“Flint” essay by Alan Garner
This is a transcript of the audio of Garner reading his essay “Flint” from the BBC Radio series Cornerstones. Link to the program here.
The transcript may contain errors.
The radio series was adapted into the essay collection Cornerstones: Subterranean Writings from Dartmoor to the Arctic Circle, which is still in print.
Listen.
I go to let the hens out before breakfast.
Three fields away, the dish and antenna of the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank wait to hear something that once happened.
The hens tumble from their hut to drink. One scratches for a worm, and something glints in the scratching, catching the sun.
I pick it up and hold it: a stone, a wonder, in my hand.
I know what this is. And I’m the first to know in the ten thousand years since the last hand that held it.
And that hand and mine just could be linked.
I lift the stone against the light. It’s thin, translucent, honey-black, and sharp, sharper than a surgeon’s steel; and in it, as if in amber, a fossil: a frond of a creature from the sea.
Back at the house for breakfast, I spoon muesli with one hand and with the other turn the shining thing. It fits my fingers.
Two strikes made it, broke it free, and a bone pressed it to perfect the edge, ten thousand years ago.
Someone brought it here. There’s no flint in Cheshire.
After the ice, people walked from Europe, following the herds. The flint was in Yorkshire. It passed from hand to hand around campfires, a chalky lump, until it reached where the garden is now.
A blow hit the lump, and the honey-black shone.
The spur of land sits above the valley, with water on three sides and well-drained soil. A good winter camp for hunter-gatherers, and a time for mending and making, telling stories, watching for the game to come down to drink, then skinning the flesh of the kill.
The postman drives up the track into the yard.
I slit the envelope with the flint.
Inside is the result of the radiocarbon dating of a cremation we disturbed at the corner of the house.
The figure is 1,387 plus or minus 29 BP, which means 3,500 years ago, give or take.
The house is on a Bronze Age barrow.
And though the house is five hundred years old and more, it’s not the first. There are at least two others beneath, with round huts under the garden and the yard.
The people that came here after the ice did not go away.
Why move when you find the place ideal?
A quarter of a million fires have been on this hearth: the hearth in the house where the days have seen hall and hut over the burnt dead.
Across the field, the telescope has news. A star flares in Cygnus. I look.
So far away, the star had died before the grave was born.
And what about the flint? How did that happen?
There was a warm sea over England, and in it were plankton and snails. They died, and their scales and shells drifted down and settled on the sea floor.
The weight of half a mile of chalk pressed the silica of the shells and scales.
Larger creatures burrowed through the ooze, and the silica followed, filling the tunnels and burrows, settled, and was hard: a cast of where they’d been.
The world heaved, the chalk weathered, and the silica was flint.
Inside its grey husk it grew beauty, waiting to be got.
My blood walked out of Africa ninety thousand years ago.
We came by flint.
Flint makes and kills, gives shelter, food. It clothes us.
Flint clears forest. Flint brings fire. With flint we bear the cold.
Listen.
What is this that is coming?
Listen.
A heart-shaped pebble, worn by water, lies in a shallow brook.
A hand takes it.
The pebble fits the hand.
It’s hard and black and good.
But it can be better. It can be made better.
The mind sees how, and the other hand strikes with another stone.
It knocks flakes from one side of the black, each flake drawing sparks into a sharp and wavy edge.
The point of the heart is hit more gently to whittle slivers.
And the work is done.
Now the pebble is an axe in the hand, to butcher with.
The edge cuts hide and flesh and sinew, and opens up the marrow of a bone.
The point digs between and prises limbs apart.
What is this that is coming?
Mervin stands by the belt on the tractor as the potatoes are lifted from the field.
He picks off the rubbish.
The tractor passes over the pond that the motorway men filled with their spoil when they made the cutting.
The earth is claggy and yellow, not loam, and there are more stones than spuds.
He throws the stones back to the field.
He takes one to sling, and stops.
It’s black, and it sits in his hand just right.
It’s small and smooth, but jagged on one side and pointed at the end.
The stone gleams, and there is light inside.
Mervin puts the stone in his pocket, and on his way home he drops it off at the house on the hill.
I sit in the old house on the ancient mound and read the county archaeologist’s notes.
Site:
A reclaimed marl pit filled with spoil from a cutting on the M6.
Description:
The artefact is a pebble of black flint, with smooth natural facets and naturally rounded butt, all showing derived features. The end is pointed, and on one side a sinuous edge has been formed by bifacial chipping and step-flaking to give a triangular section.
Remarks:
On the superficial evidence, it would appear to be a Lower Palaeolithic handaxe, preserved from destruction under the Anglian and subsequent glaciations.
It is Abbevillian in execution.
I sit back.
Abbevillian.
That’s more than six ice ages ago.
It must be half a million years.
How did it survive?
Half a million.
It wasn’t Homo sapiens.
Homo erectus, perhaps, or Homo heidelbergensis, or some such.
And now in my hand.
I look out of the window at the telescope.
The dish is tilted. The antenna is collecting signals so faint that they have had to be cooled to near absolute zero to steady the atoms before the data can be sent to the computers.
A light, not thought, flashes in my brain.
I log on to the telescope to find what it’s hearing.
It’s a quasar: a mass of energy with a black hole at its centre, swallowing stars, near the beginning of time, more than thirteen thousand million years ago, before our solar system was formed, before our galaxy took shape.
And the whispers of that energy, travelling at the speed of light, about one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second, seven times around the world in a second, one and a quarter seconds to the moon, eight minutes to the sun, 4.2 years to the nearest star, 2.5 million to the nearest galaxy like ours—
the whispers are arriving at the antenna of the telescope now.
If now exists.
If now is possible.
And I sit with the axe in my hand.
The axe is a first meddling with the universe by our intelligence.
Intelligence took what was and changed it, to make it work better.
Once that has happened, the telescope becomes inevitable.
Idea leads to idea in a chain reaction of discovery that won’t be stopped.
Eve will pick the apple.
Pandora cannot shut the box.
We are the questing ape, the ape that says, “What’s next?”
The pebble opens the cosmos.
If mind had not interfered with pebble, if hand had not struck flake, no dish would hear, and no antenna focus.
Half a million years.
Thirteen thousand million years.
When the hand picked the pebble to fetch the telescope, the whispers had covered more than ninety-seven percent of their journey to this Cheshire field.
And I hold the flint, full of stars, and wonder.
The pebble opens the cosmos.
And yet, lost in the immensity of understanding, should I not fear this thing?
Forwards to the power of ten, to the sun’s nova, and beyond that.
Backwards, time lies bedded, stripped by the wind, made again, and a new time to be stripped by the wind.
The rain grates mountains that were over Snowdon, that were under seas, and beyond that.
All time bears on a single moment.
The one point of light is intolerable.
“Of Abbevillian execution,” says the note.
The axe is named from the place where its type was first identified.
Intelligence shaped it.
But is intelligence enough to save us from ourselves?
And are we alone intelligent in this vastitude?
There’s an argument that says it may be that we have not yet found intelligence beyond our world because intelligence that evolves to be conscious of itself carries within its own destruction.
So will the flint that shaped us be our nemesis?
Our nemesis of Abbevillian execution?
We’ve been here before.
We’ve had practice.
We have rehearsed.
Abbeville is in the valley of the Somme.