observable erosion

Most erosion is not observable except from a "god's eye" view, that is, over great spans of time. through hindsight and theorizing and carbon dating and tree rings and layers of sediment. 

maybe we can think of chalking as adding a "layer" to the landscape, something three-dimensional to the topography. and though it is temporary, all landscape is temporarily formed when looked at through the lens of a hundred thousand years (give or take). 

I was surprised, when we chalked Spaights Plaza last Sunday, how quickly our chalkings eroded. They eroded, from what I can tell, in two distinct ways. One being physical, the other figurative.

Physical erosion: it rained a little on Monday, but the chalk still looked vivid when classes started, footsteps probably being the greatest cause of erosion on that day. By Tuesday, all chalking was pretty much gone, most likely due to rain and melting snow draining across the small plaza like small rivers. (Insert Images here)

    

Figurative erosion: in some ways, this is not erosion at all, but instead "revision." Early on Monday, before 8am, we found that students had added to, crossed out, and revised almost all of our chalked messages using anti-feminist, pro-patriarchal rhetoric. This could be read as erosion, because not even 24 hours after we'd written our chalked texts, the messages had been altered, distorted, and revised to promote antithetical politics. Evidence of our original messages lay beneath like layers of chalky sediment, but our original feminist intention had been eroded into one of argumentation and polarized debate. Only a quote from Keith Gilyard on dominant discourse was left unaltered by the sweeping change that had come in mysteriously. Sadly, much of campus was only able to see these altered messages. (insert images here)

  

  

On one hand, isn't this what we wanted? To spark some sort of "dialogue," "conversation," or "interaction" with the readers of our chalked messages? I'm sure we'd all imagined something more complicated that these polarizing words. Something, then, in the student "body" seems to be lurking just below the surface, eager for an opportunity for expression. All students seem to feel silenced politically - or someone was just drunk off of scripture after bible study Sunday night. It's hard to tell. There were no feminist supporters writing as a third voice to our messages or to the messages scrawled on top of ours, and this is perhaps the most disappointing aspect to the whole thing.