Thursday 16 February 2012

"It is meaningless - in a way"

"It is meaningless - in a way - so each of us can put our own meaning on it." So said a local in response to what they're called Achill-henge - a megalithic folly in concrete on the Western coast of Ireland.

I sometimes think that you can put too much weight onto the powers of logic. Logic only works well when it starts from the right base. What one might call bastard-modernism puts a lot onto an apparently scientific method - which is why Christian Fundamentalism is a modern construct, but without science's power of review and criticism. The people of earlier times were more allegorical, more mystical, more woolly - they had no need, in the great scheme of things, for 6 days to equal 6 days - they could mean what you wanted.

As does Achill-henge. And so, in our own green and pleasant land, its more ancient cousins like Stonehenge and the Avebury.

You can make a wild stab at what it all means - the burial mounds we can at least understand part of - but there's no real certainty. I still remember the first time I saw the Rollright Stones. On an icy early October morning, wandering along the ridgeway road that leads from Little to Great Rollright. And there were the stones -almost  nuzzling up towards the fence by the roadside - not sinister, not really scary but certainly... well, uncanny really. Eerie, it might be called.

I've never really understood what it is about the place - it's just a strange place. People tie ribbons to the trees, but I've never understood why. It may have meant something once but we don't know what - the ancient Beaker People left no writing. It's like a tea light or a thunderstorm or a lunar eclipse or a kiss. They're what they are, and we react however we react and put in the meaning we want to impute. As the man said - "It is meaningless - in a way."

2 comments :

  1. "meaning" is overrated... Walking back from the pub in Avebury on a still, clear Summer night along the stone avenue, and I kind of got the point of it, or it could have been the 6X.

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  2. 6X is notorious for the meaning it imparts. And Old Timer more so.

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