Spring                                                            Bee Hiving Moon

32,000 years ago.  In Europe.  When the Alps had glaciers 9,000 feet thick, in a valley in what is now France, in a cave concealed by an ancient rock slide, these astonishing works remain, a galleries of ancient art, a museum with no light, no movable images and nothing between us and the artists who worked here but time.  These are the oldest works of art.  Period.  And their lines flow from one place to the next, moving with the grace of an angel in flight, creating forms with ease, with economy of line.

Werner Herzog makes strange and wonderful films.  He finds human narratives in fascinating places.  That the French allowed him to film Chauvet testifies to his reputation and he only enhances it with this work.

He interviewed a man, I didn’t get his name or profession, who said to understand the photograph below there are two attributes of life then that could help make sense of it.  The first he said is fluidity.  That is, trees talk, rocks talk, entities are not fixed, they are fluid, one can change into the other, so a woman can become a river, a tree can become a man.  The second is permeability, the forms are not fixed, a woman might have the head of a bull, or a horse the head and upper body of a human.

He suggests, and it certainly makes sense to me, that this drawing from Chauvet Cave illustrates exactly that first example of permeability.  It doesn’t take much to get to Picasso’s Minotaurs or the Labyrinth in Knossos.  Or, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Imagine living in a world where life, sentience, spirit embedded itself in everything.  More, image a place where the boundaries of your form and your life were not firm, where the boundary between this place and the Other World seemed always thin.  More, imagine lions with the head and forearms of a cave bear.  Or, a woman turned into a tree by a stream.  A hunter turned into a stag and eaten by his own dogs.

This is a world where neither faith nor belief are necessary because the world is as it is.  Magical.  Changeable.  Wonderful.  Horrifying.  Unpredictable.  Just imagine.