Meadowdale Park today: cold, but intensely sunny on the beach. I’ve missed this place—a knee injury has kept me off the steep trail for the last few months. In the interim, someone has raised several small cairns, stacks of rocks, some only two stones high. They have been placed on stumps, along the sides of fallen trees, and on the backs of the benches spaced at intervals along the path.
I am bothered by this. On some level, I find the cairns aesthetically pleasing. But they don’t belong here. They are entirely unnecessary as trail markers, and they are entirely out of place surrounded by mossy limbs and nurse trees, the white trunks of leafless alder, and the sound of the rain-engorged stream echoing up from the base of the ravine. The stacks of rocks are an act of forest vandalism—more than that, they are a defilement, a desecration.
And I want to knock them all down.
What is the motivation to stack rocks like this? I suppose that it is the same motivation that lies behind all acts of creation, all acts of artistic expression. We seem to have a need to leave behind physical traces of ourselves. The cairns are symbolic monuments to their builder’s passing presence: “I was here, in this place, and here’s the proof!”
All monuments serve this function to some extent. The motivation behind the cairns is, at its heart, an attempt to cope with personal mortality. It is the same motivation that lies behind skyscrapers, perhaps. The desire to leave a physical mark in the world has its source in the awareness that your life is temporary, and the gnawing suspicion that it is also completely trivial.
I probably won’t knock the rock-stacks down. At least not today. Even if I don’t knock them down, the weather eventually will. Or a squirrel. All attempts to leave a lasting trace of yourself behind are ultimately doomed.
And, in time, the rocks themselves will eventually find their way downhill and take their place in the sand on this sunny beach.
Perhaps the form of art that bothers me most is contorting wild into abstract form in more biodiverse thriving places. Ordering and objectifying fragments of wild habitat into moldable pieces was a major stepping stone toward Homo’s step out of wildness into intentionality of species supremacy. As the human ape grew ever adept at controlling and colonizing, breaching ecology by foregoing co-adapting, anxiety of disconnecting from wild embeddedness channeled into expressions such as art. Increasing intensity of symbolism drives an increasingly artificial life.
Domination comes with a painful loss of organic connection. While he later minimizes his own essay ‘The Case Against Art’, Zerzan noted of art’s origins: “The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer’s words, ‘creation in order to subdue the torment of perception.’ Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away.”
Civilized humans’ liminal calling to randomly stack rocks may be coming from a dormant calling to re-enter wildness, but with clumsier results than a toddler’s first walk. While still an indigenous invasion, these stackings may be a step toward wild’s threshold, intuitive attempts to drop domesticating in exchange for a resurgent wild presence, but without self-awareness or knowing how.