HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#173 :: Mineral Rose

A better mineralogist than I would be able to name this thing. He would be able to say how many millions of years it took to form, what the minerals were in the dripping water that formed it, where it was probably found, and how many hundreds of thousands of years older than him it might be. I am not a mineralogist. I am a fetishist, a magpie with a computer and not much personal knowledge. What few bits of true knowledge I own were hard-won at the end of relationships, the beginning of lives, the point of injury or near death, or the moment of revelation given at the moment light struck some faraway thing I was looking at. The rest is stolen knowledge, or borrowed - trivia or mental jetsam that I cannot make use nor get rid of. So I have things like this in my house, and thoughts stuck in my memory - the proper spelling of Eadweard Muybridge, the way to tie a Winsor knot, the head-bolt torque settings for a Volvo B-18 engine (no, wait, that was true, bare-knucks knowledge) - that must surely be taking up room that could be occupied by better wisdom. But if I hadn't come upon this little stone thing, what would be there in its place?