On the day we found the trilobite and took its photograph, we had already been to visit the gannet colony at Cape St. Mary’s, so you can imagine us picking our way along the foreshore below the cliffs with thought balloons over our heads, and in each a scribble of elliptical flight paths, orbits left by the gannets wheeling around the nucleus of their tall nesting rock. Imagine their black-tipped wings like long sensitive scythes, their stretched necks faintly yellow as though dusted with pollen. From a distance, their cacophony resembles the ratchet ratchet of an old threshing machine; closer up it’s more more more, or maybe here here here, the urgent, impacted birth-and-death cries of beings who will, once departed from their home rock, be mute. The place dense with energy, taboo, as though we’d stepped inside an atom, chaos and order in tense standoff, calling directly into the open ear of our DNA: the sort of place where beauty teeters giddily on the brink of terror.
So it was a relief to let that potency recede, to embrace an ordinary walk and contemplate something as quotidian as lunch. We ambled along the cliff bottom, clambering over squarish blocks of rubble, strolling the flat water-smoothed shale – some russet red, some blue grey – which sloped into the sea. There’s a lustre rising in the shale that, were it flesh, we’d call a blush, since it suggests some inward softening, some memory or hope coming to the surface. And, although the ocean’s wash-and-withdraw was a constant reminder, it was hard to imagine that water had transformed the rough cliff without some answering agent, some reciprocal hankering after smoothness. Eros, erosion. So it seems.
We sat on those smooth boulders to have trail bars and tea. And then, a few paces away, we spotted the trilobite sprawling in the shale – bold, declarative, big as my hand and just as complicated. It seemed the shale had suddenly broken into literacy, publishing one enigmatic pictograph from a secret alphabet. Suddenly it was refusing relegation to raw material. Suddenly it was demanding to be read.
For they are local and exotic
For they anticipate lobsters, the Pre-Raphaelites, the tenor saxophone, and the buckskin jacket
For they are seemingly absurd though perhaps well founded
For they appear like a fully accoutred medieval knight stepping onto a nearly empty stage
For they are elegant and monstrous
For their pleural spines extend past the thorax like the kind of drooping moustaches sported by bad guys in westerns
For they are local and exotic
For the paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling
For they index both the micro-continent of Avalonia and the Mid-Cambrian Period and so situate us in space and time
For they dislocate space
For they infinitize time
For the immense odds against its occurrence in the rock record
For they pose the problems of mind and body
nature and culture
rock and stone
substance and accident
mysticism and materialism
allochthon and autochthon
dressed and overdressed
five hundred million years before the first false dichotomy appears in the Anthropocene
For they mean yet do not speak or write
For they are elegant and monstrous
For sometimes I hear the mind my former lives all share.
You pose on my desk in the photograph,
a riddle, an odalisque, a rune,
one plump cipher from a long-gone
semiotic system. Cryptic and Sapphic,
at once emerging from the stone
and scuttling into it, you earn
each micro-quantum of the consternation
promised by your name. The more I learn
about you and your family – e.g.,
your eyes were calcite crystals, spars of rock
arranged to transmit light, unique
in all of animalia – the more piquant
your present absence. Friend, stranger, paradoxidid,
I wave one jointed arm.
I wink one endothermic lid.