Agricola, the seventeenth-century metallurgist [...] spoke of a juice (succus) that was a stone-forming spirit (lapidificus spiritus). Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry, called it a “petrescent liquor,” from the Latin word petra, rock; and he thought there might be special juices for metals and other minerals [...] There were moments in the sevententh century when no one could admit that fossils might be the records of animals that lived before Biblical creation [...] It was supposed that “stone marrow” (merga) “dissolved and percolated” through the earth, sometimes forming bone shapes and other fossils. Alternatively, people thought that fossil shells had been real shells that were invaded by the stony liquor, a stone-forming spawn that seeped quietly up from the depths of the earth and overtook the slow and the dead.

James Elkins — What Painting Is, pp. 26-27

[The illustration of ammonites is from Boyle’s colleague Robert Hooke’s Lectures and Discourses of Earthquakes and Subterraneous Eruptions (1668?1700)]

I’ve been reading The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, by James Elkins. It’s worth a read — he covers a lot of phenomenological territory, in pursuit of what seems a very personal understanding of what seeing (as contrasted with vision or sight) is about. Seeing, as he sees it, is a complex ‘metamorphosis, not mechanism’. Unexpected insights in familiar places (he is an art historian by trade, and much of the book deals with how we exploit seeing in our representations of its effects). This from a riff on Picasso’s Women of Avignon:

When a whole crowd turns to see us, we are rooted in place. (Imagine a painting of heaven with everyone, from Jesus to the smallest soul, staring right at you).

I’m trying hard to imagine that, and it terrifies me. There’s a long middle section dealing with Bataille’s assertions about things which ‘can’t be seen, even though they may be right in front of our eyes: the sun, genitals, and death’, which I’ll come back to later…