the lascaux project
EDITED BY PEGI EYERS
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My motherline and mitrochrondial DNA (mtDNA) have been traced to the Lascaux Caves region of France - in essence, the site of my ancient European Indigenous homeland. I am compiling a new anthology of art, poetry and prose expressing the magic and mystery of the Lascaux caves! - Pegi Eyers Please submit your contributions to [email protected] by June 21, 2028 potential themesSacred Site / Deep Time Origin Stories / Full Circle / Reuniting with European Homelands / Homecoming / Reverse Migration / Voices of Earth / Archaic Whispers / Matriarchal Clan Mothers / Animist Art / Cave as Womb Space
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LASCAUX
Joseph Spece
Struck a pair of stones to start off. Left behind
ten men curled like scythes around the fire.
Left behind the bracing moon. Passed a pack
of ibex, passed the mammoth. Left the carious
canines before the rath, left the scapula -
freed space for petal dyes, for fixatives.
Passed (in a dream) Chauvet. Alsace. Lorraine.
Past the scree, past the wolf standing sentinel, her
mouth. Struck two stones to hearten the blaze,
sped up; pulled from the sack the manganese, the gilt
mixture of ochre and ore, the animal fat,
the deer bristle. The hare I speared fresh
for better reds. Mash of berries in a rolled frond.
Looked back – still breathing, still lone, set
bone to the bare wall: summoned up the aurochs
in a dervish turn, flank hot with lashes, all hot with dying
and kneeling
down. Then nothing. Then the quiet
credit of our kind.
****
Joseph Spece, Poetry, "The Poet Takes a Walk," November 2009
ten men curled like scythes around the fire.
Left behind the bracing moon. Passed a pack
of ibex, passed the mammoth. Left the carious
canines before the rath, left the scapula -
freed space for petal dyes, for fixatives.
Passed (in a dream) Chauvet. Alsace. Lorraine.
Past the scree, past the wolf standing sentinel, her
mouth. Struck two stones to hearten the blaze,
sped up; pulled from the sack the manganese, the gilt
mixture of ochre and ore, the animal fat,
the deer bristle. The hare I speared fresh
for better reds. Mash of berries in a rolled frond.
Looked back – still breathing, still lone, set
bone to the bare wall: summoned up the aurochs
in a dervish turn, flank hot with lashes, all hot with dying
and kneeling
down. Then nothing. Then the quiet
credit of our kind.
****
Joseph Spece, Poetry, "The Poet Takes a Walk," November 2009
cave art
John Steffler
Early March sun hot on the coffee table and my stocking feet, I'm
looking at photos of iron oxide and charcoal paintings someone made
in near darkness on the walls of Chauvet Cave near the Rhone River
32,000 years ago. Minus ten degrees Celsius outside, but the light
swells on the snowy yard before flooding the window. Jean Clottes'
book, Cave Art, open on my lap. It's strangely easy to think in
thousands of years. For 25,000 years we told the same stories,
engaged with the same gods, the great animal rivers, the obdurate alien
fellows, stacked-up dense and barging, rhinos, lions, bears, bison,
aurochs, mammoths, in the tundra's slopes and valleys, never far from
ice. For 25,000 years. Used the same kitchen utensils, answered our
children's questions with the same words. The herds of thick-bellied
horses, the reindeer, red deer, ibex flowing north and south, upland
and downland, always pursued by the poor sun. We watched and
adored them, filling ourselves like ticks with a drop of their vast
life. We were sticks, we were zigzags, we were eyes only, drinking in,
swallowing images to build outselves, lines and words to hold the
animals inside our limbs. No stars or sun. The reindeer were the sun.
No plants or rivers. The horses were the plants and rivers. No human
faces. Only animals. We were invisible. Bottomless. Witnesses.
And when the ice began to melt and forests crowded the tundra plains,
some of us followed what was left of the deer and the ice north-east
into America, into Perth where I sit with photos of Chauvet Cave, and
some of us stayed in the warming forests and raised sheep, pigs and
wheat, made carts and explosions and portraits of ourselves as the sun,
and soon sailed west here to Perth where where we didn't recognize our
cousins from only a few thousand years ago, had forgotten all our
shared stories, our old gods, except in sorrowful turbulent dreams.
****
John Steffler, CV2: The Canadian Journal of Poetry & Critical Writing "In Nature's Fold: Animism in Poetry"
looking at photos of iron oxide and charcoal paintings someone made
in near darkness on the walls of Chauvet Cave near the Rhone River
32,000 years ago. Minus ten degrees Celsius outside, but the light
swells on the snowy yard before flooding the window. Jean Clottes'
book, Cave Art, open on my lap. It's strangely easy to think in
thousands of years. For 25,000 years we told the same stories,
engaged with the same gods, the great animal rivers, the obdurate alien
fellows, stacked-up dense and barging, rhinos, lions, bears, bison,
aurochs, mammoths, in the tundra's slopes and valleys, never far from
ice. For 25,000 years. Used the same kitchen utensils, answered our
children's questions with the same words. The herds of thick-bellied
horses, the reindeer, red deer, ibex flowing north and south, upland
and downland, always pursued by the poor sun. We watched and
adored them, filling ourselves like ticks with a drop of their vast
life. We were sticks, we were zigzags, we were eyes only, drinking in,
swallowing images to build outselves, lines and words to hold the
animals inside our limbs. No stars or sun. The reindeer were the sun.
No plants or rivers. The horses were the plants and rivers. No human
faces. Only animals. We were invisible. Bottomless. Witnesses.
And when the ice began to melt and forests crowded the tundra plains,
some of us followed what was left of the deer and the ice north-east
into America, into Perth where I sit with photos of Chauvet Cave, and
some of us stayed in the warming forests and raised sheep, pigs and
wheat, made carts and explosions and portraits of ourselves as the sun,
and soon sailed west here to Perth where where we didn't recognize our
cousins from only a few thousand years ago, had forgotten all our
shared stories, our old gods, except in sorrowful turbulent dreams.
****
John Steffler, CV2: The Canadian Journal of Poetry & Critical Writing "In Nature's Fold: Animism in Poetry"
The First Sign of Civilization
Elise M. Powers
Art of the Painting of the Lascaux Caves - Christian Jegou
You might think, as I did,
that the first sign of civilization
was the wheel, or harnessed fire,
or sharpened stone, or cave walls
stenciled with ochre hands.
But it was a healed bone --
a femur, broken clean through
and mended back to bearing weight.
Here's the thing: A break like that
in the Wild is a death sentence.
Ask any fox or fawn
if they've survived a broken leg.
If you can't walk, you don't eat.
If you don't run, you can't survive.
Nature is ruthless, indifferent, unforgiving.
But we humans have a capacity
for compassion that interrupts instinct,
that rewrites the script of survival --
a tenderness so crucial to who we are
that we etched our origin not in stone,
But in mercy, in kindness.
****
Elise M. Powers
Caves, Sounds, and the Human Imagination
an excerpt from The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination
To earth, down into the depths below. Even after thirty thousand years we can still feel the vital essence of ancient worlds emanating from Paleolithic art, but what were the sounds and rituals that accompanied the artists when they decided to etch their stories into stone? In the chapter entitled "Caves, Sounds, and the Human Imagination," The Sound Atlas explores the field of archeoacoustics, the discipline that studies relationships between humans and sounds across history.
An excerpt:
"In the right cave. At the right spot. Clapping becomes hoof beats. Echoes blur together and reverberate to conjure a herd of prey, stampeding. Torchlight and shadows flicker across the outlines of wild horses, elk, mammoths. Hunter and hunted commence to dance a dance of what is to come, or in honour of what has always been, time and again.
Cross-modality information transfer: a term proposed by linguist Shigeru Miyagawa to describe the flow of knowledge between the auditory and the visual centres within the growing brains of early modern humans. From the interplay of creation and enactment, a transmutation occurs. The abstract arises. Perhaps within the cave was where our species’ symbolic minds began to take shape. Perhaps nestled within the blind wombs of the world, the first sparks of human imagination alight...."
The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination by Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen
@michaela_vieser @utter_earth >amazon< #soundatlas #soundscapes #archeoacoustics #paleolithic #songofthecaves #artsoundscape #deeptimelistening
Photo credit: Replica of the painting from the Chauvet cave in the Anthropos museum. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
An excerpt:
"In the right cave. At the right spot. Clapping becomes hoof beats. Echoes blur together and reverberate to conjure a herd of prey, stampeding. Torchlight and shadows flicker across the outlines of wild horses, elk, mammoths. Hunter and hunted commence to dance a dance of what is to come, or in honour of what has always been, time and again.
Cross-modality information transfer: a term proposed by linguist Shigeru Miyagawa to describe the flow of knowledge between the auditory and the visual centres within the growing brains of early modern humans. From the interplay of creation and enactment, a transmutation occurs. The abstract arises. Perhaps within the cave was where our species’ symbolic minds began to take shape. Perhaps nestled within the blind wombs of the world, the first sparks of human imagination alight...."
The Sound Atlas: A Guide to Strange Sounds Across Landscapes and Imagination by Michaela Vieser and Isaac Yuen
@michaela_vieser @utter_earth >amazon< #soundatlas #soundscapes #archeoacoustics #paleolithic #songofthecaves #artsoundscape #deeptimelistening
Photo credit: Replica of the painting from the Chauvet cave in the Anthropos museum. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
cave of forgottten dreams
Werner Herzog
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For the documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams Werner Herzog takes us on an incredible 3-D journey into the Chauvet caves in Southern France: enormous chambers full of the oldest prehistoric art known to man. Modern 3-D brings these ancient works of art to life, gliding through the cathedral-like cave, over formations and sloping passageways, and across the beautiful 32,000 year old drawings. The scenes are interspersed by interviews with scientists musing on the cave's mysterious beauty, the evolution of creativity and the nature of humanity. >Review by the Bradshaw Foundation<
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a 2010 3D documentary film by Werner Herzog about the Chauvet Caves in Southern France, which contain some of the oldest human-painted images yet discovered — some of them crafted 32,000 years ago. It consists of footage from inside the cave, as well as of the nearby Pont d'Arc natural bridge, alongside interviews with various scientists and historians. The film premiered on 13 September 2010 at the Toronto International Film Festival. >Cave of Forgotten Dreams on Wiki< |