They were like calved icebergs, or a ransacked library of giant white books. The marble slabs’ edges striated from the quarry drills.
The deepest place I’d ever seen. The marble quarry like an empty socket in the earth, the bottom filled with milky, aquamarine water. Peering over the edge, my grip on my father’s hand tightened. This was during the time in my childhood when I was terrified of basements and dark places, when I had trouble sleeping through the night.
Marble is recrystallized limestone, normally white . . . Limestones and dolomitic limestones may be slightly altered by percolating waters and are often called marbles, but true marbles are the result of metamorphism involving heat and pressure.
—From Rocks and Minerals,
A Golden Nature Guide
I don’t remember if it was actually sunny that afternoon but given Colorado’s three hundred average days of sunlight per annum, we can assume shafts of auric light slanted into the quarry.
My father explained how quarrymen sliced off white slabs of marble, lassoed them with cables, winched them up from the pit. Marble, he told me, is Colorado’s official state rock. He also explained that marble from this quarry was of exceptional quality and was used to sculpt structural elements of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Melvillean scholar Lewis Mumford was skeptical of the Lincoln Memorial’s colossal proportions, its “classical serenity.” “In truth,” Mumford writes, “the Lincoln memorial was a particularly clever piece of imperialist propaganda.” In Christopher A. Thomas’s The Lincoln Memorial and American Life, he describes the temple as “a confection of a cultural and political elite bent on stripping Lincoln of his earthly imperfections.” Imperfections, we can assume, such as Lincoln’s dim view of race relations and his ongoing, genocidal war against Native Americans. His regular descents into gloom and depression. And perhaps his notorious Adam’s apple, like something trying to push its way out of his throat.
On the drive home from the marble quarry, my father and I stopped at a house up Divide Creek, near Colorado Mountain College. A beautiful home with a swimming pool, large deck, picture-frame windows looking out over the scrub oaks and sagebrush. The house belonged to a friend of my father’s, a blind man from France named Jules Amis. He was in my father’s Rotary Club; Dad said he knew everyone by the sound of their voice.
My father described Jules Amis as “a miraculous guy.” He played golf purely by sound, with helpers standing on the green, ringing a bell. He once challenged my father to eighteen holes. When my father accepted, Amis said, “Very well, then. Meet me on the course at midnight.” He helped launch one of the original blind skier organizations, called BOLD: Blind Outdoor Leisure Development. He was a sculptor and engraver who may or may not have engraved the eagle on a piece of ubiquitous American currency. He could fix anything, including the broken pedal of a stationary bike that I tried to ride on his outdoor patio.
During our visit we watched Jules work on a life-size sculpture of a human figure in his studio off the garage. He sculpted with marble mined from the same quarry my father and I had just visited. He carved and shaped with power tools, his face coated in fine white dust. He used bare hands during the finishing work, moving them up and down the marble face, slowly rousing the human figures in the stone up from their long sleep.
Detractors of the Lincoln Memorial say it’s too polished, too naive in its nationalistic, hypermasculine hero-worship. Perhaps in a related but inverse vein as literary critics and activists who warn against the extraction of facile “lessons of inspiration” from those with disabled bodies.
I hope what I’m doing is less about memorializing or drawing inspiration from Jules Amis, and more about the lesson of art as something born from heat and pressure and darkness. Rebecca Solnit, from The Faraway Nearby: “Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not know quite what you are doing and what will happen next.”
The truth was that something about Jules Amis scared me. The unpredictable way he ambled and stomped across the wooden deck. His French accent and thunderous voice, always echolocating. How he rummaged around in his toolbox, found a wrench to fix the bicycle pedal, eyes on the tips of his fingers. All those marble figures ghosting around the house. I didn’t understand his sculptures, though I wanted to be part of them, somehow. Perhaps my first exposure to the transformative power of art, employing raw material from the yawning sub-terra.
Historically, mining has always fueled both creativity and destruction. In Bluets, author Maggie Nelson references Sar-e-Sang—the Place of the Stone, a mine in Afghanistan where workers unearthed lapis lazuli beginning in the seventh millennium BC. Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians used the brilliant blue stones in King Tut’s funeral mask; Cleopatra may have ground it into powder for eye shadow. Much later it was pulverized into the most expensive of all pigments: ultramarine. Traces of ultramarine directly from Sar-e-Sang exist in the paintings of Titian, Vermeer. Mary’s blue robes in most Renaissance paintings would not emit their effulgent brilliance without the act of mining.
I can see both sides of the Lincoln Memorial debate. For me, what makes Lincoln memorable was his psychological fortitude, how he carried on despite the misery in his past, his tendency toward what Melville called “the hypos.” Maybe, then, all those cut and quarried slabs—true marbles are the result of metamorphism—winched up from such depths, are a fitting tribute, even if the statue itself exaggerates his physical proportions, downplays that outrageous Adam’s apple.
The word sincere translates roughly as “without wax,” dating back to Roman times, when some marble salesmen covered up blemishes in their products with cosmetic wax. Other, more trustworthy merchants presented the stone as it was, without masking the flaws.
My father had his own faults, his lack of attention to certain aspects of child-rearing or road safety, but he was a devoted and fun-loving parent, always taking me to quarries, abandoned mines, the High Country Gems and Minerals shop. A week after that first visit to the marble quarry, he put up with me when, during his afternoon nap, I snuck into his bedroom and set the digital alarm clock thirty minutes forward, hoping he’d wake up and take me on one of our excursions. Perhaps this is where I learned to engineer time and chronology and memory for my own purposes.
I never took to sculpting, but years later, on the advice of a therapist, I began obsessively grinding words into marble-patterned composition books. It was there that, from a slab of buried memories, I carved out the awkward, lanky shape of our teenaged neighbor, with his prominent Adam’s apple that reminded me of Abe Lincoln’s. And how, after school, he coerced me down into a different kind of quarry—the mouth of the cave that led to my childhood insomnia and fear of the dark, my lifelong headlamping through the hypos.
Though it frightened me a little, Jules Amis’s accent also reminded me of Corporal LeBeau, the French resistance operative from Hogan’s Heroes—the TV show always on when Clint forced me into underground labor. LeBeau was claustrophobic, but also the smallest of Hogan’s men, so he was often enlisted to hide in tiny, enclosed spaces: the dumbwaiter, the safe in Klink’s office, various tight shafts and crawl spaces.
He was often alone in the dark, sacrificing for the resistance.
Metamorphic rocks are rocks which have been changed. The changes usually bring about a new crystalline structure, the formation of new minerals, and sometimes a coarsening of texture.
—From Rocks and Minerals,
A Golden Nature Guide
It rained on that drive after I woke my father up from his nap. He whistled as always while driving, steering with his knee over gravel and brick-red mud puddles. I don’t remember where we went, exactly, but I want to believe I asked him if we could visit Jules Amis again, to watch quietly as he gifted quarried marble with imperfect human form.
JUSTIN HOCKING is the author of The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld: A Memoir, which won the Oregon Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award for Nonfiction. He served as the Executive Director of the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC) from 2006–2014 and is a recipient of the Willamette Writers Humanitarian Award for his work in writing, publishing, and literary outreach. He teaches creative writing in the MFA and BFA Programs at Portland State University.
