The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt

parts of Africa, frequently in the North.” The bushmen also gave detailed descriptions of a kind of cockatrice—a climbing tree-snake with the comb of a guinea fowl and a cry like the clucking of a hen, but without the legendary wings. FG observed the bushmen’s drawings with interest. “One of their habits is to draw pictures on the walls of caves of men and animals and to colour them with ochre. These drawings were once numerous, but they have been sadly destroyed by advancing colonisation and fewof them, and indeed, few wild Bushmen, now exist … I was particularly struck with a portrait of an eland as giving a just idea of the precision and purity of their best work.” In later life, he collected a description of a wild Bushman, from a tribe living in caves in the Drakenberg, and his method of drawing.
    â€œHe invariably began by jotting down upon paper or on a slate a number of isolated dots wch presented no connection or trace of outline of any kind to the uninitiated eye, but looked like the stars scattered promiscuously in the sky. Having with much deliberation satisfied himself of the sufficiency of these dots, he forthwith began to run a free bold line from one to the other, and as he did so the form of an animal—horse, buffalo, elephant or some kind of antelope—gradually developed itself. This was invariably done with a free hand, and with such unerring accuracy of touch, that no correction of a line was at any time attempted. I understood from the lad that this was the plan which was invariably pursued by his kindred in making their clever pictures.”
    FG offers this, in his discussion of Mental Imagery, as an example of the projection of a complete mental image on to the paper. He follows it immediately with a description of the map-making abilities of the Eskimo, who could draw from memory accurate charts of the icy bays and inlets explored in their canoes. (Explored, it is also claimed, in spirit journeys undertaken by shamans who have never set flesh-foot in the accurately depicted estuaries, peninsulas, pools and promontories.) Karl Pearson, FG’s biographer, commenting on his description of the Bushmen’s prowess,and his extrapolation of it into the evidences of the mental imagery of our ancestors of the Ice Ages, remarks that FG’s artistic interest would have been aroused by the discovery of the cave paintings in Lascaux and other sites, made after his lifetime. These too, it is now generally thought, had shamanistic powers, could evoke presences or lead out souls into the fluid eternal pursuit of hunter and hunted, eater and eaten. Maybe it is not even fanciful to connect FG’s observed reference points, “stars scattered promiscuously,” with some astrological divination. “Below, the boarhound and the boar / Pursue their pattern as before / But reconciled among the stars.”
    [Quaere. Delete this?? S D-S]
    I T WAS A DREADFUL and dangerous journey from Tounoubis to Lake Ngami. It was unbearably hot, and unbearably dry; there was no water to be had for 3½ days out of Tounoubis, and several of his oxen perished, not being fresh, in the remorseless heat. When he came there, he recorded a “waking vision” which came to him as he lay sleepless by the camp-fire at night.
    â€œBut in the dark, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!” So
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, which contains a lucid dissertation on the mental constructions of the lunatic, the lover and the poet. Shakespeare must have had a lively interest in mental imagery. Both Hamlet and Antony discourse upon shapes, whales or dragons, discerned in the random configurations of cloud formations. I have made some study of the mental activities which go on whenwe observe a stump, or something glistening in the dark holes between leaves, and take them for living creatures, a small dog, a raven, or a pair of bright eyes belonging to a