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ICICLES,  MEDUSA,  AND THE HISTORY OF CHEESE

Centuries of rain combined with carbon dioxide created the distinctive grooves, flutings, and fissures in the enormous limestone cliffs of Ha Long Bay, north of Hanoi, and similar karst formations in China and Eastern Europe.  Presumably it took only the briefest glance of Medusa’s eyes to sculpt men into stone.  Yet if the world should indeed end in fire, both the karst cliffs and the stones that once were men would quickly melt like the watches in Dali’s best known painting. Because his saddlebag was made from a cow’s stomach- lining rich with an enzyme called rennin, the milk it contained separated into curds and whey while a  nomad rode his horse across the desert on a hot summer day.  Thus he became the first person to eat cheese; given his great thirst and hunger, he consumed, presumably with alacrity, both the liquid whey and the lumpy white curds. He probably did not realize how the triangulation of heat, rennin, and the motions of his horse helped create his accidental cheese, but the ancient Sumerians knew the secrets of cheese- making 4000 years before Christ; the Greeks also knew; likewise the Hebrews of Biblical times. By the Roman Empire, transformation of a liquid (cow’s milk, sheep’s and goat’s milk, camel’s milk, even the milk of buffaloes, deer, and asses) to the variety of solid substances known as cheese had reached a high level of culinary and aesthetic sophistication. Icicles, too, often achieve aesthetically pleasing shapes and can be strikingly luminous. Some resemble crystalline beards; others suggest long gnarled fingers or simple cones.  In his poem “Icicles,” Mark Irwin compares the cones with carrots and–through the voice of his young son– a pinocchio nose. The sound they make after breaking up and falling to a wind-swept street reminds him of delicate piano music.  But no matter how brilliantly designed,  icicles are doomed to give up their solidity, sooner or later to melt, thaw, resolve itself into a dew. The original “melting watches,” they demand no Salvador Dali to remind us of time’s mutability. Medusa aside, not all petrifaction is a dead end.  Deucalion, the son of Prometheus, along with his wife Pyrrha, cast stones from which there sprang men and women to repopulate the world after a disastrous flood.  First they had to interpret an oracle’s command that they cast behind them the bones of their mother: a thinly disguised metaphor for the stones of the earth. And because they were lucky enough to be embedded in one of the earth’s most “receptive” types of stone, known as sedimentary rock, some shells and bones of the distant past reveal to us precise reproductions of their inner and outer structures.  The process of petrifaction, sometimes by interaction with minerals from underground water, has preserved for us ancient plant and animal remains.  Most dramatically, wood has been transformed into stone molecule by molecule, its original form sustained in those striking rockscapes called petrified forests. Without petrifaction there would be no dinosaur prints, no footprints of ancient people such as those recently discovered in the south of Africa near the once sandy shore of a lagoon. Studies have even been made of petrified shit, technically known as Coprolites; if the source can be determined the fossilized excrement can offer important clues about the feeding habits of various animals.

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