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Rock solid

January 23, 2026
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In the TV show, Big Bang Theory, physicist Sheldon Cooper claims that geology “isn’t a real science.” He’s quite a snob about it. But if you unfold any standard geological map — one that outlines the underlying bedrock of any state or county — you will see something so mindbogglingly complex and incomprehensible, that it couldn’t be anything but science. 

A geologist is someone who can tell the difference between diorite and andesite, and can measure the schistosity of mica, and explain how seashell fossils came to be found on the top of Mt. Everest. Geologists find petroleum and metals under the earth, and tell us the Earth is 4.6 billion years old. And a good deal of what is written in the field is — much as with  quantum physics — well beyond the ken and vocabulary of mere mortals. 

They write things such as: “Mass transport deposits (MTDs) occur as intercalations within turbiditic sequences above the ophiolites. They represent syncontractional submarine slides that occurred on frontal accretionary prism slopes during the Late Cretaceous–Paleocene closure of the LPOB.” That, by the way is “Ligurian-Piedmont Ocean Basin,” in case you were confused. 

Southern Utah

So, yes, they are scientists. And it’s fun to learn as much as you can, and collect interesting rocks and minerals. But geology is also for poets, artists and cooks. And it is the humanistic aspects of geology that have fascinated me since first studying geology in college. 

I read a good deal about geology, including the four books written by John McPhee in the 1980s — although they are about geologists as much as about the rocks they study. They are at the comprehensible boundary between general and specialist knowledge. And you’ll never drive through an interstate highway roadcut the same way again. 

Along the Colorado River, Utah

Geology is just everywhere and affects all of our lives not only daily, but even hourly. Think of your car. Every bit of it, save only the rubber in its tires and the fabric or leather of its upholstery, came originally out of the ground. Whether it is the steel of its engine, the platinum in its catalytic converter, the glass in its windshield or the plastic of its dashboard — all dug out of the ground before being polished up and installed on your Hyundai. 

And even your tires, these days, are only partially rubber. The rest of it was dug up, too. 

The skillet in your kitchen is just a rock that has been processed. The knives, too, and the potato peeler. All just carefully refined stones. In many ways, we still live in the Stone Age; we’re just more sophisticated about it than those guys banging rocks together in the Paleolithic caves. 

Paleolithic bison carving

Our human prehistory has been divided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. I suggest we now live in the Metalithic Age. (Everything now seems to be “meta.”) We do amazing things with the ore we dredge out of the ground and the petroleum we pump, but the foundation of our civilization is still geology. 

New York on the Hudson River

Cities are the index of civilization and most of the world’s great cities are built on harbors or rivers. The Indus, the Euphrates, the Nile, the Huang Ho. That’s geology. The cities are built with steel and concrete. Geology. Their streets are paved with either concrete or tar and gravel. More geology. 

Our food grows in dirt, or grazes on the grasses that sprout from the soil — a soil derived from the bedrock underneath. What are vitamins and minerals but the residue of those same rocks? 

Blue Hill, Maine 

Geology drives history, too. For instance, because Norway and Greece are so rocky and ungenerous for agriculture, their peoples took to the sea and the Greeks colonized everywhere from Spain to the Black Sea, and the Vikings from Constantinople and Sicily to England and Iceland. Geology kept the Old World and the New from interacting significantly until 1492. It blocked the westward expansion of the British colonies in North America for a century. It is the reason that Afghanistan is the “graveyard of empires.” Plate tectonics — “continental drift” — and the formation of Eurasia as a single east-west landmass has been hypothesized as the cause for European and Asian historical dominance. 

Asarco pit mine, Arizona

And geology, in the form of coal mining and petroleum extraction, is the cause of catastrophic climate change and global warming. 

Geologist Donald Beaumont wrote, “Geology will, unfortunately, remain an under-recognized, ‘phantom,’ science in that its role in explaining the foundations for human society may never be fully appreciated.”

I’m not making the case that geology explains everything, nor that it is the only thing that made us what we are, but I am saying that it helps explain it, and that you can see the same forces acting out elsewhere in the world. 

Olympic Mountains, Washington

It isn’t only physical, it is psychological also. Geology creates emotions. And so artists and poets have used geology to elicit in their audiences certain emotional states — rocky metaphors. 

Pleasant Cove, Chuckanut, Wash. 

It is to seek this power that great landscape artists — whether painters or photographers — make their pictures. It is not to make a postcard of a pretty piece of scenery, but to find in the land a metaphor for thought, emotion or state of mind — or even a political philosophy.

Canadian Rockies, Alberta

That mythic force is why we feel the rise in our throats when we sing of “amber waves of grain,” and “purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain.” Rocks and terrain serve as metaphors for internal states. 

“The Nymphs of the Luo River,” by Gu Kaizhi

European artists have used that metaphor since the Middle Ages, Asian artists since the Jin Dynasty. 

“La Gioconda” detail 

Consider the Mona Lisa. Yes, it is a portrait, but behind the smiling lady is a rocky landscape. It is not like anything actually found in Italy, but rather it is a metaphorical landscape — a mountainous desert. Renaissance artists often used such stony views as a reminder that life on earth is a kind of spiritual desert (and the afterlife is where true fulfillment is to be found). As Geoffrey Chaucer wrote: “Here nis noon hoom, here is but wildernesse.”

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, Calif. 

St. Jerome lived in a cave, and painters used the story to show the geology of spiritual isolation. Here are only three of many Renaissance paintings of the saint, by Andrea Mantegna, Lorenzo Lotto, and Joachim Patenier, all from the early 1500s. 

Romantic painters in the 19th century used the vast Alps as a reminder that the cosmos is infinitely larger and more impersonal than we like to believe. Geology becomes an image of The Sublime. 

“Manfred on the Jungfrau” by John Martin

Chinese landscape painting features some amazing mountains. I used to believe these scenes were pure fantasy, but no, these mountains actually exist. On porcelain, by Huang Huanwu, a traditional painting — and a photograph, to prove they’re real. 

Three paintings and a photo

Prehistoric peoples used the rocks for their art, too. 

We use stone for permanence. Consider all the marble statuary and granite architecture. 

And the way we scrawl our names on rock faces. “K and A Forever.”

The stone is certainly more permanent than the relationship. 

Hudson River Palisades, N.J. 

Even the pigments that artists use comes from the ground. In the past, it was actually rocks that were ground up and processed. Now, there are pigments also made from petroleum. 

Lapis Lazuli

Different rocks, with their colors and textures, evoke different emotions. Think of a brilliant diamond or ruby; think of a cinder. Different emotions. 

Mendenhall Glacier, Alaska

We use geology in our language, although often the words mutually exclusive import. 

“You must have been stoned when you thought that up.” “No, I was stone cold sober.” “Well, the theory is either a bit rocky or it is rock-solid.” He answered with a stony silence.

Schoodic Point, Maine

The colors, textures and the grain all impart meaning. 

By John Ruskin

I began seriously considering the art elements of geology after seeing a splendid drawing of gneiss by English artist and critic John Ruskin. He made it over several days while visiting Scotland in 1853. The drawing had everything I respond to: texture, detail, close observation and an attention to the world as it is, that is as close to love as is possible to hold for the inanimate world. Ruskin was an astonishing draftsman. 

By Mel Steele

It has been one of the lessons of the 20th century and Modernism that meaning in art can transcend anecdote and be more than a story told in a still scene and can impart meaning purely through shape, color, texture, line and scale. Emotions can be evoked by all of them. We have had well more than a hundred years of abstract art. 

Even realistic painting depends on the medium it is made from. It isn’t just the face or the scene, but the color and texture of that face and scene. 

Craggy Gardens, N.C. 

And a camera pointed at the shapes of geology can create meaning in the same manner as the abstract painting we lionize. 

I have since found many rocks, with their esthetic pleasures. There is bright color

Blue Ridge Parkway, N.C. 

There is gnarly texture

Blue Ridge Parkway, N.C. 

There are planes of surface

Schoodic Point, Maine

Repetition of shapes

Hug Point, Arch Cape, Ore. 

Complexity of image

Schoodic Point, Maine

And a starry night

Pisgah National Forest, NC

Or flying over the continent and looking down at erosion

Over Colorado

One of the primary functions of art is to make us pay attention. It is an interaction with the world and a response to it. 

Rio Puerco Ruins, N.M. 

The most important lesson I was ever taught was by a college professor who would not accept glib work. Like many bright students, I was adept at giving a teacher what he or she wanted — basically repeating back what was said in class. But when I did that in my English Romantic Poetry class, he gave me a D for a paper that was otherwise correct in every aspect except one. “Don’t give me back what I’ve said,” he told me. “Engage with the material.” Real engagement cannot be faked. 

What was real were the words written, not the words written about the words. Dive directly into the poetry. Don’t waste time learning “about” the poetry. 

Try to take the material under study seriously and be real about it. If what you find contradicts what the teacher said, all the better. You’ve learned something. 

Engage with the material — something you should do with friends, family, society, even the air and the rocks. Engage. Don’t gloss. 

Click on any image to enlarge

Die Welt ist schön

July 6, 2018
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Why do I do this?

The year I was born, the New York School of painters was coalescing. When I was an adolescent, they were ascendant. They were my boys: Jackson, Willem, Franz, Barney and Mark. 

(And they were boys. It was years before Helen and Lee were fully recognized.) 

During those years, the boys were flying high, but they still needed to be argued for. The mass of people continued to make fun of them. “My three-year-old could do that.” 

But to me, their power and meaning was manifest. During my teenage years, I spent many hours at the Museum of Modern Art, soaking in those great works. I spent way more of my time at MoMA than I did at the MET. 

They were called “Abstract Expressionists,” but at the time, for most people, abstract meant distorted. Picasso was the most famous artist in the world — the most famous abstract painter, and his subjects were still recognizable as bulls and guitars.

But for the New York School, it would be hard to name a subject. When Jackson Pollock was quizzed about what was his audience looking at, he said, “A painting.” 

There came to be a distinction made between abstract art and what was called “Non-Objective.” My boys were the latter. They weren’t imitating the world, but creating a new one. 

Yet, while I can honestly say I spent 10 hours at MoMA for every one I spent at the Metropolitan, the museum that became my spiritual home was the American Museum of Natural History. I didn’t just enjoy it; I loved it. I still do. 

At AMNH, I met the wonders of the natural world, from the giant blue whale hanging from the ceiling to the “Soil Profiles of New York State.” There were dinosaur bones and the colossal Olmec head. Rooms filled with rock collections and the great, illuminated theater of dioramas with their dramatis personae of stuffed bears and lions. 

I had the luck of growing up in rural New Jersey. While it was only a short bus ride to the George Washington Bridge and civilization, it was also a land of woods and streams — one ran through our property. Red fox and white-tailed deer would occasionally pass through our lawn. Tract housing and mini-malls had not yet taken over. 

So, I had these two very polar influences pulling me: On one hand, there was the manifesto of the art world that painting should be painting, and not an image of the world; on the other, I was in love with nature and the world of seasons, leaves, birds and geology. 

This tension still thrives in me. In 1998, I got to see the huge Pollock retrospective at MoMA and the painter’s 1952 masterpiece, Blue Poles, which was on loan from its home in Australia. The 16-foot-wide painting was intensely beautiful; I stood in awe — and that is not too strong a word, despite its current depreciation among the cell-phone generation, for whom even a cheese doodle can be “awesome.” 

Yet, on the same trip, I also went back to the Natural History Museum. Entering its dark and marble halls was an act of love — and that is not too strong a word. 

Since then, the art world has walked through several new rooms: Pop, Conceptual, Postmodern. And each of them seems to step further back from the physical sensation of the the natural world. 

Pop wants us to recognize cultural artifacts as worthy subjects for consideration — and they certainly are. 

Conceptual art removes us from even that, into a world of pure idea, and those ideas are often so removed from our everyday experience as to be unintelligible for the mass of people. And often kind of silly. Often the art would be better expressed in words. Write an essay. 

Postmodernism seems to tell us that there is nothing but rehash of old imagery, and what is more, even those are really about power relationships and keeping the little guy down, especially if he is a she or is melanin-enhanced. 

Certainly, there is among these isms, much art of value and meaning. And I often agree with the political ideas expressed. But I have always missed in them a sense of love for the things of this world — the smells, textures, colors, shapes of the things we use and inhabit. 

I have never given up on that. 

In some ways, this dichotomy is the difference between reason and empiricism. Conceptual and Postmodern art think their way through the world. What I value is experiencing my way through it. Seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting. 

But I still have this memory lodged in my psyche of Pollock and Kline and Rothko and de Kooning. 

So, I have at times attempted a synthesis. I love nature. Rocks and trees and birds and bees. The ocean and lakes; the canyons and grasslands; the swamps and forests.

Ah, but even as I read that, I know those are words. It isn’t rocks and trees, really. It is the hardness and grain of a particular granite, the different bark of birch and yew. It is the spot upon which I stand at any given moment and what I feel as breeze on my skin, what sun glare I shade my eyes from. 

And in that granite or in that tree bark, there are shapes, textures, colors. I touch them. I see them.

There is a place I have visited many times in Maine. It is Schoodic Point, which is a part of Acadia National Park. The main park on Mt. Desert Island, is crowded and developed, but some 40 miles northeast, by road, there is the Schoodic Peninsula, jutting out into the ocean. At its tip, it is bare, hard rock and spume and surf. The wind is usually raw and comparatively few visitors come there, especially in the fall and winter. 

(The double-O in the middle of Schoodic is pronounced like the double-O in “good.”)

There, I can use my camera to record the abstract expressionist details that combine the emphasis on form and texture with an engagement with the natural world. It is a chance to reconcile those conflicting parts of my being. 

There is in some religions and mystical philosophies a contemptus mundi that I cannot share. The world is beautiful — not pretty, but beautiful; even its ugliness is beautiful. 

In 1928, the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch published a book in which his images of the world, both natural and industrial, found pattern and form in details excerpted from context. It was named, Die Welt ist schoen. 

That has become a watchword for me: When you engage with it as deeply as you can — and we are each different in this respect — when you so engage with it, you discover that Moses was not exceptional; every bush is the burning bush.

That is what makes those cypresses of Van Gogh so penetrating, the haywain of Constable, the waterlilies of Monet, the peppers of Edward Weston, the simple crockery of Chardin, the rabbit of Durer. Die Welt ist schoen. 

So, I cannot worry if my humble images are important art or not, or whether it is art at all. Muche wele stant in litel besinesse. 

This is my tiny translation of Schoodic into image, the finding of the same elements Pollock sublimated into his canvasses, but here extracted from the hard edge of stone.

Click on any image to enlarge

 

The sublimity of decay

August 30, 2014
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coal town wv
The view from the top of the mountain gives you the conventionally Romantic view of the landscape, the long view, closer to heaven and further from the streets. The view is pristine, and the tiny ants below, with their Ford Pintos and 7-Elevens, hardly muck up the scene.

It is the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, of Frederic Edwin Church, of Albert Bierstadt and the landscape stands in for a kind of vast, sublime Eden.

This is the view of West Virginia promulgated by its official state song: “Almost Heaven.” And it isn’t that such a view is false. It isn’t false — there really is great beauty in the mountainscape of the state as seen from its peaks — but it is partial. Conversely, it is easy to see the bottoms of the mountains as some sort of dystopia: the epitome of Appalachia and its poverty, meth use, grime, coal-mining eco-disaster and educational malaise. coal tipple wv bw

But there is a Romanticism of the hill-bottoms, too. I don’t mean a nostalgia for the black-and-white WPA photographs and the “simpler, old-timey folksiness.” That kind of Romanticism is a refusal to recognize reality. That isn’t really Romanticism, it is escapism.

No, I mean that the soot, the coal trains, the sludgy stream in the mountain cove, the old homes, with their collapsing porches and front yard full of automotive detritus can elicit their own sense of the sublime.

You drive through the valleys of West Virginia coal country, around the impeding hills to the next valley and you pass grade crossings, coal tipples, rusting car frames half submerged in the streams, and lines of houses just up the hill from the road. Next to the road is the railroad track and next to that is the stream, all following the same geography. appalachian plateau BW cropped

The central part of the state, the Appalachian Plateau, is a weathered peneplain, where all the mountains are rounded bumps all about the same height, like the mountains children put into their tempera paintings, one seen in between two others.

It is primarily in these mountains that coal is mined. And in those valleys, crossed with a braid-work of streams, railroad tracks and roads, that most people live and work. Pocohontas wv

In the south, you have McDowell County, a center of coal production country spreading into Kentucky and western Virginia. The collapse of the industry means that the population is one-fourth what it was in 1950, poverty is rampant, and for those men that remain, the average lifespan is the lowest in the U.S. — 12 years shorter than the national average.

In the plateau region, which is what most people think of as “typical” West Virginia, the roads meander through the V-notches between the hills; it is impossible to drive in a straight line anywhere. You are always curving around some mountain into the next valley and around the next mountain.

Until the opening of the West Virginia Turnpike and I-77 and I-79 (work not completed until 1987), traveling anywhere in West Virginia was a slow and tortuous process, and locations not a hundred miles apart as the crow flies, could be more than 250 by car. Aside from the chute-the-chute of the Interstate system, driving in the state is still pretty much a slalom. bradshaw wv

In the small towns, smeared longways along the streams and tracks, the hardware stores and groceries have largely been supplanted by Dollar Stores and coin laundries, and the largest private employer in McDowell County is the Walmart. There are satellite dishes — many dangling and unhooked. The macadam at the gas station is potholed and the store sign advertises prices for cigarettes by the carton.

But, despite this triumph of entropy, the landscape has significance. It has meaning: Just ask any who live there. They may be needy to escape, but if they leave, they pine to return. It is a landscape that gets under your skin, like coal dust gets under your fingernails. keystone wv night coal mine bw

It is a mythic landscape, not a pristine one. It tells us things about the universe and about life.

It is a landscape with its own hell: underground fires that can last decades and at night glow red and orange like the combustion of hell. Some count over 500 such fires in West Virginia. Avernus may be the gate to the underworld for the ancient Romans, but it is West Virginia in the New World. coal train and house

The slow rusting of old refrigerators and Chevys, and abandoned buildings overgrown with weeds and vines, their glass broken out and now enameled with spray-can art, and the closed factories, with lines of smokestacks — these all tally the losses, the sucking down into the past of the present, spinning like water around a drain before disappearing into oblivion. This, too, is sublime. We feel it more in places like West Virginia; it is instantly visible.

Also, because the land is littered with the obsolete and abandoned, you can see them, can pay attention. In suburbia, familiarity has dulled our senses and we hardly notice the clapboards, the street curbs, the cars in the shopping center parking lots, the school buildings, the very trees that line the roads. They are there to be seen, but who actually looks? coal train in rain bw

In this moonscape of detritus, waste, loss and forgetting, the details are burned once again into us, made unfamiliar by rot and decay, so we can see them again. The very “thingness” of each chesspiece on this gameboard of depletion makes them palpable and gives them presence, and presence imbues meaning — significance.

There is a difference between the pretty and the beautiful. Postcard sunsets and green mountain vistas are all pretty enough, but they distract us from the essential facts; they are a magician’s misdirection, keeping our eye from the real thing. As Tom Robbins wrote, “The ugly may be beautiful; the pretty, never.” The real thing is our gaze into the eye of eternity, and you get that from contemplating anything bigger, vaster, scarier, more overwhelming than yourself. coopers wv grad crossing

Yes, you can look at the old tires and relic houses and see only a failed economy, but you look instead at the passing of time engraved on those same objects and you see intense beauty.