscape that cinematic forebears could not save through sentimental represen-

tation alone. Hopper’s Monument Valley scene invokes the central features of the postmodern, as

described by Fredric Jameson: “a new depthlessness . . . a weakening of historicity . . . a whole

new type of emotional ground tone . . . [and] the deep constitutive relationships of all this to a

whole new technology.” This is the contested southeastern Utah, and the broader West, of the 25

late '60s: “The Nation’s Most Ironic Nature Park,” in Cronon’s terms, or, in Easy Rider’s: 26

Billy: “It’s a weird place man.” Wyatt: “The smoke’s getting to me.” 27

!!!!!!!!! Ibid., 292.24

! Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University 25

Press, 1990), 5.! Cronon, “Introduction: In Search of Nature,” in Cronon, Uncommon, 28.26

! Easy Rider, directed by Dennis Hopper (Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1969).27


!Figure 3. Billy and Wyatt survey Monument Valley at nightfall in Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider. !“A Bloody Rock”: Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire !Appalachian-born Edward Abbey (b. 1927) was one of a small but prominent class of writers

who, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, developed an “eco-critical” literature of the West. Much

of this literature engaged in the practice of placemaking—the poiesis of lived environmental ex-

perience into the abstract space of the text. Henry David Thoreau’s century-old Walden was an

obvious touchstone for the movement. Other writers in this movement include Charles Bowden,

Barry Lopez, John C. Van Dyke and, to a lesser extent, established novelist Wallace Stegner,

whose essay collection The Sound of Mountain Water (1969) is similarly evocative of regional

identity in the West. Abbey is today the best known of these writers, likely because he did not

merely reenact Walden in Arches National Park. His works, particularly Desert Solitaire, were


bromidic shots across the bow of an oblivious nation—sharp, poetic, and even playful calls to

action against industrial tourism, extractive industry, and the “dark cloud” called “Progress.” 28

His influence on the political discourse was immense. Bowden wrote this of his contem-

porary: “Ed Abbey invented the Southwest we live in. . . . What Abbey did was say [deserts]

were worth fighting for despite all their discomforts . . . He made a region come alive, and once

it started living within you, well, by God, you had to do something about it.” Abbey’s work,

notes Bowden, was effective precisely because it was so radical, because the “redneck” writer

saw in the West a region that could be saved through violent undertakings. “Want to bring the

Colorado River back to life?” he paraphrases Abbey. “Let’s blow up Glen Canyon Dam.” 29

Thus when one reads Abbey for his well-known evocations of place, his uncanny ability

to immerse his readers in a virtual Utah, one must always remember that he saw that Utah as a

political and moral battleground. Abbey, notes Edward Twining, was a philosophy student both

in training and in countenance, insistent throughout his life and career “that the world is real, that

we know it through our senses, and that we are compelled by an absolute moral imperative to

respond to the world in a responsible way. A moral way.” This pragmatism spilled into Abbey’s 30

writings on (and participation in) antiestablishment activity, particularly the sabotage of industri-

al machinery immortalized in his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Moral realism is also present in Abbey’s readings of his surrounding geologies. For

Abbey, the “human degradation and suffering” experienced in American cities could find resolu-

! Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 42. Through the rest of this pas28 -sage, I will use in-text parenthetical citations to designate page numbers in Desert Solitaire.! Charles Bowden, “Afterword,” in Edward Abbey, Black Sun (Boulder, CO: Big Earth Publishing, 29

2003), 156.! Edward S. Twining, “The Roots of Abbey’s Social Critique,” in Coyote in the Maze: Tracking Edward 30

Abbey in a World of Words, ed. Peter Quigley (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), 21.


tion and remedy in the embrace of the wilderness. The natural world was not, he argued 31

throughout his career, a gaseous idyll utterly separate from humanity but rather a real place that

could be further sanctified through conscientious human presence. In his prose, Abbey attempts

to militate against the perpetual climaxing of technological modernity—a modernity that, for all

its advances had still failed to secure for its subjects a lasting moral prosperity. Utah’s deserts, he

reckoned, could provide the very perspective needed to see this failure.

Why did Abbey look West to begin with, and what did he find there? I argue here that

Abbey found in the desert geology’s imbedded temporalities an alternative rhythm to that of in-

dustrial modernity. But for Abbey the desert is not “modernity’s sedentary other.” Rather, it is 32

an active agent, insistent at every moment of the virtues of its own permanence. This attitude is

no doubt born of his broader anticivilizational radicalism, but we should not discount Abbey’s

quite astute geological insights. The desert was not for him just a getaway, but also a place filled

with “monuments of a historical awareness,” to borrow Walter Benjamin’s phrase from his “The-

ses on the Philosophy of History.” A place, in other words, whose queer and dynamic topogra33 -

phies could convince the disaffected and displaced of their radical potentials.

In a chapter named “Rocks,” Abbey rushes to tell us all we need to know of his affinities

with the local physiognomy. “Southeastern Utah: the canyonlands,” he asserts, are “Abbey’s

country” (61). He is enamored of the rocks and their “lovely” names: “Onyx and sardonyx.

Cryptocrystalline quarts . . . Chrysoberyl, spodumene, garnet, zircon and malachite” (60). But

! Ibid., 27.31

! Nick Prior, “Speed, Rhythm, and Time-Space: Museums and Cities,” Space and Culture 14 no. 2 32

(2001): 197.! Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New 33

York: Schocken Books, 1968),


this “country” shows signs of longterm human occupation by others. Following Salt Creek’s

drainages upstream, he comments on the appropriation of lithic resources by both centuries-ago

Indians—“if you are extremely lucky you may discover a complete and intact arrowhead” (61)—

and modern prospectors and land-abusers. Contrasting the transmutation of organic material

(wood) into inorganic (petrified forest) with the narrative of arrival of coal and uranium extrac-

tors (one of whom pathetically names his mine Mi Vida), Abbey makes his point abundantly

clear. Some of us may slip the surly bonds of civilization and even organic flesh and fully conju-

gate body to land. Others, in their ignorance of the earth’s immanent truths, remain forever sub-

jected to the vicissitudes of an unwelcoming “voodooland.”

Abbey narrates the history of mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century mining in lower

Utah, depicting prospectors and treasure-seekers as hapless, exasperated, and perpetually sick. In

extractive industry, like all Fordist-era industries, the laborer is a fungible commodity. As the re-

volving door of death, economic failure, and other forms of faulty speculation swept away the

region’s weak practitioners of mineral capitalism, fleets more arrived with innocent faces and

speckless pickaxes in tow. Nature, in Abbey’s estimation, takes on a certain agency in these mo-

ments of physical precarity. It conspires against the miners through the lethal particulates of rock

dust and the “vague, theoretical, and intangible” waves of deadly radiation (65).

Abbey expands upon this idea of nature’s antagonism in one particularly striking passage

about the “Skyline Arch” formation, where “something took place a few years ago which seems

to bear out the hypotheses of geology” (fig. 4):

One November night in 1940 when no one was around to watch, a big bunch of rock fell out of this arch . . . The event had doubtless been in preparation for hun-dreds maybe thousands of years—snow falling, melting, trickling into minute fis-


sures, dissolving the cements which knit sandstone particles together, freezing and expanding, wedging apart the tiny cracks, undermining the base—but the cumula-tive result was a matter, probably, of only a few noisy and dusty minutes in which the mighty slabs cracked and grumbled, shook loose, dropped and slid and smashed upon the older slabs below, shattering the peace of ages. (37) !

Abbey has often been labeled “anarchist” by both critics and acolytes, and would likely

have had no use for the Marxist mysticism Walter Benjamin developed at the end of his career.

But the vision of historic rupture presented in this passage is nothing if not evocative of the

German critic’s final theses. For Benjamin was not only polishing Marx’s abstract theory of his-

tory, but also reiterating his ancestor’s call to violent, even cataclysmic, struggle and revolt.

The weight of the past upon the present is given flesh—or stone—by Abbey. How might

we compare the lost past and the lived present? It is mediated through the shared technology of

science and the arts: “The photographs, ‘Before & After,’ prove it” (ibid). What Benjamin refers

Figure 4. A “before and after” comparison of “Broken Arch,” photograph of informational plaque, reprinted on http://www.tworvgypsies.us/!USA-2012-trip-5/45a-arches.html.


to as the past’s “secret index, by which it is referred to its resurrection,” Abbey names as the

gradual amassing of catalysts. It is of course only after the moment of rupture that its precondi-

tions become examinable and scientifically verifiable. To the casual observer, the collapse might

appear without precedent; to the observer with “historical consciousness,” struggle was always

immanent, contained within the “pressure solution” of the geophysical system. 34

Ultimately, in noting that what we erroneously perceive as docile or static is in truth a

violent and dynamic material system, Abbey hopes to draw out the synonymy of human and nat-

ural agencies: “The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history,” notes Benjamin, “is

peculiar to the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action.” 35

Geologic Life: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty !Though the official scientific term for the present geological age is the “Holocene,” (Greek: en-

tirely-recent) running roughly twelve thousand years ago to the present, critics in both scientific

and humanistic disciplines have taken to calling it something else: the “Anthropocene,” the re-

cent period of humankind. This is, as geographer Kathryn Yusoff noted in an article from earlier

this year, a “diagnosis” of sorts, one that in her estimation should be central to our understand-

ings of “social geology.” She argues that humanity has now fully become a geological force on

par with the “inhuman” forces of nature. What brings the Anthropocene to a particularly critical

juncture is the unfettered and self-destructive use of one fossil—the fossil fuel, dragged into the

present from the Carboniferous epoch—by another, the “future fossil” of humankind. What is

needed is a “geological turn” in the humanities and the sciences, one that fully conjugates biopol-

! Geologist L. Bruce Railsback defines “pressure solution” as “the petrologic process wherein minerals 34

dissolve as the result of pressure applied externally to them.”! Benjamin, “History”35


itics to geo(thermal) politics and reimagines Homo sapiens as “geologic subjects.” Within that 36

new paradigm, we are forced to confront the organicity of our terrestrial sources of energy (oil),

and see in them our own dim and precarious future.

To imagine humanity as a future fossil in the geologic strata of the Anthropocene is to become given to the time and chaotic churnings of the Earth; it is to become attentive to our minerality in its less vital and more enduring form. Implicit in this imagining is a model of the Earth as strata: vertical rather than horizontal territory, intensified by the passage of time, in layers that press hard on the possibilities of forms that become fragmented in time and material integrity. 37

!To combat the unrestrained use of fossil fuels—our “carbon metabolism,” which has dramatical-

ly foreshortened the possible timescale of human existence on earth—we must conceive “of our-

selves as embedded in geologic temporalities (rather than just as authors of them)” and achieve

perspective through the knowledge that our own vital energies, too, will one day turn to fossil. 38

The devolutionary cycle Yusoff refers to with the geological term mineralization, pio-

neering Land artist Robert Smithson referred to as entropy, the process in which an object simul-

taneously succumbs to decay and is rebuilt. Spiral Jetty, his best-known work, engages that

thermodynamic theme. Jetty is aesthetically quite simple: a fifteen-hundred foot long, fifteen foot

wide coil of basaltic rock and dirt—6,650 tons of it, removed from the ground near the Great Salt

Lake’s Rozel Point and transported by truck to the shallows. The whitish spiral extends into

Rozel’s mud flats and is crisply framed by blankets of red alga and microbacteria (fig. 5). Land

art scholar Suzaan Boettger has memorably described this visual effect as “a sparkling whirl in a

roseate cosmos.” 39

! Kathryn Yusoff, “Geologic life: prehistory, climate, futures in the Anthropocene,” Environment and 36

Planning D: Society and Space 31 (2013): 781.! Ibid., 78937

! Ibid.38

! Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California 39

Press, 2002), 205.


Figure 5. Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water, 4.6 x 457 m, Rozel Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah, photograph by George Steinmetz, 2002. !! Smithson conceived of the project in 1968 while on an excursion to the West with two

artists similarly invested in earthworks, Michael Heizer and wife Nancy Holt. He was drawn to

the site, Rozel Point, because of the industrial machinery that had been abandoned nearby: “di-

lapidated shacks” and “countless bits of wreckage.” Boettger notes in her survey of the move-

ment, Earthworks, that Smithson found an affinity with the nineteenth-century Romantics, who

had similarly been attracted to architectural ruins from antiquity. According to Smithson, the spi-

ral form was sui generis, having no phenomenal—only noumenal—origins. “As I looked at the

site, it reverberated out to the horizons . . . A dormant earthquake spread into the fluttering still-

ness, into a spinning sensation without movement. . . . From that gyrating space emerged the


possibility of Spiral Jetty.” Jetty was designed as a geological clock; in its brief life thus far, 40

salt crystals have already begun to incrust on the rock and dirt, producing mineralogical buildup

in some areas and causing decay in others. As noted earlier, even before Smithson’s death in a

1973 plane crash, Jetty was mostly submerged by the Salt Lake’s rising tides. It remains in a

state of flux to this day, its always imminent Brigadoon-like reemergence from the briny ether

adding yet another layer of myth to its already cosmic form. For Land art aficionados, Jetty’s

schedule—“mostly visible . . . in in the period between the end of evaporation due to summer

heat and before autumn rainfall”—is now as scriptural as the surfers’ or crabbers’ tide tables.

From this simple and even primeval form has arisen two generations of critical appraise,

analysis, reassessment, and remobilization as myth and metaphor. Jennifer L. Roberts has recent-

ly taken up Jetty’s possible historiographical connection to the nearby 1869 “Golden Spike”

event, which joined the two ends of the transcontinental railroad, as well as that event’s 1969

centennial celebration. The pounding of the spike, and the rigid linearity of the spike itself,

serves a certain historical model—one that is utterly propulsive and closed, dependent on legible

and irreversible schisms. The spike completed Manifest Destiny in the space of an instant, mark-

ing off with chauvinistic political and cultural certainty the difference between the (agrarian) past

and the (industrial-mechanical) future. Jetty’s gyroscopic shape, on the other hand, is a metonym

of its own model of history: a “tailings pond for the historical effluent of official frontier history,”

slowly accreting detail, dimension, and new material. Jetty bares Smithson’s investment in the

sacral infinitude of geological process-time, and in balance, his dismissal of the Golden Spike’s

industrial labor-time. Unlike the rail builders’, Jetty’s work is “never done.” (I shall return to 41

! Suzaan Boettger, Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties (Berkeley: University of California 40

Press, 2002), 201.! Jessica L. Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 41

2004), 125.


this linear-cyclical opposition later, in a discussion of Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s

Cycle.) “By appending Spiral to Spike,” Roberts writes, “Smithson proposes an inclusionary

brand of history, one based on extension rather than contraction, continuance rather than instan-

taneity.” Postmodern critic Craig Owens writes about the work in his essay “Earthwords,” argu42 -

ing that Jetty must be read alongside Smithson’s essays and experimental lexical projects. The

geophysical structure of A Heap of Language, for example, provides useful context for Jetty (fig.

6). “Verbal sentiment,” piled up as sediment, evinces that mineralization is the shared metastatic

quality of language and our surrounding terrestrial forms. Jetty, “itself a graphic document in-

scribed on the surface of the Great Salt Lake,” is a “site” that must always be mediated by 43

Smithson’s own photography, and the countless photos and critical assessments that followed.

Jetty itself is firmly embedded in place, but photography remobilizes it. Through its multimodal

dissemination, Jetty becomes a distributed thing, disobliged from the pretense of spatial unity.

Figure 6. Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language, 1966, pencil drawing, 16.5 x 56 cm, Museum Overhol-land, Niewersluis.

! Ibid.42

! Craig Owens, “Earthwords,” in Beyond Recognition, eds. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Till43 -man, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 43.


Smithson’s entropic obsession manifests in the physical design of Jetty, as salt accretes

upon the rocks and functions as a “continually revised appendix” to the work. Salt marks the

passage of time, holding the whole work “in a perpetual condition of delay.” But entropy, ther44 -

modynamics’ reversible process of decay, manifests itself too in Smithson’s authorial attachment

to the work. Today, Jetty is incontrovertibly associated with Smithson, and is visited primarily

within the context of pilgrimage. Art critic Erin Hogan describes that expeditionary genre in the

travelogue Spiral Jetta, in which her scholarly enthusiasm for the work mixes with sycophantic

pathos when she realizes that she forgot to bring her bathing suit. Rozel Point is just remote

enough that its visitors are unlikely to be ignorant of what they will find there. It is Jetty, but of

course also Smithson, the handsome and brilliant artist felled in his prime, who secured a twenty-

year lease on Jetty’s site, thus for a time legally binding his actual name to the unmarked work.

Smithson once wrote, “The Spiral Jetty could be considered one layer within the spiraling crystal

lattice, magnified trillions of times.” And his mark, as excavator, architect, archeologist, and 45

theorizer of this somatic-terrestrial collaboration, is a thin and ultimately disposable residue too.

Writing on Smithson’s diachronic authorial presence at the site of Spiral Jetty, philoso-

pher Gary Shapiro notes that early earthworks such as Stonehenge and the Nazca lines tended to

be anonymous and collaborative projects. Jetty, on the other hand, is definitively Smithson’s. In a

slight variation on the chronotopographic form, Smithson has invested a built, rather than extant,

landform with a historic consciousness—a geological episteme?—but he has not done so at the

! Roberts, Mirror-Travels, 136.44

! Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 45

1996), 147.


expense of his own name. For the time being. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s famous commentary

on the death of the author, Shapiro remarks that

. . . the contradiction Smithson enacts with his signature is that between nature and culture. . . . The signature is itself both inside and outside the world of art, and it must "remain and disappear at the same time." The posthistoric signature in-scribes itself in the work or in the text . . . and it continues, in the mode of de-forming it, the modern practice of attaching the individual name of the artist. 46

!Inscription and deformity: the entropy of the author’s signature. Smithson’s authorship is de-

signed to persist throughout Jetty’s entropic lifespan. A paradox: though his effacement arguably

began at the moment Jetty came into being, the tiniest microbic particle already undoing the

work of hand and truck, that chemical process nevertheless refers back to Smithson as the “prime

mover.” And yet, already the untrained eye may mistake Jetty for “pure” geology, a curious “nat-

ural” formation in an already incongruous chemical feature: a lake in the desert. To that eye,

Smithson is the absent center of the work. To the overtrained eye, Smithson may in fact be too

present, the traces of his celebrity, of his labor-time, of his artistic intentionality in this despoiled

“taskspace” occluding the basic organic beauties elsewhere at Rozel Point. The Great Salt Lake

is a machine long since set in motion. A recent appendage to that machine, Spiral Jetty is subject

to the processes of the whole; it will, we can only guess, continue to amass and degenerate as

Smithson intended. The contradiction Shapiro describes, “between nature and culture,” has its

own entropic flux. But a thousand or a hundred thousand years from today, Jetty’s indeterminate

aesthetic—in the thin gap between creative industry and geological accident—will almost cer-

tainly tilt toward the latter. No longer a site of pilgrimage but a site of mythic rediscovery. And

its “origin and purpose,” to borrow Kubrick, will by then be “a total mystery.”

! Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel (Berkeley: University of California 46

Press, 1995), 234.


“A Parenthesis of Infinitesimal Brevity”: Utah’s Upper Triassic !Having explored some concerns of the present day—the end of the frontier, the despoliation of

the desert, the West in precarious postmodernity—let us, finally, engage a remoter past. We begin

in Mesozoic Utah, via two modes of address. Consider first this passage about the Moenkopi

Formation, a geological megastructure that sprawls from Utah to California and whose contours

and striations show incontrovertibly that rivers once rippled through the now-desert:

The Upper Triassic Chinle Formation in southeastern Utah was deposited in a complex fluvial-deltaic-lacustrine system. . . . Chinle strata represent deposits of fluvial channels and floodplains; lacustrine deltas; lacustrine basins; and lacus-trine and playa mudflats. These rocks include a variety of vertebrate, invertebrate, and plant fossils, trace fossils, and paleosols that provide information on deposi-tional environments, water tables, and paleoclimate. 47

!And this one:

Distinct bench levels tell a story of old shorelines, a record of where Lake Bon-neville paused in its wild fluctuations over the course of fifteen thousand years. Its rise was stalled about twenty-three thousand years ago when the lake's elevation was about 4500' above sea level; over the next three thousand years, it rose very little. The relentless erosion of wave against rock during this stable period cut a broad terrace known to geologists as the Stansbury Shoreline. 48

!One needn’t be overly familiar with geological academe and ecofeminist memoir to place these

two passages in their right categories, even lacking clearer syntactic signposts. The first is from

“Sedimentology of the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation, Southeastern Utah: Paleoclimatic Im-

plications,” a 1987 journal article by geological surveyor Russell Dubiel. And the second is from

Utahn memoirist, environmentalist, and civil disobedient Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge, writ-

! Russell F. Dubiel, “Sedimentology of the Upper Triassic Chinle Formation, Southeastern Utah: Paleo47 -climatic Implications,” Journal of the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science 22 no. 1 (1987), 35.! Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 30-31.48


ten that very same year, from a perch on the Great Salt Lake no more than seventy miles from

Dubiel’s tripod and theodolite.

In “Sedimentology,” Dubiel argues that through paleomagnetic reconstruction and evalu-

ation of sedimentary deposits, we may conclude that during the Late Triassic, the Colorado

Plateau was actually situated in a “tropical monsoonal” climate. In Refuge, Williams tells a 49

wholly different story, of the (un)timely confluence of three recent events in familial and regional

history: her mother’s cancer diagnosis, the dramatic decrease in the lake’s water levels, and the

catastrophic flooding of a nearby bird refuge. One narrative is driven by Lyellian rationalism, the

other by the fear of the universe’s irrationality and entropy. One is enfolded in a bombastic vari-

ant of Linnean taxonomy, what John McPhee has called “language of the sort that would have

attracted Gilbert and Sullivan.” The other’s presentation of geological fact is inflected by an 50

emotive and poetic analyticity. Bench levels do not merely demonstrate, they “tell a story”; the

wave does not merely shape the rock, it is “against” it. Unmuting the turf, she finds politics.

But professional aims and narrative strategies aside, Dubiel and Williams are united by

the belief that geological timeframes convey cultural and even moral meaning. For Dubiel, geol-

ogy disabuses us of error and suspicion. Its study helps us cognize a world we will never experi-

ence firsthand but that nevertheless shapes and confines our everyday presences. Through geolo-

gy we situate ourselves more firmly in the phenomenological everyday. Stand here and you stand

on ground that evolved as your species did, ebbed and grew and eroded as you do today.

Williams corroborates this sentiment. We stake our lives and livelihoods on geology’s momen-

tary permanence, she argues. If it crumbles, let it do so long after we are buried in its bedrock.

! Dubiel, “Sedimentology,” 45.49

! John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), Kindle location 221.50


“The Provo Shoreline looks like a huge bathtub ring around the Salt Lake Valley. It is a bench I

know well, because we lived on it. It is the ledge that supported my neighborhood above Salt

Lake City.” As the neighborhood changes, as buildings are built or boarded up, as her Mormon 51

culture creeps slowly into modernity, the stoic rocks assure her that the cruel everyday is a nick

in a strip of flint on a great sandstone butte.

There is a great deal of other consequential and illuminative prose from the past four

decades that could be considered “geological humanism.” Among them are McPhee’s famous

field surveys Basin and Range (1982) and Assembling California (1994). His interest is in con-

veying geological histories to literary audiences. Thus his work is always demonstratively about

geology rather than a sideways meditation on it. McPhee engages geology as object rather than

as theme. But he does pinpoint precisely what it is about geology that might draw the eye of the

creative interloper: its ready absorption of metaphor. “The far-out stuff was in the Far West of the

country,” he notes, “wild, weirdsma, a leather-jacket geology in mirrored shades . . . its strike-

slip faults and falling buildings, its boiling springs and fresh volcanics, its extensional disassem-

bling of the earth.” Geology’s discursive language is richly informed by analogies from poli52 -

tics, literature, art, and psychology: “Rootless mountains and bitter lakes . . . fatigued rock and

incompetent rock . . . angles of repose.” A romantic discipline, McPhee suggests, one governed

perhaps by failed poets. For the researchers McPhee accompanied during his development of

Basin and Range, the sedimented object demands a sedimented verbiage.

! Williams, Refuge, 32.51

! McPhee, Basin, Kindle locations 228-229.52


The southwest’s array of basaltic formations known as “clinoptilolite, eclogite,

migmatite, tincalconite, szaibelyite, pumpellyite,” and so on, are the very essence of chrono53 -

tope. In the very names themselves—prolix composites of ancient prefixes and novel suffixes;

thickly rhythmic indexes of proper names, sites, colorings, and cryptic errata; inarticulable letter

combinations performing as the industry’s shibboleths—one sees an effort by scientist to congeal

each object’s idiosyncratic history into the “economy of the sign.” Far from being “arbitrary,” as

Baudrillard suggests of semiotics, the stratified geological name is knowingly metaphoric of the

structure it describes. Robert Smithson, for his part, would note of the mineralogical taxonomy: 54

“Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any

word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles

each containing its own void.” 55

When McPhee describes natural features as “temporary,” he is referring to a brief times-

pan of a hundred thousand years. He jumps three million years in one paragraph, forty million in

the next, arriving at 1797 just pages later. In this fidgety junket, McPhee reenacts for his audi-

ence the revolutionary series of discoveries, in the mid–nineteenth century, that geophysical time

was far more elastic and uncertain than the rigid five or so thousand years once believed. The

process of unveiling the earth’s true age, beginning in the late 1770s with the Comte de Buffon,

was all fits and starts. Its phases of radical advance and reassessment constitute a geology of

! Ibid., Kindle location 207.53

! See Jean Baudrillard, “For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,” in Selected Writings, trans. 54

Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 57-97. It should be noted that geology’s port-manteaued vocabulary predates—or even presages?—the bombastic Derridean turn in the humanities. If it is any consolation to the cultural historian, our own critical language is utterly humbled by that of the rock historian.! Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 55

1996), 107.


their own. In The Culture of Time and Space (1983), Stephen Kern writes about patterns of de-

velopment in geological research in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He notes that minds

once anchored by the certainty of creation ex nihilo came unmoored at the advent of the “infinite

expanse of the past”—a situation that persists, seemingly ineluctably, through the present day.

In just over a century the age of the earth had oscillated from the cramped tempo-ral estimates of biblical chronology to the almost unlimited time scale of Lyell, down to Kelvin’s meager twenty million years, and then back up to hundreds of millions of years. . . . the history of man came to appear increasingly as a paren-thesis of infinitesimal brevity. 56

!Writing in an era of more certain geological timescales, McPhee leads us, stratigraphically, from

the here-now to the there-then. In plate tectonics and hydrothermal transport, he sees signals of

humanity’s very, very smallness, our destructibility in the scheme of it all.

All three narratives—Dubiel’s, Williams’s, and McPhee’s—are organized around the

concept of deep time, a phrase coined by McPhee but elucidated best by botanist Stephen Jay

Gould. “Man has been here 32,000 years,” noted Mark Twain, as quoted by Gould in Time’s Ar-

row, Time’s Cycle; and it is only in the past one hundred fifty that we have developed geological

consciousness; and only on the last sixty or so that said consciousness has evidenced itself in our

art and literature. A deep time mindset is easy enough to achieve in theory—just add several ze-

roes to the Judeo-Christian account—but challenging, even vertiginous, to ponder at greater

length. Time as arrow, linear and accreted, and time as cycle, looping directionlessly through

“fundamental states . . . immanent in time,” emerge as opposing (but mutually contingent) ac-

counts of geophysical and anthropological time. Gould presents this opposition within a history

! Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 – 1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 56

1983), 37-38.


of science, but he could equally be writing of Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin, or Friedrich

Nietzsche and G. W. F. Hegel.

In his chapter on late eighteenth century geologist James Hutton, Gould explains Hutton’s

important discovery that the earth was a “machine,” but not an entropic one, set into motion and

allowed only to decay over time. Rather, landforms showed signs of “repair,” which meant that

the age of one could not be inferred simply from its proximity to or aesthetic commonality with

others. “Time's cycle rules the world machine of erosion, deposition, consolidation, and uplift;

continents and oceans change places in a slow choreography that can never end, or even age, so

long as higher powers maintain the current order of nature's laws.” Deep time thus originates 57

from the discovery of non-linearity in geology. If geological change happens not in a straight-

forward march of traceable moments but rather in elusive and irregular patterns, history loses its

claim to absolute determinability. This not only upended the assumed timescale of planetary up-

growth. It fundamentally reframed the dimensions of human ethics for, as Gould paraphrases

Hutton, “if moments have no distinction, then they have no interest.” 58

Returning to Dubiel, Williams, and McPhee—all these authors aim, in their scientific and

mnemonic readings of the land, to evoke a multiplicity of temporalities: the short duration of the

surveyor’s visit, the medial duration of marsh erosion, the long duration of fluvial channel evap-

oration. But time is not always aggressively linear in these texts, marked by steady and logical

accretions. Bedrock, sea level, cancer stages: all of these ebb, flow, and oscillate, alternately in-

spiring certainty and indeterminacy within their studiers.

! Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 69.57

! Ibid., 80.58


Williams and McPhee were certainly not first writers to evoke the “deep time” chrono-

tope. As André Spears notes, as early as the Enlightenment and Romantic literary eras this trend

had already been set into motion. For poets like Thomas Love Peacock, Percy Bysshe Shelley,

William Blake, and others on the cusp of industrial modernity, “an archaic sense of the world be-

came the mirror-image of a possible fulfillment on the horizon of future history, a fulfillment

with its roots in civilization's deepest strata.” Walter Benjamin theorized this tendency in his 59

final and most aphoristic essay, “On the Concept of History,” a meditation on historical material-

ism’s critical momentum. He starts his fourteenth thesis with an epigraph from Karl Kraus’s

Words in Verse: “Origin is the goal.” (Is this goal achievable in the Huttonian view of the uni-

verse?) In his sixteenth thesis, he picks up the thread thusly: “The historical materialist cannot do

without the concept of a present which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come

to a standstill. . . . Historicism depicts the ‘eternal’ picture of the past; the historical materialist,

an experience with it, which stands alone.” It is necessary, Benjamin suggests, to view history 60

as a process that at critical moments crystallizes and stops flowing entirely; moments of climac-

tic tension, revolution. History is not a smooth, gradating continuum but rather a concatenation

of ruptures and realignments.

In geological terms: from afar the granite mesa appears singular and monumental, rising

from the earth in smooth and painless chromatic intervals. But upon closer inspection it is always

a “linear multiplicity,” as Deleuze and Guattari might call it, its sharply contrasting lithic forma-

tions evidencing cataclysm, upheaval, decay, short-lived advances and long periods of retreat,

! André Spears, “Evolution in Context: ‘Deep Time,’ Archaeology and the Post-Romantic Paradigm,” 59

Comparative Literature 48 no. 4 (Autumn 1996)! Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Dennis Redmond, http://www.marxists.org/refer60 -ence/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm


“variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots.” The chipped and fluted rock face dares us 61

to read it as an emblem of moderation and bloodless progress.

Time is not all these authors evoke, of course. There is space, too. From Karl Marx on

through Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Beatriz Colomina, and Edward Soja, modern readings

of space typically seek to uncover the power structures immanent within them. Space, more often

than not, is organized by the activities of capital, contoured by the tempos of labor and consumer

practice. “Space is composed of intersections of mobile elements,” wrote de Certeau in 1980. 62

Lefebvre, in the experimental text Rhythmanalysis (1992), asserts that space is constituted

through rhythm, repetitive action, and political energies shared between persons and social bod-

ies. Dubiel and Williams do not reject such readings; of course, their own readings would not be

possible without contemporary technologies, modes of travel, and political affinities (Dubiel, re-

call, is a U.S.G.S. surveyor). In fact, by invoking deep temporalities, they manage to bring into

the modern spatial order sites which earlier might once have been construed as out-of-bounds.

That order, which to date has focused mainly on the city and the suburb, must be exploded to in-

clude all potential loci of human/technological/natural/political mobility and self-actualization,

including the desert and other “wildernesses.” Even in Dubiel’s driest technical terms, he con-

jures within the space of the text this crisp sense of the lithofacies: “Sandstone bodies grade lat-

erally into siltstone and mudstone lenses that contain organic-carbon fragments and whole, car-

bonized plant fossils.” Dubiel does not provide precise measurements, but these gradations are 63

ones we can easily visualize; in that rather haptic passage, the author vividly evokes each physi-

! Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: 61

University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 21.! Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.62

! Dubiel, “Sedimentology,” 37.63


cal element’s embeddedness within the others, and his own body’s relative position to them as a

still and/or moving observer.

And Williams, in an interview with Mormon literary journal Irreantum:

We live in a landscape where rocks tell time differently. Time and space. In the desert, there is space. . . . If we have open space, then we have time to breathe, to dream, to dare, to create, to play, to pray, to move freely, so freely. . . . I have be-come completely addicted to stillness. I am not so easily seduced by speed. I find I just can’t move so quickly in the world. It’s the silence. 64

!This desert spatiality is likewise constituted by rhythm and pause, stasis and mobility. Geology

for Williams is a theater of “intricate immensities” (to borrow a phrase from Gaston Bachelard).

One cannot perceive a geological whole from one vantage point. One must amble around it, at-

tempt to view it with monocular, binocular, or no vision at all. One may be with it tactilely, affec-

tively—or process it from afar, clinically. The rock formation, all these authors suggest, must be

viewed not as an object but as a process, always in the state of becoming.

!Conclusion: Blowing Up the Glen Canyon Dam !Near the end of this essay’s development, I came into possession of a beautiful and dog-eared

copy of one-armed Civil War veteran Maj. John Wesley Powell’s The Exploration of the Col-

orado River and its Canyons. Powell completed this travelogue in 1869, perfectly a century be-

fore Abbey and Smithson set foot on Western soils and broadcasted their geologic ruination. The

Utah of Powell’s account is a dominion—not nearly a state yet—of unrivaled beauty and, impor-

tantly, of limited perceivable industrial potential. In the chapter “From the Grand to the Little

Colorado,” Powell and his nearly dozen-strong expeditionary party name each sublime geologi-

! Terry Tempest Williams, quoted in Jana Bouck Remy, “An Interview with Terry Tempest Williams,” 64

Irreantum 4, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 18.


cal feature as they encounter it in their languid caravan of boats. In order: Gypsum Canyon,

Mille Crag Bend, Narrow Canyon, Oak Glens. Abbey would later call this the “folk poetry of the

pioneers.” Powell writes: “We have a curious ensemble of wonderful features—carved walls, 65

royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. From which of these features shall

we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon.” 66

Powell’s iconic travelogue, with its eminently framable lithographs, is emblematic of the

chronotope. Even without the dates on the journal entries, one arrives at a firm sense of Powell’s

expeditionary tempo purely through his careful and detailed descriptions of each exploit. Bakhtin

calls this a feature of the idyll: “the conjoining of human life with the life of nature, the unity of

their rhythm, the common language used to describe phenomena of nature and the events of hu-

man life.” One could thus argue that Powell’s episodes add up naturally, and cohere within a 67

legible matrix of time, because of his unimpeded communion with nature and the serendipitous,

non-programmatic manner in which he journeys through it. The rhythmic, muscular, and ostensi-

bly natural labor of rafting, climbing, hiking, and pitching tents inheres in the space of the text,

hypnotizing the reader into Powell’s worn-out and lived-in durée.

A century later, Abbey arrived at that selfsame junction, on a “last voyage to a place [he]

knew, even then, was doomed,” to discover this morbidly prosodic billboard (fig. 7): 68

!!

! Abbey, Solitaire, 226.65

! John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons (Meadville, PA: Flood & 66

Vincent, 1895), 233.! Bakhtin, Dialogic, 226.67

! Abbey, Solitaire, 195.68


Figure 7. “The first billboard ever erected in Glen Canyon,” from Abbey, Solitaire, 195.

! As Bill McKibben asserts in “The Desert Anarchist,” an essay that opens a recent reprint

of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Glen Canyon was the cynosure of Abbey’s moral universe. Its

damming, or “plugging,” was the pinnacle of arrogance, the perfect visual and political metaphor

of humanity’s long campaign to choke off the natural world. Abbey’s solution to that monstrous

pork-barrel project—a symptom of the madness of Industrial Civilization, the “megalomaniacal

megamachine”? The merry eco-terrorists of his Gang famously plotted it as his proxies: “the rup-

turing, removal and obliteration of, of course, that Glen Canyon National Sewage Lagoon

Dam.” As Abbey would later remark (extemporaneously), such a destruction would immediate69 -

ly expose the recent signs of human degradation: “sodden garbage . . . sunken boats, the skele-

tons of long-forgotten, decomposing water-skiers.” But over time, nature will take its course; in

five years, maybe ten, the wind and sun will “sterilize” the mess. Floods will return and remove

! Edward Abbey, The Monkey-Wrench Gang (1975; repr., New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 401.69


the remaining detritus. The flora and fauna will reappear, and with them generations of new life.

And within two of our own, human, generations, Glen Canyon “and the living river, heart of the

canyon land, will be restored to us.” Entropy—of a different sort. 70

Industrialization, as we have seen, has made the idyllic chronotope less possible; the

rhythms of modern machinery, which so angered Abbey and Williams, may be construed as dis-

ruptive to human creativity even outside the framework of polemic. As critic Jonathan Crary has

recently argued, industrial capitalism’s coup de grâce comprises the annexation of all earthly

time into the time of productive labor, the cataclysmic fragmentation of diurnal rhythms, and, as

can be more deeply felt, the annihilation of meaningful social bonds. Certainly the travelogue, 71

as a genre, is not dead, and has arguably never been more publishable than today. But the direct-

ness with which Powell is able to transubstantiate his time in nature—the quick scramble through

the rapids, the awestruck mosey around canyon bends—has been replaced with the critical re-

move of chronotopography. “When the immanent unity of time disintegrated,” concludes

Bakhtin, “nature itself ceased to be a living participant in the events of life. . . . [Nature] was

turned into landscape, it was fragmented into metaphors and comparisons.” Nature the emblem 72

of history, the emblem of rupture, stasis, entropy, rebirth. But perhaps never again just nature.

!!

! Ibid., 24.70

! Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).71

! Bakhtin, Dialogic, 217.72


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