Lookout Cartridge (57 page)

Charging no doubt through the Indian and West Indian neighborhood where Jan’s Notting Hill Gate flat placed itself: and through her to the Druid’s busy phone south of the river: or miles southeast to the trees and the old gray stones of a Marvelous Country House that I could only look forward now to understanding better: beyond even these to whoever had thrust me onto that unmoving rapid-transit escalator back up which I then rebounded like a wave myself through an unmoved medium but found at the top only the moist smile in the change booth and her transistor enlarging itself with the mumbo jumbo of
You Are Everything and Everything Is You
.

Where the hinges are missing, saith the priest, I will spark the gap.

Ah
Mumbo Jumbo
, said Dudley Allott when I’d described from start to finish the shooting of what I’d thought was our final scene: but capital
M
and capital
], Mumbo Jumbo
means among the Mandingo of Western Sudan a priest who keeps off evil.

Action, yelled Dagger, and for this early part of the six hundred feet we shot at Stonehenge that midnight in early August of this year 1971, I had the Nagra in its case on my shoulder strap and the mike on a short boom.

I moved parallel to Dagger across the interior of the Sarsen Circle northeast among the battery lamps and torches slowly as if
we
were the procession; for outside the circle the line of New Druids and others proceeded toward us from the misnamed Heel Stone some eighty meters off as Dagger and I inside the circle came to the central and misnamed Altar Stone with the huge pi-shaped trilothons either side of us southeast and northwest unbeknownst to our faithful Beaulieu whose focus on the New Druids was at this point narrowly framed through another arch on the far edge of the ring.

Dagger had shortened his depth of field, as we’d agreed. We would get an effect of some flaming conglomerate body back in the heavens clearing the horizon and getting bigger and nearer until it was persons singling themselves out of prickly fight. Individuals from the void but coming communal, like parts of our film: the earth of Corsica yielding the brick and plaster of Ajaccio, the stone home which takes in and lets go yellow and olive and red slickers (and from which several communicants here tonight had come), and now these windy megaliths built in circles and avenues, barest of dream-able forms.

Concentric circles of stones and vanished stones ring the half-fallen horseshoe of trilothons, once two horseshoes: all forms broken, some of the twenty-ton Untéis gone almost as wonderfully as they came: one of the thirty-ton Sarsens fallen in ’63, raised in ’64: the mind completes the architraves, the eye describes the circles, no bloody gags about Druids and old doomed maidens can fill the gaps devised hundreds or thousands of years before the Druids, who nonetheless deserve this place too, no technical chatter about loop pans from Cosmo in his poncho off in the shadows toward the car park can rattle the Beaulieu’s snakelike advance, and we will presently hear under one cloud-lit trilothon visiting statistics in an Alabama accent about a Stone Age computer whose spokes turning through fifty-six-year cycles predict the future of the sky.

I knew more about Stonehenge now than when I’d told Rose’s friend Connie about Merlin; more than when Jenny (not here tonight) giggled at the bank clerk; and more even than when I told Tessa (tonight distinctly here) that a cremation barrow nearby yielded blue beads from Egypt, 1400
B.C
.

The Indian from Kansas City came through the circle across our advancing path from right to left—as if heading for the trilothon through which one aligns with midwinter moonset—and as he grinned, I asked what he thought of the place, and he and his Hollywood cheekbones were off camera when he said: I wish my brother could see it!

Coming along the Altar Stone, I had for a moment no sight of the procession and Dagger’s must have been through the 29–30 portal to the left of the one into whose alignment with the distant Heel Stone we now bent, for we were around the Altar Stone, it was behind us now, and stretching behind it through the great southwest trilothon was the alignment of midwinter sunset. And ahead—though I had to stay next to Dagger to keep our personal parallax from blocking my view—the procession we were shooting had come from the wide avenue and was passing the probably misnamed Slaughter Stone, and as we moved toward our trilothon picking up laughter, shouts, and the flat dry voice of the procession, its torches filled our frame ahead at a rate not fast enough to match our rate of nearer approach so there was more rather than less of the night sky in our portal as we came up to it and then went through, camera first, mike second.

In the glimmering dark just where the circle’s outer circumference bent out of sight, a man was taking pictures with what looked like a very large double-lens reflex except he held it up in front of his eye.

We’d stopped moving here ten feet outside the circle. Into the mike I told Dagger’s man from the Ministry of Monuments in whose charge we were that these were the New Druids. They were willing to stage an artificial rite to give themselves some exposure, and by my own Druid Mr. Andsworth these were neither sanctioned nor dismissed.

The bank clerk from Salisbury who had given me all the facts at the Altar Stone months ago, had got into the act too. He knew the man from the Ministry, and he interrupted to ask Dagger if this was in color. Dagger said no but he wished we were because black and white wasn’t commercial any more.

The man from the Ministry was reciting to my mike the numbers of tourists for this year and last year and the year before that, but Dagger I am certain had focused past the man’s shoulder to pick up Nash.

Nash was rubbing an eye with his ring hand and I recalled the silver, orange, and ruby rings from the Softball Game. Nash was watching the procession approach but he must have felt Dagger and turned at the camera and stared. Elizabeth of the Marvelous Country House greeted Dagger and shook hands, and said to me, Still in England?

Round the circle and frame of another portal I saw Tessa weightless in her open raincoat against a huge standing stone; she tried to pull a man apparently in our direction, pointed to us, then relented; I couldn’t see the face, and when I mentioned him, Dagger laughed loudly and said he’d already gotten him. Nash had moved off. The procession was close. I said, We back away into the circle at their speed. Dagger said, Right.

I glanced behind through the portal we’d used once and would now use again and back at the Altar Stone with the largest hand-hewn prehistoric stone in the country—the lone standing part of the central trilothon—rearing up behind him, I saw the man with the camera and he had it trained on the portal where Tessa had been bugging that man, and the man with the camera who in his plastic mac and with a high forehead might have been the bank clerk but he couldn’t be because when I’d seen the latter he hadn’t had a camera, which I now saw was a cine camera not a double-lens reflex, and when I asked Dagger who he was, Dagger said Oh some friend of John’s.

Dagger said Let’s go, and we started backing up somewhat more slowly than the procession was approaching us. I asked what the man with the camera thought he was doing. Dagger didn’t know; check it out later; his own was heavy enough.

The procession divided at the edge of the circle, one line came through 29–30, the other through between 30 and I, the white robes brushed the stone. I looked back and the other camera was gone, but the Alabama academic we’d been put in touch with through Mary in Corsica (or through her brother whom we hadn’t met) was on schedule waiting for us. I heard Tessa say, Oh go to hell.

I forgot my mike was on and said to Dagger that if that man had black-and-white reversal film he could film silhouettes of stones and people and after we shot our b & w negative film we could have the lab double-print so what we shot would fill the shapes of what he’d shot.

But the Alabama archaeologist in his broad, pale-colored hat was ready to talk, and that camera man with wide eyes disappeared. In my original account there were two full pages of third-hand stuff the archaeologist told about azimuths and alignments, the Z holes and the Y holes (circles lying between Sarsen and Aubrey), the relation between eclipses and the winter moon’s rise over the Stonehenge Heel Stone, with anecdotes neatly inserted such as the ancient Chinese astronomers who failed to predict a solar eclipse and were liquidated.

Dagger tracked the procession past, while I kept the mike on our archaeologist who had just been asked by Tessa at my shoulder what was so important about eclipses and who had not planned to take that up and was now setting out to speculate on the positions of the fifty-six Aubrey Holes (the outermost circle way beyond the stones) and the rising and setting alignments through various arches, so he quickly disposed (he thought) of Tessa by saying priests in other cultures also used astronomical lore to hold power and Tessa asked if he knew the Maya observatories and he said. Much later than Stonehenge of course, and she as quickly declared that the origins were in ancient Asia and what about the thirty-six columns at Aké which Le Plongeon proved marked 180 years each, which came to more than twice the age of Egypt if you insisted on exalting measurement.

The man who had declined our Beaujolais at the Bonfire in Wales came by and the woman who had embraced Dagger in May and the Kiowa Apache who had a brother in Idaho and who in May had said he’d been in Britain for four months and wasn’t looking back and who in my gathering uncertainties I thought uttered the word Māyā twice as he brought up the end of the procession.

A strange voice said, Oh is
he
here? but when I looked, there was only Tessa, and I asked Who she’d been playing hands with over there, but Dagger hauled me off toward the Moonrise or southeast trilothon, leaving the Alabama archaeologist pontificating to Savvy Van Ghent the UPI newsman and casting alarmed glances at the mike and camera retreating.

Only now, after Gene and Jack and the Clisham hut (weeks after Stonehenge), could I think the other filmer there may have been Aut’s New York man who as far as I could see would have no edge on us since it was our scene he was shooting. I did not ask Dagger that night,
Which
John? because I was not to meet John of the Mercer Street loft till October. And a near-nausea like what I’d had in the New York camera shop due to photography I think and not the sewer fumes much less the sight of the stabbed man’s chest blood, came into me now en route from the autumn Hebrides to London and Jan Aut—yet more a threat of sickness maybe not truly sensed by some crystal semiconductor whose outer-faceted solidity reveals its inner atomic form, but sensed rather in the other and peculiar and mingled attributes of liquid crystal—and looking back and forth among the boats and real estate and tall antique clear-glass Shell Motor Oil quarts so beautiful in shape and embossed imprint you might prefer to think that their origin (A.B.M.) meant something more probably transcendent than Automatic Bottle Machine—I hovered again near nausea that might swirl between me and a growth as dangerous as it was parallel and independent—or eyes (say, Stonehenge and Callanish looking out to space) dangerous as the idea I was to hear expounded dreamlike by that odd and genuine John in steel-rimmed glasses which I then drew into what was only in part my own form: to wit, that as capitalist ingenuity may save us at the very brink of its own imminent lethality, so certain digital manipulations John prophesied that you and I though not John know threaten their opposite (for they envision the thinker’s mental state as if in some police act hooked by pulse rate and brain electricity to a computer) will find lo and behold a gated instrumentality that was always there by which to project (and here it is!) mind directly upon the screens of other minds—and maybe more even than this, which I might have to postpone seeing, for I had work to do; and from the Stonehenge footage, the altercations, the sweet burn of pot, and from our survey of views on Stonehenge voiced that August night accommodating themselves to the doorless doorways and roofless diameter of what Geoffrey of Monmouth calls the Dance of the Giants—and Dagger (off camera) called a symbol of British progress—I recollected only now what seemed to have a bearing on my search. I did not scout the spectrum of variously lighted opinions—interrupted to reload the magazine—the (now bearded) deserter’s opinion that Stonehenge was like a mind-blowing sundial, his hard-nosed friend’s (from the Unplaced Room) that Stonehenge was a chain of priestly shit to keep the people snowed, the Alabaman’s that ultimately he would rather not say, a New Druid’s (his upraised white-draped arm like wings) that these were petrified trees, the jolly woman in the blanket who had embraced and loved Dagger at the Bonfire in Wales that Stonehenge with its spinning circle and its open doors was a place where everyone could be everyone else, come out of hiding, come and go in love, and yet once more the Alabama archaeologist that he’d really rather not commit himself and did I have a light, I did and handed over a box with one match in it and he bent over the box as if already shielding a flame from the wind, and I turned away and caught Tessa watching and then she turned away; but I did defer two other views important now in the light of what seemed not quite to be happening. I had left Dagger and gone out of the circle to find a drink and Cosmo said, Did you see Tessa’s green beret on that guy who’s supposed to be a mute?

And seeing Nash with a half-gallon jug, I went near him and heard him say to the deserter (whom I’d not recognized in his beard), Well is he here or not? I heard he was.

The deserter’s dark-haired companion from the Unplaced Room arrived, and I turned as if not paying attention. He
is
here, said the deserter. I heard nothing else and when I turned toward them Nash was turning toward me and the other two were walking off toward the circle where there was some physical activity. Nash had only his own paper cup, so I had a quick drink out of it. But on an impulse like self-preservation I said to Nash, That’s OK. I know he’s here. I saw him.