Laughing Rocks

This morning I leave the Grand Canyon for Tempe, AZ to visit my friends Betz and Harold; Betz was a student of mine a long time ago at the University of Illinois. But in this note I want to talk about "the Canyon"--the big one, the Grand one!

I've never looked a mile down into anything (other than looking out an airplane window, and that's not the same thing). John Muir once wrote, "It seems a gigantic statement for even nature to make..." and J. B. Priestly described it as "all Beethoven's nine symphonies in stone and magic light." For me, I realized that as powerful as images can be, there's no technology that replaces the human eye and the mind's comprehension of image. To stand on the Canyon's rim and to look inside -- seeing the layers of depth, each connecting further down, until you think you've reached the bottom but there's still more to go -- that is a visual experience that I've not seen replicated in other media. I'm looking at something that was carved by a retreating ice age two million years ago, exposing rocks that are 200 million to two billion years old!

What have these rocks seen? If they could talk back to us, what would they say? I've been thinking about social networking systems of late. All the chatter, self-image making, and cultural flimflam seem so meaningless at times. But what if we could converse with those that are not here or listen to those objects that we experience now but have been in existence before our time? What if the rocks could speak, what would they say to us? I was imagining the design of an interactive system that could tutor or guide our perceptions -- that past wisdom might speak to the present and even laugh at our self-absorbed ways. Might we draw perspective from a greater context than the day-to-day urgent (and yet unimportant) events of our lives? I thought of these things as I sat on the edge of the "grand abyss." I wondered. I listened.

In 1991 I saw a movie that I enjoyed very much at the time -- "Grand Canyon." You can look it up to learn about the movie, but I've always remembered one scene. One of the characters, Simon, was talking to his buddy and asking him if he ever visited the Grand Canyon. Simon said about this place that I've now experienced:

"You ever been to the Grand Canyon? Its pretty, but that's not the thing of it. You can sit on the edge of that big ol' thing and those rocks... the cliffs and rocks are so old... it took so long for that thing to get like that... and it ain't done either! It happens right there while your watching it. It's happening right now as we are sitting here in this ugly town. When you sit on the edge of that thing, you realize what a joke we people really are... what big heads we have thinking that what we do is gonna matter all that much... thinking that our time here means diddly to those rocks. Just a split second we have been here, the whole lot of us. That's a piece of time so small to even get a name. Those rocks are laughing at me right now, me and my worries... Yeah, it's real humorous, that Grand Canyon. It's laughing at me right now. You know what I felt like? I felt like a gnat that lands on the ass of a cow chewing his cud on the side of the road that you drive by doing 70 mph."

I leave now for Tempe, AZ driving 70 down the interstate...