FIGURATIONS, the “faces in the rocks” of my book’s title, are sometimes dismissed as “mere pareidolia”—the sighting of recognizable figures in natural formations. But to raise pareidolia above novelty to the level of fine art we can draw upon the rich Surrealist tradition: if we go beyond commonplace figures, which are mostly outlines (of faces, animals, and body parts) we can open ourselves to the inventory of images buried in our unconscious—frightening, forgotten, salacious, overwrought, scientific—all of which are enhanced by their simultaneous and undeniable identity as rocks or ice, whose detailed surfaces guarantee this fact. And their diversity and bizarrerie exceed the limits of our imagination. This is the gift of the apparent “chaos” of the natural environment.