Author Topic: The Stone  (Read 367 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

night_train

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
The Stone
« on: October 13, 2018, 05:40:10 pm »


The Stone.  It is not a long read, but man, is it a challenging one.  It is esoteric, full of symbolism, and weaves unpredictably in and out of dreams, visions, and alternate realities.  We are never really sure where the narrator is at any point in the story.  Nevertheless, I feel there is some meaning to be found in this labyrinth of a book.  We owe it to Hardy to at least attempt a discussion of it.     

I re-read the book recently, and I took notes along the way hoping to capture a summary of each chapter while at the same time, highlighting relevant details.  The only problem is, each chapter is full of potentially relevant details.  My “summaries” ended up being ridiculously long which made the whole endeavor rather pointless.  The one thing it did, however, was cause me to read the story more carefully than I otherwise would have.  I managed to catch certain details that I missed the first time around.

Someone suggested analyzing this chapter-by-chapter, but that will likely not get us very far.  With each new chapter brings a new revelation that alters our perception of what transpired before.  We would likely struggle trying to understand each part in sequence.  I recommend focusing on the characters and piecing the fragments of their stories together into a coherent whole.

I know this board is not very active, and a new Residents album just came out, so this thread might just end up being me rambling alone in a pathetic attempt to make sense of the whole thing.  If you have any insights, please share them. 

Quote
"I found that there was nothing remarkable about it at all. It looked like any old parchment book with decorative initials, it seemed quite ordinary to me. I could not understand how it could ever have affected me as supernatural. It was written in Hebrew and therefore, completely incomprehensible to me." - Chapter 11, The Stone

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter


night_train

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
Re: The Stone
« Reply #1 on: October 14, 2018, 01:19:54 am »
The Stone is about a spiritual journey.  That much is clear.  Many of the characters that Charles Bobuck encounters seem to have religious significance: They are compared to angels, or the Buddha, or God, or a monk, etc., and they appear to act as spiritual guides for Charles.  Maybe it is no surprise that many characters are doctors (e.g. Dr. Hill, Dr. Coleman, Dr. Hulbert, Dr. Wasser, Dr. Savioli), and that Charles (presumably) dies in the end.  If this whole opus is simply Hardy Fox's way of retiring his Charles Bobuck persona and leaving his past behind, then he sure put a tremendous amount of effort into it.  There is a lot of theology here.   

Where to begin?  At one point in the story, The Book of Ibbur is introduced.  I think "Ibbur" provides the biggest hint as to what the whole story is about.  According to Wikipedia, Ibbur is "one of the transmigration forms of the soul and . . . is the most positive form of possession, and the most complicated. It happens when a righteous soul decides to occupy a living person's body for a time, and joins, or spiritually 'impregnates' the existing soul . . . to complete an important task."  With this definition in mind, the righteous soul that occupies Charles' body is likely the ghost described in Chapters 1 and 2:

Quote
"From nowhere, a naked man appeared at his side and purposely sat down on top of Charles head until the results appeared more like a centaur than any human ever seen.  At one point the mans **** perfectly aligned with Charles' nose.  The resulting image was quite funny though no one was around to appreciate it but Jesus hanging there on the altar.  Then he stretched out, slowly being absorbed into the sleeping human, until all that was left was a sleeping Bobuck." - Chapter 2, The Stone
       

Notice that the moment the ghost enters Charles' body, he hears Dr. Hill's voice.  The narrative then immediately flips from 3rd person to 1st person.  Here we can get an idea of how the plot is structured.  The "Father Peter" reality is Charles Bobuck's external world (which may not necessarily be the real external world), while everything else, described in the 1st person, is Charles Bobuck's inner world.  The spiritual journey begins when the ghost enters Charles, and speaking as Dr. Hill, guides Charles to his ultimate purpose.

And what is that purpose?  Well, the book is titled "The Stone."  Compare the following two quotes:

“Congratulations, your rock is a piece of liver.” - Charles Bobuck in the first chapter
vs.
"Finally, the stone that was not a piece of liver.  The stone was not a piece of liver, it never had been." -Charles Bobuck in the last chapter

The purpose is to see the stone as a stone, and not as a piece of liver.  This alludes to the Buddhist parable Charles recalls in Chapter 3:

Quote
"I had been reading about the life of the Buddha before I went to bed, and one passage kept coming back to me in a thousand variations, going back to the beginning again and again:
 
A crow flew to a stone which looked like a piece of liver, thinking perhaps it had found something good to eat. But when the crow discovered that it was a stone and not a piece of liver, it flew away to seek food elsewhere.

Like the crow that left the stone, so do we abandon Siddhartha Gautama, the ascetic, because we have lost our appreciation of his simplicity.
" - Chapter 3, The Stone

The stone represents the ascetic embrace of simplicity in life (and the rejection of life's distractions).  Here is Charles' experience as he falls from a tall building:

Quote
"I was falling. And the stone, loosened by my hand was falling too.  We fell together and the stone, near my face, was the only thing in focus.  Somehow it made sense that the world would be a blur other than the stone, the stone that looked like a piece of liver." - Chapter 14, The Stone
   
It is not easy to get distracted when you are about to fall headfirst into the ground. 

night_train

  • Newbie
  • *
  • Posts: 3
    • View Profile
Re: The Stone
« Reply #2 on: October 16, 2018, 12:49:48 am »
I'm convinced that if we understood the inspiration and source material to The Stone, then all characters in the story would fall perfectly into place like puzzle pieces.  Unfortunately, I don't think that is ever going to happen.  Not enough people are going to read the book to figure it all out, and only Hardy will know what it really means.  I suppose there is a chance that he made it illogical and nonsensical on a literal level just to make it more dreamlike, but I doubt it. 

Anyway, time to speculate again...

Dr. Hill
In my last post, I suggested that the church ghost is the Ibbur that merges with Charles and then speaks to him as Dr. Hill.  If there is any character in the story that acts as the voice of God, it would be Dr. Hill.  He appears as a benevolent, omniscient being that steers Charles towards self-actualization ("I know everything. I have known for a long time. Do not worry, and do not fear.").  He has significant control over Charles, but guides him rather than coerces him.  In Chapter 9, Mary mentions that many of the tenants in the building "are his collection of oddities."  He looks after them all. 

One of my favorite passages in the book is from Charles' dream in Chapter 3:
Quote
The image of the stone that looked like a piece of liver multiplied in my mind to become a dried-up riverbed.

I am walking along, picking up smooth pebbles, bluish-grey ones with specks of glittering dust. I rack my brains, but I still have no idea what to do with them. Then I find black ones with patches of sulfurous yellow, like the petrified attempts of a child to form crude, blotched salamanders.

I want to throw these pebbles, far away from me, but they keep falling out of my hand, and I cannot force them from my sight.

All the stones that ever played a role in my life push up out of the earth around me.

Some are struggling clumsily to work their way up through the sand to the light, like huge, slate-colored crabs when the tide comes in, as if they were doing their utmost to catch my eye, to tell me things of infinite importance. Others, exhausted, fall back weakly into their holes and abandon all hope of ever being able to deliver their message. - Chapter 3, The Stone

Charles sees the one, true stone as a multitude of stones of different shapes and colors that beckon to Charles in different ways.  Perhaps they are the voices, inclinations, feelings that have intruded his mind.  He then hears a voice, presumably Dr. Hill's, telling him to remember the stone that looks like a piece of liver.  He guides Charles onto the right path, despite his subject's resistance.  He even stops Charles from committing a murder later in the story.  In Chapter 7, Dr. Hill hands Charles a Rubik's Cube and tells him. "When you feel distress, look at this cube and remember that as complicated and random as it seems, there is a pathway to order.”

Portraying God as a man of science who does not believe in the supernatural ("Introducing magic or gods into explanations works against any understanding.") is a very Hardy approach to the idea.  Dr. Hill tells Charles that Charles has a power of creation that some cultures would consider god-like.  We can see that, rather than ask for subservience, Dr. Hill empowers Charles.  Charles feels rejuvenated and clear-headed after his encounter with the doctor, and later speculates that Dr. Hill might just be in his imagination.  This reinforces the notion that Charles' journey is an inner journey.  He finds God within himself.

moleshow

  • Czar of Nerdy and Useless Information
  • Administrator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 220
  • Debatably Helpful
  • Location: Kay See Ehm Oh
    • View Profile
Re: The Stone
« Reply #3 on: October 19, 2018, 03:04:24 pm »
yknow? in retrospect, it became quite clear to me that i actually have and had no idea what exactly was going on in The Stone- it seemed kind of like a pseudo-religious experience, being enforced upon a baffled Bobuck who was falling in and out of assorted identities to an extent almost comparable to slapstick.

you seem like you might have the right idea, though.
"All our lives we love illusion, neatly caught between confusion and the need to know we are alive."