Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, Alyson Waters Read Free Book Online Page B

destiny. Time passed without givingany purchase to men. Rituals had to be created in order to control it to some extent so that man could orient himself, gain a foothold at last in a world that was very poorly organized, governed solely by the laws of nature, and in which intelligence was, in short, the too obvious trait of easy prey.
    The paintings, often admirably preserved, fossilized by flows of calcareous water, sometimes even protected by a sheet of thin, translucent calcite, are the only irrefutable traces that remain of these rituals and ceremonies, but the deep footprints allow us to imagine there had been dancing as well, and because there was dancing, in all likelihood there was singing; music secured its power, as it does today, through hypnosis and hysteria. I cannot be sure of course, but a certain form of oral literature may have existed, its legendary characters being precisely those reproduced by the painters, an entire animal mythology forged by tales of hunting and combat. This would explain the countless, almost identical depictions in several caves nowhere near each other: those depictions were there only to serve as illustrations for the story that a storyteller, or the painter himself, told aloud for an audience that never tired of hearing it. These paintings, then, really only produced an effect as they were being executed, carried along by the story for as long as it lasted; then they were no longer of interest and the painter had to start on another, the same one, as soon as the storyteller again took up his immutable tale from the beginning. The paintings traveled through the ages, intact, whereas the tales that justified them and gave them meaning have been lost. The paintings live on quite well without them, poignant poetic enigmas, incomplete and perfect, and henceforth they precede every conceivable narrative.
    (I know how to show off my erudition when the occasion calls for it, and this is a good opportunity. If I want to slip in my little anecdote, it’s now or never. You may have noticed that nothing is as hard to slip in as an anecdote. Among the forms of commerce that tie men to one another, the exchange of anecdotes is by far the one that works the least well of all. In this business, each person acts exactly as if he had two mouths and one ear. The goal is to prevent the other person from getting to the end of his anecdote, either by taking advantage of a moment of silence or by rudely cutting him off in order to slip in one’s own anecdote, despite the meager interest it arouses in the adversary who is concerned, above all, with getting on with his; and we call this savage and pitiless bickering “conversation,” and it seems the two are still good friends when they part. Nonetheless, since I now have the opportunity to slip in my little anecdote without the constant risk of interruption that often forces us to abridge our anecdotes, or to summarize them in order to spare the listener the minor details when he could just as easily have done without the salient points, having himself on the subject a much better story that he’s just dying to tell, I would be wrong to deprive myself of it. First allow me to state – and this preamble should be repeated word for word as my conclusion – that as unbelievable as it may seem, I swear my little anecdote is true: the Spanish Jesuits were for a short time suspected of having painted the Altamira cave paintings themselves in order to prove that all art described as Paleolithic was nothing but fraud and hoax. The scientific dating of the paintings nipped this notion in the bud, but it was nonetheless based on a reasonable assessment of Jesuitic malice and was suggested, indirectly, by the tumultuous religious feeling that overcame the first visitors to the cave.Will our museums – those great cathedrals of silence, respect, and boredom in which we no longer await anything but God – one day produce the same effect?)
    Unless we find