This path was created by Multiple Authors. The last update was by Paul A. Harris.
In the beginning ... a Word
PETRIVERSE. Noun.
1) A world composed of rocks; e.g., a rock garden.
2) Words composed of rocks; i.e., verse written in stone.
[Latin petra, rock; Old English vers, from Latin versus a furrow]
Pierre Jardin coined the word 'petriverse' because no existing term adequately captured the entanglement of rocks and writing he sought when creating a brand and a site that function as both a material essay in stoned thinking and a revelatory garden of petric poetics. As a world composed of rocks, a petriverse is a rock garden featuring carefully constructed rock configurations and naturally balanced stone stacks. As words composed of rocks, petriverse refers to petric texts inscribed in a landscape-oriented-page-space for perusal by a perambulatory public.
The christening of the Petriverse pictured here is a kind of creation story, marking two births simultaneously: the emergence of the message itself from stones (petriverse, a text written in rocks), and the annunciation of the garden as a whole (The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin). The performative nature of the message--it does what it says by doing it in words--likens it to the divine logos (fiat lux, let there be light). Use of alphabetic rebus (URC) foregrounds the materiality of language, and signals a regressive aesthetic, as in concrete poetry. The line of stones at the bottom marks the boundary of the world being created, while the group of seven stones with one set apart stand for 6 days of creation and one of rest....
Choose a path below to explore different dimensions of the Petriverse: Telluric Lurings probes the garden's attractive forces and mysterious energies; Find Balance examines the psychical-physical aspects of stacking stones; Igneous Ligneous initiates intimate relations between inhuman materials.
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- Garden and Gardener Paul A. Harris
