The Writing is on “The Wall”
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The Writing is on “The Wall”

Because we know where we stand with them, we are more likely to experience happily- ever-after lives with stones than any other substance on earth. In their once-upon-a-time-span way, stones recreate, over and over again, their own unique stories. That this seemingly prosaic material can be arranged into such cursive structural shapes as dry stone walls, evokes in many of us a kind of storybook cognizance. In that stones are the heart and content of good walls, there never seems to be an end to what you can say about walls, either.

Perhaps this is because they are built with virtually endless amounts of time and stone and imagination. They manage to transform everyday material into beautifully interlocked arrangements of very simple geometry. Man made ribbons of old stones envelop the benign randomness of certain parcels of land, as if gift wrapping them for us to hold and behold in the present, perfect. These uniquely formed walls are created from a myriad of random shapes, labouriously woven into one whole. The 'complexity of one'; this is surely a wonderful thing.

All meaning can be described as an understanding of the complexity of oneness. Writing, like walling, is a sorting process , describing something whole in a series of seemingly unrelated , or previously overlooked thought-shapes. The builders and the writers leaving no stone unturned. Every shape, every fragment is ultimately useful. If there is anything to be discarded it is our common preconceptions. If there is anything to be discerned, it is that stones are useful because every one is unique. And yet they are able to fit together, and lose their uniqueness, to become lost in a greater whole. A greater usefulness. Providing greater pleasure and greater strength. This is all very satisfying to the soul: diversity tending to oneness, instead of disparity.

Shakespeare told us there are ‘sermons in stones’, and consequently there must be a certain ‘weightiness’ to walls of stone, where ironically the message needs only be the spaces, the invisible wholly words we read ‘between the lines’. The self-help, attained through, and contained in, these ‘courses’ of well fitted stones, comes to us almost naturally. The instruction is structural, and if the criticism, like the stone itself, is hard, it is at least ‘constructive’. The writing is ‘on’ and ‘in’ the wall. The message is somewhere hidden between these man made, yet inanimate patterns, rather than by way of any man made products. Everything speaks of rightness and fitness. Everything is healingly simple in a world gone mad with its own mind-numbing ingenuity.

The writings permeate through well made dry stone walls, like feelers from a spreading vine, softening the harsh facts of our complicated existence. Therapeutic substances linger in the time and space they contain. Thousands of breath taking expansion joints moving imperceptibly to accommodate our unsettled existence. Like deep breathing exercises, inspiration can be experienced throughout the walls that were originally made only to contain livestock . Safely hedged in on all sides, it is our thoughts that are contained now. We are protected not only from meaninglessness, but the waste of excess and the futility of randomness.

The wall, unlike the beach, is a place for writing something significant, something lasting. Unlike paper it has weight and substance . What about ‘paper scissors rock’’ you ask? Well rocks, when you think about it, really win every time. Rocks rule! And unlike our digital world, rock walls retain information in a way that is not dependant on modern technology. Not just bedrock outcroppings or geological stratifications of visible history , but everything from the austere stone pilings of ancient people to the imaginative work of artistic craftsmen, these are all stacked testaments to the necessity of life.

Our lives are comfortable and shallow. It is rare that any careful attention is given to something, as if it were one of the ‘necessities of life’. Although it may not be one those necessities, a stone wall (whether the building, the owning or the admiring of it) remains a testament to the actual necessity of life itself. It could be said that stones reflect that need to be built into something. It is part of their life story, and ours too. A wall ‘needs’ to be built in the same way we ‘need’ to build it. A living author needs to build upon those who have gone before. A composer needs to find music in the arrangements of notes that have been used over and over again. It is a necessity for living beings to keep arranging the natural building blocks of life,(does this sound like stones?) into meaningful shapes and structures that they can relate to. A waller goes to great lengths compiling and righting stones into meaningful arrangements. There is great significance and purpose in the work we wallers have been called to do. And it is to wall extensive purposes, that the stones call us.

Submitted by John Shaw-Rimmington