In December 1994, my youngest sister, Franki, died unexpectedly in Edinburgh, hemorrhaging during childbirth while giving birth to twins. Three months later, my eldest sister, Sally, killed herself near London, stuffing the exhaust pipe of her car. Soon after, I started reaching for rocks, stones, and other seemingly solid objects as anchors in a world unmoored, ways to make sense of these events through stories far larger than my own, stories that started in the most fundamental and speculative histories – geological, archaeological, histories before history – and opened unmistakably into absences that echo in the world today, absences not only mineral but human and animal, and occasionally vegetable, too.
Hugh Raffles is a Professor of Anthropology at The New School in New York, and previous to The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, the author of the New York Times Notable Book The Illustrated Insectopedia. Unconformities opens with the quote above, and as a presumed thesis statement, I found it very intriguing. But although Raffles spends the rest of this book travelling the world, exposing different forms of rock, and exploring the stories of those tied to the various geologies (and in particular, those indigenous peoples, animals, and landscapes exploited by Western White Men), his lost sisters don't really figure into what follows. To be clear: the travel and science writing, along with the historical storytelling, were consistently fascinating – and Raffles doesn't owe me any exploration of his grief or personal life – but after opening with that bombshell, I kept waiting for the material that follows to tie back into what I thought what the premise. Still, a highly original, informative, and engaging read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley, and although I know better than to quote from an ARC in reviews – and especially in this case as the digital version is filled with errors – I only quote to give a spirit of things; don't quote my quotes, I guess.)
Geologists call a discontinuity on a deposition of sediment an unconformity. It's a physical representation of a gap in the geological record, a material sign of a break in time, readily readable once you know where and how to look.Raffles begins in Manhattan, where he now lives, with an exploration of the types of rock to be found underground, an overview of the history of amateur and professional geologists in the city, and in what felt like a bit of a swerve, a longish recounting of the mistreatment of Manhattan's original inhabitants, the Lenape people. I soon realised, though, that the swerve is rather the point: In every locale that Raffles visits, he describes the unique geological features (from weirdly magnetised lava stones in Iceland to Spitsbergen's “blubberstone” – an artificial stone made of spilled whale oil [from the days of their mass slaughter and processing here] concretised with “sand, gravel, and coal into a rocky mass”), and after an introduction to the people living and working in the area today, the majority of each section then details some terrible exploitation of the innocent by the mighty.
Raffles visits the Standing Stones at Callanish on the Isle of Lewis (which stones used to be visible from one lost sister's house), and I was fascinated by the information he shares about their construction in deep history, and also appalled by the more modern stories of the rich Brits who bought up the Orkneys (in a wave of Scots-mania inspired by Victoria and Albert), who then enforced the Enclosure Act and forced the mass emigration of generations-long residents, all while knocking down and pulverising the standing stones that spoiled their views. In what was probably the most disturbing section, Raffles begins by writing about modern meteorites found in northern Greenland and then rewinds to the days of Polar Exploration, when Europeans were first encountering the local Inughuit people. We learn that Robert Peary, first to reach the North Pole, was also the first to convince the locals to show him from where they source their iron – and then he relieved them of the three giant meteorites that the Inughuit had been using, selling them to the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. We learn that Peary's companion on his push for the Pole (and the man who repeatedly saved his life) was an African-American named Matthew Henson, who received no acknowledgement for his accomplishment during his lifetime (he couldn't even get hired by the AMNH as a chauffeur in later years), and along with the meteorites, Peary brought back six Inughuit people for the museum to study, most of whom soon died. Nothing in this book was really what I expected, but it was constantly surprising, engaging, and informative.
The problem, as so often, is time: written, then oral histories evaporate; myths and legends rear up, then fade from view. Only material remains, summoning archaeopoetics from archaeologists, just as it summons geopoetics from geologists, and poetic poetics from poets, all gathering up the millennia to apprehend life from these and other stones.And so, I suppose, Unconformities is a summoning of anthropoetics from an anthropologist, and I loved every bit of it. Not the read that I thought the prologue was preparing me for, but an absolutely topnotch read nonetheless.
