Three pebbles

"What is a pebble? Is it an object or a thing? A weapon or a tool? Is it naïve or is it sentimental? Is it a token of the real, or a fragment of ideology? Can you do more than skip it or hurl it or mark a grave with it? What is the pebble to poetry? Of what might the poem make it speak? ... The pebble is a thing, a fragmentary rock, a bit of nature that fits easily in the hand, yet which can scarcely serve effectively as any sort of weapon or simple tool. The pebble is an individual marked by its participation in and never more than partial emergence from multiplicity; a heap of pebbles is a figure for, or metonymic of, multiplicity itself. To pick up a pebble is to separate it from its fellows, arbitrarily removing it from the multitude of other pebbles — on the beach, in a ravine, out of a quarry — among which it is invariably found. Each pebble is marked by its never more than partial emergence from something larger: rounded, worn, unimaginably old, each the result, if Francis Ponge is to be believed, of 'scission from the same enormous grandfather,' the primeval 'hero' of the earth itself, a 'fabulous body' that, 'having been liberated from Limbo … is nowhere to be found.' ..."
Jacket2

Francis Ponge

2008 February: Francis Ponge, 2011 September: Soap, 2012 March: Things, 2018 May: Nioque of the Early-Spring