by Rod Mengham
7 ‘The Exploration of Grimspound: First Report of the Dartmoor Exploration Committee’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature, and Art Vol.XXVI (Plymouth: William Brendon and Son, 1894), p.102.
8 Ibid, p.109.
9 Ibid, p.105.
10 Ibid, p.119.
11 Ibid, p.102.
12 Ibid, pp.114–15.
13 Robert Burnard, ‘Exploration of the Hut Circles in Broadun Ring and Broadun’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art,Vol.XXVI, (Plymouth: William Brendon and Son, 1894), p.187.
14 Maxwell Adams, ‘Proceedings at the Fifty-Second Annual Meeting held at Buckfastleigh, 22–25 July, 2013’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature, and Art’, Vol. XLV (Plymouth: William Brendon and Son, 1913), p.36.
15 Ibid, p.38.
4
the new leaf climbs the air
the bee tickles the plant
and the wolf has suckled its young
the swallows gather
to make their magic
and lose the memory
of the dark hours
we cook with the stones
taken from the river
where beavers destroyed the net
and brought bad luck
*
now the clan is inside the self
like the tooth of a boar
but father drives away the
uncle with broken leg-bone
and evil mouth the one
who yawns and groans
when his thigh wound swells
who sucks on the necks of the weak
dragging the child towards the fire
to make his guts jump
pain is wedged in his soul
he is not the owner of his revenge
*
father feels the flash in the loins
and the spurt of denial
he is still the best hunter
bowstring at his throat
he can see the eyelash of marten quiver
he creeps like a spy to chop off the tail
of a snake heavy with young
*
the embryo becomes visible
then is pushed away
and set free to cover
and bind with a pelt
the belly now loose as dust
the first strong lock of hair
is given with outstretched hand
and burned with a feather
the father spends these nights in the open
he is watching all the dead stars
being swept out of heaven
*
I could hardly breathe watching
the mountain deer stand still
even the sparrows were quiet
for a smell we could not recognise
a dove burning in the air
*
there is light on the horizon
like a dorsal fin
but the daybreak is weak
now ashes fall like snow
from the limits of the world
and the rain seethes
where it touches the earth
*
we stumble upon the smell of smoke
the sharp reek of sacrifice
men pile up charcoal in the pit
and fashion prayers
to peel the shadow from the sun
to free the mist from the moon
they smear the marrow
on breast and chin
elbow bent and ready
to rake the flesh
*
there is a great flapping of wings
in the enclosure
the crows have grasped a kid
and a jackal waits by the big tree
its belly stiff with hunger
father must shoulder the goat
and take it to the hollow bank
where the women carve the chalk
and bend the clay
I must keep watch on the foal
*
father is shaking mad
he is heavy with care
his brother’s stealth was like
a stab in the palm of the hand
a blow on the back of the neck
the loss kneads his heart
they were born from the same womb
they set out on the same path
now he must follow the tracks
into the lowlands
knowing they are too faint
*
a rider has come
for many days on horseback
he dismounts with a heavy stagger
he speaks of a deep gulf
a gorge with a river far below
a tiny moving glitter
everywhere else there is drought
we have made our circle of wall
and a pitfall for antelopes
we have imprisoned the stream
*
my sister gathers pot-herb and sorrel
while I stoop and muck out the stalls
make perches for house-birds
*
the rider sleeps in the store-house
his horse is isabel-yellow
in the middle of the night
I dream of his long staff
resting on the flesh of his thigh
when he asks me a riddle
I search for the right answer
but he rolls aside to my sister
I see his hand on the groove of her back
I stretch and scrape at the thatch
to let in more light
but his hand moves on to a new place
where the skin is as smooth as butter
*
sister says there is a new light in heaven
to gird around the waist of the earth
but when I looked out from under the dripstone
through the drizzle
I saw only a steep bank of cloud
running away
and the last embers of the sun
blaze up
*
father went out to check the snares
in the evening glow
said he had seen a stranger beckoning
but when he went near
it looked like the face
had been gnawed away
it made him giddy
it made him sink down
as if on the edge of an abyss
he could not sleep
until break of day
in case it was the ancestor
the spinner of dreams
come to make an end of him
*
I put on my kerchief
step into the deep snow
and poke the ground
in search of the year-old sheep
the one whose navel-string
I had to bite
I wear a dogskin pouch on my back
hands free to clamber
and make my way
to the standpoint on the hill
but someone or something is there on the crag
quite still
as if ready to spring away
it makes me think of my uncle
some say a great bird
once seized his ankle
and cut the leg-root
for bearing tales
others say it was not a bird
but a spirit
a great one
the lord of a distant time
when the land was covered in waves
with nowhere under the vault of the sky
for birds to settle
and nowhere for swimmers to rise to the shore
until the great ones
put the world in order
leaving a footprint
on the shore
that is now the great rock-sanctuary upstream
where birds do settle and remain
&
nbsp; leaving a lure
in the waves
a feather from the quiver
of the fisher-god
who has the right to lure a bride
into the sea
and put his arm around her
or draw her into the great mire
to be sucked in and swallowed
*
there is a saying
that those without land
are left with nothing but the scabs on their wounds
it is silent over the hill
where everyone has gone
first there was fever and a strange lightness
then a swelling jaw
and a tetter all over the body
then every living thing died out
sometimes we heard them wail
when the wind was in the east
*
in the pit was one of twins
on a pointed stake
father ran out with a knobbed club
to tear his brother asunder
he found him with the lamb tied to a tree
and a boast in his windpipe
in the palm of his hand
a lock of human hair
and the smell of wood-tar
*
father says we must draw lots for the gods
to let them come
on this side of the world
he says I have the gift
I know how to draw lines
on the hearth stone
and scour the bowl for sacrifice
I have learned the smell of the wild boar
and the whirl of the dance
I can enter the pool where the fish writhe
without their knowing
I have seen the four-horned deer
proud on the hill’s crest
in the dusk before dawn
I know how to dig out a broken thorn
to release the pain
and I have learned the words of the songs
*
father sent a messenger a boy
light of weight over the mire
too late a host of warriors came
over the hill
on they ran like a wave of the sea
drowning everything
and with them the dogs of war
father was felled at the bend of the river
over the boom for the fishing grounds
his back was mauled his body was in shreds
*
I am dressing myself to be given away
to a man I do not know
we will be tied together with a strip of hide
we will eat a stupid round flat cake
we will tell lies to each other and embrace
and so I am being born again but I remember
everything that remains behind
*
now the clan is not even a rumour
now our tongue has shrivelled up
no one will hear our fame
our words are no more than wax in the ear
*
they say a great bird is coming
to soar over the rim of the earth
and cool the ground with its wings
even the dawn-caller will forget to awaken
*
it is not too far off
the outermost time
when the world itself is thrown from a sling
when the Last of the Singers is gone
A Note on Grimspound
WE DO NOT KNOW what language was spoken in Grimspound at the time of its use or occupation. As an experiment in historical back-projection, all the poems in the fourth section of the text are derived from the Nostratic Dictionary (2008) compiled by the palaeolinguist Aharon Dolgopolsky. Nostratic is a hypothetical macro-family of languages that reconstructs the common origins of the known major language families of Eurasia: Indo-European, Semitic, Altaic, Kartvelian and Dravidian. In other words, it is a total fiction; but its basis in comparative philology gives it a plausibility hard to resist. And I have not resisted, which means that all the poems in the fourth section are based entirely on concepts and percepts found in the Nostratic Dictionary. The crucial factors in the cultural assemblage of Nostratic are judged to have been microlith technology, the use of the bow and arrow, and the domestication of the dog.
Inhabiting Art
Preface
INHABITING ART is a mode of being we all experience all of the time, without always remembering how the conditions we live in have been fashioned by cultural behaviour sometimes customary sometimes exceptional, sometimes unconscious sometimes intentional but always expressive of a habitus, a sense of being acquired in the company of others, in the everyday activities of a group whose shared ways of perceiving the world are the very ground of the individual vision, individual sensibility.
In this book, habitus is often tied to habitat, familiar territory seen in relation to familiar ways of making it work. Although I have a personal interest in natural history, these essays are about cultural history in relation to landscape and cityscape, cultural history viewed episodically or in the form of a palimpsest, where the present state of the habitat both reveals and conceals its own prehistory, the record of its own formation and transformations.
I am interested in artefacts that could only ever be the products of one place and one time, but equally I am fascinated by their ability to speak to us in our own languages of recognition and evaluation. They inhabit us when we extend to them the curiosity required to follow their rhythm, to home in on their pitch and tone of voice, and when our trust in them is sufficient to be able to inhabit the mysterious patterns they have imprinted on our imaginations. Some of these essays sound very knowing, but their own most continuous pattern is an insistence on what we don’t know, whether the artefact in question is a simple utensil, a sophisticated oil painting, a neighbourhood, or a tract of forest.
The genre of the essay could be said to resemble a habitus in its own right, with an original habitat in the shape of Montaigne’s tower, although this scene of writing was as much the construction of Montaigne’s own imagination as of the skills handed down to his masons and carpenters; and this punctuating moment in cultural history is one pretext, or excuse, why these essays are also concerned with the play of the mind in every sense that the phrase can make room for.
Knife
It has a broad axe shape, but is sliver-thin. Even at the blunt end, the ochre-coloured flint, smoothed and polished, is a slim-line product. It looks like a small spatula, and would be something of a puzzle to archaeology, but speculation is pointless, rendered futile at a touch. The obliging object tells the hand exactly where it wants to go.
As soon as I picked it up, the long haft made itself at home, slung between first finger and thumb on the elastic webbing of skin. The first fingerpad went straight to the back of the blade. After three thousand years of dumb neglect, the instrument was attuned, responsive, prompt to its ancient cue.
The leading edge is minutely pecked. Broken small craters, overlapping scoops, were quickly opened up in the glassy stone by the same degree of force aimed repeatedly, dozens of times, at the same hard margin of a few fingers’ breadth.
The life-knowledge of the flint-knapper dwells in the sparing of exertion at the very point of landing a blow. The effects of this knowledge, the depth and shape of indentations in the stone, are accordingly generic if not uniform. An even more precise and unthinking calculation is needed for end-on strokes that split the individual flint.
At some point the maker, under the spell of making, no longer sees the use to which the blade is put, seeing instead the bloom of a new shape begin to emerge from the flint’s uncertain depths. Sometimes this shape is only poorly divined, or glimpsed and avoided; sometimes it is nursed into life, by craftsmen who watch for the ideal form of knife-being, especially if this is a votive blade, intended for ritual deposit. Best of all is when the artist, setting his sights on perfect function, sees it rise above the hor
izon at the same point as beauty of form.
This tool for cutting was neither deposited nor lost. I think it was left beneath the roots of a broad oak with a clutter of flints, worked but unfinished, until the maker should return, and return soon. There it lay until the sea covered all the oaks whose stumps are now below the tides at Holme-next-the-Sea.
Lying there through storms that uncovered the massive inverted bole of roots at the centre of Seahenge, close by, it found another hand to belabour, to switch on, to gear up, when just enough sand had been swished aside for its pale surface to draw the eye.
It may never have been used, but was made for a hand that used others like it, and it would always transmit the same feeling for action, the same possible uses for butchery: severing, slicing, scraping. It was the lever between inner and outer worlds, it showed that the airs and waters, rocks and earth, moving and combining and resisting one another, obeying the spirits that ruled them, had their equivalent workings, their times of calm and upheaval, under the skin; in the wallowing lungs, the weeping flesh, the flowing heart, and in all the symmetries of bones and muscles, the asymmetries of lower organs, the random belt of the guts. It brought the cross-sections of life within grasp. Behind it, the physician’s trial and error, the surgeon’s initiative; the whole breathing, faltering body of science.