We went on a family trip to Cheddar Gorge and Caves and I was, like most visitors who have been in the show caves over the past 187 years I’m sure, very impressed by the rock formations. What I was particularly impressed by was their semblance to other things in nature I would usually think of as alive.
I know, and knew before I stepped inside the caves, that over a long enough timescale rock is dynamic. In terms of visualising this, I would have thought of lava, or rocks being eroded over time, or even water dripping over rock to form stalactites and stalagmites. But seeing the organic forms of the rocks within the caves made me think more about rock as a living thing.
This, in turn, made me think about N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which features characters who can harness the energy of the living rock, and others who are made from and can travel through the rock. The latter also live as long as rock, so they are in touch with the geological timescale of their world. So my mind went via a literary example to think of the rock as alive.
It was all prompted though by the shapes of the rock, in which I could see other structures I recognised from fungi, plants and animals.
The tentacular, living rock! My apologies to any geologists who are probably rolling their eyes at this ecocritic coming to see the rocks as living material. But I enjoyed going into the guts of the cliffs and back out again.
