Monday, May 10, 2010
Getting Stonehenged; or, It’s Not What You Find, It’s What You Bring
1977, England: We were domiciled in gracious but isolated quarters outside of Oxford for six weeks while Dad did research. I’d suffered a sudden precipitous deterioration in my vision, losing most all of my distance acuity over a few short months and not even realizing it till we went out sightseeing at the famous Salisbury smudge and the renowned Blur of Myopia. I wasn’t seeing much of the sights when we took our tours, but some things remained in my range of perception. I could smell and sense the history; the creme anglaise and clotted Devon were plentiful, rich and fresh; and sometimes we visited places that even a purblind yankolescent such as my 13-year-old self ought to have been able to appreciate, like the rehabbed torture dungeons in musty old castles and the odd decrepit graveyard.
Plus, of course, I was a confirmed fan of British humor, and took full advantage of the opportunity to immerse myself in it. To begin with, there was Python - I’d known about them forever, as a 13-year-old measures such things. There were also the Goodies, too, but they already seemed a bit juvenile to me. Flanders and Swann had by then already ceased to produce new material for my delectation, perhaps in part due to Flanders’ demise some years earlier, and I’d already memorized both their albums long before; but then I discovered… The Goon Show.
Sure, they were defunct, but I’d had no prior exposure to them and in their day they’d been remarkably prolific and even more so silly. Sillier than Python, sometimes, and that was saying quite a bit. As their medium had been the radio broadcast, my visual impairment was no impediment to my full appreciation of their funny noises and non sequiturs. Harry Seacombe was their straight man - they gave him some good lines but mostly he was singing welsh Zeppo to their other-Marx-Brothers, consisting of: Peter Sellers, before he achieved renown as Jacques Clouseau, squeaking and jabbering in a dozen hilarious dialects and cracking his colleagues up on-air; and most significantly for me, Spike Milligan. He wrote most of their scripts; it was his twisted, ridiculous vision that the Goons evoked. His funny noises were the funniest; his silly voices, the silliest; and his nonsense, the most nonsensical. I didn’t have many role models at age 13, but Spike Milligan was definitely a few of them.
Since I felt compelled to get out of our isolated Oxfordshire village occasionally, I’d go on those bus tours with my mom and sister even though I couldn’t see much while on the road. I made up for my limited access to the outside world by expanding the inside one - that is to say, I read a lot. I read Catcher in the Rye, the Narnia Stories, a bunch of things I no longer recall… and Spike Milligan’s autobiography. Following the example of T.E.Lawrence, whose Seven Pillars of Wisdom verbosely described his experiences in Arabia during WWI, my man Spike wrote about North Africa during WWII, where he served without apparent distinction as a foot soldier. Except, instead of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, this was more like Four Fingers of Fleam. He was always getting into trouble and goofing around and generally making the living hell of service to the Queen against Rommel sound like a good bit of fun with a spade and a gun.
And thus it was that, one relatively less-overcast day, Mom and sis and I set out from wherever we started such things, as passengers on a right-hand-drive bus that took us to the Plains of Salisbury, a vague greenness flashing past the window next to which I sat, where I clutched a book the reading of which while in motion experience had taught me would nauseate me, but the eventual consumption of which I eagerly awaited. In the interim I watched England zip past, lulled by the rumble and thrum of the diesel engines and the cottony indistinctness of the landscape. We were headed, though, to a site which promised an experience as clear for me visually as historically. Megaliths benefit little from clear distance vision - roughly-hewn, massive and looming, they’d be the opposite of my trips to murky churches with their delicately-worked reliquaries kept yards away behind railings, details obscured by distance and darkness and visual defect. After visiting (but not seeing) too many of those, I was relieved to be on my way to open fields and huge crude monuments. I was in the mood for something obvious, and Stonehenge was not reputed to be excessively subtle.
The bus arrived, in 1977, at 2000 BCE. We pulled off the highway and could see the circle of orthostats and trilithons standing nearby, shadowless under grey skies. Even I could see them clearly against the meadow and horizon. Toward the, obedient, if not druidic, we all marched - the busload of tourists, mom, sis, Spike and myself. Spike, of course, accompanied us in the form of his penguin-edition autobiography, but in my myopic world his voice was so clear that he really seemed to be there with me - more than the other historical spirits haunting those earthworks, at any rate.
In 1977, historical preservation was a work in progress. Some sites kept visitors far from the erstwhile action, behind barriers and between the lines. Stonehenge wasn’t like that then. It was just a bunch of big rocks, after all - what could late 20th-century tourism do to it that nearly four thousand years of just sitting there hadn’t? I guess someone figured out the answer to that question because within a few years fences went up to block visitors from the immediate presence of those brooding stones. I got there before all that. When I visited Stonehenge, I walked right up to the circle, around it, through it, between its elephantine elements, under its looming lintels, dragged an impertinent finger along the mottled flanks of an unnatural formation more ancient than its own constructed ancientness by virtue of its geologic pedigree, caressed surfaces once wrought by hands so long since gone as to be lost to history’s history. For a while there, I was dwarfed by its magnitude, physically and historically. I was a blip, a wafer in a sedimentary formation that began before the past and extended beyond the future, an enduring chain of ages all linked together by the presence, there, of those stones, eloquent in an unknown language, marking seasons and years like Foucault’s Pendulum made permanent, and I was less to it than an equinoctial sunbeam or a solstice moonrise. For a while, was was really there, in it, within it, of it. For a while, anyway.
But I was also thirteen, and I lived on a steady slow simmer. I could only take so much of anything. Before our tour group had been called back to the bus I had reached my megalithic limit. I had been well and thoroughly stonehenged, and I was ready to move on. But the bus was across a broad field and likely still locked. I couldn’t tell, with my inept eyes, whether the driver had left me a way back to my cushioned seat, and I didn’t care to walk away from those chilling stones all the way across the meadow just to find that at the end I’d have to come back again. I was stuck at Stonehenge, for a little bit more of our respective slices of time. Thankfully, I was prepared for such an eventuality. I had my friend to keep me company.
And thus it was that my clearest recollection of Stonehenge, after treading its ancient paths and breathing in its antique air and letting its granitic impenetrability seep into the palms of my hands, after familiarizing myself with its utter mystery till I had neither room nor patience for further quiet contemplation of its majesty, was when I found a huge stone sinking on its side into the English turf, and I clambered sacrilegiously up onto it with my book and read about Spike Milligan’s misadventures. It wasn’t a great book, as such things go, but I’d had a crawful of greatness by then. What I wanted was comfort, distraction and the accelerated passage of time. Stonehenge couldn’t provide those, with its frowning stones, overwhelming presence, and timelessness. However, I knew how to do for myself what the monument could not do for me. It was not the lesson I’d gone to the stones to learn, and it was not the only one I learned from them - but it does seem to be the one that’s lasted the longest.
Moral: What you take away is what you bring with you, not what was waiting there for you to arrive.
