Earth my Home - Eden Saga

Alain Aillet tells us in the menu the enormity of an old story: that of our house, the Earth and its mountains. Gaia or Ge, originally a hostile planet, has become a magnificent place to live. For many beings, and for a host of small bipeds. Thus, Ge became our home. Our geographic dwelling place. (French:) Notre Géo-logis.Our Geo House. Such is the purpose of geology. (xs)

In French, géo logis and géologie are pronounced in the same way. Because French has the language of birds.

Memory Mountains

The Hercynian fold is not only a geological structure: it is a very old memory that has become a landscape. In the Massif Central, in Armorique, but also in the Ardennes, the Vosges, inland Brittany or Cornwall, something special happens: we walk on mountains that, on a human time scale, have already almost disappeared.

The current reliefs are the eroded remains of a huge chain born millions of years ago, when several continental masses clashed during the formation of Pangaea. Or when the planet was terraformed…

And it is precisely this discordance between what the landscape was and what it seems to be that can produce poetry. A mountain that no longer looks like a mountain. The word “mountain” spontaneously evokes in France the Alps or the Pyrenees: peaks, verticality, conquest, immensity.

Mountains and Megaliths

The Massif Central tells something else, its mountains are mountains after the mountain. The large Hercynian ridges have been leveled, fractured, re-lifted, dug by water, ice and weathering. What we see today is therefore not the intact monument of an ancient chain, but its memory sculpted by time.

A granite chaos, a moor, a plateau, a deep valley become almost archaeological objects. We no longer just look at a mountain, we look at what remains of it.

Megaliths come almost naturally in this story: there is a fascinating meeting between two temporalities. On one side, the granite, which tells of hundreds of millions of years; on the other, the menhir, the dolmen, the cairn, which tell of a few thousand years.

Human Mountains

Between the two stands the man. And the man chose to move some of these stones. It is dizzying. Because when a man places a menhir on an Armorican moor, he does not just place a stone; he inscribes a minuscule human duration in an almost inconceivable geological duration. The menhir thus becomes a kind of hyphen: the mountain has lived before us, the man came, left a stone, then he left and the mountain remained.

This is probably one of the reasons why some Western landscapes have this mythological power without the need for explicit mythology.

The Massif central produces a different poetry, the feeling is perhaps less oceanic than continental. The plateaus, valleys, volcanic juices, granite chaos and ancient erosion surfaces give the impression of a world abandoned by a civilization much older than us. We then understand why so many fantastic stories, legends and popular traditions have been able to take root in these territories.

Survivals

There is a deep affinity between landscapes that have lost their youth and narratives that have lost their origin. Both are relics, and perhaps the real issue is absence.

A Hercynian landscape is a landscape of what is missing: it lacks the original mountain, the disappeared reliefs, the ancient oceans, the beings who crossed these lands, the men who set up the stones, and often even the first explanation of things.

And yet, this lack is not poverty. It opens up a space and imagination engulfs it. Perhaps this is what distinguishes very ancient landscapes: they do not tell a story. On the contrary, they give the impression that a story was told here and then erased.

Face Landscape

And the walker becomes the one who tries to read it, not necessarily to find a hidden truth—it would be to replace one dogma by another—but to experience this very particular sensation: we arrived very late in a world that had started without us.

The granite doesn’t speak, the moor doesn’t speak, the menhir doesn’t speak. But together, they produce something that looks like a sentence, and this sentence could be:

“You think you are looking at a landscape; in reality, you are looking at the time that has taken the form of a landscape.”

It is perhaps there, at bottom, that the western poetry of the old mountains begins: in the encounter between a land that remembers everything and a man who remembers almost nothing.

Old House

(French:) Géo-logis:Geo House the home of the Earth, but also the place where the Earth houses us. Our house is not on the Earth, it is made of the Earth.

The granite that supports a Breton house was once buried under a lost mountain. The clay of a wall was perhaps deposited at the bottom of a sea. The limestone of a threshold stone was once the skeleton of a marine organism. The metal of a beam has slept for millions of years in a rock.

Thus, building a house is strangely like assembling fragments of time and our house becomes a small geological theater.

The word logishome, house then takes on an unexpected depth: we are not simply inhabitants of a house, we are tenants of a mineral history.

We sometimes say, “I’m going home.”

Breathing

But where do we really go? In a house built on a ground that has never been motionless. Under the parquet floor, under the foundations, under the garden, under the road, there is another house. A much older house. It has neither doors nor windows, but its walls are the continents, its cellars are the depths of the crust, its attics are the mountains, and its corridors are the faults through which the Earth still breathes.

We inhabit it without knowing it. Our home is the Earth. Geo-lodgings. A home that does not belong to us, we are not even the first occupants. Before us, the seas inhabited here, the forests. reptiles, glaciers. The men who used to erect stones that we sometimes don’t even know the name of those who placed them.

And before them, there were the mountains. Immense mountains, of which today only a memory remains in the form of a plateau, a valley, a chaos of granite. The Massif central is thus perhaps less a mountain than a house after the fire: the walls are still there, but the original building has disappeared.

In Armorica, the moor sometimes seems to be only the roof of a house whose floors would have been engulfed by time.

The Eternal and the Temporary

So the walker walks. He doesn’t always know what he’s looking for; in fact, perhaps he isn’t looking for anything. It only walks over millions of years.

A stone under her foot seems motionless to her. She is not. She has simply learned to move at the speed of time. And suddenly, something changes, the landscape ceases to be a backdrop, it becomes a dwelling place.

We discover that the hills are not in front of us: they are under our feet, in the memory of matter; that the horizon is not a limit: it is a scar; that the rock is not an object: it is an event that has lasted long enough to seem eternal to us.

Only then do we perhaps understand what it means to dwell. Inhabit is not to possess a place but to accept to be hosted by it. We are the temporary hosts of a world that, for its part, only changes shape. (French:) Géo-logis.Geo House Our house is not eternal. But it is infinitely older than us. And perhaps that is precisely why we feel at home there.