The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin: by Paul A. Harris Main Menu Paul A. Harris

Manifestone

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Stoned thinking plays out in what Bachelard calls “a kind of dialectical animism” between matter and mind. This animist dimension of animaterialist imagination exceeds the discourse of “animating” that is ubiquitous in contemporary new materialisms. This dialectic makes stone come and alive and enter the realm of the intelligible. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asserts, "Stone is animated and self-organizing.  It speaks, when we stop insisting that communication requires words rather than participating in meaning's generation.... It is not so much that we project ourselves onto rock and trick ourselves into discovering tales of our own implanting…. More surprising is that, despite having dwelt on the earth for a brief time…, the stories in which we participate, stories in which we are not the protagonists, are nonetheless partly about us." 

Pierre Jardin expresses this vision in the Petriverse's "Manifestone," which broadcasts the garden's lithic ontology and ethos in a lighthearted haiku: "Stones are vital signs of the earth's living spirit, plus they're pretty cool." (The scholarly reader will note that Jardin obliquely echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson's pseudo-syllogism in Nature: "Words are signs of natural facts; Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts; Nature is the symbol of spirit.")


 

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