Stonehenge
By HJG
This
spring, I was fortunate enough to journey to Europe. Although pilgrimage
isn’t exactly the right word, it’s the closest approximation
to how I felt about going to Stonehenge— it was a spiritual Must,
a command, and I didn’t even know it until after I left. I can never
describe it, but here are some of the words I’ve used to attempt
to recapture the spirit I felt. The prose blocks were written recently,
in retrospect. When the words just sort of sit on the page, trying not
to fall off— that’s from when I was there, on the first of June,
two thousand and one.
I don’t know how large Stonehenge is in measurement words, so let’s
call it fifty feet diameter— respectably large, but not overwhelmingly
huge on a purely physical level. In the rolling English countryside, picture
a cylinder made of solid stone, fifty feet diameter, that starts roughly
at the center of the earth and reaches up through the sky to that place
in between the atmosphere and space, where the spirits in the sky tend
to dwell. Feel the solidness, the Weight, the unadulterated mass of stone
stretching for infinity. Now take away the pillar and leave only a circle
of stones on the barest surface of the Earth. That’s a little bit
of what Stonehenge feels like.
Like every molecule you breathe, every molecule in your body, is covalently
Bound to a molecule of Stonehenge. Your blood is full of hemoglobin-Stonehenge,
and it’s trying to function with this new weight. You breathe in
oxygen-Stonehenge and struggle to exhale carbon dioxide-Stonehenge. Your
lungs are FILLED with it, your inner body coated. The grass is specifically
adapted to carry the extra weight, the flowers integrate this extra power.
You cannot. You can only stare and try to breathe and obey the little
rope that says oh no, don’t go too near, and you wish as you never
have before that you were one of the birds keeping vigil Inside the circle.
I’m here.
Weight.
Majesty.
Age.
Weight. Like posts
of thunder into the ground.
Connection.
The petrified trees of life.
Grove. Community.
Doorways to the gods.
It booms with holy—
A five thousand year old bass line:
resonating.
“You get me closer
to god.”
My body tingles.
Eyes closed. I salivate. It calls,
softly buy firmly.
To touch one would
be to touch the ancient tree— but exponential.
It calls to me. If I were alone, I’d run to it. My stomach feels
it.
Everything in me feels it.
Five thousand years, but it was old when they built it.
It makes the air heavy,
saturated with rock molecules.
The air is full of the rocks, the energy.
My teeth tingle.
I am glued to this spot,
the words keep flowing.
I’ll never feel like this again.
They are oblivious to us—
inside their world, it is dark, stormy.
In their world, Druids still chant.
The Stones care to know nothing of us.
To go inside that circle...
I’ll never know what it’s like.
Maybe that’s for the better.
What would I do if I were wrong?
What if I were right?
It’s a nexus, crackling, a
story dying to happen.
It is SO OLD.
I’m searching to connect it to history,
but it won’t.
It’s not big bang old or primordial ooze old.
It’s spiritually old, energy old,
we don’t have a history for it yet.
The birds are techno-chirping, echoing.
Black birds, playing in the Stones.
Odin’s birds.
I keep salivating.
My body tastes something.
I am attracted in every way to it.
But I can’t go in.
And what would I do if I could?
I thought I couldn’t bring it with me, but I can. It’s still
here, inside me. I hope it stays, that my normal wordsmithing will only
scrabble for coherence, pleading to be let in, to be able to communicate,
and will forever be lacking, because this is the farthest beyond words
I’ve ever been. I’m still speechless when people ask me, “What
was it like?” It’s like nothing. It Is. It’s always
Been. It’s the reason for the verb To Be.
It’s the spiritual pressure of the bottom of the ocean. It presses,
imposes its weight, and wouldn’t it be interesting to open the hatch,
and let the ocean In...
