EXCERPT This field trip came about as something of an accident: It was, if I’m not mistaken, around five hundred million years ago when the material that would become Earth, having detached itself from the sun, underwent something of a crisis, producing the differentiated planet we know and love, forming the hard crust upon which all of our diverse activities unfold, and which protects us from the inner fire. This moment is recognized by the discipline of geotraumatics as a primal scene whose repressed memories can be divined from the enigmatic yet evidently pained planetary countenance. All of the processes described by geology can be traced either to the influence of the sun—the climatic processes that alternately irritate and sooth the surface of the earth, or that of its repressed runt sibling—the inner sun, the molten core of the earth, trapped beneath yet constantly liable to resurface rudely and protest against its entrapment—only to solidify and crust over once again; the plutonic, or deep earth, processes.…