You need to breathe in to breathe out…
We drew a long, collective breath
That took in faunal remains,
40,000 years of sediment,
Layered timescales,
Rapidly shifting climates
Levelling out
To a fossilised archive of lifeworlds.
Material encounters:
Passing round a segment of hyena jaw –
Several teeth still in place –
Weighed in hand
(A momentary connection to
A distant, deeper, aspect of this world);
Standing in the rain in a car park in Somerset,
A car boot cave.
But we went on a long journey to get here.
Walk underground,
train connecting to train connecting to train,
A hire car to drive through the dark
And a final 45 minutes on foot
To join the others for dinner.
Travelling through time.
And one time scale closes in
While another opens up.
And then our group sets off,
A waterproof parade
Across the valley and up muddy steps;
Cutting off through the trees
Along a well-worn path.
A road taken before
By hyena, auroch, arctic fox,
Lemming, vole and mouse;
Reindeer, wolf and wild cat,
Mammoth, perhaps,
And a Quaternary scientist.
All drawn into the cave –
Dragged, seeking shelter, returning home,
Multiple routes converging.
And all these journeys come to an end here.
Or rather, a temporary pause
Tens of thousands of years
Locked in layers of limestone.
Dug up, sifted, boxed and bagged,
And carried away to be cleared up, identified, dated, displayed.
This unassuming
Out-of-the-way opening
In the rockface.
Gully cave.
Tarpaulin covering the floor
And scaffolding lent against the wall –
A work site between its summer liveliness
Are we to imagine how much it holds?
You need to breathe in.
Future fossils.
The tarpaulin will outlast us:
Polymers with ponies; canvas with corvus.
The excavation will continue
And we will be folded into it.
Who knows for how long – a year?
Til they hit the cave floor.
Or more, if time continues to deepen.
And it does.
For this work will leave its own traces:
Artworks, film, articles,
Stories, memories, more.
Adding to the layers
Exhaled into the indifferent passing of time.
Lives, layers, landscape.
As we travel on
Deeper and deeper
Into Gully Cave.
