24
SepA petrified forest or large redwoods ~ (micro-tales, 9)
I was going to travel to what I thought to be a remote part of the world in which there was a petrified forest. Large extensions of redwoods would have been surprised by the sudden eruption of the Mount Saint Helena volcano. What an undending verticality of stone, I would expect. I would even hope. I saw myself in a Pompei of trees, trying to understand what they were doing in the very moment they were seized by the shock. The anonymous, normally imperceptible movement and expression of the tree would have been frozen for me to contemplate, to meditate in the precision with which it had been either performed or uttered. Walking through a stoned jungle, like in another, more artificial, enchanted forest of Bomarzo. Spellbound by the gestures trying to walk across an atmosphere of ashes. Aloft, petrified whispers of old treely conversations.
(The volcano provoked the trees to fall down, violently uprooted. A thick blanket of ashes and mud covering their trunks, pulverizing their branches, volatilizing their leaves. The water, filtering through the ashes, replaced the molecules of wood by new molecules of silica. "Sometimes cell by cell". A large cemetery of semi-unburied corpses.)
