Magnolia petals

Thiyel stirs at the back of the cave, where he is sleeping off a meal of doe deer that he ate earlier in the afternoon. Maxtla rises and moves towards Thiyel, pulling the fur blanket back to reveal his small barrel-like body with its dense covering of reddish hair. He is bruised and has hips gnarled by arthritis, but he is still gaunt, strong and fit. He stands up.

Maxtla turns to Thiyel and shows him a withered magnolia petal. Maxtla holds Thiyel’s arm and he falls silent, taking his hands off his genitals. She points with her other hand in the direction of the stream. Thieyel looks in that direction and a picture of a flowering tree on the streamside comes into his mind. Maxtla taps six times on Thiyel’s wrist. “Go”, she says. Thiyel grunts, rearranges his furs and steps out into the moonlight, touching Maxtla's breasts as he leaves. Will he remember what he has gone for?

Later, Thiyel returns with ten magnolia petals and the body of a small rodent that he found decaying by the stream.

'The Inheritors' by William Golding

Another way of exploring the problems of Neanderthal psychology is to look at the work of other authors that have ploughed this particular furrow before. Joseph Carroll, a University teacher from Missouri, provides a powerful set of tools for evaluating these kinds of novels. My own, less sophisticated, attempts are below:


William Golding wrote 'the Inheritors' in 1955 and I think it is a brilliant piece of writing. His premise was that the Neanderthals were gentle hunter-gatherers, an idea in marked contrast to the zeitgeist at the time.

He writes almost the whole book from the point of view of the Neanderthals, who do not understand the dramtic changes that are happening to them. For this reason, the plot is quite hard to follow on the first reading. A good synopsis appears here.

Golding establishes his world view from the opening lines and we can use chapter one to look at how he does his. The main protagonist is called Lok.

"Lok was running as fast as he could...Lok's feet were clever. They saw. They threw him round the displayed roots of the beeches, leapt when a puddle of water lay across the trail...Now they could hear the river that lay parallel but hidden to their left."

Golding gives Lok's feet human-like powers: they see, they hear, they guide. Further, Lok is dependent and trusts his feet to guide him. This hints at a lack of integration that I discussed previously. Instead of Lok being lord and master of his feet, Lok is subservient.

The language is enriched by close attention to the world around him (the trees were beeches, the roots were displayed, the river lay parallel), which gives a real sense that Lok is at one with his world.

Golding has his characters speak to each other in short sentences:

"Faster! Faster!"
"There, Liku."
"The log has gone away."
"One day. Perhaps two days. Not three."
"I have a picture."

There is no use of past or future or tenses or the subjunctive mood. This is consistent with the idea that Neanderthal language was less sophisticated than our own.

This causes novelists great problems, partly because dialogue is an essential way of developing the plot. It can be a succinct alternative to pages of description.

Golding overcomes this by the use of 'pictures' which can be shared between the Neanderthal family. The pictures are visually rich and seem to convey a sense of urgency and emotional mood.

In the novel, the character Ha is praised as having 'many pictures' and Lok's leadership qualities are questioned because he does not have reliable pictures.

This is a powerful plot device, which is almost irresistable. Jean Auel seems to use it extensively in the Clan of the Cave Bear. However, is there any evidence that such an ability ever existed?

I think it unlikely. Chimpanzees seem to rely on vocalisation and imitation to convey complex information. Their hunting stategies rely on vocalisations and young animals learn from the older ones. If Neanderthal genes mixed with Cro-Magnons (and that is a big if) then we might expect to see evidence of this kind of telepathy between modern humans and within ancient tribes. I think that the evidence for this is weak. Susan Blackmore's acknowledged failed search for evidence of psi should make us nervous of accepting telepathy.

[This is not the same as saying that primitives (such as Aboriginals) do not visualise and remember their landscapes as images.]

Yet, novelists need to find a way of getting their Neanderthal characters to talk with other and convey information without boring the pants off their readers.

Back to the writing page...

Tronkyin

Maxtla stares into the cold heart of the fire and tastes her racing heartbeats. A dark shadow, the aura of a raven’s wing, drifts across her eyes, blocking her view of the flames. Her heartbeats taste as wet earth on tired bones. Her breathing deepens and her heartbeats slow: the shadow lifts and takes the taste away. She knows that something is about to happen. A headache forms deep in the nape of her neck as the muscles tighten.

The scent of burning fat rises from the fire. Maxtla stirs as a memory of a warmer day floats into the air. She looks into the flames and sees an older woman holding a leg bone that was once her father. ‘Moon’, a voice screeches in the back of her head. ‘Watch for the moon’, says the wise woman who listens to the screeching crone. Her mother raises the leg bone higher and passes through the flames. She starts to chant phrases from her past.

‘Tonight, Maxtla,’ mother commands. ‘It must be tonight. Look at the moon.’ Maxtla looks up and the clouds clear to show the face of the full Sap moon. A shaft of white light illuminates the darkness as her mother fades into shadow. The old crone jabbers ‘Now’, and the wise woman advises, ‘be ready’. Images from her girlhood drift across the fire, she tastes red droplets on her lips and hears a scream of separation; she now knows that the evening will grow much darker. Her legs shoot pain upwards and tell her to move. She rises and bows her head to the spirit of flames.

Beside Maxtla sleeps Tronkyin, an ailing child, one whom the gods seek. Breathing fitfully, with short wheezing breaths, the baby’s grip on the present is weakening. Maxtla strips bark from a young willow branch and rubs the juice on the child’s lips. Tronkyin licks the juice, winces at the bitter sweetness and falls into a deeper slumber.

Inner eye

Well, how was it for you? Did yesterday's writing get you closer to thinking like a Neanderthal? For me, it was ok. Just about ok. It was interesting how the vocal contributions of the left and right hemispheres became 'personified' as the wise woman and the crone. I was not expecting that and this sails us straight into Jungian archetype territory, which could be quite significant.

I think that clues to Neanderthal thinking must be found in contemporary people whose brains are 'less integrated' than usual. For example, synesthetes, whose sensory experiences of taste, sound and colour get blurred.

'Maxtla stares into the cold flames of the fire and tastes her heartbeats...Her heartbeats taste as wet earth on tired bones.'


Well, its a start, but I think the blending could and should go further.

One symptom of schizophrenia is visual, auditory or olfactory (smell) hallucinations, thought to be caused by reduced activity of the pre-frontal cortex.

This moves the experience on one stop further down the tube line to the primitive. The voices - become personified - and are experienced 'out there' (in the 'real world') rather than 'in here' (in the unreal world of my head).

I remember reading Jung saying that the hallucinations of schizophrenics were not random rubbish, but revealed 'truths' that the schizophrenics could never have learned. This was evidence of the collective unconscious. In his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung describes encounters with unconscious objects in his mind, that read like ghostly projections.

A dark shadow, the aura of a raven’s wing, drifts across her eyes, blocking her view of the flames.

This is the most difficult passage in the writing, yet the most compelling. Where was the shadow? Was it on the outside of her eye (between the flames and the eye), within the eye (like a detached retina) or within the brain - in which case how could it 'block the view of the flames'?

There was a woman called 'Ruth' in the 1980's who was reputed to hallucinate solid objects. She was studied by Richard Gregory. She was apparently able to hallucinate the image of her daughter on her lap, and the amount of light entering her eyes was allegedly reduced in proportion. Gregory concluded that there was some evidence of this:

'the supposed hallucinations acted like coloured filters held over the eye.'

So, perhaps there is a continuum between 'in here' and 'out there', which the novelist could explore.

I was desperate to use the ideas of an inner (or third) eye, or chakra, but these are metaphysical or religious concepts, not physiological ones. Is the pineal gland the inner eye? I do not know. Aura has two meanings: the spiritualist one of a force field of psychic energy and also a medical one, the disturbance of vision (often a shadow) before an epileptic fit. I quite like the ambiguity of both meanings here.

Jung was very wary of the dissociation of the soul, which was greatly feared by primitive tribes.

We . . . can become dissociated and lose our identity. We can be possessed . . . by moods, or become unreasonable, so that people ask: "What the devil has got into you?" We talk about . . . "control", but self-control is a rare and remarkable virtue. (Jung, Man and his symbols).

Perhaps this lack of integration is the same as 'losing self-control', and was common in Neanderthal people.

Exploring Neanderthal minds

Can we think without language? My thoughts are an internal dialogue using words. The more words I know, the more precise my thinking. Do young children, with their limited language, think the same thoughts as older children? Perhaps not, but surely they can think, even if they can only express their thoughts in terms of their body. They are good at making their intentions felt, partly because the older people around them are sensitive to their communication. Parents 'know' what their babies need, even though the babies do not use words.

So, what kind of mind would we have without the single dominating internal dialogue? Who is speaking in my thoughts and who is the audience? Experiments with split-brains show that the right side of the brain has a limited language function, but it gets 'shouted' down by the dominant left hemisphere language centre. The right hemisphere has awareness of nouns, but limited ability at using grammar. What would our thinking be like if each centre competed with each other for our attention. Could we develop independent personalities?

Neanderthal humans became extinct in Europe about 30 000 years ago. Modern humans are not now thought to be related to the Neanderthals.

Who knows how Neanderthal humans thought or how they communicated with each other? Modern thinking suggests that that their brains were as developed as ours, but were not as well integrated.

But perhaps we can use this to find some clues to Neanderthal thinking:

Maxtla stares into the cold flames of the fire and tastes her heartbeats. A dark shadow, the aura of a raven’s wing, drifts across her eyes, blocking her view of the flames. Her heartbeats taste as wet earth on tired bones. Her breathing deepens and her heartbeats slow: the shadow lifts and takes the taste away. She knows that something is about to happen. A headache forms deep in the nape of her neck as the muscles tighten.

The scent of burning fat rises from the fire. Maxtla stirs as a memory of a warmer day floats into the air. She looks into the flames and sees an older woman holding a leg bone that was once her father. ‘Moon’, a voice screeches in the back of her head. ‘Watch for the moon’, says the wise woman who listens to the screeching crone. Her mother moves the leg bone higher and passes through the flames. She starts to chant phrases from her past.

‘Tonight, Maxtla,’ she commands. ‘It must be tonight. Look at the moon.’ Maxtla looks up and the clouds clear to show the face of the full moon. A shaft of white light illuminates the flame as the mother illusion fades. The old crone jabbers ‘Now’, and the wise woman advises, ‘be ready’. Images from her girlhood drift across the fire, she now knows how the work will grow tonight. Her legs shoot pain upwards and tell her to move. She rises and bows her head to the spirit of flames.

Hush! Caution! Echoland!

The opening words of Finnegans Wake are etched in a glass window in the tourist bar of the Guinness factory in Dublin. Looking through the words you can see the beautiful city beyond.

What a jolt: reading the book in Bristol, it seems a tricksy intense jungly kind of a book. A dense tangle of allusions and illusions. A cocktail of cleverness shot with cheeky humour. But look-see, I am wrong again, this book is as rooted in Dublin-town as Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist.

I love the way that his new words send me off travelling to new places. 'Here is the way to the musyroom!'

Echoland. All lands echo as the past impinges on the present. Thank you, James Joyce, for waking me up. I could write a whole novel around that idea.

"Waves of time break on the foreshore of this echoland. The salt-driven winds, funnelling through the estuary, touch our lives until they are swallowed by the hills and ridges that protect us from our enemies. "