Nature’s sculptures

Orgues d'Ille-sur-Tet, in the Pyrenees

Art and nature. They’re opposites, aren’t they? 

That’s a statement that often takes a more specific form, as in the debate over nature versus nurture. To me, trying to present nurture and nature as simply antithetical alternatives is all wrong. You’re interested in knowing how a personality is formed? Well, I’m certain that it’s nurture that shapes and moulds it. But it works on something that was already there, something with which we were born, and that has to be nature.

In other words, we inherit some of the things that make us what we are. And then those things get moulded by our parents, our teachers, our peer group until we get turned, for better or for worse, into the adults we become.

Still, that wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about here. In this post, I’m concerned about nature producing art. That’s art in the strict sense, the creation of objects that inspire joy or awe or simply astonishment. Normally, they’re human creations, which is why we tend to oppose art and nature. So it was a remarkable experience to be in a place where nature had built an extraordinary work of art.

Danielle and I spent a few days in France a week ago. She’s French and was missing her country, though Southwest France, the nearest bit to where we live in Northeast Spain, is about as far as you can get while staying in France, from her homeland in Alsace, way to the East, on the border with Germany and Switzerland.

As for me, well, I’m French too, though only thanks to marriage to her. My roots lie deep in England, disappointed though I am at the mess England is making of itself, hanging on to a corrupt government and turning its back on its neighbours by choosing Brexit. But, English or not, going to France was a big deal for me too, since it was the first time I’d crossed an international border for nearly three years: the end of a career which had involved this stone doing a lot rolling, left me more than happy to gather moss for a while.

The first thing I liked about going to France was being in a place where I could speak the language, foreign though it remains to me, with a lot more ease than I can speak Spanish. French is undoubtedly my second language and there’s a tremendous sense of ease in speaking it instead of constantly having to wonder what the next word should be or, worse, even after having found the right word, which of a plethora of possible forms it should take (Spanish verbs! What a pain. And to think that 12-year olds in Spain can handle them…)

So there we were in Southwest France. Which meant near the Pyrenees. It was lovely to see the peaks in the distance, still with some snow clinging to the tops. Not like the Alps, of course, since they’re nothing like as high, but with a real snow covering nonetheless.

Orgues d'Ille-sur-Tet,
with Pyrenean summer snow in the background

Danielle had discovered that there was a place called ‘les orgues d’Ille-sur-Tet’, ‘the organs of Ille on the Tet’, the Tet being the river that flows through the fine town of Perpignan. We decided to drive up there to take a look.

Wow. What a place. Millions of years ago the whole of it had been under water. At that time, sand had piled up at the bottom and then got compacted. I’m no geologist, but from what I’ve gleaned, if the process goes for long enough, what you get at the end is a sandstone tough enough to be used as a building material.

Well, these formations didn’t get long enough. In a relatively short time – in geological terms, which means a hell of a long time for us, like longer than it feels when you're waiting for a bus, or longer even than it feels waiting for the Trump presidency to end – the sea level in the Mediterranean fell and various upheavals left this area quite literally high and dry.

Well, high all the time, up in the Pyrenees. Dry only in good weather. And, when it comes to the art, it’s the rainy weather than matters.

Rain simply washes away the relatively uncompacted, and certainly uncemented, grains in these sand deposits. But less so in places where there happens to be an area of harder stone at the top. That protects the sand underneath, while everything around it gets washed away, leaving tall columns of sand with a bit of a cap on top (I don’t think ‘cap’ is the technical term used by geologists).

Just rain erosion on compacted sand 
– and yet so much more too...

Hence the naming of the places as ‘orgues’, from the slightly organ-pipe-like shapes of the structures. Though the people who run the site do admit that the word is usually only used in French for structures, like the Giant’s causeway, made of basalt.

The Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland

But let’s leave the science (what little I have of it) to one side. The striking aspect of the place is its sheer beauty. Delicate carving of extraordinary shapes. As though carried out by a fine sculptor. Someone like Giacometti, perhaps.

Sculpture by Giacometti

It left me feeling that setting art up against nature was a bit of a false dichotomy. After all, this wasn’t art imitating nature. It was nature making art, wasn’t it?

Sculpture by Nature