A little ramble on geology and awe
Thu May 26 2022
For a couple of weeks this month there’s been street work on my block to (I think?) repair a water line to a neighboring building. Our building’s water came out reddish-brown with iron sediment for a couple of days and most of my calls were interrupted by jackhammers.
The distraction made me want to go back to the chapter on “artificial ground” in Stephen Graham’s Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers:
Of all things, modern humans tend to naturalise the ground, seeing the terrestrial platform beneath their feet as some immutable and natural product of geological processes working over unimaginable time horizons. Such an understandable tendency leads to an overwhelming sense of ground as an inherently horizontal phenomenon–the very surface of the earth stretching to and beyond the horizon. Such a perspective radically underplays the importance of the vertical accumulation and composition of ground. For, increasingly, the terrestrial material beneath the feet of our fast-urbanising species is anything but ‘natural’ geology: it is the vertically accumulated phenomenon of manufactured ground…Geologists now estimate that the deliberate shift of material by humans through construction, mining, agriculture and the generation and the movement of materials deemed to be waste now amounts to around 59 billion tonnes a year.
Graham cites Smudge Studio’s 2011 zine Geologic City, which is a terrific guide to the various geologic encounters in the urban environment. In a way, a lot of my interest in reframing the geologic mirrors the research process that led to Networks of New York. With that project, I’d initially been thinking about and treating internet infrastructure as somewhere else: data centers were a northern Virginia thing, not an everyday occurrence. The internet as “place” did not include the place where I lived because the place where I lived was ordinary, everyday, and I was seeking awe. Similarly, people (including me) go to “nature” to go see geology—to the Grand Canyon or to an Icelandic volcano. They go in search of awe by going away from the city, because the awe of the city is presumed to be of a .
It’s facile, but ultimately the thing that tends to keep me going is finding awe in the most quotidian circumstances—to take in the absurd planetary project of the internet by reading markings on a city sidewalk, to consider by looking into a cut-open slice of the street I live on.[2] Like any act of faith, it’s a matter of finding a sense of communion with or connection to something bigger than oneself—not necessarily something fully knowable, because what really is, but something that makes the world seem like less of the hostile and unforgiving terrain it generally is. And I tend to make the mistake of looking elsewhere first for awe because it is often hard to feel awe in the same place where one reads the news and does their taxes and cries in a shower. But as it becomes increasingly certain that the pandemic probably isn’t ending in my lifetime, looking elsewhere starts to become a high-risk luxury.