30 August 2004
Dreamtime
My name is Kate Mosse. My novel Labyrinthis a work of fiction. This website is made up by a community of story-tellers. None of it is true.
Except some visitors to www.mosselabyrinth.co.uk - some assiduous, some occasional - have used this space to write about themselves. The structures of the site - the Tarot chamber, the Stained-glass workshop, the competitions - provide anonymous frameworks onto which the clay of experience and imagination can be fashioned into stories.
So stare at stained-glass and you will get ideas – stare at tarot cards - if you spend enough time gazing up at the stars, they will tell you stories.
We have a widespread ritual of story-telling based on the stars called astrology. In my last home page diary, I told you some stories 'made up about plants'. If you look at the research Greg and I have done into the turn of the millennium, you'll find predictions of chaos and despair from the end of the first Christian millennium, stories made up about thunder and the wind, about red skies and blue, about date marks arbitrarily carved on a wall or on rock that had already outlasted the dinosaurs.
Visiting Australia I was shown a flat-topped mountain, like a table.
Perhaps, in truth, it was a table to begin with. Yes, a table fashioned by giants from the dusty red land and beaten hard on the top by their mighty fists. Or perhaps an ancient hero once stood on that land and, to protect themselves from attack, they whirled their spear around them in the dust and caused a mighty wind to blow the red sand away, leaving them alone on the high ground. Or perhaps it is a magic place with a charm upon it that prevents insects and snakes and other vermin from crawling through and across it, digging their tunnels and undermining the land.
I was told it was the ancient floor of a lake. The top of the mountain was comprised of the hard sedimentary rock created over millennia at the bottom of the long-disappeared water. Now that layer of sedimentary rock was a couple of hundred feet above the plains around it, proud of the erosion of the land all around. As far as the eye could see, metres and metres of soil around the ancient lake scoured down by rain and wind ...
The story I was told - the story of rock, soil, sand, dust, lake water, rain, wind and erosion comes from a very special sort of dreamtime. The dreamtime of geology. But it could have been any science.
Scientists' stories differ from my stories of giants and charms in that they are printed in textbooks, not carved in abstract or symbolic shapes on pieces of bone or consigned to the pages of a note book or a website.
My stories are mine and they can be yours, if you read and enjoy them. And your stories are yours, until you share them and they become ours.
We own the Labyrinth.
