“In a suburb of Uxmal, the Great Ice Cap of Gondwanaland was constructed according to a map-outline on page 459 of Marshall Kay’s and Edwin H. Colbert’s Stratigraphy and Life History. It was an ‘earthmap’ made of white limestone. A bit of the Carboniferous period is now installed near Uxmal. That great age of calcium carbonate seemed a fitting offering for a land so rich in limestone. Reconstructing a landmass that existed 350 to 305 million years ago on a terrain once controlled by sundry Mayan gods caused a collision in time that left one with a sense of the timeless. Timelessness is found in the lapsed moments of perception, in the common pause that breaks apart into a sandstorm of pauses. The malady of wanting to ‘make’ is unmade, and the malady of wanting to be “able” is disabled. Gondwanaland is a kind of memory, yet it is not a memory, it is but an incognito land mass that has been unthought about and turned into a Map of Impasse. You cannot visit Gondwanaland, but you can visit a ‘map’ of it.”
R. Smithson (writing about his Second Mirror Displacement)
