Thoughts on stones (ii)

Friday Fragment #36

‘The stone is at the heart of the recipe, and the heart of the recipe is not the cabbage leaf, not the side of bacon and not the crust of bread, but the story.’ The stone is the story, because all recipes begin as stories. | In Kieslowśki’s hour-long masterpiece, A Short Film About Killing, there are two stones. Jacek drops one of them from a motorway bridge in an act of reckless violence. The second stone is brought down with a more measured violence, to finish what he had started, over the head of the taxi driver whom Jacek had presumed to already be dead. Yet there is a third stone in the film, unseen, which is the most clinical and malevolent concretion of all: the state, which punishes the most abhorrent crimes in its society by taking the life of the individual who perpetrates them. Capital punishment; justifiable murder: the most grisly of simulacra. The film was instrumental in Poland finally abolishing the death penalty. | Sisyphus was condemned by the Gods to push the largest of boulders to the top of a hill for eternity. On almost reaching the summit, the stone would roll back down, becoming a never-ending task that could never bring fulfilment: punishment in the Underworld for his repeated duplicity in the world above. Whilst the boulder and the hill represent great difficulty, the wickedness comes in the futility of the repeated act. Unable to complete his task, but consigned forever to repeat his efforts, Sisyphus cannot find a greater meaning for his toil. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.¹ For some of us, there is only the endeavour, the labour, the now – not the disappointment of a last failure, not the unrealistic expectation of success: no greater meaning. | The stone, instrument of violence and death for Jacek, object of senseless struggle and torture for Sisyphus, brings quiet and comfort to others. At play, it can skim and skip. At rest, in my pocket, it sits in the hand – soft, impossibly smooth, a roughness abraded by an attrition of maybe a million or more years, under the wind, in and out of the sea, at company among other stones. In the hand, it re-connects one to a time and place, to a distant past and a different land, and thus a disconnection from a time or place that might trouble the mind in the here and now. Away from those I love, it’s their hand in mine. Remote from a youth and years long since passed, it’s shoes once worn, a wind once felt, a story once shared, a beach once walked.

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1. From The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus.