No doubt much is better lost. I should like to make a conveyance. A conveyance may be a deed. I doubt I’ll ever get around to peat wheels. When I referred on May 24 to the Unplaced Room as a title of the footage we’d shot that morning, Dagger said Great, you make up the titles.
Will Dudley find out why Catherwood’s Jerusalem panorama burnt? (Thebes, too.) The New York lawyer he corresponded with about it he consulted also on the question of an American divorce for an English marriage.
Why did I wish to share Tessa with Lorna? Did Dudley know about Tessa and me? Do I? One bright warm day that Tessa and I got together in New York was a Monday, and she later told me that contrary to her information the Museum of the American Indian was closed Mondays but Dudley who was supposed to be there never mentioned this.
Did Dudley know why he was taking up the study of Catherwood? If he didn’t at first, he came to know. For he told me on the tiled edge of the Swiss Cottage public swimming pool.
Immediately after the New York holocaust Catherwood began the illustrations for his second Maya book with Stephens.
Dudley’s hypothesis that an exponent of a rival archaeological theory had set the fire touched Tessa more than Dudley; he said there had been two hundred gaslights in the Rotunda the night of the fire, a considerable risk.
But Tessa, who had come to think herself part Maya because of her East Asiatic fold — the epicanthic fold — at the inner corner of each eye, decided it was a Catholic continuing the work of the sixteenth-century priest Diego de Landa who had made good his revulsion at Maya religious practices by incinerating a number of codices containing Maya history.
Felloes, said Dagger in the early hours of May 29 driving home to London from Wales, were the wooden sections of the rim of a wheel.
We had discussed at length the strange man who had made a dash from the grove either into the dark and the fog or into a thicket.
I said, We’ve got to get this footage developed Monday.
It’s possible, said Dagger.
13
On the road it felt like Sunday. I might have been just another hiker. I observed the roadsides.
When I left the widow’s and was still in sight of Callanish, I used my map to find three other sets of Standing Stones, some fallen. All three sites, but notably the largest and nearest, seemed now to me to look toward Callanish. Having been to those great crude contours on the headland, I wanted to tie to them these three other sites genuinely primitive in their present state.
The first, in a spongy, rising field and above and behind a crofter’s house, seemed to communicate with Callanish, to share from its roughly equal elevation the signals of some observance. Here there were eight stones — I did not know why I studied them, I knew I had done with Callanish, knew where I must go, yet I paced and estimated, and could not believe it an accident that in one westward alignment two stones on opposite sides of the circle with one of the central cairn stones between them made a perfect pointer some three-quarters of a mile to the Great Menhir at Callanish. I slipped my compass back in my parka pocket and it rattled against the smaller of my borrowed weapons.
At the second of these minor sites it was hard to tell if the marshiness or the original construction of the central cairn or perhaps some modern excavation had pitted out the center; again the stones were large and strangely intentional; but inescapably Callanish was there almost two miles off, and this site with the eight-stone circle a mile away and to the right of Callanish created a triangle so vivid in the solitary breeze that I saw here three points of one community where ancient forms were buried to dissolve upward to the sky or outward in the earth that, if not so brackish then, may have had trees.
But I’d detoured already, though on a southwest road that would soon have brought me to where I could have set off crosscountry on that direct (and, as my driver in the red car had said, foolhardy) route to Clisham. So I turned back to the road that went first toward Stornoway and met the southward road that would best take me where I wished to go. But there were no cars. And then one came up over a hill behind me and was gone as if accelerating at the sight of my thumb. And then I found I was off the map.
On a map you move faster, though often only somewhat faster. But each time you’re again in the actual place that holds your feet, the trick-contraction of the map seems to have been someone else’s thing you’ve poached on like a power not yours.
Dagger had smuggled maps of the French eighteenth century around his legs and maybe something less antique between his skin and the cartographer’s parchment. But put him between Woking and Stonehenge, Lyme Bay and Bristol Channel, Monmouth County in Wales and the edge of Middlesex coming home to London, and he could not read a map to save himself.
He said he’d been at the barricades in Chicago in ’68—I’d never been clear why — and had been picked up by Mayor Daley’s cops with a couple of Yippie friends because they’d had maps of the city on them. One of these friends had come to stay with the DiGorros in January. He had spent a lot of time in a Haverstock Hill pub with UPI newsman Savvy Van Ghent, who liked to ripple his muscle under the American flag tattoo. He had come to one softball game in April and left (now I think of it) with the sensitive and surreptitious Nash — and I’d never seen this former Yippie again and I’d been then a bit sorry because, whatever Lorna thought of him with his large tattoo of a snake-handled knife extending concavely from under his chin down over his Adam’s apple disappearing into the heavy hair on his chest and well below the opening of his shirt, I had wanted Will to meet him — because (to carry us one backward jump further) Will had seemed to show a strange lack of appetite for visiting America and I wanted him to see someone of this sort. I mean someone free. Unbound by ambitions. Though you can’t tell these days — the most mystical Hawaiian drop-out when you look inside his guitar proves to be all business with a master plan set like a charge to launch him when the break comes. If no, keep looping; if yes, proceed.
I had always had a purpose in others’ eyes. But it was a quality, not an object, and the quality was prudence, or the look of it. My father phoned me from New York to ask if I thought he should build a second cottage at the summer place. He’d had his martinis. Geoff Millan came and wept one night and when it was over and he was finishing the brandy Lorna had poured him and she was in the kitchen heating frozen pizza, he blinked out some sort of smile and said, Moral stability, yes, that’s what you’ve got — moral stability.
A car flew by.
I walked sideways across a cattle grid to avoid slipping my toes through the widely spaced bars.
I was back on my Ordnance Survey map, now that my way had curved back south and west. So I could identify the cleanly delimited grove of trees on a hill to my right as a deliberate plantation.
Later I stopped by a black chilly loch where the land was more rugged and hills were becoming mountains as if by dropping their lower slopes abruptly, for I was getting down into Harris. I had the sandwiches the widow had made for me. I was in someone else’s system. But certainly I knew some things that others did not.