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 ourselves, 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, to 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 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.
