I was but an
inverted Tree.
–
Andrew Marvell
That it is known
as the ‘Rock’ is in retrospect a marvelous index of the not-so-simple relation
between building and climbing (and thinking) which this essay will explore. The
Rock is of course not a rock but a room-less building of walls meant for
climbing composed of crack-featured concrete slabs elevated at different angles
and embedded with a variety of stones. Concrete,
from concrescere, ‘to grow together’.
This stony conglomeration of metal, concrete, and rocks rising from a bed of
pebbly gravel is thus also not not a rock. In other words, the Rock is a
building that is analogously a rock,
recalling that analogy—a term between univocity and equivocity—concerns a relation
or participation among things that are categorically different yet bear a substantial
connection to each other, as when we say (to follow the classic Aristotelian
example) that an apple is healthy. Likewise
in nick-naming the Rock with the word ‘rock’ we are not so much signifying what
it is as calling it by what it does for other beings in relation to rocks, both
despite and because what it does is also formally inseparable from its sharing rock’s
nature. What makes the Rock ‘rock’ is that is a rock for rock-climbers, at once
a practice rock that becomes rock in
being practiced upon as rock and a not-rock that is rock in the sense of
something whose being or essence, whatever makes it what it is, is itself to
practice being rock, insofar as being the Rock can be thought of as an activity,
which I think it can seeing that being
is a verb. Rock is what the Rock does (for climbers)—a climbing rock: rock to climb
and rock that climbs.
We
may see the Rock as a kind of concrete shadow of Mount Analogue,[1]
not in the sense of a model of some ultimate rock, but something more useful
and homely. Where Mount Analogue is the imaginary cosmo-geological mountain of
mountains which must by analogy exist somewhere on earth, invisible yet
accessible (i.e. the more-than-mountain that all mountains are analogies of), the
Rock is analogue rock in the sense of
being an actual as opposed to imaginary construction that functions as rock, an
accessible yet ‘invisible’ less-than-rock that is an analogy, however
imperfect, to all rocks. The correlative ‘invisibility’ through which the Rock
functions is the measure of eliminative not-seeing that activating its
potential requires, namely, the physio-imaginative act of climbing as if some
holds were not there, as in above image where I am laybacking the left side of
a hand-crack instead of jamming it. Such seemingly artificial or contrived invisibility
actually has a very close inverse relationship both to how one naturally uses things
in general, how the instrument or tool “disappears into usefulness,”[2]
and to how one dwells in and with them, how “Inhabited space transcends
geometrical space” and the house becomes “both cell and world.”[3]
Hold-elimination is the haptic mirror and a kind of reverse engineering of phenomenal
depresencing, the harvesting of a potential that appears when its means is
taken away, just as the vital form of building and dwelling coincide in what
cannot be touched: “We make doors and windows for a room; / But it is these
empty spaces that make the room livable. / Thus, while the tangible has
advantages, / It is the intangible that makes it useful.”[4]
Off-limits features are windows.
Gaston
Bachelard gives a beautiful description of the way using and dwelling are
blended through housework into the fashioning of the present, life’s ongoing building
of itself within/without buildings:
Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.[5]
The Rock is such a
community in an inverse sense, an exclosure
of walls made for climbing, a practice which likewise connects using and
dwelling in a manner that reflects back upon building as a means of navigating
the space between these functions. Enclosed in a building, one may in a
flexible sense dwell without using (think) and use without dwelling (work).
Exclosed at the Rock, one may in a flexible sense dwell while using (as when
pondering boulder problems) and use while dwelling (as when climbing on the
walls). Like the housewife of one’s climbing’s life, the rock-practicer moves among
the Rock’s roomless rooms awakening its stones into the building of oneself and
others as climbers. I am not alone in having spoken of myself as a ‘product’ of
the Rock and returning there, reversing the inner-outer expansion of geometric
reality, gives me that paradoxical spatial sense of mnemonic shrinkage/expansion
one typically feels revisiting an old home. The whole thing seems so much smaller,
yet larger and taller next to the thought of repeating the circuits that once
made the tower’s top feel close to the ground.
However
one considers these dimensions, the Rock demonstrates that the complex ways in
which climbing practices stone beyond itself definitely concern the
using/dwelling boundary and reflect back upon the nature of building. From the
Tower of Babel to skyscraper builderers, building and climbing are non-accidentally
related. The whole sphere of climbing itself exists through an open collection
of constructed enclosures, things that hold and keep and protect us from the
world and ourselves. That artificial climbing walls have continued to evolve more
and more towards forms of dwelling, into inclusively exclusive urban entities selling
and developing the space of climbing as community, work-play, lifestyle-domicile,
etc. only presses further the issue of climbing’s relation to building, the
question of what it is that climbing builds, the horizon of its dwelling, and
above all, the order and dimension of its homelessness.
The
Rock, like other kinds of human buildings, is something between a rock and a
construction, part of the continuum between nature and architecture, from cave-dwellings
to skyscrapers, but also something curiously beyond-within that continuum, namely,
building materials petrobatically repurposed
to mimic their own natural formations.[6] There is a beautifully weird
creativity to this progressively atavistic way in which climbing leads architecture
(and architecture leads climbing) to the construction of bouldering walls which
in turn become a tool for building climbers capable of ascending the hardest
and steepest natural shelters like the now famous Hanshellern (lit. Hans’s
cave) in Flatanger, Norway. Really speaking the first artificial climbing walls
are built dwellings made into climbing walls by the simple act of practicing climbing
upon them, as documented by Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s anonymous Roof Climber’s Guide to Trinity (1900),
just as early artificial climbing walls resemble buildings, or like Schurman
Rock (1939), ruins. As mountains develop in the form of geologic ruins—Ruskin’s
gloriously gloomy “great cathedrals of the earth” and index of the planet as “wreck
of Paradise”[7]—so
do modern climbing walls take place in the fertile ruin of architecture, in a
zone where the climbing human can like an animal vine again take hold in new
ways of life’s in/organic interface. If climbing is primordially related to the
desire, as per Plato’s exemplary allegory, to ascend not only up but out of things, then we may surmise that
there is a deeper secret relation between climbing and building as intertwining
paths twisting upon-through earth as our temporary dwelling-place in the
‘hanshellern’ of this cosmos, the overhanging divine underworld of the universe.[8]
For
all these reasons, the Rock presents one with the imperative to (re)consider
climbing as a middle term between building and thinking, reprising the terms of
Heidegger’s essay, “Building Dwelling Thinking.”[9]
Switching out the word-holds—exactly the procedure that climbing walls have plastically
evolved to allow—produces the following problems/solutions which this brief essay
has perforce failed to send:
1. What is it to climb?
2. How does building belong to climbing?
1. Building is really climbing.
2. Climbing is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
3. Building as climbing unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.
1. What is it to climb?
2. How does building belong to climbing?
1. Building is really climbing.
2. Climbing is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
3. Building as climbing unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.
Monitor Rock (aka Schurman Rock)
[1] See René Daumal, Mt. Analogue: A Tale of Non-Euclidean and Symbolically
Authentic Mountaineering Adventures, trans. Carol Cosman (New York:
Overlook Press, 2004).
[2] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of
the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed.
David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 171.
[3] Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas
(Boston: Beacon, 1964), 51.
[4] Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching, trans. John C. H. Wu (Boston: Shambala, 1989), 23.
[5] Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 68.
[6] I am coining the word from Ancient
Greek πετροβατικός ‘given to rock-climbing’.
[7] John Ruskin, “Of Mountain Beauty,”
Modern Painters, Volume IV, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31623/31623-h/31623-h.htm.
[8] The name Hans (John), from Hebrew Yôḥānān, means ‘graced by YHWH [God]’.
Norwegian hell, meaning ‘cave,
overhanging cliff’ and cognate with English
hell, derives from the root *kel- ‘to
cover, conceal, save’. So there is something playfully symbolic, at the verbal
level, in the present fact that the hardest route in the world, named Silence and climbed by the tautologously
named Adam Ondra (lit. ‘man man’ or ‘manly man/earth’, from Greek aner, andros, ‘man’ and Hebrew adam,
‘man, human,’ fr. adamah, ‘earth’;
cf. human, fr. root *dhghem-
‘earth’)—“Life wants to climb and to overcome itself by climbing”
(Nietzsche)—hangs there like an open secret upon climbing’s inverted horizon.
Indeed the crux move of Silence,
involving a full body inversion, performs the self-inversion that the spiritual
ascent of man as arbor inversa, “a
plant whose roots are not in earth, but in the heavens” (Plato, Timaeus, 90a), necessarily involves. See
A. B. Chambers, “‘I was but an inverted Tree’: Notes Toward the History of an
Idea,” Studies in the Renaissance 8
(1961): 291-9. In hermetic terms, as “the Fall of Adam [is] the passage from a
spiritual gravitational system . . . to a terrestrial gravitational system,” so
spiritual freedom “live[s] under the sign of celestial gravitation instead of
that of terrestrial gravitation,” via the inversion represented in the figure of
the Hanged Man as symbol of the human reordered according its highest will: “The
other characteristic trait of the spiritual man is that he is upside down. This
means to say, firstly, that the ‘solid ground’ under his feet is found above, whilst
the ground below is only the concern and perception of the head. Secondly, it
means to say that his will is connected with heaven and is found in immediate contact
(not by the intermediary of thought and feeling) with the spiritual world. This
is in such a way that his will ‘knows’ things that the head — his
thinking—still does not know, and so that it is the future, the celestial
designs for the future, which work in and through his will rather than
experience and memory of the past. He is therefore literally the ‘man of the
future’, the final cause being the element activating his will. He is the ‘man
of desire’ . . . the man whose will is set high, above the powers of the head
—above thought, imagination and memory” (Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism,
trans. Robert Powell [New York: Putnam, 1985], 316). Similarly, Aleister
Crowley’s brief guide of 1898 to the Y-Boulder at Wasdale Head lists twenty-two
problems, the first and last being inverted variations of “The Easy Way”: “1.
The Easy Way . . . 22. The Easy Way.
Feet first. Face inwards” (John Gill, Origins
of Bouldering, http://www128.pair.com/r3d4k7/Bouldering_History1.1a.html). “The
way up and the way down are one and the same” (Heraclitus: The Complete Fragments, trans. William Harris, n.p.,
2010).
[9] See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 347-63.
