Stone Tape Theory

The increasingly commercialised spooktastic Helagonfest (archaic name)  has come and gone this week leaving  vestigia  in its wake: festoons of fake spider webs, legions of rotting pumpkins with lopsided grins, gutters arustle with sweet wrappers. Fun for the kids, though. The weirdest it ever got when my own two were young trick-or-treaters was at the big old house on the corner where, when the man answered the doorbell, he gave them a bible each. (They never rang that bell again.)

With my rational (if you haven't seen it, it doesn't exist) approach to all things ghostly, I suspect that ghouls, revenants, spirits of the night, zombies and other miasmic manifestations of the netherworld are just so many figments of the imagination, tall tales to be enjoyed as one temporarily suspends disbelief for the thrill of a scare.

Among many such fictions of vestigia (traces of things left over from a previous phase of existence) can be found the bonkers concept of stone tape theory. The idea is that, just as information can be recorded and stored on magnetic tape in a pattern of ferrous molecules and then converted back into sound and vision (who remembers the reel-to-reel machines, cassette and video recorders of our pre-digital age?), just so, highly-charged events from the past might have encoded their psychic energy into the molecular structure of  surrounding stone or brickwork, to be 'played back' centuries later by anyone gifted enough to be able to pick up and interpret the emanations. Complete bollocks, of course, but fun to speculate about.

What Tales Such Ancient Stones Might Tell

Consequently, I've co-opted the idea of stone tape theory as the bedrock for this week's latest vestigial offering from the imaginarium. (There is a back-story, the massive volcanic eruption of Ilopango in Central America, circa 450AD, but you don't need to know that to appreciate the poem.)

The Tell
Their Corn God was cruel that year,
wiped out the sun in his displeasure,
and needs must be appeased:
one treasured young Saxon life
paid down
against the very future of the tribe,

flaxen-haired, of waxen form
and shy of sixteen summers,
bound by hand and foot
and fate to die, a doll, a daughter,
a dutiful death.

These selfsame rocks
registered the primal shock
as well the taint of spilled blood
the piss of fear,
a devastated family's tears.
It did no earthly good.

Reconstituted in a kinder time,
the jumbled masonry
within this wall can still vibrate
with powerful memories - the tell -
especially when baked all day long
by harvest sun, it's stone tape hum
decipherable by anyone
possessing atavistic sensibility.

Although dark glasses mask her face
and a scarf conceals her tresses,
see those slender shoulders shake
in silent seismic grief as fingers
make brief caressing contact
with hot hewn Celtic stone.

Eventually she lays
a plaited corn doll at its base,
though nothing can atone
for a black soul,
for what befell upon this spot.
Wrong place, wrong time,
no rewind
or erase function available.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)

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Vestigia - Something to Get Your Teeth Into

“Some pains are physical and some pains are mental, but the one that’s both is dental.” Ogden Nash (1902 – 1971)

If you are an adult with four, perfectly formed and completely erupted wisdom teeth that have taken their rightful place without a twinge, you are very lucky. Or you have a big mouth. Not all of us can accommodate these vestigial teeth, still they come pressing and squeezing and causing pain with no sign of evolution stepping in.

Our ancestors had large jaws and extra molars to cope with their natural diet. Meat was sometimes raw and plants took lots of chewing. Upper and lower canines were more pointed and sharp.

Wisdom teeth, which, if all goes well to become our third molars, start to make their presence known from the late teens onwards. There was no room for mine.

The worst thing for a seventeen year old trainee dental nurse is to find herself on the receiving end of some oral surgery, take it from me. It’s one thing assisting a dentist and reassuring a patient, but when you’re the patient and you know exactly what’s going on, it’s a bit scary. And it is fair to say that even with self-knowledge and lots of faith in dental professionals, I can be anxious.

The pain started at work. It was mainly ear-ache then the jaw started hurting. My boss was on to it, having a look, taking xrays and making the kind of calming sounds that lets you know they are very happy in their work. A few days later and Sunday morning found me in safe hands, in the private dental surgery at his home address, with his wife making my dad a cup of tea. Dad had driven me there and was more apprehensive than me. I was making my best effort to be brave. Out came the wisdom tooth, no problem. About three weeks later, we were doing it again with the other side.

Our son has been blessed with a fabulous smile of straight, healthy, well-cared for teeth with no fillings. However, he has a ‘text book’ horizontal impacted lower-left wisdom tooth, the best – or worst, depending on your point of view – I’ve ever seen on an xray. He wants to keep it, at least for now.

Wisdom teeth, problems for lots of people and not needed anymore. Future generations, millennia ahead, might have got rid.

  

A poem from Manasi Saxena on the All Poetry website,

 





Dear Wisdom Tooth,

I am sorry for not having attended to you so far,
I did not realise you were needing more space to grow
and that you had things to say.

I thank you for troubling me now,
when I can understand that you mean well,
for the lesson you are offering me
that sometimes we need to let go of things
we cannot make room for
because they cause pain and anguish and
need to be returned to the universe lovingly.

Please forgive me for having neglected you so long
and for not being aware of your pain.

I love you, and now lovingly give you back to the universe.
May you find peace and space and freedom in your
return to the origins.

So it is, so it is, and it is done.

Love,
Manasi

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

  

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'That' Scent...

Let us call her Madeleine (not her real name, for obvious reasons). When I was a young man, newly arrived in the metropolis and teaching English and Drama at a north London comprehensive school, I met Madeleine (not her real name, for obvious reasons) at a party and was rather taken with her. She was very pretty, vivacious and carefree, a socialite of the Chelsea set in the decade before Sloan Ranger became a term of contempt. Although she was a few years older than I, she still lived at home with mummy and daddy in one of those leafy squares off the Brompton Road. Daddy was “big in meat in the city” and mummy was the embodiment of Mrs Dalloway. Madeleine (not her real name, for obvious reasons) was a fashion model who’d also appeared with very few clothes on in a couple of John Boorman movies, including ‘Zardoz’, I believe, with Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling. We became friends and lovers. She called me her “young man” and I arrived at the conclusion that Madeleine (not her real name, for obvious reasons) not only used Chanel No 5 – ‘That scent’, yes, we’re getting there – she probably bathed in the bloody stuff! I didn’t mind. To begin with, I quite liked the fragrance because I quite liked her. However, during the course of our several-month liaison, it gradually became apparent to me that, while I might be her “young man”, I wasn’t her only man. There was the aspiring racing-driver who used to get her drunk on Moet and occasionally beat her up. There was the old Etonian who was very adept at replicating Queen Anne furniture which he off-loaded to less than scrupulous cronies in the antiques game. I think he kept her in class A recreationals as well as Chanel. But the alarm bells well and truly rang the night when Madeleine (not her real name, for obvious reasons) arrived at my house at 3 in the morning barefoot and delivered by fire-engine. I just refused to let her in – I had to be up for school at 7  – let the firemen put the fire out. I never saw her again but I have acquired a life-long aversion to Chanel No 5. The olfactory key is a potent instrument in any memory-picker's tool kit and it only takes the merest whiff of No 5 to unlock a sequence of evocative and not always pleasant madeleine moments for me. 

Staying with London as a locale, I wonder how many of you have read and enjoyed Ben Aaronovitch’s brilliant ‘Rivers Of London’ series of novels? Ben, was born and bred a Londoner, has written TV scripts for Doctor Who (‘Remembrance of the Daleks’) and the space soap ‘Jupiter Moon’ and also worked at Waterstones in Covent Garden for a while when times were lean; but his novels, five to date, have all been best-sellers so he only goes to bookshops for signings these days. The premise of the novels is that magic exists, can be used for nefarious ends and the Met has a special division, based at The Folly, responsible for investigating and dealing with any criminal activity that has a whiff of the supernatural about it. Chief Inspector Nightingale (wizard) and his sidekick DC Peter Grant (apprentice wizard) are the heat on the streets of London with sharp noses for vestigia, sensory traces of wrong-doing involving magic. The novels are all cleverly devised, entertainingly told and ripping good yarns that reward your suspension of disbelief. If you haven’t stumbled upon them yet, they are a treat in store. To find out more, check out The Folly - “official home of English wizardry since 1775” - at www.the-folly.com

And so, to the poem. This is something I wrote for and performed at the Haunted House event in Blackpool a few evenings ago. It’s best read out loud with all the lights turned down, except for the glow from your laptop/PC/tablet screen. Look out for ‘that’ scent, reeking sulphurous…..

 

Whispering Winds

The city sleeps

while in its streets

move tortured spirits of a cruel past,

seeking rest. 

Trees whine in parks,

wires whistle, papers rustle -

sounds easily explained by day

grow bold at night. 

Shackled dogs howl,

hackled cats growl,

fear drops a frosty few degrees

because

unquiet is on the prowl. 

You didn’t spot those shadows,

dark wraiths milling round

mottling the ground,

insubstantial all night long,

lurching, shifting, searching. 

Such emptiness in solid air,

such almost tangible despair

might shape to rend this curtain of complacency. 

Soot billows out of grates,

ridge tiles begin to fly,

shop-signs tumble,

trees are ripped from hallowed soil

by manic gusts.

The hour is both profoundly dark and late

when disaffection, reeking sulphurous,

tears at our smug substantiality. 

Pray that this night won’t go on forever… 

Then, as a pearl-edged dawn approaches,

for those who have the ears to hear,

(dogs in shackles, cats with hackles),

a million jangled,

paranoiac screams

mingle west,

lost on whispering winds.

 

Thanks for reading. Have a good week, S ;-)

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