To you, in 11 million nights
A woman scrapes away at the darkness with fire, and when she is done, she scrapes away at blindness with art.
Why does she do this when the world burns around her?
“Baragoulner!” exclaims the Frenchman, knowing that this word means nonsense and nothing more. His Breton friend laughs, as it sounds exactly like “bara gwin,” he laughs, which means bread and wine. They are both suddenly very hungry.
Later that evening, when the sun is down and the bones are clean of chicken, the Frenchman sees it and says “Que Dalle!” He believes it means, quite literally, nothing. But even as he throws away his bones, his Occitanian wife laughs at the exclamation. It is very simply just “que d’alia,” she smiles, kissing his head. It is the wing of a chicken indeed.
Embarrassed, the Frenchman has no confidence that he says what he means or even means what he says: at night, when he kisses his '“gosse” goodnight. He’s glad to have his children safe and happy. As he shops online for picture frames for his “gosse,” and speaks to a Quebecois merchant online, he is in for one last terrible surprise.
***
Many nights ago, it was probably raining – as it always seemed to -- and the archway beside the Ardeché was slick with water. For the travellers amongst the chalked steps of the Ardeche, where the winding river Rhóne cuts through valley and orchard alike, they hastened to their carvings, bone-strings, seeds and petty leaves; their powdered tools. They had to remain dry in the coming rainfall. They were left to dry as the senior residences downriver were fostered by a rival tribe - a rival tribe of mothers, fathers, cousins, once-lovers.
They had exacted a tribute on them for their folly of abandoning them; these travellers gave their sons over to them, their faces powdered with ochre, and in the middle of those despondent nights, if they listened close enough, they could hear their howling screams.
The one son they didn’t want – the bovine, egg-shaped man with a heavy brow, the one whose voice squeaked with fear of the dark – still stayed with them. He was the last of an old clan of warriors and rulers, unaware that he was the last of a family of despots and lovers. He had little idea what that meant – only that he had discovered the cave, at first. Maybe the land itself had taken pity on his plight, but his adoptive family rarely talked about it. They had chosen their path long ago.
“A work of art is a confession.” - Albert Camus
Whispers in the dark of the Chauvet cave; a quick, come here, from the mother, and the shuffling of feet of the eldest man amongst them, the one who still had the bite of a mountain lion on his collar. One by one; first with the matron, whose daughters she had lost, and then with the erstwhile sons, their brothers abandoned, and all the hands on the wall. Hold, hold, the cave walls seemed to say. Hold, hold this, as I blow here, came a reply.
When he left to return to the sun the eldest man, cousins of his brothers’ killers, kept his spear close. His furskin boots and blood-red deer-ear lapel were still wet. The next day had come. Hunger had returned. He looked over his shoulder at the cave, the little marks made, and hoped that when he returned, he did not find them all lost to the darkness of their nameless gods.
But a little part of him knew he could not return now – as he approached further down his river, he spotted himself as a child playing by the stream. He spotted it, as large as a mountain, that horned rhino. Yes, they were the type his sister loved so much. She had refused to thank their grandmother until, eyes full of fury and wonder, she had taken to the walls with coal. They laughed at her at first, but before long, they had all joined in. She was small then - he held her on his shoulders to reach the very top of the painted rhino’s horn - and now she was still small. But she was so, so much larger.
The eldest man was about as old as it takes to enter a New York bar without alarm.
His may have succeeded or he may have slipped on riverstones on his way to avenge his kin. It’s hard to say. No matter what happened next, what remains is the fact the rain was heavy and the rocks were not stable. The opening of the Chauvet cave finally closed in a collapse heard for two miles around. Even this calamity was outmatched – there were volcanoes in those days in southern France.
Perhaps the eldest man had already fallen to his knees and witnessed his family trapped, or perhaps he was destroyed in a magma surge. If there were skeletons in that cave, a family huddled for warmth, then they would not remain forever. It would be another million nights before the cave cracked open once more. Another family, one perhaps descended from that eldest man who left that day, or the strangers who buried him, or some foreigners who would never have even understood the language they spoke – people found the cave. They were so awestruck by what they found inside that they even added to the wall’s patterns.
The Rhône valley was at peace then, perhaps, and the new family huddled for warmth inside of it, telling stories of the gods and goddesses who touched the walls around them with blessed red magic. After all, there were no people in the Chauvet cave - only animals, the natural world, and they surmised that, of course, it was the animal gods that watched over them that had given them safe refuge.
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
And every night passed as every night does. The days were longer then – our ancestors might have spent the extra few minutes dreaming of a world where they could paint cave walls forever. Day by day, the earth slowed its roll, and the family that discovered the cave added their own mimicry to its walls, paying heed to the past in their own way. As soon as they arrived they were gone, dead, and bones.
As the first family cried itself to its final sleep, they must have wondered how they were going to be saved. When the cave collapsed, they must have felt cursed. Perhaps they were punished for sending their sons away, or perhaps their art offended the wild gods of this land – curses are the deepest and most magic of plants. They bear fruit in the driest heat.
In the Ardeche, where time swung its cleaver with reckless fury, languages came and went across millions of nights without anyone left to speak them – even this story of the cursed family is almost certainly false. Time made it sure that it would be impossible to tell their story as it was, or even know there was a story to tell. There exists no more everlasting curse.
However, once in a million nights, a curse becomes a miracle.
Pictured, left, the Cro-Magon man. First discovered in the mid-19th century, these findings helped pave the way for a modern understanding of human genealogy and a consistent anthropology - that both the Neanderthal and Sapiens lived alongside one another, and had lived in Europe for thousands of years. This 26,000 year old fragment is positively modern compared to the Chauvet cave painters, and yet it seems like it comes from another world. It has not — these fragments are from south-west France, only two-hundred-and-eighty miles from the Chauvet cave. The well-preserved nature of these remains have allowed a glorious insight into the lives of the Aurignacian, or prehistoric, human.
The first skull found belonged to a man around the age of forty and is the most intact. The second and third skulls belonged to women, one of which had survived for some time with a skull fracture. The man had type one of neurofibromatosis, which means he had an uncouth person covered with tumours. Nonetheless, he survived into mid-life. They were buried with an infant.
The studies of these fully modern humans (their skull-shape points to them being identical to our current people) were some of the first pieces of evidence to a fact that may seem obvious: prehistoric life was unconscionably and irrevocably harsh. These peoples’ spines were fused from traumatic injury.
They survived only due to communal support. It is unknown whether these injuries were inflicted by traversal through the Dordogne’s harsh landscape, combat with prey or predator, or even with fellow humans. When they died they were not forgotten or discarded; they were buried with tools and bones, perhaps to prepare them for a life beyond their harsh and unforgiving first.
For Michel Rosa, known by the diminutive epithet ‘Baba’ by their colleagues and friends, exploring the Ardeche and tucked-away corners of the metropolé must have been a job of dreams. Even if Baba found nothing, there are a few places as idyllic for a speleologist. He wasn’t alone that day – December had arrived and the Mediterranean climate finally surrendered to winter. They noticed a slight draft behind a clearing, something nobody had noticed in the French countryside for too many nights.
They pulled, prodded, but knew that gentility was key when exploring old caves. The murals of Lascaux, the most famous French cave, were almost lost due to the changes in humidity and dust that well-meaning visitors brought with them. No, they had to be careful, even if it was nothing, as it often was; it was a park ranger who eventually, gently, created a small, wormy way into the passage. They descended twenty-six feetinto the dark, every step atomically precise. The air was different here, as any speleologist would say, “the air smelt like the past.”
Jean-Marie Chauvet, Christian Hilaire, Éliete Deschamps and his daughter, took note of the expansive parade of stalactites before them. For the electric lights in their hands, they knew the people before them had only the dimmest of fire. They didn’t quite knew what they had found, but as they saw the contours give shape to art, how it leapt from the walls, it would not be vanity, or romance, of this writer to say they had been awestruck. This is for what the word was made.
It would be years before carbon-dating, archeologist sampling and analysis, and Parisian supervision ascertained the age of the cave. They had first expected something similar to Lascaux, over 17,000 years ago, but the true number was staggering: the first paintings of the cave were more than double that age. They were advanced beyond their time. Humanity had populated Europe since 56,000 years ago, the speleologists would tell you. They were invaders then – the land had long been the domain of the Neanderthal. Two human peoples entered Europe, but the bovine, egg-shaped man died, and now only one remains.
Dreams in the Dark
It is dangerous to use charcoal torches next to a cave painting, despite that being very similar to how early humanity viewed them. The choice made by modern speleologists and paleo-anthropologists is the use of clever substitutes. Even the small release of smoke and vapor from a fire is enough to, over time, degrade the quality of a painting.
Right, Medina-Alcaide’s team in the Axtarra cave experiment with open-air fire. With its glimmer, and unstable flicker, they witness the incredible: the paintings of the wall seem to come to life. Multiple layers of parietal art are highlighted differently as the fire coughs — these paintings weren’t just stills, they were meant to be seen in the flesh.
The chronology of art was thrown into question; progress is rarely linear, but contemporary understanding of art itself suggested industry, tradition and technique evolved as humanity became more settled in the European archipelago. No, progress is not linear indeed; the artists of the Chauvet cave, if brought alive somehow today, would thrive with brushes and linen-cloth and pastel paints. The techniques shown in their artistry would not be rivaled for another 17,000 years, and then not surpassed, perhaps, until the invention of agriculture itself.
But there is a more tragic possibility: that their art was mimicry, like so much of art is today, and that mimicry was of a cave they had lived in once before.
“Yes, just like that!” the mother said, remembering how her mother taught her, back down the Ardéche years ago. What we display as art may just be learned imitation. Then again, what is the greatest form of flattery?
Spontaneous art, however noble, is rarely possible; if we do not pull from our masters or our academies, we pull from our dreams themselves.
The Chauvet cave artists knew this truth even if we do not know them; the only marks of humanity in a sea of beautifully painted animals are the red-outlined marks of the group’s hands. From it we see a portrait of what they wanted to be remembered as - not as faces, not as materials of their observation. The portrait-obsessed culture that emerged from the 16th century and compounded in the proliferation of the photograph may have made faces as abundant as leaves on a tree, but there is a stunning lack of them in almost any cave painting in the world.
Even the artists of the Chauvet cave, talented as they were, chose their hands to mark their work more than anything else. If the world is made to be seen, why wouldn’t faces be the most important feature? Perhaps the world is not meant to be seen, only to be touched, and felt, and held.
The Arch in Ardéche
Right, the river Ardéche and the chalk archway that must have caused almost as much awe amongst the painters of the Chauvet cave as their work did for us. Perhaps awe kept them running and surviving — perhaps awe is a modern concept (modern meaning post-agricultural) that is forced upon early modern humans as a way to romanticise their living conditions. David Keltner writes about the power of awe to make one become more communal, and is thus an incredibly powerful survival instinct:
Unlike Lascaux, the authorities were wiser here. A one-for-one recreation of Chauvet was opened in 2015, the Caverne du Pont D’arc, and is now available for public viewing only a few miles from the original hole in the ground that was first found by Buba. In it, just as close as one can get, one can see and count the hands on the wall. On it, towards the top, one hand has a crooked ring finger.
While the curse of Chauvet, and all paleolithic art, is the distinct lack of context and knowledge of the lives these remarkable humans led, here, at last, is an insight: a crooked ring finger. The height of the hand almost certainly makes it a male’s hand, as well as the size of its digits, and perhaps his impressive height made him a hunter and leader tasked with defending the cave - or, perhaps, he was a nervous man who delegated that responsibility to his sisters. In that sea of mystery we have a drop of truth – that, eleven million nights ago, a man with a crooked ring finger and his family lived in the valley of the Ardéche. The people who resided there accomplished feats of artistry that asked for no audience and no venue besides the darkness of the cave they called home.
The Lascaux Cave
Chauvet was not unprecedented. There were numerous caves, even in France, that showed the tip of the iceberg of human creativity: however, as with any story, there is hubris. What lasted for thousands of years in isolation was almost completely destroyed within a decade.
Pivotally, Rowan Wilkon channels a phrase byHillel Schwartz , clearly says that creating copies of art to be distributed or viewed is ‘degenerate and regenerate.’ It separates us from originality, and the connection to the creator, but saves and democratises the piece, albeit with its dilution.
Lascaux’s copy was not made out of principle, however; it was made from the folly of hubris.
Read On
If the purpose of the art was to make a statement of their existence, they did it in the worst place possible – Buba was exceptionally lucky for discovering the cave the way he did. Paradoxically, it is because of its sheltered location (for one millennia after the other, no one could even see the cave) that one can now see the art. And, even more bizarrely, only a handful of people – probably under a hundred – have even seen the works in their true form.
Everything else, from the Caverne du Pont D’arc to the photos attached to this article, are mimicries. The pixels on this screen have no connection to the real cave. They are only points of data transmitted as light across the arteries of the digital world.
The physical replications took time, care and some of the most passionate artists across the world to recreate. Nonetheless, they were made of materials separated by 36,000 years of physical processes: the charcoal used in deep reverence, and rightly applauded care, to recreate the triptychs like the now-extinct Megalaceros and wooly rhinos comes from trees that may be the great, great (and many more greats) grand-children of the trees first burned to make them – that would be if the artists were lucky.
For all the power summoned by the governments and artists of the world, one is left with the irrevocable reality that everything one can see of the cave are imitations. The real cave will be preserved, photographed and studied on occasion, but in the future it may become a fact that there will have been more people on the moon than in the Chauvet cave, and the permission for the former might be unabashedly easier than the latter.
It is no surprise, then, that Werner Herzog, acclaimed filmmaker of Nosferatu the Vampyre and Encounters at the End of the World, would be one of those privileged few. He even employed 3D imaging to help bring the cave to life in a way that nobody had ever seen before – even if, admittedly, he said that 3D was ‘a gimmick of the commercial cinema.’
His previous documentary about the people who live in the most remote location on earth, the Antarctic, also drew critical awe at its display of humanity at its most spectacular. Both locales offered the dimmest of circumstances with such a paucity of hope that can only come from a filmmaker as unflinching and romantic as Herzog – after all, it was Truffaut himself who called him ‘the most important filmmaker alive.’ But any opinion made in the past 36,000 years has been made out of sight of the Chauvet cave, so what more could they tell us?
The Chauvet cave has the luxury of sitting on the summit of all parietal art re-discovered. This luxury is only because the vast majority of painted caves were lost. Only other works like the Cuevos de las Manos or the Lubang Jeriji Saléh have caused more awe amongst the speleologist community. Perhaps Chauvet was the ugly child of a dozen other cave networks that did not suffer such a curse upon its inhabitants, and those that blew charcoal and rubbed ochre into those walls sat back and thought to themselves, “This is nothing.”
It may be the head of a colossal iceberg that time has melted away. It may be humanity at its greatest.
One is often confronted with terror, as if it was an old friend, even in our world of countless bounties. But in the absence of hope, in the terror to which paloethic humanity were victims, of frothing volcanoes, helpless infanticide and disease, hunger, starvation, injury and murder; they persevered; it may have been the most human thing they could have done. Bone flutes and ornate skulls were found in the deeper parts of the cave – what songs they sang we can only dream. Footprints of a small boy walk one way into the black plateau; what did he see when he looked up?
In a way, the cave looks at us now. It watches art displayed at the tap of a finger, music shot between our ears, images that crawl across buildings a hundred feet in the air. As that cave collapsed, the humans may have thought that all the terror they had witnessed made their fears true; there was no life here, not really. Humanity would end, the cave would lay dormant forever, and an artless planet would pay no mind to their struggles and victories.
1,500,000 weeks later, these fingers tap at a keyboard. The fingers type “they were wrong.”
“I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”
Charlotte Bronte
Twelve-thousand leagues above the surface, Indira can just about make out the Great Rift Sea from her confinement. Her hands and feet do not touch the walls anymore – all she can do is bounce in her pod and catch her pen again. From one hand to the other, she lets it spin, wondering if it will land in her hand again. The maw of the world below almost reminds her of home.
It will be seven more minutes of surveillance before she can authorise the sortie. From the way the light catches her visor, and the tungsten glass of her capsule, Indira does not need to check her communiqué: the sun is setting in Malawi.
There’s a good-evening wish that makes its way down the totem-pole line-up of other pods. Others receive and reply, but she is the last in the line. Words like ‘home,’ ‘sun,’ ‘cry,’ and ‘humanity,’ whisper across the teleline like postcards of a place to which you’ve already been. It makes her chuckle to see her fellow explorers buckle under the weight of sentimentality. Of course, that phenomenon has its own term they drilled into her at the Olympus research facility: phantom orphan syndrome. She thought the term was a bit dramatic. Indira and her peers have never been to Earth.
However spectacular the view is, she turns her pod true north and sees Gao head-first in a paper-book. In fact, she couldn’t even see his head. They may have not got on well during the debriefing (an off-hand comment on how the reliance on paper was what got Earth into such trouble in the first place didn’t go down well) but Indira did not plan to endear herself to the other Martians. Still, all of her questions, reactions, observations, couldn’t just be jot down on a pad and left to stagnate. People had a remarkable ability to transform ideas. So she turned her pad off.
“Isn’t it strange to think, Gao? Of all those lives down there? Long ago?”
He does not think of the lives lost, or the ‘Blue Marble’ speech that the Professor gave before sending them on this mission. He would much prefer if he was going to Pluto.
Just then, a blinking red eye: it appears in everyone’s pods. A blink. Radiation storm. She knows it’s procedure, and Indira is aware of her safety, of the fact these pods were built to last, but right now - It goes dark. She’s in the dark.
She’s lost in the darkness. Her pen doesn’t bounce back to her; her pad is already turned off, and it won’t power on again. She’s lost in the darkness, and can’t even make out Gao’s book-hidden face above her. Polarised shields would do that; it’s just procedure.
She sighs, knowing what the delay would cost her, but she already spent most of her savings for this trip – she likes to call herself an explorer, but Indira knows she is a tourist. Gao is a bookstore owner and she is a children’s art teacher. They may be on Mars, where the red sands hide under green-grey soil, but she imagines herself at the very dawn of the Space Age, looking up to see the Apollo limp off the planet for the very first time.
But she’s still in the dark. And yet, as the panic that her medication usually forbids begin to rise again, she submits herself to her curiosity. A small analogue cabinet beneath where her feet should be seems about right. She kicks it, gently, opens it and finds the book that they threw in for her trip: an old parietal art flickerbook. The words are bare, the printing is dull and it makes her miss the pad; she flicks through it anyway. She already knows the story.
In the darkness, she can still make out the glimmer of her world in the palm of the sun. They may be over the Mediterranean now, it’s hard to say. She ruffles through her supplies, and Indira thanks herself for asking for the under-carriage feature, even if it cost her extra. She has all the room for painting materials - some synthetic, some plant-based - and looks over the little hole in her kit that says ‘charcoal.’ One day, soon, she smiles to herself.
By the time the lights come back on, and the crescendo of their orbit has been reached, her hands are dirty and smudged – she’s got some of it on her face, and wiping it away just makes it worse. Gao, who has finally put his book down, cocks his head at the sight of Indira’s pod. He thinks of making a joke about her picking something up from her subjects, as revenge for the debriefing, but he can’t find the ugliness in it. It’s raw, crude and a waste of good powders. Gao is just about to ask Indira about it – he jumps. It’s gone dark again, has it? He blinks. No, only for her.
Indira’s messy hands finish tucking away the painting supplies. By her estimations, it has been one-hundred million nights since these painters passed away. And yet, here, as she watches the North Ocean sparkle with jealousy miles below her, they’re here again. Indira begins to cry. It’s the first time she’s painted since she booked the trip, five years ago.
A hand, her hand, on the paint-marked metal. It’s cold.
“If you can do it, then so can I,” she whispers.
Beneath, the world grows just a bit closer.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Chauvet-Pont-dArc/Artists-of-the-cave
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/atxurra-cave-art-experimental-archaeology
https://www.ancientartarchive.org/chauvet-pont-darc-36000-year-old-art/
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429950-600-how-im-bringing-ancient-music-back-to-life/
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_do_we_feel_awe
https://face2faceafrica.com/article/fascinating-sites-of-prehistoric-human-footprints-in-east-africa-you-should-know-about/2
https://salinachristaria.com/charlotte-bronte-keep-looking-upward
https://donsmaps.com/cromagnon.html