Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

And seeing Nash with a half-gallon jug, I went near him and heard him say to the deserter (whom I’d not recognized in his beard), Well is he here or not? I heard he was.

The deserter’s dark-haired companion from the Unplaced Room arrived, and I turned as if not paying attention. He is here, said the deserter. I heard nothing else and when I turned toward them Nash was turning toward me and the other two were walking off toward the circle where there was some physical activity. Nash had only his own paper cup, so I had a quick drink out of it. But on an impulse like self-preservation I said to Nash, That’s OK. I know he’s here. I saw him.

I returned to Dagger.

What energy in process were we tying into here? It was an energy constantly disturbed in its course or starting out again and again at new points.

The film might be a mess but we’d have to see. Tessa and I weren’t driving back to London tonight. Dagger and I hadn’t negotiated the centrifugal pan that with the processional reprise (plus chant) might climax the scene. But we still had plenty on the third spool. There seemed fewer people, but these were crowded around the Altar Stone.

Tessa was goading the deserter, Are you going to let him tell you to shut up?

This must be the deserter’s companion. He looked at me keenly as I prepared to record. Gene’s wife was there with two children who had climbed onto the fallen stone and were trying to push each other off.

Yeah, said Nash, don’t tell him to shut up. I’ll shut you up.

Look out you don’t get a nosebleed, Nash, said the deserter’s companion.

Again I wanted to ask Tessa whom she’d had by the hand before. She certainly wasn’t missing her green beret. The man from the Ministry stood calmly embarrassed next to the bank clerk. Nash got pushed, and he and the deserter and the other fellow as they jostled each other toward the single upright of the Sunset trilothon were joined by Cosmo who was saying something and was told by Nash to stop shooting off his mouth. They went outside the Sarsen Circle and I heard the deserter say something like, You did see him.

Whereupon of all people little Elspeth of the long hair and stern visage was at my side introducing the Indian from Kansas City and telling me his responses to Stonehenge might be relevant, he didn’t think the place essentially English.

This was now pounced on by Tessa (ah that curled lip!) who declared the quintessential Englishness of this place, the practical mysticism of the land . An English voice was heard to say, There, there! and I turned asking who had said that.

But Dagger was shooting the scuffle now intermittently manifest through the north northeast part of the circle, and I said, wishing to rescue our scene, Let’s do the big pan.

Dagger agreed and called to the New Druids to line up and reprocess before the torches went out, and I suddenly asked if Reid was here, the guerrilla-theater actor, and Dagger said yes somewhere.

And though I couldn’t enter it into my diary which Jenny was going to type, I felt that very much a part of this scene was her off-again-on-again relation with Reid who had got some hold over her but who had not been the reason I’d made sure Jenny wasn’t here tonight. But the word Reid threw me out into the real successes of our silent Softball Game where I and he had appeared together, and the Indian Krish (now perhaps dead in a ditch).

And Reid had appeared (or disappeared) with the red-haired woman, and as he’d crossed the grass beyond third base and headed off into foul ground and Hyde Park he’d had a glow about his body, almost an aureole, that had probably not come out on our film. But Dagger said, Wake up! and he was right and I found myself waking from some still further arc of time whose formula I couldn’t frame but whose swimming materials I knew included Tessa’s mouth and the cassette recorder my mother wanted us to write letters to her on, and a sheet of liquid crystals like a negative being peddled by the God Mercury Cartwright, and a rusty zipper between two sleeping bags in the light of moonlight wind upon a lake in Maine: and the arc whose formula these partly were, was the softly cadenced sigh of Lorna’s sobbing in the late fifties that I could hear even when she was out of the house like a new motion of our Highgate things, a picture, a hunk of quartz, a piano, a Victorian couch, a refinished stairway, all for a long moment on loan and not after all ours — sobs that made me fear for my life.

And as I got with the reprocession but was still afield on waves of pointless past, I said Who is this that people are asking about — is he here, is he not here, who is it?

Probably not just one person, said Dag, maybe some of these Hindu mystics are your greatest sex fiends when you get away from the firelight, right?

In the dark, through between two lintel-less slabs, I saw Nash moving his hands in front of someone all in white whom I couldn’t see.

We tracked the procession back toward the northeast portal on a route that led toward the Slaughter Stone again and the Avenue and the Heel Stone, but when Dagger said, Now! he swung past them counterclockwise and I kept out of his way as we made one revolution passing the procession, made a second revolution-pan so fast Dagger staggered, and a third even faster with Cosmo calling, Just loop that pan and run it as many times as you want.

But the fourth time around, the procession was just through the arches and outside the circle — the dark gaps had been run into the gray-lit stones and the stones into one whirling circuit of the continuous panning shot as if we had whirled the procession out a runway by centrifugal launch and made the circle an unbroken power once again.

A voice was saying, If you don’t feel homesick, either you ought to or you ought to stop worrying about not feeling it.

Nash was suddenly in view holding a handkerchief to his nose.

Dagger spun us out toward the Sarsen Circle, and the bank clerk was standing at the 21–22 arch northwest from the Altar. I urged Dagger to follow, and we gave the man a chance to speak, I felt our climatic unifying pan had not held anything together, I was a long way away from what I had felt with Jenny here, the windy innuendo I’d felt here and then the crystal truths measured for us by this very man whom you might see tracing generations of craftsmen at the County Archives during his lunch break or poking about the Wessex barrows on the crest of some remote down with not even a bike to convey him home, only a thin ash plant and his knobbly-knuckled thumbs. He was saying now that he’d just heard someone nearby groaning, Graveyard, graveyard, just a graveyard; an interesting view, but he hadn’t found the owner of the voice.

Dagger was pointing elsewhere but I had the mike close.

Yes indeed, said the bank clerk, for if it’s just a burial ground — and make no mistake, it may be! — (and I half-heard the word Is , like a gust’s mild buzz through the stones, yet there was no gust, no breeze) why then our main concern is the giant work of the thing. Now these Sarsens, the big ones, came overland from eighty miles away. A miracle. But the bluestones, which are much smaller but still run to five tons, were many if not all of them brought from Wales. Geology tells us that. Think of it! One hundred thirty miles by air — but in real miles, two hundred and forty! And this without the wheel, though possibly with rollers. But by water, more than halfway by water, from West Wales through the Bristol Channel to the mouth of the Bristol Avon — you know the gorge? — then up the Avon, then-overland, and perhaps along the river Wylye, then overland again to here. Think of it. This is what Stonehenge means, I say.