Long throatsinging sound in the distance: hush; elsewhere: breath held quiet –
and out in the alluvial night some task left undone, some spirit still unsequestered, wandering; what it sees is hard to say, what it says: more so; even still, what it sees is the whole of things all at once: beginnings and endings all of a moment, sees them in space not time; it might be mistaken for an avenging spirit, but it is merely present: and this, without malice; it hovers above, touches the seas with one limb: another resting mountainside: a way of turning, movement making raw the same place over which it hangs, conflagrating, reborn, ashes on the wind: not knowing time at all, the spirit knows no otherwise than this: only motion and regret hanging above the line of the cataclysm, series of infinite unretrieved moments illegible to the spirit being borne backwards-facing ahead because it is all right there, not will- or having-happened but present in the spatial sense, its every aspect: real land sunken or atop the waters; the mining of its stones: carved, stood, beaten, and buried; countless journeys thereof, land and sea, interior and exterior (of which the spirit is aware but unwatchful of); all are at once and below, these movements, sitting alongside others in a row infinite but not insuperable for the spirit to grasp: each twitch of life, grassleaf bent in the ancient or future wind, peaks raised and ground down again, marshes formed and flooded and drained, all those lives unalive and deathless at once;
but sometimes things do bubble, puncture (the planar metaphor will have to do); the space of the spirit has been/will be/is (words without valence) bombarded by holes of time’s burst, which the spirit swears have not always been there, which is to say impossible: everything being there because there is only a there for it to be: no when; there are defects, inevitable ones, in the translation between these zones: one impossible to understand from the standpoint of the other; so the spirit has this moment (and it is, impossibly, a moment, though the spirit knows no such thing, cannot name it) of guttural noise, non-lingual groan that maybe comes from the constant wind (though, being constant, unnoticeable): of misunderstanding, which has never occurred, so continues not to occur in some sense, but in another (more real): must; for the zone of the spirit over the continents outside of time is now punctured by moments of placeable time, raw time, uncut and noxious, no longer quarantined outside the zone, having been pushed through by impossible force, superheated, weapon-sharp, the spirit unknowing how any one thing could have not been the case and then become the case: from not-being to being, and all the while, piercing through in filaments: traces, all around the spirit’s zone, little arcs of time bending in and out, sounding tones, sharp to the touch, but the spirit leaves them be, will forget how or from whence they came, believing only that they are, have been, will be: but this is wrong, a fatal miscalculation on the part of the spirit trying to metabolize the contamination of another realm, but blameless for mishearing a language it cannot and will never speak; such staves of time are treacherous when adumbrated beyond their own region, no longer layered but revealed and naked in space, disconnected from their constituent parts; what happens to time-outside-time, what it becomes, is like an infection, sickening the spirit, unaware as it grows ill, its limbs going slack, slipping from the continents: and what if it falls, what if loses sight of all those moments of which it was appointed watcher, having the capacity to see them as one whole and not a succession of parts, who then will watch over time’s undesignated space, who will fill the absent space-beyond-time to tame it once again? – in the dark, for a moment, until caving into sleep: the quarriers anticipate the day of the stone.
They have done it before: taking days to complete, the journey from quarry to circle; building, bouldering their settlement, their sacred grove with stones upright, tripartite-suspended table at the center – whose purposes remain forever veiled, can only be guessed at, and perhaps even if they could be witnessed in the flesh would not be believed – the stones leaving trails like slugs as they are dragged; all around clear: the need for movement, the rearrangement of energies, power: new spaces made for old material. They pick at the quarry, delving: its tunnels elongating into the earth’s eternal night where its determining strata and sub-strata lie – their emanations bathing the miners, worming their way under the skin, lending other spirit-casts.
A cough, miner to miner: healers brought in, to no avail; guttural throat of earth (returning). Ill weather – some faces flush, gather at the stone-choosing place, skin same color as the muck; some We is made there belowgrass (better: the we): foul earthen blossoms, hands clenched, hard cragged faces (eyes, brows) carved like the diluvial caverns, smothered subterranean spaces which the storm above does not penetrate, not now; some backs bent low and groaning, hacking and hewing it out, filthed feet dug-in to the wet black earth: worms doing the dream-whorl perpetual within that world, riding the inner tides; all sides held-hand like, but the stone stays out of view, shadowed;
guts, teeth, blood-smell, the fall of deer heads un-tooled, no trophies cracking the earth – some hunter having hauled off to the isle’s edges, chasing across the frozen sea water her quarry, snowblind the arrow flies true: black blood on white earth; the crown is the first to be taken and the last to be used up and buried beneath the stones: made into picks, maces –
the stone as it is hauled dayward – for a time, that other time the we knows and does not know, the we: single and multiple, dead and living both – swift, is made to be born again, lifted from its interior mount to be set on some outer one, mount or mound more like, in another season: will be made gone.
The same by night or by day: to cut, to live, to drag, to build – they learn time, take stock of it and dole it out; from far away comes, sometimes, one; from far away one came and said something: a stone, a stone it would be, and which one unknown, but the choosing of it is important – cut, lifted, dragged; building with it, building the we, but not here, where the quarriers sleep settled in their stones, loam-covered, the sod protection from the vengeful sky: someplace else, sometime else; the we know it, some have been there among the ones who are like the we, but not the we (or not the same we) – overlapping, interlocking; the answer: yes in some ways, no in others; they will share the stone, the one stone required, taken far: days and nights and days and nights; not all the we are sure for what; there will be stops, stations along the track carving inward from the water, for feasting, sleeping and hands, some hands from some else-we – who knows? – grass and slopes and coasts and hills and rocks and crags and storms and rain and snow and ice and time, too much time, too much labor: this on which the stone rests, those to whom the choosing must be entrusted, their sweat and blood;
the we knows the fact of this: there is earth and sky; the we knows the fact of this: there is day and night; the we knows the fact of this: there is then and now; the we knows the fact of this: there is here and there; the we knows the fact of this: there is life and death; the we knows the fact of this: there is one and one and one; the we knows it is one and not one; the we knows it is one and they are also one, where the stone is going; they are different and the same: one and one and one; the we knows life and death are and are not one, like the we, like earth and sky, day and night, then and now, here and there, life and death, one and one and one – like coolness and warmth, snow and sun: they flow as one and not one; this the we knows, and the we would say this in one way that is hard to write; they know it: it is theirs, like the stone, but like the stone they will lose it when the like-then, the not-now becomes the now: found, cut, bathed, shaped, taken; their hands: a part of the we enlined. (Habit and memory synthesize time – these: the first and second syntheses; time’s virtual percolation, time as force and flow, is the third synthesis, but gives rise to the others; or, Chronos and Aion – descending levels of memory to time’s sharp point.)
Primordial sweat, exuded earth – workers everywhere stand: one cannot be distinguished from another; taking sights, they all establish a round, they speak unto the round, their deliberations carry on into the night at the minepit: stone’s birthsite; then, chipped and flaked: sandstone dressed for sledging; the actual transport, the engineering required to move a stone weighing anything from 1 to 14 tons, was simple. There were five ingredients: timber, rope, labor, time and organization.
When they are no longer here, it will be that ground, but this earth (pieces of places, known and alienated): here is the stone; the we lift the stone; the we shout; the we sing; the we mourn; the we, full of joy, burn flames; the we eat; the we say words when they are here with the stone, by day and night; the we shape the stone; the we lay hands on the stone; the we knew what the stone was, what it was for: for them and for the stone; the we think the stone knows; the stone does not know that, but knows things the we does not know, knowing them in a way the we does not know; the stone is a little slow: it has just learned day and night; it does not know life and death, only degrees of shape: it had a shape before the we came along, a different one; the stone knows it is one and also we; the stone knows it is here; the stone does not know flow, though it is flow; the stone takes in the moon and the stars, takes in the sun; the stone knows cold and warm better than the we, even; the stone knows time, a kind of time not given for the we to know; the stone is time – it is in time, too: made of it and by it; the we is small and fast: the stone is large and slow; the we makes the stone smaller, but it is still large, still slow; the we makes the stone theirs for a time, but it is not the time of the stone (the stone knows this, will come to know it more); the dust from the stone is still stone, is still large and slow, is in the process of becoming one again and also not one, but the stone, its dust gone, is one and just one for now (which means then); the stone does not know now and then; the stone is on the move; the we moves the stone; the stone does not know how it moves, but the we helps: the we has hands, feet, the we fells trees for tracks, for boats; the shod sound of a blade being brought air-wise, errant bird, its un-flight a path through wood, through the bark-like face, a tree held in the center by the we; some sound is made, some cry or sob, or wind, only deep wind, rushing into the hole where the light point rests; and then they are gone, like building a great machine, pieces brought from the island all over, its components, and this the altar its key (no ideas but in things); then we get on their way with the stone.
Rostrum of the rock face: its coagulated, constituent parts, each going and becoming the ill-likeness of their being; and what is being limped atop the great landwork? – coiled beneath: its effulgent liver sent fireshoots into unclouded skies, formed the black day-night of prelapsarian seasons, but now it sleeps, it sleeps, the wyrm, its teeth scattered in the sea; along its low-bent spine they sail, they curl and double-back along rivers carved into its encrusted hump, crooked above the watered depths, the grave into which it is sinking: though, someday, it may rise, gather up its teeth, and complete its task of swallowing the world, encircling it whole: coiling all meridians, constricting until the last of the last breaths before oblivion – the stone, first brought down from the island by coast, floated perilous by the we toward the sunken shores of Doggerland, calamitously off-course at times, careening between rocks and open water, following the faint lights of the station fires shoreward again: station to station, and at each marker another welcoming, another feast – spit of slow-cooked meat, array of nuts and berries, bread baked in the ground and broken still-steaming, cups of ferment full to brim – with the other strange peoples; rock hauling was an occasion, a communal festival, an opportunity for singing shanties and work songs, an excuse for a party;
the we does not sometimes recognize the speech, or only just, torn from one side of the mouth, tipped into the ear, one tone changed out for another; some stretches take too much time, outwaiting storms, winds – the work is slow, the journey cut short of its sealined path; slacks the sun down behind the shore – the we carries hands held high above the waters lapping in seared sunbeams of the last light; panoply of too-soon labors: head, heart, hands – the feet, too, innumerable scrabbles on the pebbled shore; their walking path sublates in the passing of night’s starguide behind clouds as the final shorelight fire is lit.
Across an unknown region, wending riverward and icebound – the stone rests while they seek out the firecourse: fanning from coast, the we pursue spring’s beacons, the line lost and reconnected one night among deep purple hills snowcovered in no moon, single light blaring out above the horizon; with the thaw they proceed inland: here, every hallowed field is heard to sing, and these, the carriers – as a part of the we (one and one and one) – thrum its song outward-wise: to the givenness of things, their abundance, the cool spread of forests: arborresting in the balance of streams come mountaindown overfull with winter’s defeat (it will come again it will); all the unnamed reverences of such a time, if they can be imagined at all, must be imagined as strange, not quite accountable, their logos like a tree twisting directions, growing with/against weather, wind, change of seasons, the axe’s blows: scarred over ever so long until the falling down; but unfallen: the throng, this we: outed in the valleys, skin browning deeper in the sun; the stone is cool in the morning and hot in the evening, absorbing the energies, relations of things: their eons all indifferent to the moments that make them up; ploughed someday, the stones know they will roll under and descend back into their earth – the sky, their place of origin, not reserved for them to rest in (until that last of last days when sky and earth hold no longer any distinction – the stones wait patient) –
but until then, from stop to stop: a trying process; the moving of small distance accretes and becomes a middle, and then an incontrovertible distance of rains and snows and suns over and over: rotating; seasons alternatively of rest and industry (works and days); not industry in the limited sense, though it is of a kind (a kind unlike to this: here, now, but distantly related); ontology of labor: a necessity until it is not; these thoughts, the we thoughts, which might have brimmed, made a world: its geometry, its textures lasting in traces, scores, arrangements, spaces: types of air held in one station before being released into the next, a play of shadows sylphlike along jagged walls: it is just like this, that same old projection, to know its embered source, its ragged quietude; alas the whole abominable thing comes back again to machines, but these, too, know their machines, employed them in endeavors more exacting: machines for world making; the great process: to take this stone to those stones: simplicity and complication in one – easy enough to cut, remove, elevate; where is it going? – down earthward: another earth, another’s ward.
Wyrd: sound of thrill and bells; warded: ho! – they halt: halfway between them a rivermouth, and across: the crowd stands waving, colors carried above their heads, a bonfire built but unlit; a day’s time it will take from here to there with the water running as it is: fast from the snowmelt; by night they will be able to throw a palm-stone and hit the bonfire built in the dale: but it will be another nightfall until the flames roar.
The stone gets stuck in a particular way on an odd hillside going down; the we must slow the stone, but – slowing it too much – they bring it to a stop; too fast and losing control it would rush down crumpling on other rocks – then: all this way for nothing; problem is that land does not conform to notion; the hill is slid-out, its silt spread all over the valley leaving a sheer cliff still dripping dirt; so they go around, down a steeper way, way of rocks where, before, the hill had been sloped and grassy; all washed out now: rain and snow and ice taking it.
Station to station again along the river valleys; and as in any performance, there was a potential for things to take unexpected turns; one is left behind in a crush, their body left out; a sudden jarring might derail or break a flawed slab; movement stops until the flesh is dried, then burned – another fire: indivisible station; sledges could become mired, and there was always a chance of injury or worse; that one will be carried along with it, now, the stone; the success or otherwise of the journey reflected on the cohesion and the prowess of those involved; cracking branches and logs along the tracks where present – grating of stone; pulled grasses staining juices on the stone; rain comes; snow comes; ice makes for easier passage along the rivers; fingers go blue and black in the cold; the blind woman among the we calls them on, calls them out from sleep each morning to lead on and on and down: some byways impassable; the story: flesh and bone came creeping from the rock slow, but faster than stone, much faster, moving though incomprehensible to the eye (had eyes been in evidence), and it was moving this thing, still: stone (but not yet), and it scattered along the ground and it took seasons and seasons beyond counting just like now: the massive collective labor of life.
They move the stone along again from fire to fire, understanding less and less they those around them; the stone: interlocutor – the fire: facilitator; at each way they are encouraged on, belonging – though temporality is hard to come by, the nighting and daying glimmed by overing clouds, raining thunders; owls watch always from the alders – haunt of chuckling owls – their eyes a sign of gloaming.
Arriving at last in no place – places being nothing at all – but a network of places: topological, continuous surface: how to mark its lineaments? (topology: all points in the differentiation of space: relations; topological: as few features as needed: flatness) – the movement of social life is itself a movement in (not on) a landscape – nature and culture are indivisible: barbed wire and arc lights; ox jaws and skulls; coppiced woodland; the transition from collective, disarticulated burials to individual, articulated ones, a geographic discontinuity (topography: as many features of the space as possible: texture): relations external to terms; entities forming new relations, new capacities, actions: folding the landscape together (land=shape: the weaving of different elements – a machinic aspect, a haecceity, a thisness in arrangement, no dumbness in desire paths: the purposes and properties of any material are processual and relational and emerge through assemblage),
stacking the stones – hauled down the long log road rolling: barker calls, round round round – pulling on the hawser, a throatsung thrum to tune the time with, over miles, through forest, wending the valleys so’s to avoid the hills all the way from misted crags to the grave plane’s endless clearing, the long row (no time for burial on along the way); get you up (said to stone): get you up – and huffing they heave, the lot of them. (What’s it for anyway, asked later along the fireside, up those lights aligned one drops, coughing, crowing the rest, nothing to tell about the sky on the land, say, these stones, any better rock would do: bitter, after days of gruntwork, sop-drunk on bad water; the form of monuments emerges through choreography of construction.)
The we has come alone among their kind, the stone surviving longer, farther than any other, taken to its place: single central node sifted into its trench, centrifugal: the rock carving show (dropping hazel shells as they go); like its sister site, that older variation at what was not called Avebury: an improvised process over a preordained plan; into that region where they built a map of the land of the living and the land of the dead – the dialectic of the stone builders and passage gravers working itself out – dropping mallard feathers (dirty of waters), through the passage of the waterbirds, the cuckoo’s calls echo out along the river bluffs
where the we wends (their comrade carried gentle, ashed, in their temporary mooring, bound for that domain of the dead wherein they will be released; more reparations for opening up wounds in the land like the offerings – clay, bone – in the mine pits); or: jackdaws perched among the stones, cawing from coombe to coombe, all-seeing overlords bellowing at the blind travelers below, bound to follow earth-wise only – to that place that might disclose the chthonic deity to whose bosom the faithful dead returned: a blank space on any map, retrospective religiosity is hard avoided –
until they reach the wide horizon, new stones skylined (not high yet as they would go; the stones that float to the sky), tilted axis clawing low clouds, stone stumps, and approaching – now: at the omphalos (no mere hylomorph):amputation and mutilation after death – grafting for the axe goddess, eye goddess (in other tombs there are carvings apparently of a “guardian-goddess” of the dead, sometimes holding an axe or dagger like a jealous protectress of the spirits inside the tomb) – hand axes were not used axe-like (carried from place to place, palm-pressed with them); oak, hazel, and hawthorn forest, husks everywhere, alders riverside, beeches on barrows; nettles, rushgrass, cornflowers, poppies; sprung yewbows fingering strings of animal guts (from gut to gut if they are lucky); think of it as a mortuary house, think of these rituals as funeral rites (if that helps, and maybe it doesn’t maybe it can’t or wouldn’t – explain, that is, whatever one might see transported backward looking out at the cursus: what today seems exhausted land); question of class divisions – probably unanswerable (though not in our sorry case – whosoever reads this: know thyself) – of the grooved war cult, or the beaker people (maybe migration is the only fact); the original arrangement fashioned with wood – wood for the living: stone for the dead.
— Ian Maxton is a writer and critic. His work has been published in Always Crashing, Burial, Protean, and elsewhere.