this big goth rock
Images by Vincent Tullo. Via Eilene Zimmerman for The New York Times, A New York Museum Staple Gets a New Glimmer. May 19, 2021.
This one might strike y’all as a little off topic, but here’s a big rock from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. A mineral to be specific. Photographer Vincent Tullo took this image as part of a series for an article in The New York Times.
Dr George Harlow, the geologist and curator of gems and minerals (I mean, what a title) explained their prominent role in the collection. He described it as attending to the theory of evolution, applying it to nonliving objects. This approach looks at how life on Earth has changed over the last 4.5 billion years and emphasises that nonliving materials have changed too. There are over 5,500 species of minerals nowadays. There were about 1,500 when the Earth formed. In that time minerals have changed chemically, their colours have diversified, their textures have rippled and reformed. Harlow maintains that in sharing the story of that development – their evolution – it is the first time “we are looking at life’s impact on the mineral kingdom”. [1]
Thinking about the formation of minerals and gems, kinda breaks my brain a little. It makes me think of vast, amorphous concepts like deep time. Geologic layers which don’t abide by qualitative time. When I think about decomposition, I think about it in a similar way; all the scientific processes that occur when the body begins to break down which mix up in all the spiritual interpretations of where the ‘us’ goes after we’re gone. All of our attempts to understand death and decay and existing start to ooze together – they resist one kind of interpretation, become difficult to define – they get weird. Maybe that’s why I find it pretty compelling. When I look at this mineral, and really let the concept of deep time seep into my thoughts, I feel like I’m hurtling through space and at the same time, I’m really calm. It’s nice, sometimes, to be okay knowing we haven’t figured it all out. I’m really not sure what that says about death, but I like this photograph and I like this goth rock.
Images by Vincent Tullo. Via Eilene Zimmerman for The New York Times, A New York Museum Staple Gets a New Glimmer. May 19, 2021.
[1] Eilene Zimmerman, A New York Museum Staple Gets a New Glimmer, The New York Times. May 19, 2021.
