The Birthday Neanderthal, half an MA and Time

I was given this Neanderthal for my birthday, and those fossils and that terrifying stuff from the stygian crevices of my head. James Fraser made this picture for me. James, you are officially the King of being able to judge a person.

I might have half an MA Creative Writing. A 'M' I suppose, or more properly an 'A'; I’m certainly not a Master - but then I hardly qualify as an Art either.

Whatever, the taught year of the degree is over and when I met the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals for my first dissertation tutorial she intimated I'd passed the last two modules; the exam board meets in October. Schrodinger's cat is completely out of the box – the marks aren’t confirmed - but I’m never, ever going to average 70% or over for the year. Oh well, I don’t exactly want to top myself. Although actually, a bit I do…

The dissertation is to be twelve thousand words with a three thousand word commentary. I’ve form for being ungovernable regarding word count guidelines; the short-story I wrote for the fiction module grew to be over eight thousand words long and was a nightmare to edit and make coherent because I couldn’t actually read it all in one go (grim to mark too I imagine). Consequently I’m planning to write six, two thousand word pieces, a mixture of fiction and creative nonfiction, based on some of the statements from my 20+ Things about me-meme; me, me, me, me. I'm hoping some unifying theme will emerge.

When I spoke about the three short-story ideas I've got so far:

• Alternating male and female perspectives of an affair over forty years;
• Changes wrought by a transfer from a mobile forager/hunter existence to sedentism and food production;
• The impact of dementia;

the Author who is Writing about Neanderthals suggested Time as a theme. I dunno why I didn’t think of that because I am already a Time-Nerd.

In an earlier post, That’ll be different, I referred to shifting perceptions of time through moment and culture. For example, during the 1940s an anthropologist, Evans-Prichard, lived amongst the Nuer, a pastoralist people of Southern Sudan.

Evans-Prichard reports that Nuer don’t have Time; that is they don’t have any expression equivalent to Time which means that they can’t speak of Time as if it is something actual, it doesn’t pass, can’t be wasted, can’t be saved and can't be made up. It pleases me to think of people who live without Time; of Time as an artificial construct.

How I feel about time is - in the short term everything matters but in the long term, geological time, nothing matters.

If my infant mother hadn't survived diphtheria in an era before antibiotics I would never have been born.
'No great loss!' My other reader might reasonably exclaim. 'You're a narcissist, you produce ungovernably long short-stories and you're morbidly attached to Neanderthals.'

Okay, that is all true - but, what if Charles Darwin's mother had died of diphtheria or Alan Bennett's mother? And anyway, if I wasn't born who would my childrens’ partners be marrying at those pretty damn special weddings I've written about; the weddings that are going to happen in the near future? And who would be here to submit bridesmaid gowns to the YMCA test? Unsettling thoughts.

Yet in terms of geological time, nothing is really significant, not whales, not poor darling infants choking to death, not the threat of redundancy, nothing.

I think to be kind and attentive are the most essential human characteristics. I try to occupy the moment and believe that everything equates. But mostly I live in a geological-time mindset; a mindset where nothing matters; except maybe MA marks and interesting facts about Neanderthals (my favourite hominin, thanks again, James).
Yes, I know I’ve used stygian twice recently. Stygian has taken over from trope as a word I bandy in an attempt to appear clever.

ps I've borrowed the 'What if my mother hadn't survived? None of this would have happened,' motif from Kathleen Jamie (Findings p. 112). Jamie's mother survived pneumonia and my mother really did survive diphtheria.

That'll be different. Wednesday 12 November 2008

Submitted our first drafts with commentary and thought about theme. Called my bit funeral and I spoke to a friend about what I was preparing; I described the different components, Jimmy Woods digging graves, the death and funeral of my friends' mother, the tune September Song and wearing a remembrance poppy. He asked if I was calling it September Song, he plays gypsy guitar and he has four versions of it on his ipod; that in itself seems extraordinary because I think I imagined I was one of the last two people alive who knew the song. I've never considered calling it that but I didn't know why because it does encompass ideas of the past, my father and time running out. Thinking about themes make me realise that I'd stuck with funeral because it is literally (is it literally?) at the funeral where all the components converge. I'm feeling a bit giddy and excited about changing person and seeing what happens to hand in next week. I was pleased that the lecturer made us work with someone different this week because it’s useful to have a change of perspective. And it’s diverting to speak to someone else.

Someone called Jo Marchant was on Start the Week on Radio 4 on Monday. She spoke about the Antikythera, a calculating mechanism dating from 70 BC that was recovered from an Aegean shipwreck in 1901 by pearl divers. The device links the technical calendars used by astronomers to the everyday calendars that regulated Greek society. Its intermeshed toothed wheels represent calendar cycles; by turning the wheels users could distinguish the relationships between astronomical cycles to figure out the relative positions of the sun and moon and forecast eclipses. It’s a complicated but it’s unlikely to have been a one-off. It made me think about the althiometer in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials. When Jo had spoken others on the panel expressed astonishment that whoever had made the device hadn't made something Really Useful, 'they could have made a alarm clock'. Jo replied that within the context of the times the maker had made something Exceedingly Useful and that first century BC Greeks would have no use for a clock, alarm or otherwise. This made me think about two things, an anthropologist called Evans-Prichard who studied the Nuer, who are/were Sudanese pastoralists. He reported that they did not have any expression equivalent to time which meant that they couldn’t speak of time as though it was something actual, it didn’t pass, couldn’t be wasted, couldn’t be saved and couldn’t be made up. I’m compelled by the notion that we invented something as stressful as time and I wonder what we do or don’t do now that will appear incomprehensible to future generations. I suspect that building substantial great structures to the glory of a god that we’ve made up might be one thing, but of course it’s just as likely to be something that seems wise and reasonable to me at the moment. I very uneasy about the common assumption that putting children from the age of four or five away in schools from 9.00 till 3.00 every day is a kind or sensible thing to do.

I went to Crail this weekend to visit my mother in law. Crail is a very strange seaside town in Fife. On my last visit the man in the museum directed me to a petrified Carboniferous tree trunk on the beach. I was completely overwhelmed by the sight of it, it’s huge and unbelievable. A few weeks later my daughter Ali went to visit her Granny and then went in search of the fossil tree trunk. She couldn’t find it so asked a likely looking local. He said he thought it must be in the opposite direction because, ‘there are only rocks that way’.