The plain scorching is and sweat from my brow drips. On the way from being to becoming I am. Aurochs horns we will trade and then feasting and dancing there will be, when Aşıklı Höyük we reach,. Glorious!
The horns to my back strapped carrying, difficult it is to walk. But only with obsidian laden, easier the return way will be.
If she will have me, at Aşıklı a gwain I will seek. Under the floor of the domo, my pichtehr interred is, and my gwain and I the unbroken line will continue. Oh pourer, successful let me be!
.
Note
This is a test piece to see whether this is too annoying for a reader. Please let me know. The odd syntax and unfamiliar words are deliberate. It’s an attempt to follow that of the first language spoken throughout the Indo-European land mass. Verbs followed objects rather than preceding them, as they do in English. Pichtehrmeans father, becoming eventually pater in Latin, and gwain, from which the English word queen descends, means woman or wife. Aşıklı Höyük was a stone age settlement in what is now Turkey. It was an important centre for obsidian between 10,000 and 9,000 years ago.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
I don’t remember the child’s name. Chrissy? Carol? But, more importantly, what does she mean? Where else would my hair be?
There is a sense of wrongness, like what happens in a car crash. Time slows down. Not that I’m offended. Rather, I’m fascinated by the rudeness. I suppose this is how children are: direct.
Her father looks at me in panic. I offer no help, unsure whether the question deserves an answer or a reprimand.
Glaring at me, he answers, “That’s his brains, darling, because he’s so clever.”
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
They were here, and then they were gone—the couple at the next table. Sure, you tell yourself, it’s a restaurant. People sit, they eat, and go, in a constant carousel. But her laughter had been a coded message, unique to you, and the one glance across, unmistakable. That’s why they’d removed those diners, consumed in a single bite like an amuse bouche. Next, they will come for you. How to mount a defence? The fish knife? If only you’d ordered the steak!
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Harry, they say, is a keen plantsman. But is that the same as a horticulturalist? He knows the Latin names, so perhaps. Or do I want, maybe, a nurseryman? It’s confusing to have so many words for gardener.
“What exactly do you want?” he asks.
I wave my hands in what I hope is visionary gesture.
Harry suggests, “Something formal? Cottage garden? Zen meditative space? Wildlife haven?”
I see he’s trying to be helpful, but choice paralyses me.
“Umm, you know, a trim and a tidy up.” That sounds ridiculous, as if I was at the barbers. “Maybe another day?”
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Distant furnaces wink through rips in night’s curtain—an army camped on the horizon. I love the dark skies of this remote place—stars, moon, the … The Milky Way’s gone!
I take a pull on my beer, tamp my pipe, and consider explanations. Our galaxy can’t vanish, I know that. Don’t I?
A space-time warp has ripped our planet from its moorings? Improbable. A cloud precisely obscuring that wash of a hundred-billion stars? A mote in my eye?
By shifting my gaze, I could test that last possibility. Yet I can’t make my head move. The whole Milky Way can’t be gone.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
I ached with tiredness and the desperation of being lost. A stone in my left shoe rubbed my heel painfully. The stone was the sun—a whole solar system in my trainer. Vladimir Putin appeared in my reverie, riding in a big black limousine and he stopped to give me a lift. The sun was green and thrashed the car’s tin roof with death-white trailing roots.
Should I have killed Putin when I had the chance? Maybe. But I mean, you know, he showed me kindness.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Never let your dog eat dragon meat. The reason is the high phosphorous content. Dogs can receive up to 22.25 mg of phosphorous per kilogram of body weight per day. Exceed this, and spontaneous combustion may ensue. Though dragon is intensively-farmed in the lowland plains and, consequently, is cheap at your local butchers, it is much safer to stick to standard cuts of basilisk or gorgon. To enhance energy and playfulness, nine vets out of ten recommend a supplement of powdered mandrake.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Hah! Think I’m trapped in this labyrinth, just waiting to be hunted-down by a bloke with a ball of thread and a stabby thing? Nah, I’ve got tricks, me. How do you escape a maze? Simply turn left at every choice point (or right if that’s your political inclination).
It would work, except this puzzle isn’t two-dimensional. There’s up-and-down as well, stairs ending blind, and abyssal falls.
And that’s not all. The walls move around—the place operates in four dimensions, changing over time. The nifty wheeze will be ensuring that when Theseus is, I am not.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
The probe took 148,000 years to reach the star, and the return signals need over 4 years. You might think, in all that time, we’d master quicker space travel. Wormholes, maybe; but no—we’re saddled with the ancient probe’s capabilities.
My avatar can roam anywhere around planet Proxima B: almost as good as being there, though without sensuous contact. And that is a big problem. The specific issue is Kr’Kara. First contact turned to scientific collaboration, and collaboration to intimacy. I love Kr’Kara, and they love me. Or did. Turns out they dumped me two years ago.
.
Friday fictioneers is a weekly challenge set by Rochelle Wisoff Fields to write a 100-word story in response to a photo prompt. You can find other stories here
Memory is an odd thing. It is nothing like a photo album. Every time we take out a memory to look at it, we change it, until all we’re left with of the original is a story constructed in the present.
I say this because the BBC’s rescreening of Jacob Bronowski’s trail-blazing The Ascent of Man series, 50 years on, has been an opportunity to compare past and present.
First aired in 1973, the 13-part documentary series is infused with Bronowski’s desire to put scientific literacy on a par with cultural literacy: an odyssey of the evolution of knowledge to parallel the 1969 series, Civilisation, by Kenneth Clark on the evolution of art. As a mathematician and a poet, Bronowski was eminently well-placed for this task. I remember being enthralled by the series.
Seen again, half a century on, there is much that seems fresh and modern in the intention and the production values. There is also much that obviously reminds us that “the past is another country: they do things differently there.” For instance, the lavish use of locations and the use of computer graphics (albeit clunky) is strikingly modern. And yet the very title comes from another age, as well as sentiments such as “”Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape.” Not a mention of woman.
There are also some details where the science has changed. The suggestion in episode 1 that Homo sapiens evolved in the Middle East would no longer be made. Despite this, Bronowski’s profound humanity shines through in his recognition that earlier species of Homo were tool users, not so different from us.
All these connections and disjunctures from today’s thought, I had expected. It was in episode 2 that I began to be aware of a gulf I hadn’t anticipated, though I should have. It was, perhaps, no accident that the treatment of rock art in the first episode was located in a European cave. There is no visit to the prehistoric rock art of Africa or of Australia. Art, that defining physical evidence of symbolic appreciation of the world, was reserved a special place in the scholarship of the time. It had emerged, so the account ran, in Europe because it was European humans who took the first leap towards civilisation. There is, of course, a post-imperial project at work here, preserving and transmitting the earlier imperial idea of European exceptionalism and destiny.
I am not arguing that Bronowski was racist: episode 11 was partly filmed in Auschwitz. What I am arguing is that ideas which struck me on the rewatching as part of a racist canon were common scientific currency back then. In episode two, Bakhtiari nomads are described as fixed in an eternal and recurring present, repeating the same patterns and unable to innovate or develop, a life without futures. This dismissal shocked me. Today, our trope about such peoples has changed 180o. If anything, we romanticise them as living lightly on the land, close to nature, and being deeply spiritual. In fact, the Bakhtiari make stone carvings to guard their posterity into the future.
What episode two made me realise was how much, in the last 50 years, we have questioned and rejected the idea of development and progress. A voice from another age of optimism spoke to us in that episode as Bronowski moved on to the invention of agriculture. In the following episode, he tracks the rise of civilisation, literally the move to live in cities. He traces the move from mud houses to stonemasonry as intellectual: “the distinction between the moulding action of the hand and the splitting action of the hand … nothing has been discovered about nature herself when man imposes these warm rounded feminine artistic shapes on her.” He contrasts this with the splitting of wood or stone to reveal the pattern that nature has put there. This, he says, is the origin of science. A laying bare of nature which parallels our own ascent: “We, human beings, are joined in families. The families are joined in kinship groups, the kinship groups in clans, the clans in tribes, the tribes in nations. And that sense of hierarchy, of a pyramid, in which layer is imposed on layer.” All of this is accompanied by the sound track of a periodically tolling bell.
Let’s follow Bronowski and split this open to reveal the pattern within. He wants to argue that every city follows the same recipe: an agricultural hinterland yielding a surplus on which rises a strong central authority. The ascent of man is linear and inevitable. It runs from stone tools through the invention of agriculture, to cities, craftsmen, kings and soldiers, and on to increasingly sophisticated knowledge and art. And I remember now how natural and seductive this evolutionary schema seemed to me half a century ago.
We know now, of course, from archaeological investigation there was agriculture without cities, cities without agriculture, and cities without kings or hierarchy. The ascent of man was not linear and inevitable but rambling loops of creative experimentation with different ways of living together, of making meaning, and of making a living. Though Bronowski celebrates the experimentation and imagination of the inventions of the set-square, the plumbline, the arch and the flying buttress in the fashioning of civic structures like cathedrals, he ignores our equal inventiveness with social structure.
I grew up with this idea of set stages in social evolution and progress that led ever-upward. It was written into the history I learned and the books that I marvelled at. The confident idea of progress had its apogee in the Victorian era and its swan song in the world of the 1950s and 1960s after the Second World War. This idea too was a cultural invention.
He is no apologist for the hierarchies of civilisation. At the end of episode three, he says “The monuments are supposed to commemorate kings and religions, heroes, dogmas, but in the end the man they commemorate is the builder.” Nonetheless, watching The Ascent of Man again is an archaeology of the mind, a picking through and reconstruction of a world that has gone or is vanishing.
Neil MacDonald Author 