IMAGININGS

So sure as this beard’s grey,
What will you adventure...?
William Shakespeare (The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene III)

IN 1978, I had a passport photograph taken in a shop in the Bermudiana Arcade in Hamilton, Bermuda. The proprietor sat me in front of a screen, took a photograph with a large camera on a tripod, and then took another picture after telling me not to move. My photographs would be ready in a week’s time.

I recall collecting four prints (and he gave me the two negatives), which would have to be trimmed down by somebody in the passport section of the British Embassy in Washington DC. The head, neck, and uppermost shoulders were the correct size, but the photographer had set his sights on my waist and everything above.

Happens I had a beard at the time. Not the first I had grown. I have had a moustache since I was in my late teens, and once I reached my twenties, I would grow a beard from time to time, depending on the weather. A cooler time of year would be more encouraging.

In 1978, when I was renewing my British passport whilst in Bermuda, I was anticipating a trip, my first, to the Rocky Mountains. I would have been 28 years old. My hair and beard were reddish brown, quite a bit darker than my hair was in a 1968 passport (taken in Gillingham, Kent). A passport in the late 1980s showed me with thinning, greying hair.

My current passport, issued here in Northumberland about two years ago, is that of a white-haired individual, with a white moustache. The same picture appears on my bus pass. When I was in the booth, having my photograph taken by a digital camera, my glasses seemed to reflect the light. I took them off, and so I am not exactly myself, as I always wear my glasses when I am out and about. I look squinty.

I spent a few years on the other side of a camera in the same shop in which I had posed for my passport picture back in 1978. It would have been the late 1990s. “Kit ‘n’ Caboodle” sold newspapers, cigarettes, junk food and soft drinks, and ghastly small toys at Christmas. One could have photocopies made. I never figured out how to work the enormous Xerox machine, and tried to be busy whenever a customer appeared wanting copies. As I recall, most of these customers were expatriate workers copying documents to submit to the Bermuda Government to enable them to retain their jobs another year or so. There were also a few poets who wanted no end of copies of their latest oeuvres. Expectant mothers would turn up wanting copies of their ultrasound scans, and would point out the important bits. The ultrasound foetus, one’s first passport picture.

At Kit ‘n’ Caboodle, I was mainly employed as their passport photographer. One would hold a Polaroid camera, and aim a beam of light at the client seated in front of a light-absorbing screen, and a tiny red dot of light could be seen on the client’s forehead. One learned where to aim the beam of light for the particular type of passport photograph. Different countries had different requirements. The United States passport needed one ear showing, so taken from slightly to one side (I forget which). The United States also requires passport photographs of even the smallest infants, with eyes wide open. This could take an hour and could reduce me to near-insanity. One had to stand leaning over the wee bairn, holding the camera out, but being extra-careful not to drop it (which could kill the kid!)

Our black customers nearly always hated their passport photographs, usually saying: “This is too dark. I look like a Jamaican.”

One woman with rather pendulous breasts pushed them up from underneath and asked me to ensure they were in the finished picture. I explained that an acceptable passport photograph showed the top of the shoulders, neck and head. No breasts (neither pert, nor pendulous).

We also had an ID photograph service, creating personal identification cards that were, clearly, not legal. $18 would buy you a laminated card the size of a bus pass with your name, address and age alongside a photograph. The client would write the details onto the card. Nothing was witnessed. The client could create his own identity.

One day a young, light-skinned lad came into Kit ‘n’ Caboodle and asked for one of our ID cards. The boy looked, perhaps, 15 years of age. I dare say he wanted an ID to buy cigarettes and liquor, requiring him to be 21. This kid’s picture added nothing to his smooth face. Before I could glue the photograph onto the card on which the boy had written his inaccurate details, and then laminate it, he grabbed the photo, whipped out a black felt-tip pen, and scribbled a beard and moustache on the immature face. “You can laminate it now.”

The boy had it in his mind that if he presented a photograph of himself with a beard, that even if he did not actually have one on his face, he would still be able to buy his smokes and Black Seal rum. He did not seem to have a notion that his hastily drawn beard was clearly just that, scribbled onto a picture. Oscar Wilde wrote: “Naïveté is like the bloom of a delicate, exotic flower. You touch it but once and it is destroyed forever.” One did not have the heart to spoil the boy’s day. I gave him two dollars change from his twenty-dollar note.

I have two personal activities that are, I dare say, hobbies. I research genealogy, which involves many, many hours following up leads back many centuries. I have around two thousand individuals in my “family tree”, all considerably detailed. Each relative has documented evidence attached to his or her file: addresses, dates, connections, photographs.

I also have a Nikon digital camera, and I spend time taking dozens of pictures that I tinker with on my computer, and that usually are deleted as the one or two satisfying snapshots stand out. If a picture is too dark, I can change the lighting with a few clicks. Nothing Jamaican about my photography.

A Mighty Fortress is Our Home

Castlerigg Stone Circle
Cumbria, England
6 September
Nearly Sunrise, BST

The place where God resides is a
great Urim and Thummim.
… Then the white stone will become a
Urim and Thummim
to each individual who receives one,
whereby,
things pertaining to a higher order of kingdoms
will be made known.
- Mormon Scriptures

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT by the time Jefferson Greenstraw let himself out of the kitchen door at the Cragmoor Arms. He had not wanted to leave Victoria alone in their attic room, but at least her brother and his wife were in the room next to theirs. He'd scribbled a brief note, and left it on the bedside table in his room, under the corner of the old coral-encrusted bottle.

He had wondered just what to write, he didn’t want to alarm anyone, most of all his wife. Then the words came out of his pen without a conscious effort, the same way they came when he touched old stones, old things:

“My Love! I’ve gone to a meeting at Castlerigg Stone Circle. Always!”

He had not signed it, and he wasn’t sure what it meant. He'd made no arrangements to meet anyone up at Castlerigg. In fact, the only people he knew in the area were his wife and in-laws travelling with him. He thought Victoria would figure it out more easily than if he tried to explain it; better understood in fewer words.

And he slipped out of the door into the cold night air. He could see Mars in the clear skies above Keswick. How curious that great lumps of stone, rock and metal spinning in the sky were thought to be gods. He was reminded of Holst’s Bringer of War with its urgent emotional drumming. Jeff always seemed to have music playing in his head. He wondered why war always seems to come quickly on stamping feet, and why even the most timid and peace-loving of men could be transformed by something beating as fast as their pulses, and then faster, and faster. The most retiring young man might become a foot-soldier, the follower of some violent dictator, or some mad religious zealot, lifted up by an urgent dance-step.

Jeff relied on his instincts. He spoke his mind and reacted, and this was important when he was relaying the messages, describing the pictures, of his stones to individuals or groups. It was better to allow the impressions to stream out of his mind and through his spoken words; when he tried to resist, thinking he could say something slightly differently, he got lost. He'd spent forty years, all his adult life, using this curious gift of perception: Relaying the messages in inanimate rocks and stones.

Jeff whispered:

"It is the natural instinct of man, just about any man, to have his blood stirred, to be caught up in something. If there is music that reveals the God of Peace, there is also music, and conversation, that reveals the God of War.

"It seems easier to follow the latter, there is something about the tramp, tramp, tramp of marching feet that pulls people to their feet, and gets them into line, and off they all go. Sniffing at the air for blood."

Thoughts like this troubled Jeff. He hated to walk steadily, a cadence fit only for war. He made an effort to try and project himself forward and to feel to be floating. Stout shoes troubled him; he preferred sandals with rubber soles, he preferred to walk silently, to glide along.

The walk to Castlerigg was less than two miles, and if Jeff had set a deliberate pace, he might have reached the circle of stained, slate stones in an hour, probably less. The air was cool and clear; he could see ahead of himself and did not feel worried about getting lost. He’d remembered the walk to and from the ring the evening before, a fairly simple thing.

Jeff felt no urgency in his hike out to Castlerigg; he believed he’d be there when he was needed. Whatever that might mean. So, he slowed his pace and felt himself weightless, drifting at the mercy of the slight breezes, but always pushed gently up towards Castlerigg. That rendezvous was set, set in stone perhaps. He had to be there. But gently.The Castlerigg Stone Circle may date back to the Bronze Age, about 3,000 BC. The Neolithic Age had been five hundred years before that and this part of Britain would have been densely wooded to an altitude of about two thousand feet above sea level. The valleys might have been swamps. So, how did it look to the builders of the Circle?

Surely the peaks in the region – Skiddaw, Blencathra, Derwent Falls, and Clough Head – had been much as they are now. And what might the people who felt inclined to design and build Castlerigg have called these low mountains? And did they realize there were higher peaks elsewhere? Did they even realize there was an ‘elsewhere’? Were these valleys home to the people? Did they migrate during the seasons of a year or the seasons of a life?

Might inspiration, revelation, intuition, and instinct - have revealed this particular plateau as someplace special? Here the people were to drag their stones and here pace out the circle and place the stones in orbits as surely defined as the order of the planets, the stars, the galaxies. It had to be done right, or it wouldn’t work. Work? Work to do what?

Did the revelation, the design come to one man? Was he the King, or perhaps the High Priest? Or did the word come to a Queen, or Presiding Priestess? Who directed the people to pace out the circle, about a hundred feet in diameter, and got them to mark the exact spots where some seventy stones were to be erected when they had been dragged down from a quarry?

Did the King or Queen, Priest or Priestess, make the circle by having someone pace around the centre point holding onto some Bronze Age twine anchored there, or perhaps held by that King? Did they have fifty feet of sturdy string or rope in 3,000 BC in this part of Britain?

Might it have been the direction of the King or Queen that the entire population of the nearby village come out to the sacred plot and hold hands and form a circle that way? Stepping back and back until the arms were outstretched; yet each hand still touched that of its neighbour. Every member of the community, which might have been a travelling band from elsewhere, if there was an elsewhere, directed by some natal star, to Castlerigg. Every member to take part.

The Stone Circle is actually slightly oval, which suggests something less rigid than fifty feet of twine was used. Are the orbits of the planets not somewhat oval?

And did the Priest or Priestess in the centre nod in the direction of, and call out to this man, this woman, or this child:

“You will be a stone, a stone as tall as the breadth of your outstretched arms!”?

And that person, even a child, was to remember that, and go to the quarry with his outstretched arms. And was some man, some woman, or some child ordered out of the ring? What might that person have done to deserve no stone? Perhaps the spaces between the stones, the vacancies, were as important as the great, lumpy blocks themselves?

The tallest stone, over eight feet high, weighs sixteen tons. Who had to go to the quarry with that tall order? Imagine the outstretched arms! Or did the gods specially commission this stone? Something apart, which the arms and mind of a simple man cannot grasp, fathom or plumb. What about the few small stones arranged in a rectangle on the southeast side of the circle? This is a feature unique to Castlerigg. A table? An enclosure? The Holy of Holies? Had there been a roof? It rains in Cumbria, fires might go out.

And what would the King or Priest have called this place? “Castlerigg” is a name from Latin and Old Norse: “Castle on the Ridge”. A castle being a dwelling place, a fortified place, of someone important. Five thousand years ago, the words ‘castel’ and ‘hyrggr’ would not have existed. But might the new name have been the best translation of the old?

Jefferson Greenstraw floated through the night, thinking. He pictured the early temples erected by the Mormons. The Nauvoo Temple had been built atop a promontory. So had the first temples built in Utah: Each a city on a hill. Stone castles, painted white. Like the St. George Temple less than twenty miles from Hurricane, Utah. The House of the Lord. The Mormons believe that their Temples are the literal dwelling places of the Lord, when he is in the neighbourhood. It’s not a church; it’s a home. A safe gathering place for a family.

Jeff walked on, up the hill from Keswick, and time was falling behind him. Jeff reckoned that if the peaks around Castlerigg had not been there, he might be seeing the first light of the sunrise soon.

Walking deliberately out of step and quietly as he could, he approached the two stones, slightly larger than the others, on the northern side of the ring, and stepped through. He paused and shivered, and moved quietly to the centre, scaring himself by recalling some lines from Shakespeare. Might this ring be no more than a Bronze Age churchyard?

“He is dead and gone, at his head a grass-green turf; at his heels a stone.”

Why do people feel the need to place something as lasting as a great or small stone to mark the burial place of a man? Man so fragile, soon to be dust and soil, and a stone to last thousands of years.

Standing in the centre of Castlerigg, Jeff looked around: The stars were dimming as the morning sun prepared to outshine them. The planets would last a little longer than the stars. The sun in his celestial glory was returning to claim Castlerigg for himself. To burn away the witches and the vampires with their mouths full of hot blood. To burn away hell itself.

And the stones have taken other shapes - men, women and children - holding outstretched hands, completing the circle. A circle a hundred feet across. Then Jeff realizes there are more people walking across the field, slowly, out of step, gliding, and holding out their arms. As they reach the circle, those forming the first ring break their circle and, stepping back, allow the newcomers to link up and form a larger circle. Stepping back again, even larger. And larger.

Jeff saw people of all colours and races, all sizes, and ageless. He looked at a young woman, and she was transformed, in the blink of an eye, back to the girl she once was, then to the crippled woman she became for a season. All ages and times were present in each person.

And there, coming into the circle, arms outstretched, linking hands with the others were Jeff’s niece, Christiana, and her young husband, Adam. Changing from young people to children to babies and back. And the circle grew. And Jeff realized that Christiana was holding the hand of Jessie Moon. And the circle grew.

Jefferson Greenstraw stretched his own arms out, spun slowly around in the circle's centre, and spoke his few words, his impression:

“That, over there, is Blencathra, and this is Castlerigg. Didn’t I tell you it was very curious? This Castlerigg Stone Circle is home. It's a place to gather when the wood and the thatch have rotted and been blown about by the winds and rains.”

Jefferson grinned, winked at Christiana and Adam, and walked away from the centre. The gatherers became great stones again, the mountains in the distance even greater stones, the markers of the gods.

Jeff walked more quickly back to the Cragmoor Arms. Victoria would be waking soon, and he’d like to be there.