Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  Fragments of human bones have been found in middens, those huge Mesolithic refuse heaps which often contain tens of thousands of items: the shells of limpets and hazelnuts alongside the bones of fish and animals, men, women and children, all of them rattling together in the proximity to which they belong. It could seem like casual abandonment; but in one of the middens on Oronsay in the Western Isles of Scotland, the remains of a human hand had been carefully reassembled and placed on the flipper of a seal. There is no way of knowing the meaning of such a gesture, but that does not destroy its power.

  Take it a step further. If you are part of the natural world, absorbed into it as a tree is absorbed into the earth that holds its roots, as a bird is absorbed into the migratory pattern of the year, then it follows that death is not a final ending, it is just one of the many stages of your belonging. The dead are there in the places they knew, the places they inhabited and moved through and their presence speaks to the living.

  Human corpses were also left intact and lowered into a fissure in the ground; they were buried on islands used just for that purpose, or placed in a cave, or in the sea, or a peat bog, or some other natural tomb.

  The remains of the dead were often accompanied by fine gifts and sometimes the most perfect axeheads and other valued objects were intentionally broken, split in half with one blow, before being handed over to the other side as a mark of respect or of memory.

  31

  19 June 2017 and the sky is as blue as any image of heaven and there’s not a breath of wind and I’ve just been told it’s hotter today in England than it is in Madagascar. Two months ago I was in Denmark making a radio programme with my friend Tim Dee. We flew to Copenhagen and then drove to Jutland along flat motorways of which I remember nothing apart from the orange juice we bought in a motorway café which had transparent floating bits in it that must have been made out of jelly. For the radio programme we went to see Tollund Man and other bog bodies within the museum caskets that hold them and we visited the old peat bogs from which they had been lifted.

  On our way back to Copenhagen we stopped at the Vedbaek Museum which houses the contents of a Mesolithic burial site found by accident in 1975, when the foundations for a new village school were being dug in some rough land on the edge of a fjord. Seventeen graves, containing the remains of twenty-two people, all of them dating from nine thousand years ago.

  The museum was opened in 1980 and it’s a sort of annexe to the main Søllerød museum which specialises in modern art. When we came in and asked to buy tickets, the young woman at the desk thought we had made a mistake, surely we had come to see the Rauschenberg exhibition. She was thin and angular and shy and bold all at once and she made me think of a learner driver who lurches the car forward and then stalls it with equal suddenness. She gave a little shriek of delight when we said we really had come for the burials.

  The building comprised three little rooms following on from each other and the displays were simple and without any special effects. The first glass cabinet contained a branch to represent a place in the forest where a squirrel jumps from a tree top in flight from the lightning-fast bite of the pine marten and the jumping squirrel and the lunging pine marten both looked weary and a bit motheaten from holding the pose for so long. Then there was the shell of a swamp turtle found in a swamp, the bark from a linden tree, a capercaillie with the black fan of its tail feathers raised for a courtship dance, and a great auk which, as the notice explained, had been reconstructed from the bodies of eleven razorbills.

  The next cabinet contained the complete skeleton of a dog. The legs were bent as if the animal was still in pursuit of the prey it would dutifully bring back to the hunter and the body was honoured with a scattering of ochre the colour of dried blood.

  And now to the people. We saw the skeleton of a woman who was estimated to be in her fifties and thus very old. Her head lay on a pillow of whitened deer antlers that sprouted out around her skull as if she was wearing them as a great bleached crown. Even though her skull was thrown back into a look of macabre laughter, there was a tremendous dignity about her, the sense that she was a person of importance, a person who demanded respect. Then there was a man who had been killed by an axe blow to his head and the stone axe was next to his shattered skull, telling the story of what had happened. A woman lay beside him and their young child was between them, the bones of the three bodies touching each other as if for comfort. The long thin feet of the adults were like the feet of wading birds.

  But the one who impressed me most was a woman who had been buried with her newborn baby. You saw the tenderness of the two of them lying there together and from the way they had been so carefully placed you could feel that their death had caused much sorrow. She was young, not yet twenty. Her head had been covered by a leather cap decorated with perforated deer teeth and snail shells, but the leather had vanished and all that was left was a scattering of teeth and shell. Her tiny baby was at her right side and her right hand was turned so that her fingers were cupped protectively beneath his feet. His ribs were partly broken and splayed out in a configuration that made them look like a butterfly. A flint knife blade had been placed on his belly, maybe to indicate the hunting he would have done, had he lived to be a man.

  What makes you pause and catch your breath, bringing the prickling of tears to your eyes, is the fact that the baby had been placed on the outstretched wing of a swan. The bones of the arch of the upper part of the wing seem to be growing directly out of the woman’s shoulder and although the white feathers vanished long ago, it is not difficult to imagine them softly cradling the little body. I could almost hear the creak of the wing as the bird lifted the child up from its grave and into the element of air.

  My husband’s coffin was made of strong cardboard. It had nylon rope handles and it was lined with white synthetic satin fitted over pieces of foam rubber to serve as a sort of nest for the deceased. I thought it would be nice to paint it and so it was brought to the house and put on the floor next to the sofa. My friend Jayne came to help me and the task was curiously convivial. I got a pot of red ochre powder paint from the studio and mixed it with water and Jayne suggested adding a bit of polyurethane glue to give it more hold. The same with cobalt blue. I drew the outline of a simple range of mountains, because my husband loved mountains, and Jayne and I coloured them in, as children might. Behind the mountains we painted the brightness of a blue sky and a tiny splash of blue fell on the wooden floor and is still there almost four years later, holding on tight.

  Two representatives of the funeral company arrived to take the coffin away: a young man and a young woman dressed in black with white shirts and white cotton gloves, and when they entered the house they kept their heads tilted down as a sign of the seriousness of the occasion and walked with slow bobbing steps which made them look all the more like penguins. They took it in turn to speak, their words trailing off into awkward pauses. ‘Oh! Isn’t that lovely!’ the woman said when she saw the painted coffin and that made the man looked startled and ashamed as if she had blasphemed or farted, so then she blushed with confusion and clasped her gloved hands together in a vow of silence. They stood and hovered around for a while and rejected the offer of a cup of tea and then they carried the empty coffin to the black hearse that was parked outside.

  This was to be a cremation: no preacher to explain the fact of death and no tried and tested ritual to guide us through the ceremony. I had found a piece of ivy that had grown its clinging arms into a rough circle around the trunk of a hawthorn in the meadow and I decorated it with flowers from the garden and people added more flowers, making it like a wreath to put on the coffin. Friends added a branch from an olive tree and I balanced my husband’s favourite hat among the clusters of black fruit and the elegance of the pale leaves. Another friend placed an apple next to the branch and I imagined how it would explode softly in the flames.

  The sun was shining. We carri
ed the coffin into a room filled with chairs. Someone gave a short speech, our children spoke, I said something. We had three pieces of music: a composition by Steve Reich that sounded like yelping angels; Lester Young puff-puffing his way through the happy-sadness of ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’; and then came Blind Willie Johnson who was born the descendant of slaves in the cotton state of Texas in 1897. In a gravelly voice that seemed to come from a long way off, he asked the question,

  Won’t somebody tell me,

  Answer if you can!

  Want somebody tell me,

  What is the soul of a man?

  A couple of weeks after the cremation, the ashes were ready to be collected. They were in a murky-red plastic container with a screw-top lid, my husband’s name and death date printed on to a white label. The container was surprisingly heavy. When I got home I unscrewed the lid and looked inside. The ashes were in a clear plastic bag. I lifted out the bag and opened it. No sign of bits of bone, just a heap of rather industrial grey powder that could have been ground concrete. That evening I put a sprinkling of my husband’s remains into a bowl of yoghurt and honey and ate it, startled by the act and by the grittiness in my mouth.

  32

  When I was twenty I wrote a book called How the World As We Know It Today Began. I made it in a little flimsy notebook, postcard size, with a watercolour illustration on the right-hand page and a text typed out on my Olivetti 22 and stuck in place on the left.

  This was the story of Adam and Eve in the walled garden of Paradise and it was quite conventional in structure, although God did keep saying that everything was good but not good enough and there was no apple, just a whispering snake. The sin was the sexual act which the first couple committed three times, three positions on three consecutive pages with big smiles on their faces while the angel looked on in dismay.

  I considered it to be a serious book, or at least almost serious. I was interested in the idea of the enclosed bubble of being happy for ever, at ease with God and nature, and I was interested in how a simple physical act could irredeemably destroy such contentment and throw poor old Adam and Eve into the confusions of a much harsher and antagonistic world in which they had to struggle to stay alive.

  I made some more picture books, including one called An Alphabet of People, and that also had pictures on one side, facing a short verse for each rather tragic individual and their alphabetically listed fears. Each verse ended with the refrain: oh Homo, Homo sapiens!

  I eventually gathered up courage and took my books to the owner of a small printing press. He was welcoming but a bit over-solicitous in his manner. He gazed at the naked people and their fears and at Adam and Eve and their sin and with a deep sigh he patted me on the shoulder and said it was a psychiatrist I should be talking to, not a publisher. He asked if I would like to have lunch with him. I declined his offer and went on my way.

  I moved to Majorca where I started working with a very academic American woman on a project we called Beyond Genesis, although I was not at all sure about the title. This was to be a collection of myths that had their origin in the story of Paradise and its loss, collected from all sorts of different cultures and historical times, just so long as the first man was Adam and the first woman was Eve. We had the Cathars in fourteeth-century France, the Bogomils in tenth-century Bulgaria, the Yezidis of Iraq and some rather haphazardly converted Aborigines in Australia whose Fall was engineered by an angry and racist God and He sent them to live in Devil-Devil Land which was the desert landscape that had been their home for many thousands of years.

  The manuscript for that project grew increasingly fat and heavy, until the day when I began the opening of a new chapter with the words: Civilisation has always. I felt a cold shock of surprise as I realised I had no idea of what civilisation had always done, or if it had always done anything, and so the book came to an abrupt end.

  Time Song 14

  Next week I will be sixty-nine,

  the years for the living

  moving on as they do

  without ever pausing.

  I have been busy with this book for quite a while,

  and it often seems

  the longer I work on it

  the shorter it becomes.

  Now the Mesolithic is more or less over

  while the Neolithic

  in which we more or less still are

  begins.

  The Neolithic means

  owning things:

  property, money,

  wives and cattle

  and whatever else

  is worth fighting for,

  to the death,

  if need be.

  The first steps of the Neolithic

  were taken some eight thousand years ago

  in the land of milk and honey

  (now the land of oil and war).

  The softening climate

  provided food

  for everyone;

  no need to wander

  or struggle,

  plenty of time to sit still

  and grow fat.

  But sitting still

  brought changes in its wake:

  human numbers grew,

  crops failed,

  the people as hungry

  as they were numerous.

  The close proximity to domestic animals

  led to sickness and epidemics:

  dirty water,

  fleas in the bed,

  rats in the barns,

  heaps of excrement

  From man and beast,

  on all sides.

  War and catastrophe

  entered stage right,

  the seven apocalyptic horses

  on the gallop,

  nostrils flaring.

  ‘What have we done?’

  the people asked their god

  and from out of the silence

  their god seemed to say

  they had sinned

  and deserved punishment.

  Many of them left their homes,

  travelling north and east

  like a conquering army

  in search of more land

  for crops and cattle,

  more women as child bearers,

  more places to claim as their own.

  The hunters and gatherers

  were swept along or swept away

  by this tide of change

  which is how – to put it simply –

  the Mesolithic came to an end,

  and the Neolithic took over;

  turning the techniques of hunting

  into the technology of warfare.

  Based on The Good Book of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Reading of the Bible by Carel van Schaik and Kai Michel, Basic Books, 2016.

  Part Three

  No Time at All

  What falls away is always. And is near.

  THEODORE ROETHKE, ‘The Waking’

  33

  14 August 2017 and a wren is in the house. It keeps hurling its little body against the high panes of glass that cannot be opened just above an open door and an open window. It’s a surreal variation of the story told by the Venerable Bede, in which it is a cold and stormy night and the King and his people are feasting in the firelit warmth of a Great Hall when a sparrow flies like an arrow through one end of the building and out again at the other end. He says the bird within the hall is like our experience of life, while the darkness beyond the hall is the uncharted territory from which we emerge and into which we must return. But my wren, if I can call it that, is trapped and cannot escape, even though escape would be so easy.

  It’s almost midday. The sky is white
and without substance. The air is cold and still. In Southern Europe people are deep in a heatwave.

  I finished a time song this morning. Perhaps I finished it too quickly, but I had been trying to write it for ages so that should make for a balance.

  In order to continue I hold the image of a leaf in my mind. Someone told me of finding an aspen leaf deep in a peat bog and the leaf emerged as perfect and fresh as the moment in autumn when it dropped from the branch of the tree that held it, and settled on the surface of clear brown water and sank down and lay there unchanged for more than a thousand years. And then as it is exposed to the air, the leaf in the hand of the person who has picked it up turns pale and disintegrates and ceases to be.

  The wren must have knocked itself out on the glass. I heard a tiny thud as it fell to the floor. I lifted it up as light as a butterfly and it opened one eye to stare at me morosely. I took it into the garden and placed it among the leaves and flowers of a pot of blue lobelia and eventually it gathered enough energy to fly away.

  34

  The blackened stumps are from trees that once grew in Doggerland. They are mostly oak and some of them once stood at a height of fifteen metres. As soon as they emerge from under the sand or clay that covers them and into the air, they begin to disintegrate.

  I was again staying with my friend Jayne and we planned to go to the coastal village of Holme-next-the-Sea, where you are most likely to see the Mesolithic forest bed, if it is there to be seen. It’s also the place which erupted into the public imagination when a circle of tree stumps surrounding a central altar or burial platform was revealed during a very low tide. The platform was made from the base of a tree, planted upside down so that its spread roots could cradle something the size of a human body. Other such circles had been revealed before, but someone gave this one the name Seahenge, which, with its echo of Stonehenge, brought great flurries of visitors to behold the miracle of the past borne into the present.