nicholas b jacobsen
  • home
  • Las Vegas Piece
    • Las Vegas Piece: The Art >
      • Pioneering Terra Nulliparous
      • Manifest Doomsday
      • “Thus while in plain sight, they remained invisible”
    • Las Vegas Piece: The Essay >
      • Modern Desert Markings
      • Las Vegas Mormon Fort
      • Mormon Mountains Wilderness
      • Mormon Well
      • The End
  • Unsettling Mormonism
  • from
  • to be a rock
  • about
    • more >
      • publications & posters >
        • glossary of unsettling origins >
          • answers / uncertainty
          • appropriate / appropriate
          • arrangement
          • baby and the bathwater
          • body
          • Book of Mormon, the
          • care
          • change
          • the Church
          • clinging
          • concrete
          • decolonization
          • Deseret
          • ebb / flow
          • embodied / embedded
          • extermination / excommunication
          • fake rocks / real rocks
          • fluid
          • Great Basin
          • groudlessness
          • home
          • human exceptionalism
          • ignor(e/ance)
          • inside / outside
          • kin(d)
          • Lamanites
          • land
          • Latter-days
          • magic / ritual
          • map
          • mountain / valley
          • migration
          • mine / mine
          • myth
          • noninnocence / risk
          • opening / closing
          • origins / foundations
          • path
          • phantom pains
          • problematic
          • Red (Cliffs National Conservation Area)
          • reify
          • remember / memory / memorial
          • rocks / stones
          • southwestern Utah
          • spiritual experience
          • stable / settled
          • there / their
          • this land
          • trauma
          • Ut(ah/opia)
          • under / inner
          • "what is"
          • white out / white supremacy
        • I' M P U R E (words)
      • our bodies as/of water
      • sculpture
      • watching the ground
      • sketches
      • pots are rocks >
        • about the clay
        • processing clay
        • pottery >
          • mugs, plates, & bowls
          • planters, baskets, & vases
          • pet bowls
          • ceramics archive
concrete
As an adjective, this word is an antonym for 'abstract'. It describes a thing that "exist[s] in a material or physical form." Later, the word was applied to a material that is made by mixing broken stone, sand, cement, and water.
Concrete also shares some characteristics with settler-colonists--it has been displaced from the lands it evolved with/in, its material make-up is a conglomeration of different places, and its presence is a result and perpetuation of industrial imperialist capitalism.
In to be (with) a rock, I talk with a piece of concrete about these issues. I ask the concrete if it remembers where it came from, if it feels displaced and lost after being unearthed from its originary mountain and from the street it helped form. I ask if it has found some kind of transcendence in experiencing such rapid change. I learned from the concrete that there are some things we can only learn by forgetting other things. Like the prodigal son, one can only know the joys of coming home after one knows the sorrows of leaving home. Similarly, I hope we are learning things in this time when many of us have forgotten our connections to land that we wouldn't learn without feeling disconnected.

see also: change, decolonization, ebb / flow, fake rocks / real rocks, fluid, home, inside / outside, kin(d), land, Latter-days, mountain / valley, mine / mine, origins / foundations, phantom pains, reify, remember / memory / memorial, rocks / stones, southwestern Utah, spiritual experience, stable / settled, there / their, under / inner, "what is"

<---   --->
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • home
  • Las Vegas Piece
    • Las Vegas Piece: The Art >
      • Pioneering Terra Nulliparous
      • Manifest Doomsday
      • “Thus while in plain sight, they remained invisible”
    • Las Vegas Piece: The Essay >
      • Modern Desert Markings
      • Las Vegas Mormon Fort
      • Mormon Mountains Wilderness
      • Mormon Well
      • The End
  • Unsettling Mormonism
  • from
  • to be a rock
  • about
    • more >
      • publications & posters >
        • glossary of unsettling origins >
          • answers / uncertainty
          • appropriate / appropriate
          • arrangement
          • baby and the bathwater
          • body
          • Book of Mormon, the
          • care
          • change
          • the Church
          • clinging
          • concrete
          • decolonization
          • Deseret
          • ebb / flow
          • embodied / embedded
          • extermination / excommunication
          • fake rocks / real rocks
          • fluid
          • Great Basin
          • groudlessness
          • home
          • human exceptionalism
          • ignor(e/ance)
          • inside / outside
          • kin(d)
          • Lamanites
          • land
          • Latter-days
          • magic / ritual
          • map
          • mountain / valley
          • migration
          • mine / mine
          • myth
          • noninnocence / risk
          • opening / closing
          • origins / foundations
          • path
          • phantom pains
          • problematic
          • Red (Cliffs National Conservation Area)
          • reify
          • remember / memory / memorial
          • rocks / stones
          • southwestern Utah
          • spiritual experience
          • stable / settled
          • there / their
          • this land
          • trauma
          • Ut(ah/opia)
          • under / inner
          • "what is"
          • white out / white supremacy
        • I' M P U R E (words)
      • our bodies as/of water
      • sculpture
      • watching the ground
      • sketches
      • pots are rocks >
        • about the clay
        • processing clay
        • pottery >
          • mugs, plates, & bowls
          • planters, baskets, & vases
          • pet bowls
          • ceramics archive