The earth carries it forward
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/