Excerpts from Stones by Renato Ranaldi

[She comes up to me and says – it’s always the women who talk when I’m asleep – On nights with a full moon the stones as black as coal on the bottom of the sea come up onto the beach and abandon themselves to the waves that roll them over, then, all shiny with water, fringed with seaweed and adorned with molluscs, they race headlong along the shore and they mate. Then an ecstatic, proudly orgiastic song breaks out, a hypnotic elegy praising their hardness.]

[Stones: sculptures before the invention of sculpture. One day a caveman stopped drawing people and animals on the walls of the cave he lived in and, as he fondled a stone, felt a strange pleasure that he’d never felt before. Maybe he thought that there was no fullness without emptiness. Who knows what really happened. Then those stones gave birth to figures of a woman with enormous breasts and buttocks. The scholars say it is mother earth. Who knows. A stone, a tiny particle of the world which in turn is an enormous rock, grinds a thought in my head that doesn’t promise any difficulties; but it’s pointless engineering a numeric enigma around those mineral fragments. The mind can’t solve it. It can’t find a home in any niche of the brain now full to the brim with axioms and postulates, there’s no room. It’s the improbability of a calculation which, now accustomed to every metaphysical whim, we refuse: they’re particles of the eternal principle without posterity: only future that speaks of the Origin: it’ll always speak of it, with no clarificatory remark. The beginning of the world, the spherical rock on which I find myself clinging…]

[Stones are the embryonic stuff of myths, they carry the message of an originating reality that determined the destiny of humankind. These shards offer themselves up to the admiration of the spirits which are open to all understanding, capable of living in dream homes where the drama is acted out from the script, with no gaps, nothing missing, about the capricious quality of their being in the world.]