Cymbals on Stones and Fossils
Jack Cleverly writes about the stories and moments that his personal stone and fossil collection evoke to him – from the ones that line his room, to those that line his arms.
On the back of our album there’s a quote from a writer called Marguerite Yourcenar: “Nature, like man, creates beautiful, useless objects.”
Over the past few years, I have collected these kinds of objects, and they have stayed with me, carried around, or arranged in the different rooms I have stayed in.
This one is from Newport beach in Pembrokeshire. At the time I found this stone, I was staying in a house by the sea with my sisters going through a difficult time - it was during winter and the sea would crash against the stony beach outside all night. I used to get some peace from remembering that the stones on the beach were formed by natural forces and pressures long before any of the stuff in my life. I carried this one around with for a while - it has a really smooth dip in it that feels reassuring against the thumb if you hold it tightly in your fingers. A drawing of this one ended up tattooed to my left arm.
My girlfriend brought this back from Madagascar before we met. For a while after, I carried this around in my pocket everywhere - it sat on a surface in each new room. Some of the colours are like her eyes - gold-brown growing lighter outwards, towards green. During that time I was staying in different flats around London with friends, and one of the first things I would do with each new room is arrange collections of these kinds of stones and other objects on the surfaces (window sills, desks).
This stone was a birthday present, and one that I have never got tired of looking at. One of the things I love about the patterns in stones is that they remind me of my mental idea of the stars, the cosmos. The forms in them, coming from the earth, make you think of space. Another idea connected to these stones is that they were formed by forces and at a speed completely foreign to ours. The timescale during which an object such as this was formed, with all its closed-up beauty, is in many ways beyond our minds.
Another birthday gift was a book called The Reading of Stones by Roger Callois, which is mostly really amazing photographs of beautiful stones - Agates, Amethysts, etc. I love the idea that these things we find beautiful were completely accidental, and cut from the earth (by something like another accident), to be seen by our eyes, to say something to us. In that book one of the essays suggest that stones like this ‘reflect man’s essential loneliness in the natural world’ back to him. They show us our limits, our lack of understanding of the world we are surrounded by - their perfect beauty can’t be apprehended by us. I liked the ‘non-geometry’ of this stone, the unplanned lines cut to show themselves in a coincidental way - another that was drawn and then cut (for the second time in its life, I guess), this time into my left arm.
I lost this stone somewhere along the way, but only after it made its way onto my arm. The patterns make me think of the ocean, unknown inaccessible natural forms, perhaps animal. Another stone from Newport beach in Pembrokeshire, to me it feels like a connection to that place and to something bigger that I don’t fully understand, to which these strange, ultimately useless (in some sense) objects connect me.
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