SISYPHUS AND I

As Sisyphus would tell you, if he weren’t busy at the moment, wrestling with a rock is unlike any other activity. First of all, right up front, rocks are the most conservative entities in existence. Resistant to change of any kind, they hate to move, they are monumentally stubborn (granite, adamant etc.) and they are way more familiar with forever than we are.

As I live on a mountainside, ever since I got it into an opaque part of my mind to straighten a protrusion in the stone wall out front (thereby widening our driveway by a meter or so and easing the qualms of Echo whenever she has to back the car in), I have acquired a new sympathy for and kinship with the guy who metaphorizes the hopeless task, having now myself sought to move a giant rock on a mountainside without the aid of any power other than my own muscle, simple leverage of all kinds and my expanding array of international imprecations. But no TNT or power shovels, so the Big Sis and I are still in the same ballpark.

We mythoguys have this funny characteristic: we tackle life's series of rock-moving type jobs all powered up with internal bluster, confident in our ability to get a simple brute-force, all-muscle task done before lunch, the same characteristic that got the Big Sis to where he is today, somewhere on that slope up there. It's a powerful quality, until it leaves the rails. Thus it was that from the toolshed I selected the little handpick and the big prybar, that should do it, and went off to address the pushover.

I’ve never seen a handpick look so toylike so fast, or a heavy duty prybar bend that much. Turned out that the rock, which I've discovered is a member of the Stonehenge family, was no mere surface presence. Apart from its granitic heft, it had an iceberg quality in that so much more of it was underground than above. I had to dig to find out just how far toward New York it went.

Three noons later I'm Sisyphizing out here atop Gibraltar, surrounded by prybar, wooden timbers, a steel beam, two saws, rope, chain, the car jack, a shovel, a full-sized pick, a scythe, another empty water bottle, piles of dirt and rocks and even the comically tiny handpick way over there where I threw it, wiping away sweat, wringing out the towel and admiring the hole I’ve dug beside this distant cousin of the Washington Monument. Before too long after my nap, I’ll be able to topple this baby, maybe as much as a centimeter.

I'll get the pyramids done tomorrow, before lunch.

STONEHENGE RAMBLE

Reading the recent news coverage about the great uncoverage at Stonehenge, how the archaeologists have discovered where the folks lived (or at least hung out) who partied among the stones in the old days, I noted that various articles here and there mentioned that the Stonehenge we now know was begun at around the same time as the pyramids, that Stonehenge was a cemetery monument and that they partied bigtime there, at least during the winter; but the articles never addressed what really got me thinking in regard to all this, a question I have never seen properly addressed, to wit: what happened in the world that suddenly caused completely different groups of people on several distant sides of the globe to go gaga for vast stone monuments of uncertain function?

In Egypt they had a pharaoh and slaves, so a series of wiggy pharaohs with many thousands of free laborers goes a long way toward explaining the pyramids and other mega-items (though it doesn't answer the question that kick-started this ramble). But in the case of Stonehenge, all you've got is a bunch of farmers, herders and warriors - there weren't many career alternatives available in those days - doing their farming, herding and warring, when suddenly one of their number jumps up and says: I've got a fantastic idea, let's do more than just dig a huge circular ditch for a thousand years—why don't a bunch of us just drop whatever it is we're doing and trek as far as 240 miles, to what will one day be called Wales, chip out a four-ton slab of rock over X number of years, using our stone tools - or your bronze tools, if you want to ruin them - then for a few more years roll the big rock slab back here, all at no salary. Waddaya think: sound like fun, or what?

And not only is he not killed on the spot, or run out of the community on a rail, or at least marked forever as a wastrel of everybody's time-- a large number of locals (and their descendants) actually take him (and his descendants) up on it, for 500 years or more! Nobody says 'Sorry Beowulf, I’ve got a wife and kids to support,' or 'My back just went out,' or 'I’m getting married next week,' or 'spring break will be over soon,' or just 'Sorry, Beo baby, but I'm completely sane.'

Instead, several hundred or thousand of them say OK, Big B, I'm in. Let's do it. See you some decades hence, wife and kids, mom and dad. And off they go and do it, chip out the slab for a big chunk of their productive lives, roll and float and roll the monster 240 miles back home on a fleet of logs, precisely dig a big hole, finally drop the stone in so it stands upright, then all fall flat on the ground gasping from exhaustion, when Beowulf jumps up and says: Let's go get another one! And they DO it!! 80 times, give or take, 43 times to Wales, till the whole Stonething was completed or a majority ran out of overtime, whichever came first.

One has the feeling that people were different then. Incomprehensibly different. Imagine trying such a thing now, when you can't even get a plumber. If you tried to talk a bunch of your neighbors into doing such a thing nowadays, What the hell for, would be the first response-- if they ever tried to speak to you rationally again, once they realized you were insane. What did those ancestors have that we don't have, apart from short longevities of free time? Whatever it was, I say we don't look for it. I ran out of overtime years ago; anyway I've got firewood to split and weeds to pull. Plus, I'm completely sane.