The Cave of Forgotten Dreams

In my fever of book research I’ve gone down an art rabbit hole. I ended up watching Werner Herzog’s, The Cave of Forgotten Dream, which I hadn’t seen since it first came out. It’s about the oldest known cave paintings in Chauvet, France, they date back around 36,000 years ago. The walls are lined with renderings of horses, bison running, growing tigers. These paintings are so advanced and skillfully done for humans we would otherwise consider primitive. There is even a naked woman painted on an overhang being embraced by what appears to be a minotaur.

One thing that really stood out from the film was a cluster of black chalky lines above eye level–marks from where a torch was put out. On the ground below are bits of ash and chunks of wood that were scratched off from where this person put out their flame. When scientists took a sample for radioisotope data they found it was 28,000 years old. Looking at those thick black lines, I could smell the burnt wood and hear the scratches against the rock–echoes of an action from another time.

Studying Paleolithic art is always interesting but imagining people deep underground, hiding from the weather outside, the mammoths, rhinos, sabertooth tigers and bears, is especially so during a pandemic when we are all inside hiding for other deadly reasons.

I remember in college we had so many conversations with professors about why these paintings were made, not just in this cave but many others around the world. Why do we make art? Why do we feel compelled to write or paint or sculpt or make films? For the same reason the humans of 36,000 years ago did–to understand themselves, to remember, and to document their lives. Interesting though, these pieces are so advanced and still the people who painted them had yet to invent the bow and arrow. We were still throwing spears at horses and chasing mammoths off of cliffs to kill them. These humans could have walked along the seabed from Paris to London because this part of the world was covered in glaciers 9,000 feet thick. Their world was unfathomably different.

The artists of Chauvet only used this cave to paint in, they did not live here. And some of the paintings are separated by 5,000 years. Something struck me about how beautiful it is that art is one of the first things we did, before we learned to even properly hunt, before speech, before language–we were painting.

Part of the fear of my book research, despite how much fun these tangents are (though this cave will be in the book) is reconciling the desire to make something for myself and knowing I am *supposed* to be creating something that can sell and make money, all that stuff, etc. But I can’t write a book with the goal of winnings awards or to please people or because it’s the type of book someone would expect me to write. That is not the reason to do anything meaningful though I’m sure many would disagree with me. Our efforts over time are to attempt to make sense of all of this, and then we are out of the world before we know it. There is no reason to do anything unless it is for some deeper purpose. Awards and approval from others are fleeting and at the end of the day they mean much less then facing the other direction and reaching for something a bit scarier, something that fulfills something for ourselves, not others.

In the film Herzog interviews this Frenchman, a young archeologist who giggles in his accent and admits on camera that before he did this job, he was a juggler in the circus. He tells a story of how the Aborigines never really stopped their cave painting until around the 1970’s when the modern world started to mess with them. Over time the lines of the painting begin to fade and people in the tribe go in and ceremoniously touch them up to preserve them. When one of the men was asked why he was going into the cave to paint by an outsider, the man looked at him and said, “It is not me who is painting, it is the spirit.”