Notes from the Cévennes, page 17
An hour later, the pasta had hardened sufficiently to be able to peel it away. Amazingly, the crisp depressions had become perfect canine pads, oval and the size of hefty grapes, the toes of the rear paw impatiently overlapping the front paw’s left toe. The larger back pad on each foot, previously visible as a smudge, were now shallow swellings. This is normal: a dog walks on its toes, it’s the four foremost digital pads that absorb the shock of landing, that press the deepest.
I nestled the pasta mould in my palm as an owner might nestle a real paw – one of the most sensitive parts of the animal, complete with scent glands, so that dogs can smell through their feet.
‘Fidus Romanus was in good condition,’ observed Stephen. ‘Quite big, probably young.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Here, look – the pads are smooth, no visible wear or punishment.’ Not being a dog-owner like Stephen, I am ignorant of such things, of how those incredibly tough, leathery cushions can indicate health problems or become infected from the constant impact of the ground. I wondered how you could have a four-legged creature that leaves only a two-legged trace. ‘The grass or the tile next door took the other two legs,’ Stephen said, agreeing with an observation Bill had made: that a dog intending to stop on landing might splay its limbs up to a foot apart. Our hound was in no hurry, remember, as it pushed off gently to the right. Maybe someone shouted, threw a stone, but it made little difference. Present-day dogs that trespass in our garden, big lolloping things that dig up new plantings, go for the fish in our little pond, are often surprisingly slow to react to my yell, to the odd warning pebble. Or maybe it all happened after sunset, in the pre-electric gloam, the flicker of the night-guard’s fire safely distant and only a pair of glowing eyes giving the intruder away.
From the similar impression in the roseate tile by our front door, its indentations darkened by soot, a much more recent dog must have turned in the same fashion in a French tile-yard some 15 or 16 centuries later. Yet our ghostly, domestic resident feels so much further off: apart from the illusion the Roman period always gives us of a greater familiarity, a curious modernity, the more recent traces are fainter, dimmer, worn by footfall. A kind of reverse echo.
I showed Stephen the other and more mysterious impression: that deep gouge on one side, near the top, like a Mars canyon complete with landslides. He didn’t seem convinced until I used it to pick up the tile, my fingers comfortably nestling in the corrugated gash. This is what sculptors in bronze call a ‘negative impression’; the hand is the ‘positive form’, as were the paws. Again, we had to reproduce that positive, and what more basic form than a hand? He now found it intriguing, and reckoned the hand must have been small, perhaps a child’s. The pasta this time was a yellowish-brown – accidentally flesh-tinted. My hand pressed the dough into the trace of another hand that had pressed in turn (less consciously perhaps) into the wet clay some eighty generations ago.
Neither of us expected much. An hour later and we were looking at slender fingers emerging from primordial mud. The little finger was a perfect cast, the others more expressionist; a bundle of wriggling worms, as oddly slender as the fingers in a painting by van Dyck. They were the ‘inscape’ of a hand more than its realistic depiction, with each phalanx bonily clear, as was the stretched smoothness of flesh between knuckles, rendered stronger by the buff-coloured dough of the medium. Presumably the original impression was blurred by movement, by the effort of seizing and lifting. There was certainly nothing static about it. Stephen still reckoned it was a child’s hand. A boy slave, perhaps. Or a jejune assistant facing a lifetime of tile-making, its smells and textures and effort already a part of his tired body, mind numbed by the unchanging routine, stirred only by the odd intrusion of an animal. A kind of hypnotic pleasure in the task, all the same. Dreaming of girls, perhaps, the unimaginable landscape of their bodies under the flimsy tunics.
The immense frustration, to me, of not knowing who this hand belonged to. That I was holding it over the millennia without looking into anyone’s eyes.
This emergence was as rough-cast and eerily precise as Michelangelo’s Prisoners, the struggling torsos extricating themselves from unworked marble. Or it was a hand carved by Matisse, so like the fingers that clutch the side of the head in his Reclining Nude of 1907 – itself originally fashioned in clay and transformed to bronze through the complicated ‘lost wax’ process involving multiple moulds. But this hand – or the part of it we could see, the three phalanges of four fingers – wasn’t art; it was an actual part of someone’s limb. It was the very grip itself, at the same time as it was a reaching up or out, a human gesture rising towards us out of the nameless swirl . . . like something octopoid cleared by an ocean wave and momentarily glimpsed before subsiding back. Back into its own time, into formlessness and oblivion.
I love the fact that the Latin for ‘moulding’ or ‘shaping’ or ‘contriving’ is fingere. The physical act remembered in the definition. Fingere is the root of the word ‘feigning’. And, of course, of the word ‘fiction’. Novels are written on the fingers, whether clasping a pen or dancing on a keyboard (in my case, a duo for two digits only). And their prints are unique.
In fact, the marks of long-gone fingers are preserved all over the house (as they are in Nîmes). You have to get up on the roof to see them. The older curved tiles show several shallow ruts scoring the crescent face from top to bottom: this is the drawing up of the fingertips, pressing and moulding the wet slab of clay to the thigh. You can also see a brushing or smoothing over with the palm or loose knuckles, as subtle as wind-trace in sand. On one tile, which I have put aside, there is a big spiral and several smaller whirls clearly scored, like the signatures of flow currents in a stream. A bored tilemaker? A sudden bubble of creativity? A moment of mutiny? Or a spontaneous expression of sheer joy, not at all like the brisk forefinger sweep of signatures found on Roman tiles. Rather, it makes me think of the long-eared owl deep in the Chauvet cave some 40 miles north of us, its head swivelled right round, traced in a film of clay 36,000 years ago.
1‘All of us, the living: nothing more than phantoms, weightless shadows’ (Sophocles). One of the 59 maxims painted on the beams of Michel de Montaigne’s tower library.
23
Taking our Tread
I love the endless variety of our south-facing roof, stretched out like a landscape ‘plotted and pieced’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins has it in ‘Pied Beauty’ – ‘dappled’ and ‘brinded’ and ‘all in stipple’. The faint scent of heated clay, like an earthy oven. The summer surface hot enough to dry fresh figs in a few hours (our neighbour’s overhanging fig tree always provides a supply of accidentally dried windfalls). A rolling bluish ocean in moonlight, the frogs calling in the distance for their mates like strange gulls.
Yet an old terracotta roof is made of the ground, as if the ground’s clay, baked to hardness, has risen in one piece on its way to the sky, then stopped. Down below, inside, our rooms are spread with its foot-trodden equivalent, clacking where loose. In my study, sheer age has resulted in the tommette tiling taking on a gentle swell and dip as centuries-worth of weight sags onto the great beams below, which run across the ceiling of the old goat-house.
In the pre-industrial world, before gigantism on the one hand and nanotechnology on the other, everything artisanal had a similar relation to the human body. Hands massively multiplied and time ignored (whether through communal exaltation or slave labour) led to extraordinary structures like Stonehenge, the Pyramids, Mayan temples, the Pont du Gard with its millimetric precision, or the great Gothic cathedrals – their architect geniuses unnamed. Similarly anonymous people once made many more things themselves, and much more frequently. And mostly better, from baskets to pots. Theirs was an almost unconscious skill, which I witnessed for myself as a teenager in Cameroon, which was then my home: up in the dry and mountainous north where adobe huts cluster like parleys of wizards, our jeep passed a man thatching his own roof from straw, perched naked in the middle as the steep pitch grew up around him.
Such constant closeness to the physical material means that you absorb its qualities. Making jugs from clay scooped nearby, or baskets from local reeds, or platters from wood you have yourself harvested, posits an unbroken flow between origin and creation. When it comes to those diminutive prehistoric scratches on bone, antler, tusk or stone – whether of repeated abstract motifs or, eventually, figurative glimpses of local animals showing an uncanny accuracy of observation (so minimal yet so evocative that you can hear and smell the beast) – we are perhaps at the core of what we now define as art: its distinction from the artisanal melts away. Instead of muddle, order. Instead of confusion, comprehension. An attempt to grasp and hold, not through hunting but through shaping. No elaborate framing, just a direct communication between the maker and the observed. More a conjuring, perhaps.
Was this the original artistic impulse? Both homage and deliberate haunting?
‘Everything made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly,’ claimed William Morris, who ‘hated’ modern civilisation: ‘beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent.’ So the handmade object isn’t always lovely; it has to be what we might term ecologically heedful. I’m not sure the prehistoric cave paintings of Chauvet, or of Lascaux in the Dordogne, are in any way green, but they show an extraordinary awareness, knowledge and sensitivity of wild things, which may come to much the same. As a boy I was obsessed by the Lascaux paintings, having missed seeing them for real by a fortnight back in the 1960s, when the cave had to be closed to save it from our toxic breath. We bought postcards and I would stare at these over and over again through the ensuing years, marvelling at their realism. Or at how much more ‘real’ these wild horses or deer or bulls were than anything painted since, including the photographic accuracy of much wildlife imagery. The bristles on the muzzle, the feel of the bony nape, the rolling eyes. I have seen this, the painter seemed to be saying. With my very own eyes. Touched it with my own fingers. This is the underfeeling of it, anyway. In fact, we have no idea whatsoever of what they felt or thought as they dabbed and pressed and stroked in the flamelight. When I showed a postcard of the bison of the far older Chauvet cave to the local woodsman, Claude, still working in the forest in his seventies, he pointed out how well the artist had caught their dainty legs and massive shoulders; Claude had seen them in a reserve on the edge of the Cévennes, and has the sharp visual memory of someone working all day in the woods.
For most of human existence, technology was limb-controlled, dependent on the eye, on breath and effort. I’ve worked for months at a time in modern factories and assembly lines, and I might as well have been a robot. I think of all hand-built things as rippling out not just from the fingers but from the entire body. Knees, especially. In a Neolithic house near Stonehenge, archaeologists have found knee-prints in the chalk-plaster floor by the hearth: two shallow depressions gradually hollowed out by countless moments tending the fire and cooking. These are not, like our paw-prints, the result of an instant’s hazard, but of stubborn application over innumerable years. Sheer abrasion.
In our back cellar, with its medieval fireplace and cobbled floor, there is a stone sink with a circular opening and a space beneath it for a tub. It could be fourteenth century or earlier. The thick stone around the hole is so heavily worn at the front that it has thinned to nothing: the opening is now shaped like a keyhole. In the entrance hall, the sink is larger: a rectangular chunk of limestone chiselled out to a basin no deeper than my thumb, with two further round-edged blocks placed either side, and a drainage hole in one corner. It shows a sunken oval on the right-hand block where countless pots and pans rested as they were scrubbed.
The sole real difference between the Roman dog’s paw-print in clay and these shallow, sunken Os in stone is time. Slow the first right down so that the flecks from the impact are all but stilled, and speed the other up to a momentary, ghostly mist of pans and elbows, and you would be watching the same phenomenon. A crater forming, an impression maintained. No deeper than a passing thought. But both, it seems, have endured.
You would have to hang around watching for a lot longer to see another impression forming. This one is on our front-door sill, which consists of a single slab of local pierre de Pompignan (a sought-after type of limestone near Pompignan village). It looks at first glance like damage, as if something’s gouged or chipped the stone near one corner. Then, after many years of not properly looking, I noticed a corrugation inside, and realised it was a fossil.
Ensuing research revealed it as part of the stem of a crinoid, a starfish-like creature both animal and vegetable, whose fronds would billow gently on the end of this stem anchored to the sea-bed by its holdfast. It preyed on micro-organisms and organic particles. It could move short distances on its long and flexible stalk, which looked like a corrugated drainpipe; it was actually a vertical stack of calcite rings. Our fragment shows a negative of the outside of the stack – an external mould; walking in the garrigue scrub, we often find inside impressions, too, disarmingly obvious on stones scattered over chalky paths through the tangled brush.
The stem itself has dissolved away, leaving the mould. It dates from between 140 and 195 million years ago. This ancientness is as meaningless to our brains as the distances to the stars. I look at the bright spot of Jupiter and its pin-prick moons through my telescope and cannot conceive of the distance – hundreds of millions of miles – between us. But what I can imagine is that whoever first placed this thick slab in front of the door, maybe more than a century ago, had noticed the fossil.
The slab itself bears a strong resemblance to a sandy sea floor, mostly smooth but with tiny worms and coils and bumps in the bluish greyness. In fact, this is the deposit of fine material – countless shells and skeletons of marine creatures falling through the shallow seas – that settled on the dead crinoid and, unstirred by currents or footfall, gently entombed it. A few more million years, assuming no disturbance, and this silt turned into rock.
Reaching the front-door sill means climbing up our external curve of stairs – smooth slabs of the same rock. We are heedless of what dizzying depths of time we press as we mount and descend. The staircase itself may be at least two or three centuries old, so that we have two simultaneous epochs taking our tread, one so shallow in comparison to the other that it can hardly be measured. We have to forget the deeper, or everything drowns – books, family, ideals, kindness, with the list including God, or whatever gods we might believe in. Geological time can be understood intellectually, scientifically, but not spiritually or emotionally. Not literally. And now it takes our footfall, as heedless as ourselves.
24
Epilogue
This year, while finally sealing our chronically leaking second-floor balcony (created, as explained earlier, by the previous owners removing the attic roof where it sloped very low), a builder pulled out a drainpipe and left a hole, prior to spreading the sealant and laying the tiles. It rained overnight: a real Cévenol deluge. Assessing the damage in my study the following day, somewhat flustered, I stepped backwards and knocked over the funerary urn. It landed and rolled briefly but excitedly, scattering black bits over the floor, like the residue of burnt toast or ground coffee; three of the urn’s repaired parts lay broken off. Without thinking, I swept the remains of the dead Etruscan into my palm and returned them to the urn. The three sherds fitted back without glue. The storm damage was minimal but upsetting: a treasured photo-portrait of my mother as a young woman, and a large aquatint of Sappho with swans and her two bare-breasted lovers collected long ago by my grandfather (who briefly ran an art gallery in Edwardian London) and which I’d innocently admired all through my childhood. It was particularly upsetting because the study had leaked at one end for as long as we’d been here – a quarter of a century – and this was the last possible opportunity for the rain to surprise. Thanks to the new hole, the drips had fallen in an entirely fresh spot, consistently dry for decades, where I had placed some of what was most valuable to me.
Hubris. Weather is so much to do with the present. Climate is to do with the past and the future. Our mistreatment of the planet will possibly deny us a future, or a meaningful future in terms of civilised conduct and a bearable existence. Right now I’m annoyed with the builder, with my own lapse in not reminding him about the hole, and with the storm itself – which arrived at precisely the wrong time. But storms are heedless of everything, from holes to wedding parties.
And the storms are getting worse, just as our winters have grown milder, the summers hotter and hotter. At time of writing, the autumn is refreshing us with cooler air but bringing no sign of rain. It is October in the Cévennes, and it hasn’t rained properly since early June. This is a proper drought. Désolant, as a villager put it, a powerful word which includes both ‘distressing’ and ‘appalling’. Stream-beds are dry, plants and trees are parched, and the wild animals along with them. The old Cévenol saying, ‘Au mois d’août, sous la pierre, humidité’ (‘In the month of August, moisture under stones’) did not apply this year. I have just returned from a hike on beautiful Mont Aigoual (meaning ‘rich in water’ in Oc), and the trees’ water-stress is not only visible in the withered leafage but palpable in the air. The mountains’ famous waterfalls are silent.
It’s autumn, but no one is planting in their potager, the soil is too dry and friable. Our view shows brown stains like tea on the hills’ drapery of scrub oak. Oddly, the village drinking fountains have gone on trickling throughout, and the great fountains of Nîmes still gush into the sunlight. Things are slightly better deep underground, after a wet spring, but the situation is préoccupant, as the meteorologists tactfully put it, who can only read and analyse the signs and have no power to solve anything. Scientists’ predictions are not reassuring: in a few decades, or even less, Languedoc will have a Moroccan climate, with the vegetation and animals to go with it.
