Realizing Bakunin's assertion that destruction is also creation, the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens achieved a level of devastation that displaced an entire region, dissolving landmarks and turning day to night. The primary feature of the initial pulverizing eruption was a haunting column of ash railing into the sky, forming what geologist Catherine Hickson has poetically termed a "stone wind." This enormous plume, a convulsively beautiful and dangerous giant, appeared motionless yet continually growing like a consuming mass, both moving yet also in its repose.

I have memories of finding in our yard fragile, hand-sized rocks coved with gas holes that my parents told me were from the volcano. Although they may have been from the eruption, my youthful assumption that these rocks came directly from the column of ash to my yard seems highly unlikely. In spite of the truth, those rocks came to metonymically symbolize for me the eruption and its aftermath. In school years later I created a rather unimpressive sculpture, a dull block of clay covered with holes, of which the psychological implications are today overwhelmingly obvious.

Perched along the Columbia River a tall, eroded rock, due to its phallic shape, is said to have originally been given the crude yet poignant label Cock Rock. Yet, today's repressive hegemony, entirely at odds with Eros, has given this visual metaphor the sterile designation Rooster Rock, a semantic escape from the rock's erotic mimicry.*

When ordinary things become sexually extraordinary the word "revelation" could be applied in its most visceral sense. Akin to Breton, what draws me out in regards to vision "is that, as far as the eye can see, it recreates desire." Our internal selves are continuously speaking to us, and our words travel back and forth through a network of corridors, as if Ariadne's thread was being used for a telegraph wire. But these corridors swell and contract, transforming and morphing to keep our desires from ever reaching us.

With its towering stiffness this basalt pillar from Baudelaire's forest of symbols, a principal illustration of the veiled-erotic, exists to help us "get along in the labyrinth."





*In Chinook, a jargon native to the region, the word "wootlat" can literally mean erect phallus, basalt column, or pestle. This rock is often cited as an example of a wootlat.