Chapter Four: The Book and the Feather
Conall had returned to the campervan, and was taking a few moments to mop the remnants of the spilled coffee from the floor with a dirty t-shirt, and to replace the rest of the fallen objects (and others that had already been on the floor) to their proper place – stuffed under the sofa-bed. Most of his stuff had, in fairness, been properly packed away, but the decision to come here had been last-minute and so he had thrown a number of items on to the soaf-bed wrapped in a duvet, hoping they would be ok. The coffee had been a mistake, though. He’d wedged the unfinished cup between a pile of fairly heavy books and a lever-arch file on the small kitchen worktop behind the driver’s seat– and it would have been okay there, or so he told himself, if it hadn’t been for the hare…
The file, marked PhD, with the words ‘unfinished’ scrawled on the label lay half-open, and he collected a number of hand-written pages, star-maps and photocopies of ancient artefacts, statues and inscriptions that had cascaded from out of it. A few of the sheets were wrinkled and brown with coffee, but he gathered them up all the same and pushed them carelessly into the pile – pages of sketches of little clay figurines copied from Marija Gimbutas’ books on ‘Old’ Europe, with lozenge shapes and zig zags marked in black pen; carved cow-horns from Iberian tombs; print-outs of stellar alignments, some highlighted in red pen and exclamation marks. He didn’t need them now anyway. He snorted at the memory: a conversation from a few months before and the words of his then-tutor: ‘Astronomy is supposed to be science! Your original subject, on evidence for astronomy in prehistory was fine, if a little loose; but to start delving into these myths, well, Con, you’re on very shaky ground. If it’s not Indian myth it’s Red Indian myth… I know you’ve had a very, very difficult time of late. But these subjects are simply not tenable and I really cannot support your continued study of them, I’m sorry!’
‘Red Indian? That’s not very PC, is it?’ Con had answered. His tutor had just blinked at him and waved it off with a motion of his hand as irrelevant. Behind the tutor’s head was a large poster of stars being created in Orion’s belt as imaged by the Hubble telescope, and above this a poster of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva including an image of an atom with electrons flying about the nucleus like billiard balls; the great and the small; was this guy so focussed on these extremes that he couldn’t see the everyday world, Con had thought? Surely what was interesting about stars and atoms was that we were made of both: the very substance of our being were atoms forged in those great stellar furnaces, matter that was, the closer you looked at it, just energy seeming to flit into being from out of some mysterious and timeless zero energy field… physics surely was supposed to allow one look at the world in wonder – not to ignore it.
Conall had often waxed-lyrical about this to anyone who would listen: on a quantum level space and time were illusory; changing the energy state of a single atom here changed every single other atom in the cosmos; alter the course of a pair of particles once joined and the other would move, too – even if it was thousands of millions of miles away – even though according to science nothing moved faster than light-speed – something between these particles carried that information in an instant. How could that be – that a pair of particles once joined were forever linked?! Modern physics was mystical, magical and it had returned the stuffy academic that Con had once been in danger of becoming into a would-be mystic, something closer to how he had been as a child; an image of Tao, the yin-yang symbol, now hung on a string around his neck, his hair, at least then, long. But his tutor remained unaware of any of this magic, un-awakened by its import – and had failed to see its importance to his student.
‘You’re a scientist Con. This research is NOT science.’
‘You accepted my proposal. I clearly stated that I’d be investigating ancient myths…’ Con retorted.
‘Look – every PhD proposal needs tweaking – we had hoped you’d come to realise that this kind of research is currently frowned upon in the academic community and that perhaps other aspects of the subject might take precedence in your research. You’re a physicist at heart; get this ‘Tao of physics’ rubbish out of your system and grow up.’
‘It’s pronounced Dao’ was all Con could muster in reply as he left the office.
Con had driven home from this meeting fuming; by the time he had reached his house and sat down at his computer his anger had not abated. He had typed the shortest email of his life. ‘I quit.’ He had wanted it to be twice as long but decided to leave ‘you wanker’ unwritten. But in writing the email he had quit not just a PhD, but its associated lectureship in astrophysics; and he wasn’t sorry. The fire he had once had for the subject had left him since she had gone, and lecturing without fire was a mere dumb-show; thirty pairs of eyes, open like the mouths of chicks screaming to be fed, and he not able to even feed himself. He would not miss that. Besides, he had been told to rein in too many times; to leave the ‘new age’ nonsense out of the class. He was fed up of being told what he should or should not believe. As if truth was something you could measure.
Two particles once joined, linked forever... but the truth was she had died and he had carried on living; and he had not known, not at the time; not unless you counted that dream – but how could you count that dream? He daren’t even go there, daren’t even begin to think... The dream… the river of milk, the horse on its banks…. No! He cast it from his mind. It was impossible; it was madness. It was okay for microscopic particles in the world of quantum reality to behave that way – to be entangled – twinned - but in the real world, the world of Newton, and television, and water bills? If it were true, if they had been linked and the dream had been some kind of warning, surely he would have known; he would have felt her fear?
Without any real thought he put his folder to one side and reached for a book on the dresser shelf above the worktop. It had been hers and her name was scribbled inside the front page in a felt-tip pen: Melissa Astor; oldest and best of the Astor twins. It was an edition of the collected of poems of Coleridge, its cover faded by sunlight, its pages heavily thumbed, many turned down at the corner. It opened naturally at a well-worn page, the poem ‘Kubla Khan’, underlined and annotated in a small, hurried hand, the same as had written the name at the start. He half-read the notes, half-remembered them, so many times had he poured over them in the last year. He sat down on the sofa-bed with the book in his hands and read for a few moments more. The handwriting was legible, if rushed, little circles dotted the ‘i’s, and triple lines underlined words in the printed poem, often followed by a barrage of exclamation marks; the handwriting of someone excited, alive. But there they hid the truth.
Kubla Khan. Her favourite poem; their favourite – they’d learned it by heart just for the fun of it. He looked out of the window at nothing in particular and recited the first verse.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
A white barn-owl feather, edged with cream and smoky brown stripes, that had been placed in the back pages, fell onto the mattress of the soaf-bed; he picked it up gently, twisting it between his fingers; brushed it against his lips; and thought of the dark-haired girl who had given it to him, not the same girl who had once owned this book, but one now equally lost to him, it seemed. The feather brought back a memory of this other girl and of her grandfather; of a conversation a year earlier in a garden not two of miles from where Con now sat, with the frail white-haired man over the best soil for roses:
‘I don’t think he’s that interested in roses, granddad,’ the dark-haired girl had laughed.
‘Well he should be! If he learns the patience to cultivate a rose he’ll have patience to cultivate a life with my beautiful grand-daughter’ the old man had replied, with a slow wink that creased the whole of his already much-lined face. Both Conall and the girl had coloured at this. ‘Granddad!’ she had said, abashed, and had mouthed a silent ‘sorry’ to Con.
Conall would go and lay tobacco on this old man’s grave tomorrow, at the Church in Avebury village, speaking the words the elder had taught him – Ihtsipaitapiiyo’pa - Great Spirit… he wondered if anyone laid flowers there now that his dark-haired granddaughter, his only surviving relative, would have returned home. Placing the book back on the shelf he continued with cleaning the van. A book from one girl, and a feather from another, he mused; it was a shame they had never met. It was tragic that they now never would. If I hadn’t been here… he began to think, but angrily cast the thought from his mind.
When the tidying was done Conall stepped outside and wrung the spilled coffee from his t-shirt then threw it back inside. The van up the way with the howling wolves on its side, curtains closed, music blaring, was gently rocking rhythmically on its squeaky suspension. He stared for a moment then quickly looked away, suddenly understanding. Lucky bastard, he thought to himself. Then imagining a night of this music and squeaking wheels he decided he would have to find another spot, closer to the circle, to camp.
Conall had returned to the campervan, and was taking a few moments to mop the remnants of the spilled coffee from the floor with a dirty t-shirt, and to replace the rest of the fallen objects (and others that had already been on the floor) to their proper place – stuffed under the sofa-bed. Most of his stuff had, in fairness, been properly packed away, but the decision to come here had been last-minute and so he had thrown a number of items on to the soaf-bed wrapped in a duvet, hoping they would be ok. The coffee had been a mistake, though. He’d wedged the unfinished cup between a pile of fairly heavy books and a lever-arch file on the small kitchen worktop behind the driver’s seat– and it would have been okay there, or so he told himself, if it hadn’t been for the hare…
The file, marked PhD, with the words ‘unfinished’ scrawled on the label lay half-open, and he collected a number of hand-written pages, star-maps and photocopies of ancient artefacts, statues and inscriptions that had cascaded from out of it. A few of the sheets were wrinkled and brown with coffee, but he gathered them up all the same and pushed them carelessly into the pile – pages of sketches of little clay figurines copied from Marija Gimbutas’ books on ‘Old’ Europe, with lozenge shapes and zig zags marked in black pen; carved cow-horns from Iberian tombs; print-outs of stellar alignments, some highlighted in red pen and exclamation marks. He didn’t need them now anyway. He snorted at the memory: a conversation from a few months before and the words of his then-tutor: ‘Astronomy is supposed to be science! Your original subject, on evidence for astronomy in prehistory was fine, if a little loose; but to start delving into these myths, well, Con, you’re on very shaky ground. If it’s not Indian myth it’s Red Indian myth… I know you’ve had a very, very difficult time of late. But these subjects are simply not tenable and I really cannot support your continued study of them, I’m sorry!’
‘Red Indian? That’s not very PC, is it?’ Con had answered. His tutor had just blinked at him and waved it off with a motion of his hand as irrelevant. Behind the tutor’s head was a large poster of stars being created in Orion’s belt as imaged by the Hubble telescope, and above this a poster of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva including an image of an atom with electrons flying about the nucleus like billiard balls; the great and the small; was this guy so focussed on these extremes that he couldn’t see the everyday world, Con had thought? Surely what was interesting about stars and atoms was that we were made of both: the very substance of our being were atoms forged in those great stellar furnaces, matter that was, the closer you looked at it, just energy seeming to flit into being from out of some mysterious and timeless zero energy field… physics surely was supposed to allow one look at the world in wonder – not to ignore it.
Conall had often waxed-lyrical about this to anyone who would listen: on a quantum level space and time were illusory; changing the energy state of a single atom here changed every single other atom in the cosmos; alter the course of a pair of particles once joined and the other would move, too – even if it was thousands of millions of miles away – even though according to science nothing moved faster than light-speed – something between these particles carried that information in an instant. How could that be – that a pair of particles once joined were forever linked?! Modern physics was mystical, magical and it had returned the stuffy academic that Con had once been in danger of becoming into a would-be mystic, something closer to how he had been as a child; an image of Tao, the yin-yang symbol, now hung on a string around his neck, his hair, at least then, long. But his tutor remained unaware of any of this magic, un-awakened by its import – and had failed to see its importance to his student.
‘You’re a scientist Con. This research is NOT science.’
‘You accepted my proposal. I clearly stated that I’d be investigating ancient myths…’ Con retorted.
‘Look – every PhD proposal needs tweaking – we had hoped you’d come to realise that this kind of research is currently frowned upon in the academic community and that perhaps other aspects of the subject might take precedence in your research. You’re a physicist at heart; get this ‘Tao of physics’ rubbish out of your system and grow up.’
‘It’s pronounced Dao’ was all Con could muster in reply as he left the office.
Con had driven home from this meeting fuming; by the time he had reached his house and sat down at his computer his anger had not abated. He had typed the shortest email of his life. ‘I quit.’ He had wanted it to be twice as long but decided to leave ‘you wanker’ unwritten. But in writing the email he had quit not just a PhD, but its associated lectureship in astrophysics; and he wasn’t sorry. The fire he had once had for the subject had left him since she had gone, and lecturing without fire was a mere dumb-show; thirty pairs of eyes, open like the mouths of chicks screaming to be fed, and he not able to even feed himself. He would not miss that. Besides, he had been told to rein in too many times; to leave the ‘new age’ nonsense out of the class. He was fed up of being told what he should or should not believe. As if truth was something you could measure.
Two particles once joined, linked forever... but the truth was she had died and he had carried on living; and he had not known, not at the time; not unless you counted that dream – but how could you count that dream? He daren’t even go there, daren’t even begin to think... The dream… the river of milk, the horse on its banks…. No! He cast it from his mind. It was impossible; it was madness. It was okay for microscopic particles in the world of quantum reality to behave that way – to be entangled – twinned - but in the real world, the world of Newton, and television, and water bills? If it were true, if they had been linked and the dream had been some kind of warning, surely he would have known; he would have felt her fear?
Without any real thought he put his folder to one side and reached for a book on the dresser shelf above the worktop. It had been hers and her name was scribbled inside the front page in a felt-tip pen: Melissa Astor; oldest and best of the Astor twins. It was an edition of the collected of poems of Coleridge, its cover faded by sunlight, its pages heavily thumbed, many turned down at the corner. It opened naturally at a well-worn page, the poem ‘Kubla Khan’, underlined and annotated in a small, hurried hand, the same as had written the name at the start. He half-read the notes, half-remembered them, so many times had he poured over them in the last year. He sat down on the sofa-bed with the book in his hands and read for a few moments more. The handwriting was legible, if rushed, little circles dotted the ‘i’s, and triple lines underlined words in the printed poem, often followed by a barrage of exclamation marks; the handwriting of someone excited, alive. But there they hid the truth.
Kubla Khan. Her favourite poem; their favourite – they’d learned it by heart just for the fun of it. He looked out of the window at nothing in particular and recited the first verse.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
A white barn-owl feather, edged with cream and smoky brown stripes, that had been placed in the back pages, fell onto the mattress of the soaf-bed; he picked it up gently, twisting it between his fingers; brushed it against his lips; and thought of the dark-haired girl who had given it to him, not the same girl who had once owned this book, but one now equally lost to him, it seemed. The feather brought back a memory of this other girl and of her grandfather; of a conversation a year earlier in a garden not two of miles from where Con now sat, with the frail white-haired man over the best soil for roses:
‘I don’t think he’s that interested in roses, granddad,’ the dark-haired girl had laughed.
‘Well he should be! If he learns the patience to cultivate a rose he’ll have patience to cultivate a life with my beautiful grand-daughter’ the old man had replied, with a slow wink that creased the whole of his already much-lined face. Both Conall and the girl had coloured at this. ‘Granddad!’ she had said, abashed, and had mouthed a silent ‘sorry’ to Con.
Conall would go and lay tobacco on this old man’s grave tomorrow, at the Church in Avebury village, speaking the words the elder had taught him – Ihtsipaitapiiyo’pa - Great Spirit… he wondered if anyone laid flowers there now that his dark-haired granddaughter, his only surviving relative, would have returned home. Placing the book back on the shelf he continued with cleaning the van. A book from one girl, and a feather from another, he mused; it was a shame they had never met. It was tragic that they now never would. If I hadn’t been here… he began to think, but angrily cast the thought from his mind.
When the tidying was done Conall stepped outside and wrung the spilled coffee from his t-shirt then threw it back inside. The van up the way with the howling wolves on its side, curtains closed, music blaring, was gently rocking rhythmically on its squeaky suspension. He stared for a moment then quickly looked away, suddenly understanding. Lucky bastard, he thought to himself. Then imagining a night of this music and squeaking wheels he decided he would have to find another spot, closer to the circle, to camp.