“Reading it, we were struck like by 100 000
volts that during the Upper Paleolithic – that wonderful time when there were,
max, 150 000 people in Europe, and life was good for around twenty thousand
years - the cave artists generally didn’t draw or paint or engrave people. There
were your stray vulvas, the masked bird man, many hand prints, but generally –
no people. Instead, there were mammoths. There were lions. There were rhinos
and horses. Oddly, much fewer reindeer, even though reindeer meat was the spam
of the Paleolithic – it was always poached reindeer for breakfast, fricasseed
reindeer for lunch, and reindeer pudding for dinner. We are often told how to
evolution stories about this or that human habit, but in reality, the way those
how to stories are formed is that evo psychologists extrapolate back from
‘primitive people’ of today to those wandering around 200,000 years ago.
However, this habit is in serious disconnect from archeologists, who have long
held that ethnography of people today, in no matter what state of society they
live in, is essentially unhelpful when trying to reconstruct the way the
inhabits of the Eurasia 30,000 years ago lived. It is impossible not to imagine
back using our PBS/National Geographic images, but what tribe do we know of
that doesn’t draw people? Deleuze and Guattari talk of the special faciality of
the West – this seems right, on all accounts – but to show so little interest
in people when one has mastered perspective, and the expressive character of
animals? That seems quite significant. But of what? Well, this is where
speculation is dumb, but irresistible.”
I went on to outline my speculative
position: the cave art of 25,000 years
ago, with its relative absence of the
human, marks the time when – just perhaps – humans did not assume they would
prevail. They did not even assume they were superior, since of course they knew
– the horse was superior for speed, the lion and tiger and bear was superior
for strength, the bird for flight, and so on.
There wasn’t - I would speculate, in this
scene still dotted with other hominid candidates for most likely to survive -
the sense that homo sapiens was superior in any department at all.
Calasso’s book is more sophisticated than
my speculation, but it shares the sense that “man” was level with “nature” – in
fact, that split between the humans and nature was inconceivable because
neither category in the modern sense existed. Enemy and friend, transformation
and death, hunting and eating existed. “When it began, the hunt was not a
person who pursued an animal. It was a being who pursued an other being. No one
could say with certainty who was who. The pursued animal could be a transformed
man, or a god, or simply an animal, or a spirit or a something dead.”
And so it was I think through most of the Holocene.
This recent change of earth time – the Anthropocene – was prefigured when a
divide, a borderline was built, in heads and hearts and fields. Did that border
have to thicken into plastic strewn oceans and the kind of yuck that we can see
in pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Ian? I don’t believe it. What is
strange about the anthopocene story is that we have a story from science that
would make sense to the cavepainters – that we are brothers and sisters of
other animal tribes, that there is nothing called “nature” that causes
anything, that everything has a material unity that we can play with but never
overstep, that metamorphosis is life.
No comments:
Post a Comment