Geological Pioneers

If the two Sherpas were geological pioneers, the older man would be a vulcanist, the younger man a neptunist. It would be the second half of the seventeenth century, and the task would be to put the still-unknown in order, tidy it up, establish with meticulous zest the circumscriptions of the age’s ignorance. The obsessive neurosis of Linnaeus, his vanity. No more dervishes, no more Druids; no more Renaissance men soaring over the surfaces of anatomy, optics and alchemy with equal relish. The task is to establish systems. First, the stars; then organic species, and fluids, and the very passage of time. Until it’s the turn of the earth sciences. Not just classifying minerals, sediments, rock strata. They must be explained: why this spiral ammonite on the slopes of the Alps? Why that mollusc in the amber emanating from that bark? All that we walk on – where is it from?

The first theory that emerges is liquid and languid; somewhat burdened by myth and, therefore, seductive, a Nereid. The ocean in retreat. An orb covered in water slowly draining away, leaving the Earth naked. Exposed to the gaze of the Creator. A world of inundations stabilising. An emerging planet that is surfacing to breathe: whale of half an eternity of submergence. The echo of the biblical Flood and the prevalence of water as punishment that was already meted out. A totally aquatic sphere, in which the dissolved minerals keep creating solidarities until eventually they’re solid. A world where firmness has had to make its own way over the course of aeons. Dryness as the conquest of time. Interesting, sure. But there is a problem with neptunism. Not where the original water came from, but where it’s headed. Where is all that sea that covered the Pyrenees, the Andes, and the very Himalayas where two Sherpas peer out over a crag?

And so the rival theory: the cult of the volcanoes. Water annihilated by Hades’ heat. A more violent idea, where it is incendiary lava that produces the soil. That the planet exists thanks to an incessant cycle of eruptions and cooling that guarantees its perpetuity. The centre of the world ablaze. The Earth designs its parts in the seething forge of the underworld and spits them out onto the surface via volcanoes. Matter comes out in the form of lava, cools, settles; rain and wind guide it back down to the coasts. As unrecognisable seabed, it continues to fall: gravity draws the minerals back into the inextinguishable combustion of the planetary centre, to the infernal laboratory where everything gets readulterated while awaiting another eruption. Cyclical, impetuous: this is the igneous factory of worlds that the vulcanists whipped up.

Goethe reflects the controversy in Faust, where it is up to Anaxagoras to argue the side of fire and to Thales, naturally, the founding role of water. ‘This rock is formed by the vapour of fire,’ Anaxagoras sustains. But Thales responds: ‘That which lives has sprung from moisture.’ Unimpressed, Anaxagoras then provokes him: ‘Hast thou ever, O Thales, in one night, brought forth such a mountain out of mire?’ And points out a hill we can presume to be imposing. But Thales, hydrophilic, remains collected: he tells him that nature flows, that it builds without any type of violence. So then Anaxagoras loses his patience. He says that yes, that of course there has been violence; that there was in fact a ‘Plutonic angry fire’ and the ‘monstrous explosive power of Aeolian vapours’ that ‘broke through the old crust of the flat soil’ so that a new mountain ‘must immediately arise’. The argument continues, but this is as far as Goethe goes.

Then came science, epistemological mechanisms, Pangea, Laurasia, Gondwana, drift, the exhibitionism of the Quaternary Period. Plate tectonics are a twentieth-century invention, a fad imposed just forty years before the older Sherpa, vulcanist by choice, peered into the abyss alongside our young neptunist, each in contemplation of the motionless body of an Englishman.