Stonehenge, the grand and mysterious ancient ruin of Salisbury Plain, thought by some to be the spherical temple with many offerings located in Hyperborea, as mentioned by Diodorus, has now been reproduced in the medium of compressed Wonder Bread, which, if you are not familiar with it, is bread in the same sense that coconut-scented shampoo is fruit. But there it is: you can see it above. A crumby little Stonehenge. Sigh.
This is not to say that the artist, Milena Korolczuk, has not been very clever in creating her Stonehenge de pain, her megaliths o fara, her ancient stones van brood. Of course very few people would be able, or would want to create a careful little sculptural sketch like this from such an unorthodox substance. It is brilliant in its own way. We applaud her.
Score: 6 druid. Six tiny little crumbly stale druids. We had put them at the back of the shelf the first summer we started Clonehenge and forgot about them all this time, but here is the perfect way to use them. We don’t even have to brush the cobwebs or mouse dropping off of them. There, little fellows, off you go!
What’s interesting about this for our purposes, if you look at the page it came from, is that except for a depiction of the earth, all of the other sculptures are human portraits. Stonehenge is the only monument or icon, or anything. Which brings us, as always to the question that echoes down the centuries of posts amassed on this now millennia-old blog,
WHAT IS IT ABOUT?
No, that’s not it. What is it? Let’s see…
WHAT IS IT ABOUT STONEHENGE????
Yes, thank you. That’s the one precisely. What is Stonehenge doing to us as a species? Why do people stuck in Antarctica build snowhenges? Why do people drinking wine make cheesehenges? Why do people at the beach make little Stonehenges from odd roundish stones? Why do rich people build full-sized Stonehenges, and regular people build those odd one-trilithon henges? Why, when people build odd things from stone that don’t look like Stonehenge AT ALL, do they call them Stonehenges?
People laugh at us when we say that Stonehenge has a secret force that in a sense lays a psychic egg in the minds of those who loom at it, forcing them to reproduce it in some form at a point in the future. But tell us, oh you mockers and laughers, how do YOU explain it? What dark forces are at work that has created Stonehenges on every continent? That has forced scientists and artists and students and real estate agents and all sorts of people with little in common to reproduce it in countless forms? We leave this question here for you to ponder.
As for what we want, we ask for two things, two forms of Stonehenge now that we have our inflatable bouncy Stonehenge that once was only a dream. We would like to see: 1. A Stonehenge replica, no matter how small, on the International Space Station, and 2. We would like to see an inflatable FLOATING Stonehenge, preferably of a good size. These are our dream henges. See what you can do. You aren’t busy with anything important. You don’t fool us.
The world shambles on in strange lurches, its rhythms forced by powers we cannot imagine, and when we try to site ahead, we see only dim inexplicable shapes in patterns of motion that defy understanding. Someday we will actually write a humourous blog, but until then, dear readers, happy henging!
CLONEHENGE 