I'm looking at some cave paintings a friend has just done, part of a ritual he's planning for our tribe.

We're in the stone age--the Neolithic, to be exact. Here's how I know: people are responding to his style, deciding if they like his art-cave and his ritual based on that--individual responses to his individual artistic expression.

But back in the Mesolithic, they would have responded with awe to any religious ritual, to the mere fact of huge creatures hovering on the cavern wall. They weren't yet able to review or evaluate, just respond: art was too new.

And in the Paleolithic, they would have said "Huh?": back then, no one understood the concepts of ritual or art.

No, it's the Neolithic. Sophisticated!

Pencil sketch by Wayan after a Saharan neolithic cave drawing of antelope

Though I was talking to this Neolithic art critic yesterday. His view of that evolution had to do with symbols--he explained "People have learned to associate the cave paintings with the animals they depict, but this took time because the animal paintings aren't very realistic. Not images of horse, bison, mammoth, but signs for them..."

I'm surprised and insulted for my friend: I think his work's quite vivid and realistic, and I'm skeptical that this guy knows what he's talking about. I think people who saw his cave-wall figures instantly recognized them as horse, bison, mammoth... their first problem was, they couldn't figure out how the animals got on the wall!

And once they recognized they were mere paint on rocks, then... how could they be inanimate, yet lively animals too? Both at once. Yet the animals' bodies aren't here. Yet their essences are. Clearly the spirits of the animals are here...

Crowded, this cave... and with more than opinions.

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