On our last day in Shetland on our return visit, my brother and I drive out to look at a standing stone not far from Lerwick, the Auld Wife of Skellister as it is known.
It is a day of an overwhelmingly still sea fog, settled heavy on the islands. But we can just make out the stone from the road. There might be a path up to it, but we just jump a fence and approach slantwise, up the hillside, struggling against the knee-high grass, the half-squelch of tangled vegetation and underlying uncooperative geology that passes here for God's bounty.
After a few minutes, we reach the stone. It is tall, nine feet or so, and hunch-backed—hence its name, the Auld Wife, since to be an old wife in Shetland was for many dwindling centuries to be hunched down under a life-time's weight of peat-creels and fishermen.
The stone is covered with sprouts of grey lichen. My brother approaches mock-reverentially and places his hands on it, bows his head in homage to the principle of anima, of metamorphosis, of stubborn vitality, which the great stupid stone embodies.
I have seen people do this with serious intent at standing stones in Orkney, and in the Outer Hebrides. People dance to the stones as though they, the stones, are alive; they talk to them, lie at their feet at midsummer. The oddity of them suggests a chink in the cosmos through which they might one day pass, through which they think they catch a glimmer of hope. Some ancient wisdom spelt it out in the arrangement of rock: all is not as it seems.
But the standing stones do not give much away. There is no eloquence in rock. There is no anything, in rock. Nothing of that sort anyway. It is utterly non-human. It stands against us. What else do we stand in so much opposition to? The sea perhaps—in its vastness, its formlessness; or the vacuum of space. But rock is certainly a contender, not-human to a peculiar degree: inert, crystalline, and gifted with a temporal depth second only to the stars.
This big old stone is not living, then, and nothing inheres in it except more stone; but the setting of it on end like this marks, nonetheless, a glorious redundancy, an ornamentation of the strangeness of life. The stone does not dance; but we dance around it. Against it we can measure our own dandelion life.
...
In the museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is (or used to be) a little whirring sculpture comprising an electric motor, a gear train, and a cube of concrete. The motor spins at two hundred revolutions per minute; the pairs of gears and worms scale the rotation down by 1/50th at each step, so that the final wheel in the sequence will make one revolution every two trillion years. That wheel is embedded in the concrete block.
The sculpture was made by Arthur Ganson, who named it Machine with Concrete.
Not far along the gear train you can find some recognisable scaling of your own life, a wheel which turns over once every 35 years. The next wheel along turns over at a little under 2,000 years, and the one beyond that, every 87,000 years. Between two and three turns of the first, and you are done; a turn of the next, and most human settlements are done; beyond that, there is all of human history, settled and unsettled.
So you stand in front of it, this Promethean model of the cosmos, for a moment or two. And allow it to settle your heart a little.
But then, two trillion years, against eternity, is a grain of sand on the beach. Even that block of concrete is thrumming with warmth and life and movement compared with the abyss into which it, and you, will soon enough tumble.
...
We head directly down from the standing stone to the car. There are some sheep in the field below us, and they approach. They are a breed of sheep I do not remember seeing before. Muscular, dog-faced sheep. They seem intent, malicious. They clearly mean us harm. We laugh sheepishly, but they hound us from from the field.
And then, safely over the stile, we turn and take a photograph, and they smile benignly at us. Dog sheep of Shetland.
