Stones

     There's something rather amazing of what once was and is no longer, that is except for those many pieces now beautifully preserved in museums, whether obtained legally or by some other means.  The spoils of war philosophy: what was yours is now ours.  And so everything from jewelry to statuary (not to mention animals and people) were often moved around the world to decorate homes and palaces, or in the case of people and animals, to be put to work.  And if a few countries were fortunate enough and wealthy enough, some material items would end up in museums for many to see (albeit still in a foreign country).  The complicated issue of whether ill-gotten (i.e. stolen) items taken decades or centuries ago, and now resting in universities, or the black market (or museums) becomes a rabbit hole that extends into bones (think massive dinosaur "finds" or the gravesites of ancestral peoples) and pottery, maybe even DNA samples.  But no worries because such a topic is way past my knowledge or understanding, so this post will be about only three parts of stone: carving, getting, and etching.

     Stone can have so many hidden colors and meanings, as anyone who has decided to remodel their kitchen or bathroom countertops can attest.  My first time walking into a "slab" warehouse (no small samples here, but an entire warehouse full of hundreds and hundreds of cut and polished stone slabs as large as walls, each of which could have been a piece of art).  Blues, reds, greens and yellows as only nature could create, with waves and streaks of other colorful minerals locked in a frozen beauty waiting to be uncovered.  Even to sculptors such as Michelangelo, stone could speak: Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.  But how, I wondered.  Long before robotic cutters could create an elaborate statue in hours, stone sculptors would use small hammers and chisels to chip away and sand such pieces bit by bit.  The patience and frustration it must involve, never mind the creative spark one assumes is idling away in their minds.  But beyond the famous names and historical figures are thousands and thousands of laborers who carved pillars and griffins and all sorts of other decorative ornaments that people would walk by without a thought, as if such elaborate works were made of clay in a factory or simply appeared from thin air.  No matter the size or the repetition, just one miscalculation or missed angle, or the discovery of an exposed crack, and off falls months or years of work...a single finger, a part of the lip, a chunk of curly hair, a ruined column.  Carving ice must be little different.  And yet look at the beauty of what can be imagined and was created, the delicate details that are as serene or as flirtatious as almost anything living (the "Monolith" by Gustav Vigeland on the left, is carved from a single block of stone and depicts 121 human figures and "...has been interpreted as a kind of vision of resurrection, and our longing and striving for spirituality").  

    About that seeking a higher power, there's a story that Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to smoking marijuana while the lads were holed up two to a room in a New York hotel during their first tour of the US, all of the Beatles still in their early 20s, thrilled and yet insulated from what awaited them.  The giggles that followed from smoking that pot soon led to this from Paul: I was alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there.  Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there.  Ooh, then I suddenly see you.  Ooh, did I tell you I need you every single day of my life.  But those days of innocence are long gone, so said because I can remember my friend from those days getting caught for growing a few marijuana plants in his backyard, only to have the police tell him that he could either pull up the plants in front of them and they would haul them away, or he could be arrested.  Wait, what??  Back then, there were few "dealers," since most people just grew what they could, enough for their own use and perhaps a bit extra for a friend or two.  No chemicals, no mysterious "what's in this?," no stranger wanting a wad of cash (cocaine back then was way too expensive and relegated to only the few who could afford it).  Even psychedelic mushrooms were from some local cow pasture, or so I was told.  But then, that was my forested area in northern California, away from the opposite side of the bay and the other coast where pills and tabs and nightclubs were more frequent, all of it seemingly just a chance to delay the thought that you might get drafted and be shipped off to Vietnam.  And yet I can remember another friend from that early period telling me that I was naive to think that the bubbling underground drug world wasn't already ahead of the game in hiring the top chemists and manufacturers to make ever stronger products and that the days of growing a few plants on your own were soon to be gone.  Today, those chemists and profiteers are indeed at work with seemingly little concern for the end consumer as even "legal" products are now being recalled, with TRE and other psilocybin mushroom bars and gummies appearing on consumer shelves outside of regulated "pot" markets (some of those products can possibly cause severe illness), a far cry from my long-gone days of innocence.  Wrote The NY Times: As cathinone molecules become more potent, they also become more addictive.  “Because they hijack the dopamine system in the brain --the salience and reward system in the brain-- they’re going to be extremely addictive,” said Dr. Michael Baumann, director of the Designer Drug Research Unit of the National Institute on Drug Abuse...“These are not rudimentary chemists,” Dr. Baumann said. “They’re actually ahead of us.”...“It’s so much more dangerous today, the drugs are so much more potent,” said George W. Hime, assistant director of toxicology at the Miami-Dade Medical Examiner.  Cathinones, nitazines, ISO and Pyro, many of them dozens if not nearly a hundred times deadlier than fentanyl, which as a reminder, is itself 50 times more deadly than heroin.  What in the world happened to just getting stoned?   

     Now jump to another area of stone, that of history, and see if any of this sounds at all familiar.  At the start of the US getting into WW II, Britain was in trouble.  They had already been fighting the Germans for over 2 years before Pearl Harbor happened, and then Italy and Japan entered the picture which was further bad news for Britain.  Not a big deal except that one has to remember that the British "empire" was stretched quite thin, with 2/3 of its territory and 4/5 of its population NOT on the British Isles, but scattered as far away as South Africa to India to Singapore and Australia.   As Alan Allport put it in his follow-up book on the British viewpoint on the war, 25% of Britain's trade passed through the Indian Ocean and now that was under threat by Italy.  The Aussie-Asian corridor depended on addicted labor, which Britain was happy to encourage (the opium trade) but its Malaya colony had now easily fallen to Japan, putting an end to that trade (Malaya supplied 3/4 of the industrial rubber and 2/3 of its tin).  And the shipping of oil from its Persian Gulf fields, which supplied the entirety of Britain's eastern colonies, was soon to be questionable as well.  But all was not lost.  Closer to home the puffed-up British attitude of invincibility, especially when nestled alongside those of its French allies, made defending Belgium seem like a sure thing, so no real worries.  Then came Hitler's Blitzkreig.  Wrote Allport: Temperamentally drawn to an all-or-nothing strategy at the best of times, by spring 1940 the German dictator had decided that he must act with speed and boldness or else lose the war.  He chose to mount a knockout blow in the west, thrusting his Panzergruppen, the small but well-equipped tank and motorized infantry vanguard of the German Army, through the Belgian Ardennes woodland to outflank the French-British armies on the frontier.  By all rights, his plan should not have succeeded.  His own generals expected it to fail,  The much-vaulted Blitzkreig (lightning war) of 1940 was an expression not of confidence but of desperation -- of the need to try anything, no matter how reckless, to bring the war to a rapid end on Nazi terms.  Anglo-French incompetence turned what ought to have been an Allied victory into catastrophe.  The German tanks broke through in the Ardennes.  The Franco-British armies scattered in confusion.  Britain's ground forces on the continent, representing almost all the empire's trained white soldiers, fell back to the Channel coast and were nearly annihilated in what was probably the one occasion in the war in which the UK faced the possibility of total military defeat at a single stroke.  As it was, the Royal Navy got most of the troops back to England.  France was left prostrate and alone.  It's government capitulated on 22 June 1940.  

        At this point, the puffy chest belonged to Hitler, who now controlled most of continental Europe "either directly or through obedient proxies."  As Allport explained: This was territory with a total population of 290 million people and a peacetime Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exceeding that of the British Empire and the United States put together.  But now Germany was exhausted and it forced Hitler to look at a "cautiously complicit" USSR (and it's vast food and other available resources).  Would it become a true partner, or one which couldn't be trusted.  Hitler had to decide.  And so Hitler made a decision: if a surprise attack worked out okay in Belgium (think Venezuela), despite the advice of his generals, why wouldn't the same happen if he pulled a surprise attack on Russia (picture Iran)?  Okay, you history buffs must forgive my ignorance or my surprise at learning all of the many, many losses of Britain across its colonies (among which were that of being forced to drop its trade tariffs on the US, and then to later see the pound Sterling succumb to the dollar as the world's currency), as well as the many poor decisions made by both Japan and Germany, each country facing key battles and making decisions that shaped the direction of the war (and this was all before the US entered the war).  Britain was truly a country, much like the Roman Empire, stretched far too thin, with Winston Churchill lamenting six years later, that the war: ...marked the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world, which has occurred since the loss of the American colonies two hundred years ago.  Our Oriental Empire has been liquidated, our resources have been squandered...our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember..  But the costs of was is always the young, the innocent, the bystander, the animals, the planet itself.  It was estimated that Britain lost seven people every hour during the war over its six years of fighting, and that was only half of the lives they lost in the first World War.  And again, for what?  The legacies of carnival barkers who can convince you that you are better than someone else (who is now the enemy) and that your country needs you to go to war to prove it?

     So just as each country and nation eventually moves in and tries to reshape history, archeologists will remind you that nothing is etched in stone, for even stone withers and fades away.  So let's view the controversy of Trump casting himself as Jesus Christ "healing" (as some have implied) a person who bears a striking resemblance to Jeffrey Epstein.  It was a joke, said JD Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism but one who reprimanded Pope Leo XIV that he "should be careful" when talking theology (wait, Vance is advising the Pope on Catholicism??).  Forced to take the image down (Trump told the press that he was supposed to be a "doctor" in the image because he has "healed" so many), Trump posted yet another image a few days later of Jesus beside a much younger, slimmer Trump.  And yet, despite all the controversy of his feud with the Pope, Trump's standing among evangelicals has barely budged.  One of my conservative friends continues to find no problem with Trump's "satirical" images, and still considers Trump the smartest president we've ever had in our history (and my friend is a retired lawyer!).  But regardless of where you stand in this quasi-political feud, the parallels of history are becoming evident...the plan (or lack of a plan) of attack, the getting rid of military officials who disagree with you, the possibly poor decisions and mistakes to come.  But the cost of war remains the same: the lives lost or shattered on all sides, the majority of which are innocent (one must remember that it was Trump who withdrew from the agreed nuclear agreement with Iran, then later blamed them for their nuclear ambitions).  In the Rice-Webber play, the character of Jesus is asked " do you think you're what they say you are?"  Maybe Trump and his desire to be defied will indeed leave a legacy, just not the one he imagines.  One protester in Little Rock, Arkansas carried her own MAGA sign during the No Kings March less than a month ago, wrote the New York Times, only her sign read Morons Are Governing America.

     Guy Spier, the investor fund manager who once bid $650,000 to have lunch with Warren Buffet (and worth every penny, he said later), suddenly closed his fund after being diagnosed with glioblastoma and given a very short time to live.  A story in Barron's reported his new take on life in today's wild market: All of this is ephemeral knowledge with a short half-life.  Even if there is money to be made, there are better ways to spend one’s time.”  I am not Catholic or of any organized religion, but I respect everyone's beliefs in their respective systems, the key word being respect.  Trump's proposed arch, taller than the Arc de triomphe but ironically not taller than the arch Hitler was constructing, will block the view of Arlington National Cemetery from the national mall.  As my old-school Chief Petty Officer step-father would have said, "show some respect."

Photo: David Parker/SciencePhoto

      Somehow I am pulled more by our failure as humans to understand much of anything when it comes to spiritual or cosmic matters.  I only have to see spring arrive and how it puts up with the changing cycle of our weather (we just had snow and in two days, it will be 80F).  To watch box elder bugs crawling between the grass blades as they mate helps remind me that nature seems to continually discard and replenish...our skin, our blood cells, our beliefs, our world, and eventually even our galaxy.  Perhaps we'll one day understand, as the Caryatids adorning part of the Acropolis show, that even things etched in stone --monuments, statues, even histories and legacies-- will wither away and fade.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust...