It was a heady, sun soaked monday morning. I was sitting on the palatial front steps of The Hancock Museum waiting for the doors to open. I had a 10am appointment with Sylvia Humphrey and Dawn Felicia Knox to look at the museums' geology collection and was musing about the etymology and associations evoked by the word “fossil”... originally the word had meant any object which had been “dug up” (an idea which I found enchanting: the action of unearthing something from the dark, pulling it into the illuminated upper-world for examining and understanding) but nowadays the word “Fossil” often invites distinctly negative connotations as something which is inert, archaic or dead*...
It didn't take long, from entering the shade of the museum and meeting Sylvia, for the shrouds of banality to be shed and the fossilised flora and fauna to come to life. I wandered as if in an ecstatic daze imagining the gaps between fossil fragments and re-imagined (sometimes re-constructed) 'wholes'; of the incomprehensible time between this moment now and a time when palms, Lepidodendrons and mesozoic swamps covered the North of England; of the deep and long alchemical process of transmuting ephemeral, organic matter into rock; of Lady Armstrong and William Hutton (geologist) and the Coal Seam Fossils which were amongst the Lit & Phil's earliest collection of specimens... Again a chain (or seam) of seemingly magical coincidence, of coinciding thoughts, seemed to be close to the surface... the relationship between the Northern Coal Field, geology, mining, the founding of The Lit & Phil, philosophy, William Hutton, the Fossil Flora, botany, archaeology, the origins of the Natural History Society and prehistory... Luckily Sylvia and Dawn had an anchoring point (or a pivot) on which to pin these huge and nebulous musings: in the archives of the Hancock's library, William Hutton's personal copy of Fossil Flora...
In 1831 William Hutton, along with the esteemed botanist and academic Dr. John Lindley, published the first editionof Fossil Flora. The publication was intended to catalogue numerous botanical fossils of England both through commissioned drawings and descriptions, predominantly focussing on the Coal/Carboniferous fossil flora of The North England Coal Seam which Hutton had extensive access to.
“...it is our intention at the present time to detail some views we have been induced to take of the circumstances under which the vegetable fossils of the Carboniferous formation have been deposited and mineralised, together with a general sketch of the rocks comprised in the term “Coal Measures;” in the structure and composition of which, vegetable remains form so important a part, as to give an economical value to them, far surpassing any other. In doing this, we beg it may be held in view by our readers, that our references will be made exclusively to the great Coal field of the North of England...”
Hutton & Lindley, Preface, Volume II
Fossil Flora also extended Hutton's enduring commitment to inclusive education as it aimed to provide a tool for the study of botanic fossils, collating reproductions and descriptions of specimens from different collections, making these accessible to a wider audience than their specific and separate geographical locations allowed. These books are exquisite... not only for their elegant illustrations, idiosyncratic language and weighty legacy** but also in the very particular and personal taxonomy they present. In tomes of fragments, samples, musings and comparisons Hutton and Lindley encapsulate a microcosm of the world, from geological history to personal obsession. “In the particular lies the universal” James Joyce said and this is no more apparent than in the pages of Fossil Flora.
By Volume II I was becoming increasingly aware of the way in which Hutton and Lindley's hypotheses (new at the time and founded on their very specific area of empirical study) underscored the emergence of ideas which have now become part of common knowledge; what they were postulating about the formation of geological beds (and the fossil specimens contained therein) in turn influenced theories of biological evolution. Notably Darwin read some of these texts whilst on the Beagle expedition to the Galapagos...
“Now, although it may be true, that the presence of organic remains in any stratum, be evidence sufficient of its having once been at the surface, yet the additional evidence in these cases, is so far valuable, as it proves that these beds remained uncovered for a period of considerable duration; long enough, indeed, for plants of a large size to flourish, and beds of muscles of considerable thickness to form, by the successive growth and decay of the animals...”
p. xviii, Volume II
It made me feel like time was telescoping... what discoveries being made now will, in 170 years, be readily absorbed in general knowledge? What prejudices and inconsistencies of our current times will be illuminated and overcome? What new ideas and possibilities will be formed upon the sediment of our current, collective thoughts?
The strata of time... The evolution of knowledge... The relativity of all the above...
The space between words and images...
Throughout this project I have oscillated wildly between objects and references, trying to match up research gleaned from letters, catalogues, conversations and books with real things, a marrying of text and object, each to inform and extend the other. In Fossil Flora this particular (oftentimes problematic) enquiry seemed paralleled by Hutton and Lindley's own project:
“...we have immersed ourselves in a labyrinth of difficulties, one half of its fossils having never been described; and, although we could easily ally a portion of these to known genera, yet the greater number of them would remain absolute riddles – waiting for some fortunate discovery by which they are to be connected with fossils already known, or proved to belong to others yet to be discovered.”
Preface, Volume II
In reading their honest disclosure about the difficulties in such research I was struck by the inherent problems of attempting to use language and logic to navigate the phenomenological universe. In using language we attempt to fix things within a particular order of symbolic understanding... but do 'objects' adhere to such a system? And is there such thing as an 'object' at all? Or is this a human way of conceptualising the infinite, interconnected universe by isolating the idea of an 'object' as a discrete entity? In fact, when represented through language, an 'object' is not an entity at all but a noun, a human abstraction.
But this becomes a conceptual ellipsis... How can I make work about objects if objects do not actually exist? How can I write about objects if language is an inadequate medium for conveying the essence of an un-object? ... Perhaps, I began to muse, this is the space of art: the space between object and image, beyond/before language... And perhaps this is also a problem too large to tackle right now...
To return to the task at hand; how did the disenchantment of these fossils (and the other objects from the Lit & Phils' original collection) come about? And how do we, as artists/writers/curious hysterics/philosophers key back into these their original wonder and enchantment? … As I leafed through the pages of Fossil Flora I was reminded of a time as a child (perhaps I was 7 or 8 years old) when I was panning for fossils in the River Nar. It was summer, the water was clear and clouds of silvery minnows flitted over and around my red wellingtons. I knew what fossils were as explained to me by adults and colourfully illustrated text books but it wasn't until I picked up a mottled, elliptical stone (about 25cm long, 10cm wide at the zenith of the ellipsis) that I understood what a fossil was... When I could physically and magically equate the texture of a tree to that of a stone. Even at that age I was profoundly affected by the deep well of prehistoric time which opened up with this discovery... Although I couldn't conceptualise it at that age it was the 'feeling' of the organic nature of rocks which affected me... that these seemingly fixed, permanent entities are ever-changing at a rate we cannot, as fleeting humans, perceive.
I pondered then, whether disenchantment in historical/archaeological/geological specimens was brought about not through explanation or understanding but through the limitations of any explanation... We look at historical objects through the lens of language, worse, the lens of scientific language: of closed explanations and possibilities. We explain and understand things through a very narrow (human centric) bandwidth of experience and inferred knowledge. And almost all scientific knowledge is founded on the relics of previous scientific knowledge, further compounding those limitations. Magic begot Science and yet the magic is so often devoid from our scientifically-defined encounters with objects and the phenomenological universe... So how do we, as limited human beings, break out of those ways of seeing and understanding in order to look at things anew and with all the potentiality they encapsulate?
Although academic and 'of-its-time' the authorial style of Fossil Flora was, at moments, richly and surprisingly poetic. It was these moments - in addition to the instances of uncertainty when the authors encountered 'unclassifiable specimens' – where a glimpse of wonder seemed to briefly and incandescently illuminate the text...
“...when that portion of the stone which covered the fossil was carefully removed, there appeared a dull black carbonaceous substance, soft and wet, and which soiled the fingers; this completely enveloped the whole fossil, and was little more than an inch thick...”
p.2, Volume I
“Under these circumstances, we are forced to leave the specimen in a state of uncertainty, which is unfortunately but too common in this science.”
On the “Halonia? Tortuosa” p. 85, Volume II
Perhaps it is through the perforation of scientific discourse/ certainty (with moments of the poetic and ineffable) that such enchantment can be unlocked? Or perhaps, as this project is already doing,it is the revisitation of a pre-disciplinary time that will loosen the grip of established (scientific) explanation in order to bring about a free exchange of cross-disciplinary intellectual dna in evolving new, heterogeneous concepts of these objects and the greater universe?
*There is something here, about the relationship between objects and language (or meaning which is lashed to objects by way of words), which I'd like to explore more... The constellations of meaning which hover about a word (specifically a word when used as sign/signifier for an object) but also the way in which language can become a heavy anchor, a fixed entity. Historical narrative and scientific explanation may perform a similar action; because explanation occludes possibility... Perhaps, in attempting to re-enchant some of the objects from the Lit and Phil's collection, to make them luminous, my task is partly to try to re-stage them in a space of language where significance and explanation is not singular but manifold, not fixed but mutable...
** I am over-awed to think that over 170 years ago this book was held and regarded by an individual I've been mapping out through research, whose presence defined The Lit & Phil, The Natural History Society and whose ideas influenced Darwin's theory of evolution (not to mention that his son, James Hutton, is regarded by many as “the father of modern geology”).
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