Andrew's Stone... Andrew's Story...

To really see something you need perspective. The best Interpreter's walk around their subject, thinking about angles and possibilities - not just facts. We are, after all, in the business of stretching minds, and encouraging and activating a sense of wonder from our interactions with others.

At the end of one of my previous entries on this blog (see HERE for original), I begin to explore the wonder-ful - and I use these words in hyphenated form, advisedly - possibilities inherent in the simple idea that objects and things in the real world of human cultural heritage are in some way shaped from within people's heads - their imaginations (or sometimes, in moments of epiphany, their dreams!). In the conception, they might not fully realise that interior 'vision', but, as we look around us we are, in a sense, looking and passing through mind-scapes of dead generations. We cannot know the mind of our contemporaries, or even our own minds fully - let alone those of long deceased folk; but we can, nevertheless, reach out and begin to feel for their presence. That is why, when I see the mason's mark in the form of the saltire cross, present at both Norwich castle and cathedral, my thought is, 'that's Andrew's work... it's in the shape he intended' - and I touch it.

I remember an English teacher of mine once explaining that, for her, literature was a form of time-travel; a kind of time-capsule transmitted - and in the reading, interpreted - in an exchange of minds between people who can never literally meet, but who are able to meet, virtually, through literature. Is that possibility true, also, of a carved stone? It's amazing enough to think that Andrew stood in the yard next to the Lodge and carved this stone; amazing that he was actually there and real... that he was the last person to place it here, perhaps - that it is still here 900 years on. At the same time, I can definitively state that, for Andrew, it was workaday activity. He probably took pride in what he did; especially being part of ventures which saw new kinds of buildings - power-projecting Empire Buildings - rising up above, presumably, awe-struck local inhabitants. Although he did as he was told by the Master Mason; although he was, a cog in the wheel, his stone was, and is, an expression of him - shaped as he saw it. And he, in turn, was an expression of what we now know as Norman culture and architecture. It's a peopled story...

In so many ways the chasm between the cultures of Norman and contemporary England is vast. I assume that much is lost in translation. But an absence of evidence should not render us mute as we seek to understand and interpret the past, for, as the maxim goes, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Although in our research we need to sort, sift and be critical and challenging, this should not lead us to disengage. We need to imagine, and be imaginative in our approaches. Like Cosmologist's in their field, we need to be artist and scientist, simultaneously.