l’année sociologique
By the time the Germans were divvying up Europe for a second time, I was what my colleagues called an armchair anthropologist, choosing to ply my trade from the comfort of my study, writing stuffy articles and theoretical travelogues that borrowed liberally from my old journals. It hadn’t always been that way, though. Not but two decades earlier, fresh out of Durham University, I took to the field, eager to apply the new school of thought: that to truly understand one’s subject, one must live amongst them. Eat what his subject eats, bathe in his subject’s river, partake in his subject’s narrative history and cultural ephemera. But for my collapsible Kodak Retina, I traveled lightly.
Of the various peoples I met in the Caribbean and Indies, none fascinated me as much as those closest to home, the last tribe of Celtic angels isolated in northern Wales. I trekked by foot into the mountains of Gwynedd, where the rolling green turned into crag. I was only modestly lost by the time I stumbled into the hollows of the angels, their nests running deep into the living rock where little light chanced to filter. I spent the winter living in an adjacent fen, surviving on whatever fauna I could trap and skin.
Many of the younger angels were showing the effects of industrialization and modernization: well-fed, dressed in odd assemblages of manufactured textiles, and speaking English as much as their sparrowtongue. In fact, rarely did I fail to understand these forgotten off-shoots of the original Briton angels. While some of their idioms and allegories sailed past me, I caught enough in the tone of their voice and the posture of their wings to reckon the gist of their phrasing.
But buried in the lowest hollow of those hills was the tribes grandfather, a skeletal thing who surely hadn’t flown in decades. He moved naked across the damp rocks, his eyes chalky with cataracts. He mumbled mostly to himself in that sparrowspeak, and the younger angels had to translate for me. ‘Grandfather says, The old ways will never return. Grandfather says, Once I marched with the angels against the Romans, before we started to fade. Grandfather says, Now I am blind and there is shit drying in my feathers.’
In time, I spent my winter weeks trying to scribble a phonetic equivalent of his sparrowspeak. Sometimes his words confused even the youngings, who could afford me no translation. Sometimes this grandfather angel slipped from sparrowspeak to a bastardization of Latin and Welsh. He was nigh indecipherable. But, I reminded myself, if I returned in five years, he would surely be dead and immortalized in the cairn of bones that European angels tend to favor in their funerary arrangements.
My last night in the hollows, I asked the grandfather angel if I might take his picture for my studies. The younger angels, they hemmed and hawed, their wings pinwheeling as much as their hands gesticulated. They spat at me, telling me to crawl back through the snow to the lands of man. But the grandfather angel, he put a bony hand up to silence them and chittered something under his breath. His translator bent to listen, then turned to me and nodded. ‘Grandfather says, You may have my soul, it’s thrice-damned as it is.‘
I took an entire reel of film, with the grandfather angel’s blessing, and developed them after I’d returned to my flat in Leeds. While the film cured in my dark room, I observed myself in the mirror. Frighteningly thin, my skin blotchy and blackened. Not with filth, but something else. Something beneath the flesh. Something acquired from my stay with the angels. I could feel a stirring, like snakes roiling, just beneath my stomach.
I checked every photo. The grandfather angel’s face was smeared and distended, as if he’d shaken vigorously at the shutterclick. As if the film had processed a whole range of movement. But that poor old thing, it had sat stock still for me. A statue could scarcely have been stiller. Every photo, the mad distending of something trying to break free.
(Photo: Source)
