d Chapter Ten: The Dream
Conall’s walk back to the camper had been a gloriously drunken affair; clutching a large bottle of water he’d bought at the Avebury post-office as he left the village, he had staggered back along the avenue, smiling at the stones and greeting the blackbirds and sheep with hellos; he had attained, so it seemed to him, a glimpse into the state of, if not Mankind before the Fall, at least himself before the events of the last year had overshadowed him; the words of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, his favourite poem, formed an internal soundtrack to his stumblings;
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold
And the Sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams
Conall stood in the Avenue, arms wide, and recited the poem to the sky.
It was all shining, It was Adam and Maiden.
Maiden… maiden. Just the mere word sent a primal and visceral quiver through his chest…Oh Shenandoah…
I long to see you! Away, you rolling river!
Such a state was a rare and precious occurrence in any man, let alone Conall for whom the last year had offered little respite from unhappiness. Three hours driving and three swift pints were no doubt part of the recipe on this occasion (though such recipes were doomed to failure if consciously repeated) but the role his meeting with Shenandoah Mac Govan-Crow had played in inducing this state would have been impossible for him to fathom; quite why his initial shock and disquiet had given way to this unexpected upwelling of joy eluded him. And his reaction was not to question it too closely lest this flimsy shell of happiness cracked. It did not even seem to lie wholly in the unlikely possibility that last year’s sentiments might once more be resurrected; subsequent events had put pay to that possibility, as had the presence of, what was his name again? Hayden. Perhaps then, after all, it was simply the peace of the place and the alcohol, and the memory of happiness reminding him that the emotion still lived, though sleeping deep, within him?
Alcohol; that wonderful poison! It numbed the brain from the outside in – and as the outermost part of this organ was the youngest evolutionary speaking, and which contained our so-called civilised side, our inhibitions and social niceties, these were the first qualities to vanish when the poison started working… Con remembered an image he’s seen of a brain in a textbook, sliced in half and its different areas shaded; like the rings of a tree, the deeper you went in, the older the organ became; on the outer surface was the neo-mammalian brain, shared by us and other developed mammals – beneath that lay the palaeo-mammalian brain and within that, towards the core, lay the reptilian brain – a level of brain we shared with lizards and fish; indeed, as an embryo in the womb we had gills and a tail and went through the whole of evolution in nine months, from fish to hairless ape; he thought of his own mother’s womb with the twin fish swimming aside each other, like Yin and Yang. Perhaps this was why when we drink we feel closer to the animals, Con reasoned, we’re sloughing off our humanity, that thin, filmy outer surface of the brain, and we’re thinking instead (if thinking was an apt word, which he doubted) with our deeper animal brains; and if we drank so much, or if we could perhaps somehow go all the way back, why… we’d be like snakes or fish - primal sea serpents – what kind of knowledge would we then possess – knowledge of our ancient selves – what kind of deep primeval memories might lie stirring in our deep serpentine brains? He wondered. If we could but think those thoughts and shut off all the noise of the later brains! An image arose in his mind from one of Wagner’s operas he’d once been forced to watch (and had grown to enjoy) where Siegfried slew the dragon and drank his blood, and could understand the language of the birds. The dragon’s blood clearly gave access to that primal reptilian knowledge, older than man – locked within our psyches – usually never heard or heeded, save perhaps when we lie basking in the warmth of the sun; yet our most basic functions are controlled from this part of the brain – breathing, regulation of temperature… was this why wisdom was often depicted in serpentine form? The entwined snakes on the caduceus of Hermes or the staff of Asclepius?
The sun was still high above Wadden Hill, the shadows of the stones short; the farthest stones visible of the southern end of the Avenue danced in the heat; all seemed still; no birds were flying. The archaeologists had ceased digging and were sat with their backs to the sun in the shadow of two stones. Con was pissed enough to wonder over to them.
‘Found anything?’ he asked, dumbly.
A middle-aged man with a short silver goatee beard ran his fingers through his hair and swallowed the mouthful of sandwich he had been eating, and looked up at Con, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand.
‘Well… we were looking to see if the stone was in the right place – the circle was partly rebuilt in the 30’s; this one had been put back in place with concrete, and so we’re looking to see if we can find traces of the original stone-hole… but we’re also looking at the original ground-surface…’
He stood. ‘See the compacted chalk, here?’
Con nodded, looking at a smooth and pristine square of exposed white earth, inches below the topsoil with its long pale grass.
‘We’re looking to see if it’s more worn and compacted between the stones or outside of them…’
‘So you can gauge if people were processing along them or not?’ Con asked.
‘Precisely. It tells us just as much if we find out that they weren’t…’
Con looked puzzled.
‘This site is part of a henge,,,’ the archaeologist said, ‘basically a big circular ceremonial structure, and we know henges are ceremonial as they have a bank on the outside of the ditch…’ he waved loosely in the direction of the huge henge bank over his shoulder that ringed the village, the trees that lined it still visible at this distance.
‘That would be useless as a defensive feature – where you’d ideally put the bank on the inside…’
Con knew all of this but was nodding anyway, wondering where the archaeologist was heading, and suddenly needing to piss…
‘But what if they were defensive, but from the inside? What if they were keeping something in?’ He raised an eyebrow, grinning.
‘What, like animals? Herds of cows?’ Con asked. Or bulls? He wondered, suddenly seeing the henge as a great bull-ring, ringed with cheering crowds.
The man shrugged. ‘We’ll see. If you’re here over the next couple of days we may find out. We might find foot or hoofprints along the avenue… or we may find evidence of footfall outside of the Avenue… as it may have been it wasn’t meant for mortals to walk on at all.’
‘A kind of ghost road?’ Con asked.
‘Yes, something like that. Perhaps the stones represented ancestors or spirits.’
‘Keep me posted.’ Con said, wanting to stay and talk but increasingly needing to pee.
Once over the hill and out of view of the archaeologists he lent with an unsteady hand on a stone and pissed against its base - returning nitrogen to the soil, he reasoned, yet feeling slightly uneasy, remembering what the archaeologist had said about the stones; nevertheless, it was with a lighter step that he marched down the slope to where his camper lay parked beside the road.
The inside of the camper was like an oven; he closed the curtains, slid open the windows on the opposite side, and cleared the heap of clothes off the sofa-bed; Con took a large tepid draught from his water bottle and lay down, eyes closed. His plan was to re-hydrate himself and snooze for a while so that he wouldn’t spend the night at the pub with a blinding headache sipping orange juice.
For a moment he swooned into a deep, dark, state of relaxation, but a few seconds later his feet seemed to be rising above his head sickeningly, and so he sat upright and drank a little more water until the van stopped moving skywards. I’m such a lightweight, he thought. Three pints and I’m pissed. His eyes began to close and the room fell away again; he felt nauseous. Fuck, fuck, fuck; the ancient reptile within was rebelling against the poison; the alcohol had changed the viscosity of the liquid in his inner ear, making him feel he was moving when he was still; the primal serpent, basically an alimentary canal on legs, was attempting to rid itself of the poison that was threatening its life. But Con was able to summon enough outer brain to fight this urge.
It took a further twenty minutes of attempting, and failing, to keep his eyes closed without feeling dizzy before the motion of passing cars rocking the camper lulled him into a half-doze. He dozed on and off, drinking some more water when he remembered, until finally the urge to sleep left him.
Sitting up he felt the first dull twinges of headache. He searched the drawers above the hob and sink for an ibuprofen. He couldn’t find the bloody things, and instead he reached higher and took the Collected Coleridge from the bookshelf; he didn’t open it, just held it to his chest, lost in thought. He was thinking of a dream he had had some twenty years before whose meaning had eluded him at the time but which had somehow become connected to all of this… to this place, to her; he had shaken it from his mind earlier but now in his half-aware state he allowed himself to remember.
The dream was simple yet profound:
He was walking through a spring landscape, at some unspecified date long ago in the past – deep in prehistory - on the site, though no monument was yet present, of some future circular earthwork or henge. In the distance there was a mountainous expanse with a great chasm in its side. Continuing to walk he had found himself beside a gently meandering stream on the banks of which were three white cows with red ears, grazing, and beside them a stately woman, no, a goddess, in a long blue robe, her face hidden by a hood. She approached the stream and placed one end of the wand she was carrying into the water, whereupon the river turned milky white. Conall removed his clothes and walked into the water, then knelt and submerged himself in the cool depths three times… after the last submersion he turned to see a white horse with a shining crescent moon set between its brows standing on the river bank beside him. He walked out of the water and kissed it between her brows but instead of leaping on to its back, as it gestured him to do, Conall walked beside it, still naked…
The dream imagery had stuck with him far longer than any normal dream; it had had the clarity of a vision; it had seemed to suggest rebirth, a new start- but only now was he starting to understand it – images within it which had remained a mystery had started to make sense over the past couple of years; clues within it had been instrumental – more than instrumental – vital – in his academic work investigating these ancient sites; and details that had meant nothing at the time had come to seem more than coincidental, as if the dream had been prophetic – and it’s tied to this place, thought Con, I know it.
When he had been here last spring, he had returned to his camper one evening after seeing Shen at the cottage, feeling restless, uneasy, like he wanted to run or shout or smash something; it was a feeling of a joyous rage, of intoxication. It was as if a fire had been lit within him; like he wanted to roar with the life he felt. Remembering the dream, he had gone to the Kennet that night, wishing to act it out; it seemed madness at the time – what did he think he was doing? This, he had reasoned, is how rituals must start – with the physical acting out of a vision. He had felt compelled to go – the dream image kept rising in his mind, relentless, hypnotic in its quiet insistence; the thought of entering those cool waters promised not a dampening or cooling of his ardour, but a transformation of it. Maybe I’m ready, he had thought, to start anew; he remembered how he had felt in the dream, slick from the water, his hair plastered back from his forehead, like a new born; he’d felt like a young god, like the kouros of Poseidon rising from the some primal amniotic fluid – but he hadn’t gone through with it. He had just stared into the inky waters feeling empty and suddenly wary and had returned to the camper, mute and deflated.
Why that night of all nights, he now wondered? Had he somehow known? Not that there was any way he could have – even if twin quantum particles could affect each other though separated millions of light years apart in space – how would it be remotely possible that he could somehow intuit what she had been doing at that very moment? Because it had been then, he knew in his heart of hearts. But he had felt a sense of renewal, not of fear. And surely, he should have felt her fear?
I go to the river to die…
But there had been no connection; it was coincidence, that’s all; it was all in his head; it was a door into madness to think otherwise. And yet he would have rushed headlong through that door if it meant, for a single precious moment, that the connection had been there - a hint that the entanglement had been real; that somehow, beyond time and space, they had always been, and therefore always would be, together.
But he had not known her anguish. There was no quantum entanglement; no tie; no hope; just mute nothingness and an old book, bent out of shape and disfigured by the desperate scribblings of her pain, which now mercifully had ended. He was too shocked to close his eyes and try to sleep again; and too hurt to cry. He drew aside the curtain facing the Avenue; the field with its double line of stones lay empty. Likewise, out of sight, the tourists in the main circle to the north were slowly departing, leaving it to its ghosts. Long past its zenith the sun was gilding the edges of the stones and the trees that crested the hills, but Con was immune to its beauty. The fine shell of happiness had cracked.
Conall’s walk back to the camper had been a gloriously drunken affair; clutching a large bottle of water he’d bought at the Avebury post-office as he left the village, he had staggered back along the avenue, smiling at the stones and greeting the blackbirds and sheep with hellos; he had attained, so it seemed to him, a glimpse into the state of, if not Mankind before the Fall, at least himself before the events of the last year had overshadowed him; the words of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, his favourite poem, formed an internal soundtrack to his stumblings;
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold
And the Sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams
Conall stood in the Avenue, arms wide, and recited the poem to the sky.
It was all shining, It was Adam and Maiden.
Maiden… maiden. Just the mere word sent a primal and visceral quiver through his chest…Oh Shenandoah…
I long to see you! Away, you rolling river!
Such a state was a rare and precious occurrence in any man, let alone Conall for whom the last year had offered little respite from unhappiness. Three hours driving and three swift pints were no doubt part of the recipe on this occasion (though such recipes were doomed to failure if consciously repeated) but the role his meeting with Shenandoah Mac Govan-Crow had played in inducing this state would have been impossible for him to fathom; quite why his initial shock and disquiet had given way to this unexpected upwelling of joy eluded him. And his reaction was not to question it too closely lest this flimsy shell of happiness cracked. It did not even seem to lie wholly in the unlikely possibility that last year’s sentiments might once more be resurrected; subsequent events had put pay to that possibility, as had the presence of, what was his name again? Hayden. Perhaps then, after all, it was simply the peace of the place and the alcohol, and the memory of happiness reminding him that the emotion still lived, though sleeping deep, within him?
Alcohol; that wonderful poison! It numbed the brain from the outside in – and as the outermost part of this organ was the youngest evolutionary speaking, and which contained our so-called civilised side, our inhibitions and social niceties, these were the first qualities to vanish when the poison started working… Con remembered an image he’s seen of a brain in a textbook, sliced in half and its different areas shaded; like the rings of a tree, the deeper you went in, the older the organ became; on the outer surface was the neo-mammalian brain, shared by us and other developed mammals – beneath that lay the palaeo-mammalian brain and within that, towards the core, lay the reptilian brain – a level of brain we shared with lizards and fish; indeed, as an embryo in the womb we had gills and a tail and went through the whole of evolution in nine months, from fish to hairless ape; he thought of his own mother’s womb with the twin fish swimming aside each other, like Yin and Yang. Perhaps this was why when we drink we feel closer to the animals, Con reasoned, we’re sloughing off our humanity, that thin, filmy outer surface of the brain, and we’re thinking instead (if thinking was an apt word, which he doubted) with our deeper animal brains; and if we drank so much, or if we could perhaps somehow go all the way back, why… we’d be like snakes or fish - primal sea serpents – what kind of knowledge would we then possess – knowledge of our ancient selves – what kind of deep primeval memories might lie stirring in our deep serpentine brains? He wondered. If we could but think those thoughts and shut off all the noise of the later brains! An image arose in his mind from one of Wagner’s operas he’d once been forced to watch (and had grown to enjoy) where Siegfried slew the dragon and drank his blood, and could understand the language of the birds. The dragon’s blood clearly gave access to that primal reptilian knowledge, older than man – locked within our psyches – usually never heard or heeded, save perhaps when we lie basking in the warmth of the sun; yet our most basic functions are controlled from this part of the brain – breathing, regulation of temperature… was this why wisdom was often depicted in serpentine form? The entwined snakes on the caduceus of Hermes or the staff of Asclepius?
The sun was still high above Wadden Hill, the shadows of the stones short; the farthest stones visible of the southern end of the Avenue danced in the heat; all seemed still; no birds were flying. The archaeologists had ceased digging and were sat with their backs to the sun in the shadow of two stones. Con was pissed enough to wonder over to them.
‘Found anything?’ he asked, dumbly.
A middle-aged man with a short silver goatee beard ran his fingers through his hair and swallowed the mouthful of sandwich he had been eating, and looked up at Con, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand.
‘Well… we were looking to see if the stone was in the right place – the circle was partly rebuilt in the 30’s; this one had been put back in place with concrete, and so we’re looking to see if we can find traces of the original stone-hole… but we’re also looking at the original ground-surface…’
He stood. ‘See the compacted chalk, here?’
Con nodded, looking at a smooth and pristine square of exposed white earth, inches below the topsoil with its long pale grass.
‘We’re looking to see if it’s more worn and compacted between the stones or outside of them…’
‘So you can gauge if people were processing along them or not?’ Con asked.
‘Precisely. It tells us just as much if we find out that they weren’t…’
Con looked puzzled.
‘This site is part of a henge,,,’ the archaeologist said, ‘basically a big circular ceremonial structure, and we know henges are ceremonial as they have a bank on the outside of the ditch…’ he waved loosely in the direction of the huge henge bank over his shoulder that ringed the village, the trees that lined it still visible at this distance.
‘That would be useless as a defensive feature – where you’d ideally put the bank on the inside…’
Con knew all of this but was nodding anyway, wondering where the archaeologist was heading, and suddenly needing to piss…
‘But what if they were defensive, but from the inside? What if they were keeping something in?’ He raised an eyebrow, grinning.
‘What, like animals? Herds of cows?’ Con asked. Or bulls? He wondered, suddenly seeing the henge as a great bull-ring, ringed with cheering crowds.
The man shrugged. ‘We’ll see. If you’re here over the next couple of days we may find out. We might find foot or hoofprints along the avenue… or we may find evidence of footfall outside of the Avenue… as it may have been it wasn’t meant for mortals to walk on at all.’
‘A kind of ghost road?’ Con asked.
‘Yes, something like that. Perhaps the stones represented ancestors or spirits.’
‘Keep me posted.’ Con said, wanting to stay and talk but increasingly needing to pee.
Once over the hill and out of view of the archaeologists he lent with an unsteady hand on a stone and pissed against its base - returning nitrogen to the soil, he reasoned, yet feeling slightly uneasy, remembering what the archaeologist had said about the stones; nevertheless, it was with a lighter step that he marched down the slope to where his camper lay parked beside the road.
The inside of the camper was like an oven; he closed the curtains, slid open the windows on the opposite side, and cleared the heap of clothes off the sofa-bed; Con took a large tepid draught from his water bottle and lay down, eyes closed. His plan was to re-hydrate himself and snooze for a while so that he wouldn’t spend the night at the pub with a blinding headache sipping orange juice.
For a moment he swooned into a deep, dark, state of relaxation, but a few seconds later his feet seemed to be rising above his head sickeningly, and so he sat upright and drank a little more water until the van stopped moving skywards. I’m such a lightweight, he thought. Three pints and I’m pissed. His eyes began to close and the room fell away again; he felt nauseous. Fuck, fuck, fuck; the ancient reptile within was rebelling against the poison; the alcohol had changed the viscosity of the liquid in his inner ear, making him feel he was moving when he was still; the primal serpent, basically an alimentary canal on legs, was attempting to rid itself of the poison that was threatening its life. But Con was able to summon enough outer brain to fight this urge.
It took a further twenty minutes of attempting, and failing, to keep his eyes closed without feeling dizzy before the motion of passing cars rocking the camper lulled him into a half-doze. He dozed on and off, drinking some more water when he remembered, until finally the urge to sleep left him.
Sitting up he felt the first dull twinges of headache. He searched the drawers above the hob and sink for an ibuprofen. He couldn’t find the bloody things, and instead he reached higher and took the Collected Coleridge from the bookshelf; he didn’t open it, just held it to his chest, lost in thought. He was thinking of a dream he had had some twenty years before whose meaning had eluded him at the time but which had somehow become connected to all of this… to this place, to her; he had shaken it from his mind earlier but now in his half-aware state he allowed himself to remember.
The dream was simple yet profound:
He was walking through a spring landscape, at some unspecified date long ago in the past – deep in prehistory - on the site, though no monument was yet present, of some future circular earthwork or henge. In the distance there was a mountainous expanse with a great chasm in its side. Continuing to walk he had found himself beside a gently meandering stream on the banks of which were three white cows with red ears, grazing, and beside them a stately woman, no, a goddess, in a long blue robe, her face hidden by a hood. She approached the stream and placed one end of the wand she was carrying into the water, whereupon the river turned milky white. Conall removed his clothes and walked into the water, then knelt and submerged himself in the cool depths three times… after the last submersion he turned to see a white horse with a shining crescent moon set between its brows standing on the river bank beside him. He walked out of the water and kissed it between her brows but instead of leaping on to its back, as it gestured him to do, Conall walked beside it, still naked…
The dream imagery had stuck with him far longer than any normal dream; it had had the clarity of a vision; it had seemed to suggest rebirth, a new start- but only now was he starting to understand it – images within it which had remained a mystery had started to make sense over the past couple of years; clues within it had been instrumental – more than instrumental – vital – in his academic work investigating these ancient sites; and details that had meant nothing at the time had come to seem more than coincidental, as if the dream had been prophetic – and it’s tied to this place, thought Con, I know it.
When he had been here last spring, he had returned to his camper one evening after seeing Shen at the cottage, feeling restless, uneasy, like he wanted to run or shout or smash something; it was a feeling of a joyous rage, of intoxication. It was as if a fire had been lit within him; like he wanted to roar with the life he felt. Remembering the dream, he had gone to the Kennet that night, wishing to act it out; it seemed madness at the time – what did he think he was doing? This, he had reasoned, is how rituals must start – with the physical acting out of a vision. He had felt compelled to go – the dream image kept rising in his mind, relentless, hypnotic in its quiet insistence; the thought of entering those cool waters promised not a dampening or cooling of his ardour, but a transformation of it. Maybe I’m ready, he had thought, to start anew; he remembered how he had felt in the dream, slick from the water, his hair plastered back from his forehead, like a new born; he’d felt like a young god, like the kouros of Poseidon rising from the some primal amniotic fluid – but he hadn’t gone through with it. He had just stared into the inky waters feeling empty and suddenly wary and had returned to the camper, mute and deflated.
Why that night of all nights, he now wondered? Had he somehow known? Not that there was any way he could have – even if twin quantum particles could affect each other though separated millions of light years apart in space – how would it be remotely possible that he could somehow intuit what she had been doing at that very moment? Because it had been then, he knew in his heart of hearts. But he had felt a sense of renewal, not of fear. And surely, he should have felt her fear?
I go to the river to die…
But there had been no connection; it was coincidence, that’s all; it was all in his head; it was a door into madness to think otherwise. And yet he would have rushed headlong through that door if it meant, for a single precious moment, that the connection had been there - a hint that the entanglement had been real; that somehow, beyond time and space, they had always been, and therefore always would be, together.
But he had not known her anguish. There was no quantum entanglement; no tie; no hope; just mute nothingness and an old book, bent out of shape and disfigured by the desperate scribblings of her pain, which now mercifully had ended. He was too shocked to close his eyes and try to sleep again; and too hurt to cry. He drew aside the curtain facing the Avenue; the field with its double line of stones lay empty. Likewise, out of sight, the tourists in the main circle to the north were slowly departing, leaving it to its ghosts. Long past its zenith the sun was gilding the edges of the stones and the trees that crested the hills, but Con was immune to its beauty. The fine shell of happiness had cracked.