I knew more about Stonehenge now than when I’d told Rose’s friend Connie about Merlin; more than when Jenny (not here tonight) giggled at the bank clerk; and more even than when I told Tessa (tonight distinctly here) that a cremation barrow nearby yielded blue beads from Egypt, 1400 B.C.
The Indian from Kansas City came through the circle across our advancing path from right to left—as if heading for the trilothon through which one aligns with midwinter moonset—and as he grinned, I asked what he thought of the place, and he and his Hollywood cheekbones were off camera when he said: I wish my brother could see it!
Coming along the Altar Stone, I had for a moment no sight of the procession and Dagger’s must have been through the 29–30 portal to the left of the one into whose alignment with the distant Heel Stone we now bent, for we were around the Altar Stone, it was behind us now, and stretching behind it through the great southwest trilothon was the alignment of midwinter sunset. And ahead—though I had to stay next to Dagger to keep our personal parallax from blocking my view—the procession we were shooting had come from the wide avenue and was passing the probably misnamed Slaughter Stone, and as we moved toward our trilothon picking up laughter, shouts, and the flat dry voice of the procession, its torches filled our frame ahead at a rate not fast enough to match our rate of nearer approach so there was more rather than less of the night sky in our portal as we came up to it and then went through, camera first, mike second.
In the glimmering dark just where the circle’s outer circumference bent out of sight, a man was taking pictures with what looked like a very large double-lens reflex except he held it up in front of his eye.
We’d stopped moving here ten feet outside the circle. Into the mike I told Dagger’s man from the Ministry of Monuments in whose charge we were that these were the New Druids. They were willing to stage an artificial rite to give themselves some exposure, and by my own Druid Mr. Andsworth these were neither sanctioned nor dismissed.
The bank clerk from Salisbury who had given me all the facts at the Altar Stone months ago, had got into the act too. He knew the man from the Ministry, and he interrupted to ask Dagger if this was in color. Dagger said no but he wished we were because black and white wasn’t commercial any more.
The man from the Ministry was reciting to my mike the numbers of tourists for this year and last year and the year before that, but Dagger I am certain had focused past the man’s shoulder to pick up Nash.
Nash was rubbing an eye with his ring hand and I recalled the silver, orange, and ruby rings from the Softball Game. Nash was watching the procession approach but he must have felt Dagger and turned at the camera and stared. Elizabeth of the Marvelous Country House greeted Dagger and shook hands, and said to me, Still in England?
Round the circle and frame of another portal I saw Tessa weightless in her open raincoat against a huge standing stone; she tried to pull a man apparently in our direction, pointed to us, then relented; I couldn’t see the face, and when I mentioned him, Dagger laughed loudly and said he’d already gotten him. Nash had moved off. The procession was close. I said, We back away into the circle at their speed. Dagger said, Right.
I glanced behind through the portal we’d used once and would now use again and back at the Altar Stone with the largest hand-hewn prehistoric stone in the country—the lone standing part of the central trilothon—rearing up behind him, I saw the man with the camera and he had it trained on the portal where Tessa had been bugging that man, and the man with the camera who in his plastic mac and with a high forehead might have been the bank clerk but he couldn’t be because when I’d seen the latter he hadn’t had a camera, which I now saw was a cine camera not a double-lens reflex, and when I asked Dagger who he was, Dagger said Oh some friend of John’s.
Dagger said Let’s go, and we started backing up somewhat more slowly than the procession was approaching us. I asked what the man with the camera thought he was doing. Dagger didn’t know; check it out later; his own was heavy enough.
The procession divided at the edge of the circle, one line came through 29–30, the other through between 30 and I, the white robes brushed the stone. I looked back and the other camera was gone, but the Alabama academic we’d been put in touch with through Mary in Corsica (or through her brother whom we hadn’t met) was on schedule waiting for us. I heard Tessa say, Oh go to hell.
I forgot my mike was on and said to Dagger that if that man had black-and-white reversal film he could film silhouettes of stones and people and after we shot our b & w negative film we could have the lab double-print so what we shot would fill the shapes of what he’d shot.
But the Alabama archaeologist in his broad, pale-colored hat was ready to talk, and that camera man with wide eyes disappeared. In my original account there were two full pages of third-hand stuff the archaeologist told about azimuths and alignments, the Z holes and the Y holes (circles lying between Sarsen and Aubrey), the relation between eclipses and the winter moon’s rise over the Stonehenge Heel Stone, with anecdotes neatly inserted such as the ancient Chinese astronomers who failed to predict a solar eclipse and were liquidated.
Dagger tracked the procession past, while I kept the mike on our archaeologist who had just been asked by Tessa at my shoulder what was so important about eclipses and who had not planned to take that up and was now setting out to speculate on the positions of the fifty-six Aubrey Holes (the outermost circle way beyond the stones) and the rising and setting alignments through various arches, so he quickly disposed (he thought) of Tessa by saying priests in other cultures also used astronomical lore to hold power and Tessa asked if he knew the Maya observatories and he said. Much later than Stonehenge of course, and she as quickly declared that the origins were in ancient Asia and what about the thirty-six columns at Aké which Le Plongeon proved marked 180 years each, which came to more than twice the age of Egypt if you insisted on exalting measurement.
The man who had declined our Beaujolais at the Bonfire in Wales came by and the woman who had embraced Dagger in May and the Kiowa Apache who had a brother in Idaho and who in May had said he’d been in Britain for four months and wasn’t looking back and who in my gathering uncertainties I thought uttered the word Māyā twice as he brought up the end of the procession.
A strange voice said, Oh is he here? but when I looked, there was only Tessa, and I asked Who she’d been playing hands with over there, but Dagger hauled me off toward the Moonrise or southeast trilothon, leaving the Alabama archaeologist pontificating to Savvy Van Ghent the UPI newsman and casting alarmed glances at the mike and camera retreating.
Only now, after Gene and Jack and the Clisham hut (weeks after Stonehenge), could I think the other filmer there may have been Aut’s New York man who as far as I could see would have no edge on us since it was our scene he was shooting. I did not ask Dagger that night, Which John? because I was not to meet John of the Mercer Street loft till October. And a near-nausea like what I’d had in the New York camera shop due to photography I think and not the sewer fumes much less the sight of the stabbed man’s chest blood, came into me now en route from the autumn Hebrides to London and Jan Aut—yet more a threat of sickness maybe not truly sensed by some crystal semiconductor whose outer-faceted solidity reveals its inner atomic form, but sensed rather in the other and peculiar and mingled attributes of liquid crystal—and looking back and forth among the boats and real estate and tall antique clear-glass Shell Motor Oil quarts so beautiful in shape and embossed imprint you might prefer to think that their origin (A.B.M.) meant something more probably transcendent than Automatic Bottle Machine—I hovered again near nausea that might swirl between me and a growth as dangerous as it was parallel and independent—or eyes (say, Stonehenge and Callanish looking out to space) dangerous as the idea I was to hear expounded dreamlike by that odd and genuine John in steel-rimmed glasses which I then drew into what was only in part my own form: to wit, that as capitalist ingenuity may save us at the very brink of its own imminent lethality
, so certain digital manipulations John prophesied that you and I though not John know threaten their opposite (for they envision the thinker’s mental state as if in some police act hooked by pulse rate and brain electricity to a computer) will find lo and behold a gated instrumentality that was always there by which to project (and here it is!) mind directly upon the screens of other minds—and maybe more even than this, which I might have to postpone seeing, for I had work to do; and from the Stonehenge footage, the altercations, the sweet burn of pot, and from our survey of views on Stonehenge voiced that August night accommodating themselves to the doorless doorways and roofless diameter of what Geoffrey of Monmouth calls the Dance of the Giants—and Dagger (off camera) called a symbol of British progress—I recollected only now what seemed to have a bearing on my search. I did not scout the spectrum of variously lighted opinions—interrupted to reload the magazine—the (now bearded) deserter’s opinion that Stonehenge was like a mind-blowing sundial, his hard-nosed friend’s (from the Unplaced Room) that Stonehenge was a chain of priestly shit to keep the people snowed, the Alabaman’s that ultimately he would rather not say, a New Druid’s (his upraised white-draped arm like wings) that these were petrified trees, the jolly woman in the blanket who had embraced and loved Dagger at the Bonfire in Wales that Stonehenge with its spinning circle and its open doors was a place where everyone could be everyone else, come out of hiding, come and go in love, and yet once more the Alabama archaeologist that he’d really rather not commit himself and did I have a light, I did and handed over a box with one match in it and he bent over the box as if already shielding a flame from the wind, and I turned away and caught Tessa watching and then she turned away; but I did defer two other views important now in the light of what seemed not quite to be happening. I had left Dagger and gone out of the circle to find a drink and Cosmo said, Did you see Tessa’s green beret on that guy who’s supposed to be a mute?
And seeing Nash with a half-gallon jug, I went near him and heard him say to the deserter (whom I’d not recognized in his beard), Well is he here or not? I heard he was.
The deserter’s dark-haired companion from the Unplaced Room arrived, and I turned as if not paying attention. He is here, said the deserter. I heard nothing else and when I turned toward them Nash was turning toward me and the other two were walking off toward the circle where there was some physical activity. Nash had only his own paper cup, so I had a quick drink out of it. But on an impulse like self-preservation I said to Nash, That’s OK. I know he’s here. I saw him.
I returned to Dagger.
What energy in process were we tying into here? It was an energy constantly disturbed in its course or starting out again and again at new points.
The film might be a mess but we’d have to see. Tessa and I weren’t driving back to London tonight. Dagger and I hadn’t negotiated the centrifugal pan that with the processional reprise (plus chant) might climax the scene. But we still had plenty on the third spool. There seemed fewer people, but these were crowded around the Altar Stone.
Tessa was goading the deserter, Are you going to let him tell you to shut up?
This must be the deserter’s companion. He looked at me keenly as I prepared to record. Gene’s wife was there with two children who had climbed onto the fallen stone and were trying to push each other off.
Yeah, said Nash, don’t tell him to shut up. I’ll shut you up.
Look out you don’t get a nosebleed, Nash, said the deserter’s companion.
Again I wanted to ask Tessa whom she’d had by the hand before. She certainly wasn’t missing her green beret. The man from the Ministry stood calmly embarrassed next to the bank clerk. Nash got pushed, and he and the deserter and the other fellow as they jostled each other toward the single upright of the Sunset trilothon were joined by Cosmo who was saying something and was told by Nash to stop shooting off his mouth. They went outside the Sarsen Circle and I heard the deserter say something like, You did see him.
Whereupon of all people little Elspeth of the long hair and stern visage was at my side introducing the Indian from Kansas City and telling me his responses to Stonehenge might be relevant, he didn’t think the place essentially English.
This was now pounced on by Tessa (ah that curled lip!) who declared the quintessential Englishness of this place, the practical mysticism of the land. An English voice was heard to say, There, there! and I turned asking who had said that.
But Dagger was shooting the scuffle now intermittently manifest through the north northeast part of the circle, and I said, wishing to rescue our scene, Let’s do the big pan.
Dagger agreed and called to the New Druids to line up and reprocess before the torches went out, and I suddenly asked if Reid was here, the guerrilla-theater actor, and Dagger said yes somewhere.
And though I couldn’t enter it into my diary which Jenny was going to type, I felt that very much a part of this scene was her off-again-on-again relation with Reid who had got some hold over her but who had not been the reason I’d made sure Jenny wasn’t here tonight. But the word Reid threw me out into the real successes of our silent Softball Game where I and he had appeared together, and the Indian Krish (now perhaps dead in a ditch).
And Reid had appeared (or disappeared) with the red-haired woman, and as he’d crossed the grass beyond third base and headed off into foul ground and Hyde Park he’d had a glow about his body, almost an aureole, that had probably not come out on our film. But Dagger said, Wake up! and he was right and I found myself waking from some still further arc of time whose formula I couldn’t frame but whose swimming materials I knew included Tessa’s mouth and the cassette recorder my mother wanted us to write letters to her on, and a sheet of liquid crystals like a negative being peddled by the God Mercury Cartwright, and a rusty zipper between two sleeping bags in the light of moonlight wind upon a lake in Maine: and the arc whose formula these partly were, was the softly cadenced sigh of Lorna’s sobbing in the late fifties that I could hear even when she was out of the house like a new motion of our Highgate things, a picture, a hunk of quartz, a piano, a Victorian couch, a refinished stairway, all for a long moment on loan and not after all ours—sobs that made me fear for my life.
And as I got with the reprocession but was still afield on waves of pointless past, I said Who is this that people are asking about—is he here, is he not here, who is it?
Probably not just one person, said Dag, maybe some of these Hindu mystics are your greatest sex fiends when you get away from the firelight, right?
In the dark, through between two lintel-less slabs, I saw Nash moving his hands in front of someone all in white whom I couldn’t see.
We tracked the procession back toward the northeast portal on a route that led toward the Slaughter Stone again and the Avenue and the Heel Stone, but when Dagger said, Now! he swung past them counterclockwise and I kept out of his way as we made one revolution passing the procession, made a second revolution-pan so fast Dagger staggered, and a third even faster with Cosmo calling, Just loop that pan and run it as many times as you want.
But the fourth time around, the procession was just through the arches and outside the circle—the dark gaps had been run into the gray-lit stones and the stones into one whirling circuit of the continuous panning shot as if we had whirled the procession out a runway by centrifugal launch and made the circle an unbroken power once again.
A voice was saying, If you don’t feel homesick, either you ought to or you ought to stop worrying about not feeling it.
Nash was suddenly in view holding a handkerchief to his nose.
Dagger spun us out toward the Sarsen Circle, and the bank clerk was standing at the 21–22 arch northwest from the Altar. I urged Dagger to follow, and we gave the man a chance to speak, I felt our climatic unifying pan had not held anything together, I was a long way away from what I had felt with Jenny here, the windy innuendo I’d felt here and then the crystal truths measured for us by this very man whom you might see tracing genera
tions of craftsmen at the County Archives during his lunch break or poking about the Wessex barrows on the crest of some remote down with not even a bike to convey him home, only a thin ash plant and his knobbly-knuckled thumbs. He was saying now that he’d just heard someone nearby groaning, Graveyard, graveyard, just a graveyard; an interesting view, but he hadn’t found the owner of the voice.
Dagger was pointing elsewhere but I had the mike close.
Yes indeed, said the bank clerk, for if it’s just a burial ground—and make no mistake, it may be!—(and I half-heard the word Is, like a gust’s mild buzz through the stones, yet there was no gust, no breeze) why then our main concern is the giant work of the thing. Now these Sarsens, the big ones, came overland from eighty miles away. A miracle. But the bluestones, which are much smaller but still run to five tons, were many if not all of them brought from Wales. Geology tells us that. Think of it! One hundred thirty miles by air—but in real miles, two hundred and forty! And this without the wheel, though possibly with rollers. But by water, more than halfway by water, from West Wales through the Bristol Channel to the mouth of the Bristol Avon—you know the gorge?—then up the Avon, then-overland, and perhaps along the river Wylye, then overland again to here. Think of it. This is what Stonehenge means, I say.
And as the man took a deep breath and began to speak of the three other (but unlikely) routes the bluestones could have taken, a voice from outside the circle with a tremor of irony I thought, said, It comes to that, and that alone.
Who spoke? said our bank clerk, and stepped out through the arch.
Tessa was with us again from another direction: I walked over some bodies out there, she said.
Did them good, I said.
The bank clerk in his plastic mac was telling Dagger of the five kinds of rock the bluestones came from, but Dagger thanked him, and as we moved away and the mike and camera were off, the bank clerk tall and devoted called to us did we know the theory there may have been an earlier Henge these bluestones composed prior to their transport here, so just possibly these stones came as one completed monument from Wales and may have been—he called desperately—a Bluestonechenge.
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