I have namechanged for this post (obviously).
cote, there are people out there who genuinely believe investigating the consciousness of stones is an important thing. I quote:
'The cultural truth of the mineralogical: nothing could be less expressive, less unyielding and unchanging, less taciturn or unfeeling, less fundamental than stone. ...
Or so it seems to us, we whose lives are so short that were the stone we walk and build upon sentient, our presence would register nothing, we mayflies who live and perish in less than a blink. Small things who think our ephemeral walking and building expansive, who measure the world as if it were likewise swift and small. Small things who dwell in a large and rocky world. If stone could speak, what would it say about us?
Stone would call you transient, sporadic. The mayflies analogy was bruising to you, but apt. Stone was here from near the beginning, from the time when the restless gases of the earth decided they did not want to spend their days in swirling chaos, in couplings without lengthy comminglings, and settled into solid forms. Dolomite knows that story. ... And it is from this vantage, this vantage so anthropodiscentered that language almost fails its imagining, it is from this lapidary point of view that stone can be seen to possess a life of its own.
A protean substance that retains no form in permanence, stone moves. Stone creates: architectures, novelities, art. Lava is the truth of stone, not a rocky aberration. All stone is in motion. Yet the humming bird pulse of human time is too rapid for geologic mobility to be seen. You expect stone to be heavy, but stone is light. If stone had a voice it would be less ponderous than your own. If you lived more slowly, if your hurried heartbeat did not limit the rhythm of your discerning, did not bind you to your swift smallness, you would know that you and stone are both human, or both stone.'