The Voice That Thunders, page 24
The magpie must also be given his due. He is not quite the random thief that I may have made him. It is not by chance that he occurs as a principal in Aboriginal Creation myths. Without him, the book would not be as it is, nor would I be as spiritually enlarged as I feel myself to be.
I woke one morning with that imperative voice in my head. I had learnt that the voice is also known to the Aboriginal mind, and held as the source of inspiration. It is called The Voice that Thunders. It said: “Go to Marton church. Go now.”
Marton church is not only the oldest timber framed church in Europe; it is the focal point of Strandloper. I went. And, as I entered the church I had known all my life, and consider to be one of the holy places of the world, I saw it through Aboriginal eyes for the first time, and was, as a human being, dumbfounded; and, as a writer, aware that all the cards had been finally dealt. An Aboriginal Elder, knowing nothing of architecture or of Christianity, would recognise Marton as sacred. For the magpie had discovered entoptic lines.
Entoptic lines were first published by two South African anthropologists, J. D. Lewis-Wilson and T. A. Dowson, in Current Anthropology, in 1988. They had noticed that the same abstract patterns tended to appear in all preliterate art and iconography, in all places and at all times, from the Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings of France and Spain to the modern religious art of the Kalahari bushmen. There are about six patterns, and they are invariable: zig-zag, cross-hatching, honeycomb, carinate, dot, and circle/spiral. Lewis-Wilson and Dowson consulted neurologists who reported the same patterns, which are found in three conditions of the human brain. They appear to be projected as external images by people entering grand mal epileptic seizures; by many migraineurs; and as the result of shamans entering trance or ecstatic states. The ritual body painting of Aboriginal adepts and the abstractions of the stained-glass windows of mediaeval Marton are the same. Both William Buckley and Murrangurk would have known them. What I had been expecting, a Green Man, or foliate head, disguised, our daughter found later. No composer of Strandloper could have wished for more. The entoptic lines created the jacket of the book; and they made the climax of the story.
At the start, I dodged the question of why I have written by saying that I had no choice. But why no choice? Only with Strandloper have the last forty years become wholly clear.
I am a member of a family of rural craftsmen, but I use my hands in a different way. I have spent those forty years in trying to celebrate the land and tongue of a culture that has been marginalised by a metropolitan intellectualism, that churns out canonical prose through writers who seem unable to allow new concepts or to integrate the diversity of our language; who draw on the library, ignorant of the land; on the head, bereft of the heart; making of fair speech mere rustic conversation; so that I am led to ask: have we become so lazy that we have lost the will to read our own language, except at its most anodyne, and, from that reading, too lazy to create? For true reading is creativity: the willingness to look into the open hand of the writer and to see what may, or may not, be there. A writer’s job is to offer.
There were two spurs to my endeavour. The first was the realisation that a well-meaning teacher had washed my mouth out with carbolic soap when I was five years old for what she called “talking broad”, which she did not know was the language of one of the treasures of English poetry. The second was that the earliest surviving example, which may have been the sum of his literacy, of writing by a Garner: the signature of another William: is a slashed, fierce cross made with the anger of a pen held in the fist as a dagger.
“There is only the fight to recover what has been lost,” T. S. Eliot says in “East Coker”. “The rest is not our business.”
So it was gratifying when a Professor of Humanities at St Louis University wrote: “There is, in [Strondloper], a kind of thesis . . . about how a precious mythology was allowed to slip by a controlling politico-literary agenda. . . . But most of all, there is a refusal to grieve. . . . The people are dead, but the words lie like stones, indestructible as the land, and as invincible.”
To have been able to use my indoctrination into academe as a means to free a suppressed, concrete voice, to give a slashed cross a flowing hand, opened to offer our starved and arid prose if but one way out of the library, back to its enriching soil, has been a privilege and an apprenticeship.
That apprenticeship: the quest from gash and slash of a cross, by way of carbolic soap, to the Voice that Thunders, is over. Now, I can begin. Indeed, I already have.
* * *
1 This lecture was delivered at The Royal Festival Hall, London, on 7 July 1996.
Appendix
Oral History & Applied Archaeology in Cheshire
There are two methods of making astronomical calculations from maps that are accurate enough for the purposes of archaeology. The second is the more complex, but is needed when the use of more than one map is called for.
An important measurement is the azimuth of the sun at rising and at setting. The azimuth, A, is associated with the declination, δ, by the equation:
ø is the latitude of the observer and h is the altitude of the sun.
Some correction is always needed, since the viewed rising and setting points of astronomical objects are not exactly where the equation shows, because of a number of physical distortions.
One is the refraction of light. The sun’s, or moon’s, light is bent by the atmosphere, so that the sun appears to be higher than it is above the horizon. This bending varies under differing conditions, but is about 0.55° at the horizon. Refraction makes the time of rising appear earlier, so decreasing the azimuth, and the setting later, increasing the azimuth.
A correction for parallax, unnecessary for the sun, must always be made for the moon, which is about 0.95°. Parallax works in the apparently opposite way to refraction.
The height of the horizon must also be included. When a long distance is involved, the angular elevation (plus or minus) of the horizon should be reduced to allow for the curvature of the Earth, at a rate of 0.0027961° per statute mile of the distance from the observer to the horizon.
Therefore, the full value of h, when used, is: h = (horizon altitude) – (curvature of the Earth correction) + (parallax correction) – (refraction).
This will give the azimuth when the centre of the disc is on the horizon. For the azimuth of first flash, at the rising, or last instant, at the setting, the value of h must be corrected by 0.25°.
To find the azimuths of sunrise and sunset at an archaeological site; then let δ = Є, using the value of Є for the date of the site, and correct h as described. For summer rising, let δ = + Є. If the azimuth that is found is subtracted from 360°, it will give the summer setting. For winter rising, let δ = – Є. The azimuth will lie between 90° and 180°, but, if subtracted from 360°, the setting azimuth will be given.
Alternatively, when the map coordinates of two points are known, the azimuth of the line joining them can be calculated, and the distance between them. The distance is needed for the working out of the angles of altitude.
Following A. Thom, let λc Lc, be the latitude and longitude of the observer at C and λd Ld be the same coordinates for the observed point D.
Δλ = λd – λc,
ΔL = Ld – Lc, (east longitude reckoned positive),
λm = ½ (λd + λc) = mean altitude.
A = required azimuth measured clockwise from north.
Find tan ɸ from: tan ɸ = K cos λm ΔL/Δλ, which gives ɸ.
Find ΔA from: ΔA = ΔL sin λm and the azimuth of D from C is A = ɸ – ½ΔA.
If the Earth were a sphere, K would be unity. To allow for its being an oblate spheroid, K may be taken to vary from 1.0028 in latitude 50° to 1.0017 in latitude 60°.
The distance CD in statute miles is:
c = CD = 0.01922Δλ/cosɸ or 0.01926Δlcos λm/sin ɸ.
To calculate the apparent angle of altitude of D as seen from C in terms of the distance, c, between them and the amount by which D is higher than C, the curvature of the Earth must be allowed for, as must the refraction that bends the light between D and C. Then:
h = H/c – c(1 – 2k)/2R,
where H = height of D above C,
c = distance of D from C,
R = radius of curvature of the spheroid,
k = coefficient of refraction.
k is usually 0.075 for rays passing over land, and 0.081 for rays passing over the sea.
Let H be given in feet, c in statute miles, and h in minutes of arc. Then:
h = o.65H/c – 0.37c
Since delivering this paper, my confidence in my ability to handle lunar calculations has more than waned. However, I have left them as first observed, so that a more competent mathematician may repudiate, or confirm, the statements. If I have erred, it does not change the main thrust of the argument, or cause to dematerialise the stone axe.
ALAN GARNER, January 1997
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Alan Garner, The Voice That Thunders
