Humans leave their mark, and the earth carries it forward as an archive.
Jussi Parikka [1]

            … touching

notes from everything, here where

mind leaves fresh prints on archives,

whispers tracks onto slabs and

bedrock to bloom again and again,

here where is emptiness, the way

a shrine is important for what’s

not there …
- from The Underworld, a poem by Brian Swann [2]

What does archive indicate?  A record, a fossil, an idea-imprint?  The beauty of the above sentence lies herein: the earth carries it forward. Recalling, the deep time of the archive already encompassing the pastness of the stone: its volcanic origin, its erosion, its glow.  Human leavings accumulate, accrete, and transform into a post-human era.  An unhuman. Faint signals emanate from the stone, indeed, of the stone.

In the example pictured in the Mark-Archive study we follow recent markings; look into what we are fortunate to see this season in the sun.  And imagine with the carrying forward.   Where and when does this marked-stone-as-archive leave humans?  Again, Jussi Parikka:  The memory of a rock is of different temporal order to that of the human social one.

[1] Jussi Parikka. A Geology of Media (2015). University of Minnesota Press.
[2]  Brian Swann. St. Francis and the Flies (2016).  Autumn House Press.
The poem The Underworld at https://theamericanscholar.org/the-underworld/

“The eye is the first circle,” Emerson writes. “The horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end," with each new thought composing a new circle, wider than and containing those coming before it. Just as the nucleus is at the center of the atom, with each larger orbit whirling concentrically around it, including and surpassing in complexity and capacity the smaller one preceding, so the eye of a person, like a pebble dropped into a pond, emanates outward its interpretive horizons, the most powerful visions proving the most potent stones, generating strong and multitudinous ripples.

- Eric G. Wilson, from Keep It Fake: Inventing the Authentic Life (2015)

Related June 2015 photos:  Water Rock Rim