On Throwing Stones
♠
I’ve got this nick on my palm, a cute cut from when I was a kid, throwing rocks at piles of rocks with my little friends and half-hated acquaintances. We were throwing rocks, god knows why, but we were tossing them at first, out of boredom, in defiance of the command of our absent minders, lobbing them lightly in wide-bottomed arcs, as if to say, to imply, that we were breaking the rules but lightly and in the toss and the lob there was no intent to harm. So we were tossing these rocks softly, making no noise, perhaps muttering sullen complaints of boredom while they made their flight, until one rock landed in just such a way, with the correct angle of impact or with an echo of impact that was just correctly delayed, so as to make a large thwock or thwack, enough to draw delight from our bored and sullen brains, eliciting delight or an approximation thereof, a yip, a hurray, and then we were scrambling for more rocks, bigger, harder, sharper, and tossing them—throwing them—with might and main, until the thwocks and thwacks of the resultant impacts were loud, harsh, and violent. With the violence came interest, and smiling not sullen now, we threw harder and harder, bigger rocks, bigger thwocks, until, as luck or misfortune or desire would have it, one of the kids I was with tossed a rock at my chest, and though it didn’t hurt I grew angry, frowned, and picked up a heavy and large and sharp rock to zing (and I saw the path the rock would take, straight as a line from my hand to his head), and as I whipped my arm back to throw—I don’t know—but something happened, the projectile in my hand simply fell, and I found myself clutching at a bleeding palm, in pain.
I remember the incident with resentment, and I can still see that little kid’s face, but vaguely. Like the tiny two millimeter scar on my palm, it’s faded over the years, though I still remember the pain (the cut had not been wide but quite deep) and the look of smug simplicity altering, changing, arriving at terror-struck realization that the rock that fell from my hand was being hefted and weighted to kill. Incredible as it seems, that scar left a mark on my world, one of disgust and anger, an unlooked for desire for violence against all others, fury at the seeming impotence of my attempt at retribution or revenge, though there was another mark that this scar left on my life.
Throwing things—stones and pebbles, rocks and balls, tantrums and terrible thoughts—was and is a hobby of mine. Sitting at a lake or a pool of some kind bordered by sand and stones, the first thought I have is to pick up a stone and sail it across the surface of the water, sometimes to skip and hop in a quick succession of thwips, but inevitably to hear that final plop. There is a certain beauty in throwing things, especially over water: envisioning the goal, the vector of the toss, the arc of a skip, or the singular sonic qualities of an invasion of a body of water, echo upon echo being subsumed by surrounding waters; it moves the mind across those waters, forward with the throw, backwards with the sound, and the waters over the mind, cooling, soothing, satisfaction and release. And the process can repeat, over and over, each toss skipping perhaps more, perhaps less, though when the sound of the final drop, the plunk of the heavier matter striking water, comes flying back to your ears, and you think of droplets like tears forming on budding shoots, trembling leaves, quivering cheeks, or surrounding a sour pucker of a mouth, the sound becomes a sphere that you’d like to throw to follow the first stone, the scarring rock, and you can wish—futile, needless, stupid wish—to begin… to begin again. But this time the stone will travel true, it will sail without sound, travel parallel to the surface of the water, never stopping, never plopping, no puhlunk by which to measure its failure to fly around the world in a perfect circle, and end where it began.
Strange. The form this resentment takes. The futile activity of throwing stones. Jagged rocks. Half-formed thoughts. Meandering ideals. Unfulfilled desires. Thoughts of revenge. A geometry of hatred. Words let like blood. Red rivers of wrath. Blue coasts of jealousy. Green fields of envy. Violence against all others. The impotence of the weakest. Cooled by water, made smooth by a moist ambivalence, the rigid posture of resentment and fury goes soft, lies supine in pillowy clouds of the most aimless, pointless, futile, needless, stupid regret. And yet… and yet… I still throw stones, if not in water, then in tin cans, as a hobby and a pastime, something I picked up when I was older, in college, sitting alone on the front porch of a house, a coffee can once chock full of nuts (which were beans…no. Fruit. Berries.) now filling with stones and pebbles (which are thoughts…no. Wishes. Worries.) and I make sounds, words, and they are sharp as the sharpest shard of slate, and I hurl them spinning end over end and let the echo and tinkle of their edges striking metal clatter and clink and resonate in my frame of mind, my anger softened like butter, the contemplative state and station of all the dispossessed and disappointed people the wronged world round.
Picking through the pile, I’ve got this ugly scar on my knee, a wide smiling-faced V of a doozie, from when I with much pride and hubris to boot, scared some kid on the soccer pitch (I was older, maybe in the ‘tweens) and instead of running up and tackling him, instead of sliding the ball out from beneath his incompetent feet (like most children at that age, I thought, I was made to have this body) I shouted out Boo! and instead of giving up the ball, the kid launched his foot in a widely erring arc, missing the ball, kissing my knee, and after a silent rip of skin, a white bit of fat flew from my knee to plop contentedly on the grass. I hobbled off the field, nursing my view of the unfairness of life, and received eighteen stitches and a mocking smile on my knee. And when I look at the scar I hear a laugh, a tinkle, the crinkle of a shamefaced smile which I’d like to choke open, yawn-wide, and from the apologizing mouth of that cowardly kid I’d like to pry out individual teeth, molars, incisors and canines, and when the hole was gaping enough to fit my fist, I’d shove and shove until the I’m sorry was lodged in the ventricles of his heart. Where it belonged. Instead it sat smiling on his face. And I said, It’s okay.
Okay. AOK. Alright alright. Fine. Because it was my bum leg that got me into this position, sitting on a porch, friends playing ball or riding bikes, fingering the mud and soil for rocks and stones. We all get what we don’t deserve. So my college buds were off to play some football, setting down beer cans and flipping their cigs in the dirt. What are you going to do? I don’t know (stroke my resentment, polish my hurt pride until it purrs, until it shines). And someone bent down, someone whom I secretly despised, and picked up the first stone at hand and lobbed it eight feet away into the wide open maw of a coffee tin can lying in the litter on the envy-green grass. And the tinkle of the stone’s success rankled my nerves. You should try it, he said, it’s fun. Passes the time. I declined, but only until they’d all left me alone. Tentatively, I fingered my first stone, smooth and round, like a slightly obese quarter, and I let it fly in an unhurried toss, an ill-considered trajectory, and yet… and yet… it found its mark. Rock hit tin and there was a satisfying clink, a mocking echo, and then the stone clattered in the bottom of the can, going round and round until its path was interrupted by what I assumed was the first stone, ending its career with a shimmering and then silence.
Different stones make different sounds, the form of the stone becomes known in the shape the echo takes. So different are the stones that it is not enough to predict according to measure, weight, or shape. Round stones roll, flat stones clatter, but a hollow stone or a particularly porous rock will amplify the volume of its echo (for echoes grow and rebound in spaces, stretches of silence, plains of absence, lost matter, and deadened desires) and so you’ll never know, even after you’ve hefted a rock and caressed the contours with trembling fingertips, what the end product, the end thought, will come to be. No plop by which to say, heavy matter plus water; no clink by which to say, stone on tin; no silence in which to say, nothing ever matters. The sounds the stones make and become, lost in the can, hidden from sight, hinted at by the rarefaction and contraction that sound waves are made of—the paths of truth, decision, and lies—are unique entities in themselves, varied and unique and distinct as all the forms of life—fauna, flora, bacterium, spore—so different and so many that it makes the animist in me come to life. Each stone is alive. Each stone has some hidden message lying in ambush.
Certain stones, like certain words, are never any fun to toss. Stones that’ll float in water are too light and, even if an errant wind doesn’t snatch up the stone and blow it askew, the sound made would be like the wheeziest of laughs. Words like love are too heavy, and the sound they make is like the clods of earth you sometimes mistake for rocks, packed dense enough when you feel them in hand, though in the air they begin to shed some of their weight, and, if they don’t altogether disintegrate, they land in the tin in a dirty thud, a phumphtt—unsatisfactory in every way. And then there are those stones that are too unwieldy to throw, and you know it beforehand, but something—laziness? anger? ennui? disgust?—makes you throw them anyway, and when family or religion or god or belief gets tossed in the can, they create a dent or tip the tin over, and the game begins to lose meaning.
All games lose meaning after a time, and it is only a matter of time that you grow bored or decide to change the rules, examine the method, and approximate a sport from the game. So, let’s say, we start with the can at eight feet away, limit the stones to certain sizes and certain shapes, and tally up point totals according to satisfying sounds and missed throws. So cute cut was thrown, and I’d give it a three on a scale of ten, because of the echoes in the hard c’s and t’s and the sentiment implied (for it’s a kid’s injury, on a kid’s small scale). Echo of impact, which I like better, would receive a four or a five on that same scale of ten, because it’s a bit more complex, a more unwieldy rock, and even though it’s a bit of a cheat (echo implies the returning echoes cheaply) the hard consonants ring the interior round sounds round nicely, with a cute eh? smiling cheekily to start. But what of the ones that missed? Moist ambivalence does nothing for me. It was too soft to speak of virility or to produce a satisfying echo, and though the thoughts okay (alright, fine) it missed the can and thus deserves, not a zero, but a circle bisected by an angled line. Deadened desires, though it misses its mark, still has some worth, though it is merely uttered and not utilized, so it gets a zero—at least it gets marked down on the page and it is considered when tallying up the score. In short, what it comes down to is math.
Imagine a Cartesian field, x and y axes divvyed up into measured blocks of whole integers, number upon number, extending back and forth, up and down, and accordingly, we’ll situate the can at about 80 positive spaces away (if only not to deal with fractions of thoughts and emotions irrational in order) and, depending on mood, time, and emotional decay, situate a small stick figure of a man at some set point in that Cartesian space. Remember, now, that we are dealing in two dimensions, there are a controlled set of variables (so far, only x and y) and if my emotional state is a bit pained, that stick figure that takes up about or exactly one integer on y’s scale, is hefting a rock at slightly below the x axis, and must, according to some set formula, some quadratic form, sling the stone up and over the limit of base emotion and arc in a perfect parabola to fall, eighty spaces away, into the crude drawing of a container that is the tin can (taking up, say, about as much vertical space as the man). No wind in this equation, no consideration for the way in which the stone is thrown (from the side, over the top, behind the back… all style is, for the moment, forgotten), and in examining the sound that that stone has made, marking it down as some specific formula, we can find the best angle at which to hit the can, the best angle and speed and force with which to send the stone on its flight, the ideal of a) hitting the mark and b) achieving the most satisfying sound, maximizing the value of both emotion and action, with a satisfyingly provable result that can be repeated, at will. In this way (keeping in mind that at any given time the can is empty, there are no preceding stones lying in ambush to affect the career of the stone being thrown) we can alter the position of the man. The further up on the scale, the more flat the line from hand to can; the further down on the scale, the path becomes bowed, the arc must be wider, the toss stronger, so that the stone will not fail to hit its mark. What will be the difference in sound? Higher up, the sound will be sharper, the echoes harsh, further down, the sound will be softer, the echoes soothing, and now we can introduce another axis, a boundless formless backwards and forwards along the plane of z, and the echoes that are formed do not exist in two dimensions, but like magic, integrals rotating around the x axis, creating volume, occupying space, the echoes multiply and expand, bringing the emotions, the metaphor, the geometry of hatred, more closely to life, though slightly abstracted, derivative in point of origin and purpose, meaning and station, and general relevance to a game of throwing stones, or, writing down grievances in clumsy rhythms, and throwing them, like stones, away.
The metaphor is weak, but it is not only a fault of language. My grasp of the true mathematics behind the graph is tenuous at best, and though I can remember that to integrate and to derive are opposite processes, and I can set them to work in opposite directions (one to create the image of space, the other to essentially throw it all away) who’s to say whether they’ve actually fulfilled any mathematical role? Not me. I don’t know. But the language of mathematics has a strange allure, for the terms can be uttered and their implicit forms invoked, though there never is any actual meaning at risk. Even if I were to say Triangle and someone were to hear me toss it in the can and let it tinkle, even if the passing person saw jump forward in their mind a three-sided, three-angled figure, and, in echo or response, triumphantly spouted, Isosceles! what is being uttered and echoed is a non-existent thing, the emptiest of echoes, but still, the sound is quite beautiful (in only the way the language of mathematics can be). Take, for example, scalene. Or, for that matter, hypotenuse. Both revolve around the concept of triangles, one for the ill-formed tri that has uneven sides, one for the most righteous of angles and the length of its widest side. Regardless of what they mean, though, they’re pretty as can be (though hypotenuse is a bit soft in its own strongly syllabled way). But you can never use the words to make a feeling. You can’t say about a kid, Ah, what a scalene little shit, and have it understood that he’s ill-formed or misguided, or about the man that his viewpoint has been hypotenused, and have it understood that his right-minded thinking has found a sufficiently large forum. Only if you’re confined in a two dimensional schema, a sufficiently controlled and limited area, like a piece of graph paper with x and y axes, can the hypotenuse take form and a scalene triangle become a shape. Otherwise, they’re merely words uttered with their meanings avoided, and in some ways, these are the best of shapes with which to form stones, as they clink and clatter in an absence of meaning, a vacuum of desire, and, as such, are just so many pieces in a pointless game.
The concepts of math and the ideas they imply are more useful for giving meaning to the game than simple utterances of mathematical vocabulary, and they lend weight to simple scores of ones and zeros so that hit and miss are not the only criteria, clatter and clink are not the only measure of awe or greatness. The form of the throw, the foreknowledge of success, can instill in the mind a rushing, onward-moving sensation, similar to the feeling of ascension of a Pythagorean scale. The sound of an echo can find a similar sine-like wave in the brain, and constructively interfere, as the physicists would say, and the sound and the thought can merge and the product created is felt to be more than the sum of two disparate parts. A thought, a stone, a dirty word, can sometimes, as easy as a, b, c, achieve a Fibonaccian complexity, and bloom like the petals of a rose, or descend into the myriad depths of an Escher-esque seashell or stairway. It is the commutative property that the logic of language relies on, the associative relationship between mind and matter, the fundamental principles of creation and then decay and decay and decay. And in the life of any narrative there is an understanding of this relationship between the forms of the mind and the stories we like—it is no coincidence that in fairy tales things happen in threes so that the mind can sail away.
Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there was a little kid with cruddy thoughts, selfish desires, and terrible intentions. When he was young his friends used to shun him, for he had a penchant for violence, an inordinate degree of pride, and a resentful mien. In his time alone, the young child would throw rocks, even though his parents and teachers told him it was not okay. But he threw rocks, stones, and pebbles, at trees, at street-lamps, and, on occasion, at other little children and his friends. When he was punished and his parents asked him why, why do you throw rocks at your friends? he would reply, I don’t know, but I think that I do not like them. His parents grew worried about their rock-throwing child, and they asked his teachers and the members of their church if they had any suggestions, if they could offer any course of action for this strange and sullen child. And the entire community of their little town shook their heads silently: he’s your kid, you’re going to have to put him down. Horrified at the possibility of losing their child, the parents tried everything—punishments, lashes, and spankings—and they forbade him to touch anything resembling a rock. But somehow, every time they found him alone, he’d have a pocket full of stones and one in hand, ready to toss at trees and animals, children and men. His father became angry, though he could not bring himself to send the child away, so he locked him up in a room with a little tin can and said, to hell with this kid, we’ll have another, and he can throw those stupid stones until the day he dies. In the room, his weeping mother placed a little bench and a small pile of stones for the child to throw, and then turned the key in the small lock on the door. And the child picked up his first punishment stone, and proceeded to fill the can…
And so we could imagine that the first stone he throws is one of reaffirmation, Sisyphian in its choice of absurdity. A little boy with no desire save to throw stones at things and people does not belong to the province of reality; only in myth could such an absurdity, if accepted at all, survive. And in the second stone, or the second filling of the can, all grievances from his short and stunted life would find their expression, the head-wagging community, the enraged father, the barren room populated impossibly with only a stool, a pile of stones, and a tin can. In the third set of stones, the third filling of the can, we get a projection of the future (and here the narrative would glide along the long years of a lifetime; his new and happier siblings’ sibilant voices, his mother’s joyful cooing echoing within the barren chamber and acquiring a tinge of regret and of guilt; the narrative time devoted to each episode growing shorter and shorter as the story winds down and decays), and though the child is growing older and becoming a man, the world outside knows nothing of his slow and painful progress, it knows nothing about how many stones it takes to fill the can, it knows nothing of how many times the stones have been tipped out and the game has begun again. And you can imagine that in such a vacuum, in such a tale, that the locked up child with no food or water acquires a type of immortality, because as life outside the room continues on and on—his unknown brothers and sisters now have children, his mother and father lie dead or dying in graves made premature by the sin against their firstborn—and in that space of immortality, in that room unmarked by time, the only sound that echoes against and around the barren walls is the clink and clatter of small stones meeting the tin can. And, after all, since the third time is the charm, when the third filling of the can is done, the walls of the room break down, the echoes have reached a frenzied Jerichoed peak, and what we are left with is the blank and purified nothing of the end of a pointless narrative, the end result of a stupid, pointless, needless game. Cherem.
Okay. Fine. Purity. Meaning. Fun? No, not fun. There is no noble goal to this game of throwing stones. It merely passes the time. Fills the head. Clutters the can. So stone may follow stone, rock can follow rock, echo can rebound against other echoes, yet no moral is presented and no lesson is learned. Blame gets tossed around, resentment finds its comfortable nook or disinterested hollow, and on top of these tiny thoughts, other meaningless term and narratives can be strewn about, burying beneath their combined weight the memory of scars and hatreds, the penalties of living and misliving, and, in a sense, one can make amends. Not to life, no, but to the ineluctable desire to make sense of the meanings of things, the reasons why resentment bubbles forth at every turn, the finality of this feeling of oppressive isolation. And in the action, in the toss and throw, in the style of the telling and the joy of finding perfect thoughts, perfect stones, with which to tally up the injuries and their resultant scars to fill this brittle and thin can, there is a further progression, a forming of that final rock, the most scar-hardened heart of the matter. And it rises like hardened bile, choking the throat, burning the lungs, and it gets coughed up, and after you examine it, finger its imperfections, test its life-sharpened edges, you can throw it in one beautiful, perfect, mathematical arc, to rest on the top of the now-filled can. Then, with a glass of water, or perhaps even a garden hose, fill the can up so that water moves over the stones, and tip it out, letting the water wash away the accumulated dirt and broken bits of cracked stones. And when the can is empty you can set it down and hobble eight paces away, and begin. And begin again.
—DC