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A Day Out of Time / Une journée hors du temps

NOTE: This piece was written in October 2016 for my old blog. I decided to use it to start my new blog for two reasons, firstly it was the last piece I posted on my old blog so using it to start my new blog feels like picking up a thread and secondly. and more importantly, looking back through my old sketchbooks and seeing the drawings I made of the stones that day was one of the catalysts for the project I have just started working on and which, for the moment, I am calling the ‘Stone roads of time’.

A Day Out of Time:

The alignments at Carnac are immense. Their serried ranks stride across the Breton landscape with a careless majesty that takes time and energy to absorb. Beyond knowing and comprehension they are magnificent in and of themselves. We study and extrapolate and make plausible hypotheses about the alignments original meaning and purpose but since no one involved published an artist’s statement or a funding proposal about the construction we don’t know and probably never will. I like that.

For me their original purpose matters less than what it has become to us now. What we look at is not what the builders saw either physically or emotionally. Physically the stones have weathered into new forms over the millennia. Emotionally we have no entry point into their world view. We do not share their ‘habitus’. We perceive and react to them from the stand point of a radically different world view to that of the people who brought and placed the stones.

So each of us relates to the stones in our own way. Each person takes from them what they need or want. Every time we look at a painting or a statue, listen to a particular piece of music or read a familiar book our response is conditioned by our own current mental attitude and mood. We see something new or we like something more, or less, or we have a different understanding.

My response was to see how time and natural forces have produced art in the stones. The sculptural forms and subtle colours of rock and lichen. The play of light and shade.

While I spent the day immersed in sketching the shapes and forms of stones David spent his studying the small intricacies of life. Filming the crickets and moths and grasshoppers; the way the stems of the grasses stirred in the breeze and cast shadows on the stones. A bumble bee feeding on a pine cone. Wasps gorging themselves on the fallen apples.

I saw several apples had fallen on the stones themselves and I was struck by the contrast their intense red colour made with the soft grey of the stone. The wrinkled skin of the apples and the blotches of brown decay that had started to mark them chimed with the rough and weathered surfaces of the stones and the way they are blotched by lichens and moss that mark their own process of slow decay.

I picked up a couple of the apples and as I did so I remembered childhood days spent roaming the hedgerows with my grandmother gathering apples and blackberries for the autumn ritual of jam making. Apple trees are rooted deep in our folk tales and mythologies and have been around as long as the stones. The people who made Carnac would also have spent days like this gathering semi wild crab apples and no doubt their houses were as full of the smell of apples cooking as our farmhouse kitchen. Life goes on in and around the big, momentous events, much as it always has. A door into their world opened for me and I felt the connection to those long ago ancestors in a full circle of shared humanity.

We do not need to know the how and why of the stones. The fact of their being is what is important. That people like us co-operated together to make something magnificent that has lasted for millenia and not just here at Carnac but at Stonehenge and Newgrange, at Brogdar and Callanish to name just the most famous ones. They built and they thrived and then they stopped, quite suddenly no more monuments were made. Their time was over. The people did not just vanish, no doubt they went on collecting apples and making the neolithic equivalent of jam but some trouble overtook their society and they no longer had the will or energy to build monuments.

It’s worth remembering that for all its scary present troubles the world is a beautiful place. That humanity contains not only the worst of emotions and impulses but also the best. That our progress and achievements as a species have come about through co-operation and shared endeavour despite the strident voices of division and hate that drop into our inboxes on a daily basis.