Embodied Imagination

AS WE MOVE DEEPER into the prehistoric caves, the world darkens and looks different. As if from nowhere, suddenly, 13,000-year-old mammoths look down on us with relative disinterest. They stare at the stalactites dripping down like stone icicles beyond us. One stands thoughtful and wooly, his tusks uncomfortably long, never ceasing to grow, wearing down his old age. They call him the patriarch. He is beautifully represented, carved into the stone in different layers of depth, which makes his wooly fur stand out in fuzzy precision. He is carved over scratches made by fingers into stone, scratches similar to ones the cave bear has left behind in the walls to sharpen its claws. The bears were long gone by the time our ancestors entered this cave in Rouffignac, in the Perigord region of what now is France, 13,000 years ago.

I envision our ancestor entering, seeing the carvings left by bear. This must be the way the wall is met, he thinks. So first he makes similar scratches with his fingers, to imitate the ancestor, the bear, who has made his winter beds here for tens of thousands of years. This is the way the ancestor did it, so this is how we begin, honoring our forebears, as a background to our own impressions. Deep inside the earth, carved over a grid of scratches, the patriarch stands looking back toward the mouth of the cave, kilometers away. Four fingers, like a bear's claw, is the matrix. Farther to the right we see two herds of mammoth meeting, looking at each other. The frieze follows the contours of the wall. These are the powers in all their gigantic nature. They meet, face off, maybe peaceably: two tribes of great spirits. This is the largest drawing. It is the cave of the mammoth spirit facing itself—encounter, reflection.

Along the wall I see, shimmying on his belly along the cave barely two feet high, our ancestor on his way to be initiated into the world of the great spirits, the massive mammoth. Facing off with self, meeting self in a great collision or