To get into the caves of Niaux, in the south of France, you drive to the foothills of the Pyrenees, buy a ticket - it’s open to tourists - and then wait for your turn to go through the metal doors which function as an airlock. I visited a few years ago.
We walked through a series of dark tunnels and caverns for about 20 minutes, a kilometre. The mountain hangs overhead and so I think about the hundreds of metres of solid rock, upwards, before reaching even the ground again. The centre of the mountain is a realm impenetrable and unimaginable. Take the remotest, loneliest place on the surface of the Earth: I could at least in theory reach that spot. No such access to the world of rock.
At the end of the tunnels there is cave art 13,000 years old.
Along the way there’s a cartoon sketch of a deer. Here it is. It’s so contemporary, so alive. The deer is bright-eyes and smiling. I felt so connected over so many thousands of years.
The final cave is decorated with bison, in their twos and threes, these small groups covering the rock face all around.
It’s beautiful.
Although the bison are sketched in the sparest of lines, they’re not caricatures, they’re accurately draw and brought to life by the shadows cast by the light and the uneven surface, and the rock which is also unevenly coloured, red and brown and black.
With a fire in the middle, the shadows of people would have mixed with the drawings and the shadowy landscape.
At the time this felt to me like a kind of reverse hologram.
The 2D drawing would imply a 3D presence in the space - invisible yet there none-the-less, the bison is right next to you, it has to be if, like my shadow it is cast on the wall.
Suddenly in my imagination the cave felt crowded, real people and implied bison, all together, moving in and out of the shadows, honestly all of us at an equivalent level of visibility, who is to say what is real, the bison on the distant plane visible too - drawings on a cave or a distant herd at dusk, it’s all the same.
Virtual reality.
Rock is a medium.
I’ve been reading recently about the work of archeologist David Lewis-Williams:
although in Western thought rock is the most solid and stable of substances, for the Bushmen [in southern Africa] it is a veil on to which images of the spirit world are projected. Paintings are tracings of these projections, which makes the eland on the cave wall a rendering of an even more real eland in the spirit world on the other side of the rock face.
Some can cross between worlds:
The task of the shaman is to pierce the veil, contacting the spirits and bringing back to the everyday human world vital information.
The shaman:
Bleeding from the nose and displaying particular postures, such as a throwing back of the arms, indicate to others in the cave that the shaman is moving between worlds.
Based on cave art in France that resemble shaman images by the Bushmen, Lewis-Williams puts forward that the underlying belief systems are the same.
Lewis-Williams also argues that the rock face for French Palacolithic people was seen as a membrane, with the animals existing, perhaps in more perfect forms, in a world on the other side of the rock. Evidence for this comes in instances when natural cracks in the rock are used to help to provide the shape of an animal; also, as we have seen, the interest in pushing bone and other materials into rock cracks may be an attempt to commune with the spirit world on the far side.
Strong caveat: For many, Lewis-Williams takes a number of steps too far.
SEE ALSO: Computer screens??
We’ve never quite got a handle on what a computer is…
a “soft” interface or infinitely permeable appliance or tool
a prosthetic extension to the body or mind
a container, something with a world “inside” - anyone else play Little Computer People on the Commodore 64?
Gibson’s cyberspace, a world which can be visited by us, whether that’s the metaverse or virtual reality, a video game, a simulation, or something lo-fi like the blogosphere
a tool to let us project across real space; a thing that enables telepresence
a non-human agent in itself
a medium.
I won’t get into definitions. Except to say:
The image of shamans twisted at the rocky cave-wall interface, travelling in the realm beyond the membrane, reminds me of nothing so much as, well, me, hunched over my smartphone, unnaturally contorted to jab with my thumbs, an overwhelming feeling of being elsewhere, the screen a veil and on the other side a world that I can visit but can never stay in, my eyes blind to the physical room and others here.
What I DON’T mean to say is that that Zoom is a form of astral projection.
Nor do I wish to suggest that there was a now-lost industrial society in prehistory, the shamanic elite making use of full-bodied user interfaces to search the Upper Palaeolithic equivalent of Wikipedia, data carried not on the fibre optics of today’s internet but via telluric currents, faint and discernible only deep underground far away from the Sun, recording and bringing back vital knowledge about bison movements and weather and so on - and gossiping with other shamans thousands of miles away on Rockfacebook or whatever.
(Though how else would you describe computers to a society ten thousand years distant?)
INSTEAD my point (I think) is that it’s not so absurd to think about cave art as a kind of virtual reality. Just as we understand VR today: it’s real and breathtaking often too, but also we know it’s not really real, but also there is the willing suspension of disbelief. Us humans are sophisticated, happily self-contradictory participants and always have been.
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‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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To get into the caves of Niaux, in the south of France, you drive to the foothills of the Pyrenees, buy a ticket - it’s open to tourists - and then wait for your turn to go through the metal doors which function as an airlock. I visited a few years ago.
We walked through a series of dark tunnels and caverns for about 20 minutes, a kilometre. The mountain hangs overhead and so I think about the hundreds of metres of solid rock, upwards, before reaching even the ground again. The centre of the mountain is a realm impenetrable and unimaginable. Take the remotest, loneliest place on the surface of the Earth: I could at least in theory reach that spot. No such access to the world of rock.
At the end of the tunnels there is cave art 13,000 years old.
Along the way there’s a cartoon sketch of a deer. Here it is. It’s so contemporary, so alive. The deer is bright-eyes and smiling. I felt so connected over so many thousands of years.
The final cave is decorated with bison, in their twos and threes, these small groups covering the rock face all around.
It’s beautiful.
Although the bison are sketched in the sparest of lines, they’re not caricatures, they’re accurately draw and brought to life by the shadows cast by the light and the uneven surface, and the rock which is also unevenly coloured, red and brown and black.
With a fire in the middle, the shadows of people would have mixed with the drawings and the shadowy landscape.
At the time this felt to me like a kind of reverse hologram.
The 2D drawing would imply a 3D presence in the space - invisible yet there none-the-less, the bison is right next to you, it has to be if, like my shadow it is cast on the wall.
Suddenly in my imagination the cave felt crowded, real people and implied bison, all together, moving in and out of the shadows, honestly all of us at an equivalent level of visibility, who is to say what is real, the bison on the distant plane visible too - drawings on a cave or a distant herd at dusk, it’s all the same.
Virtual reality.
Rock is a medium.
I’ve been reading recently about the work of archeologist David Lewis-Williams:
Some can cross between worlds:
The shaman:
Based on cave art in France that resemble shaman images by the Bushmen, Lewis-Williams puts forward that the underlying belief systems are the same.
Strong caveat:
SEE ALSO: Computer screens??
We’ve never quite got a handle on what a computer is…
I won’t get into definitions. Except to say:
The image of shamans twisted at the rocky cave-wall interface, travelling in the realm beyond the membrane, reminds me of nothing so much as, well, me, hunched over my smartphone, unnaturally contorted to jab with my thumbs, an overwhelming feeling of being elsewhere, the screen a veil and on the other side a world that I can visit but can never stay in, my eyes blind to the physical room and others here.
What I DON’T mean to say is that that Zoom is a form of astral projection.
Nor do I wish to suggest that there was a now-lost industrial society in prehistory, the shamanic elite making use of full-bodied user interfaces to search the Upper Palaeolithic equivalent of Wikipedia, data carried not on the fibre optics of today’s internet but via telluric currents, faint and discernible only deep underground far away from the Sun, recording and bringing back vital knowledge about bison movements and weather and so on - and gossiping with other shamans thousands of miles away on Rockfacebook or whatever.
(Though how else would you describe computers to a society ten thousand years distant?)
INSTEAD my point (I think) is that it’s not so absurd to think about cave art as a kind of virtual reality. Just as we understand VR today: it’s real and breathtaking often too, but also we know it’s not really real, but also there is the willing suspension of disbelief. Us humans are sophisticated, happily self-contradictory participants and always have been.