Signs on Stones

Lunaticus’s account is also a summary history both of communication technology and civilisation. The National Museum of Scotland contains its own representative account of this history, in its rich collections of carved stones recording the cultures of Scotland, and the early writing systems – ogham, runic, Roman – which communicate the meaning and purpose of the monuments to those who can read the stone writing. Culturally and historically, it provided a resonant setting in which to view and read ballast. Of all these records of past life, the Pictish monuments were most exciting to me because, as the bearer of a literate culture established in New Zealand by settlers like Golder, but brought up in ignorance of Maori culture and its traditions of non-alphabetic representation (especially in weaving and carving, but also in rock drawing), I had not previously encountered a culture which had left proud traces of its existence and mode of life in artefacts (in this instance, collections of stones inscribed with iconic and symbolic images), but for whom literacy did not seem to be important and whose graphic inscriptions lacked an interpretive key in a verbal commentary.⁹ The stones perpetuated and memorialised the existence of a people no longer accessible either through descendants or through their own language, a people assimilated into the nation of the Scots and into the historical record as having secured for a time their territorial integrity against the English. Their written stones achieved what contemporary televisual or digital imagery often seeks to achieve, the sense of communication across time and space uninflected by cultural and linguistic difference; but to encounter them is to raise immediately the problem of translation. ¹ As soon as (English) words are put to the images – ‘that’s a mirror, isn’t it?’; or, ‘that’s a nobleman’ – the process is initiated of normalising the cultural other by drawing their signs into a familiar interpretive and linguistic frame. By not including a written language, on the one hand the Pictish monuments encourage an engagement on the assumption of a shared or sharable body of knowledge (just as Edgar’s stone signs do); on the other, in the silence of their non-speaking, they can signify fully only to those who are already possessors of their significance. In this respect, Edgar’s stones are given voices in the exhibition catalogue (most notably in the poems by Dinah Hawken) but also, like Keats’s Grecian urn, preserve their difference in the silent integrity of their being.