Since Sarah Puglisi is thinking about rocks and Dada today, this might be the time to drop this one into the pool. For fun. As Sarah said, I hadn’t expected Dada, but then, one can’t expect Dada.

I like to read Bird Baylor’s Everybody Needs a Rock to my students. After we get the “rules” for rock collecting worked out, I take the kids out around the school looking for the perfect rock. Amazingly, you’d think they’d never seen a rock. This is the staggering power of suggestion: “Hey look at this!” I hear it over and over. Pockets and shirt tails quickly fill up when hands are no longer free.

This is raw teacher power and the magic of working with little kids. Mind control. It makes you humble when you realize the damage (and the good) you could do.

A couple of years ago I suggested that the kiddos paint their special rocks. They put faces on them, cut out “costumes,” gave them hair and little plastic eyeballs and stuff. The hot glue gun did all the hard work.

The rocks developed, er…personalities. The kids kept them in their desks, and after a while I forgot about them. Little did I suspect that the rocks might come to life. They were making friends with each other, having slumber parties, and some of them even had furniture - beds mostly - for (I assume) sleeping. This went on for the whole year. A little rock counter-culture developed. It was an underground, or indesk, movement. And very low key. Subversive, in a way. For real. I paid attention, but from a distance, because this was one of those things that “just happened” like the ’60’s, and Woodstock, and blogging. You could never plan, or organize, such a thing.

I have this one special rock that I use to illustrate Baylor’s rules for choosing a rock. I found it on the Oregon coast about 30 years ago. It’s a smooth piece of sandstone, gray, and with a clam’s shell embedded in it. It looks like a rock-clam, or a clam-rock. Hard to say. This last year I went to pull it out to show the crew who were reading the book with me, and I couldn’t find it. It was gone! I keep it on my desk with my other interesting rocks and the dead piranha from Brazil, and I had no idea where it could have been. I was beside myself. Understand, I wouldn’t have cared as much if it had been a hundred dollar bill.

I was surprised by my reaction. I didn’t realize this little rock meant that much to me. But when I thought about how this might be the only thing I still have from that long ago, and that it was unique, I was distraught. Somehow, it had “followed” me around, living in boxes and drawers, windowsills and dresser tops throughout my entire adult life. There’s nothing else I can say that about. After several days of anguish, and wondering where it could have been, I found it in a place I’d put it away for “safe-keeping.” I felt relieved, this time, at my own foolishness and poor memory.

Knowing this history of mine with rock life, you might see why I’d be interested in a book called Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard. I quote at length from part I of her essay:

The island where I live is peopled with cranks like myself. In a cedar-shake shack on a cliff - but we all live like this - is a man in his thirties who lives alone with a stone he is trying to teach to talk.

Wisecracks on this topic abound, as you might expect, but they are made as it were perfunctorily, and mostly by the young. For in fact, almost everyone here respects what Larry is doing, as do I, which is why I am protecting his (or her) privacy, and confusing for you the details. It could be, for instance, a pinch of sand he is teaching to talk, or a prolonged northerly, or any one of a number of waves. But it is, in fact, I assure you, a stone. It is - for I have seen it - a palm-sized oval beach cobble whose dark gray is cut by a band of white which runs around and, presumably, through it; such stones we call “wishing stones,” for reasons obscure but not, I think, unimaginable.

He keeps it on a shelf, Usually the stone lies protected by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth. Larry removes the cover for the stone’s lessons, or more accurately, I should say, for the ritual or rituals which they perform together several times a day.

No one knows what goes on at these sessions, least of all myself, for I know Larry but slightly, and that owing only to a mix-up in our mail. I assume that like any other meaningful effort, the ritual involves sacrifice, the suppression of self-consciousness, and a certain precise tilt of the will, so that the will becomes transparent and hollow, a channel for the work. I wish him well. It is a noble work, and beats, from any angle, selling shoes.

Reports differ on precisely what he expects or wants the stone to say. I do not think he expects the stone to speak as we do, and describe for us its long life and many, or few, sensations. I think instead that he is trying to teach it to say a single word, such as “cup,” or “uncle.” For this purpose he has not, as some have seriously suggested, carved the stone a little mouth, or furnished it in any way with a pocket of air which it might then expel. Rather - and I think he is wise in this - he plans to initiate his son, who is now an infant living with Larry’s estranged wife, into the work, so that it may continue and bear fruit after his death.

Dillard’s essay is a meditation on the value of prayerful watchfulness. We are here, she says, to witness. Our consciousness as we “keep an eye on things,” lends meaning to an otherwise insentient world. She recalls a visit to the Galapagos Islands in which she first noticed only the big things. “Like everyone else,” she said, “I specialized in sea lions.” Later, though, she became aware of the palo santo trees, and realized that she’d like to “come back” as one of them, bearing her existence, as they do, effortlessly witnessing, mute, and “waving their arms.”

“Quit your tents. Pray without ceasing,” she concluded.

And listen, “Hey look at this!” something, or someone, could be saying.