`A Citizen of the Earth'

Two writers from radically different worlds shared a reverence for the cave paintings in southwestern France dating from the Upper Paleolithic, some 40,000 years ago. The largest collection of such work, some of the oldest surviving art objects created by our species, are found in Dordogne, most famously at the Lascaux caves, near Montignac. Four teenage boys discovered them on Sept. 12, 1940, three months after the Nazis overran France.

For Guy Davenport, such works are “not in the least primitive or unsophisticated.” In his essay “The Symbol of the Archaic” (published in The Geography of the Imagination) Davenport traces an unbroken line from the Paleolithic to the High Modernist. Referring to the skepticism that greeted the antiquity of similar cave paintings found almost half a century earlier in Spain, he writes:

“There was, however, a silent believer from the beginning of his career, who saw prehistoric art with eyes which would influence all other eyes in our time. When [L’Abbé] Breuil was copying the ceiling of bulls in the Spanish cave Altamira, a young man from Barcelona crawled in beside him and marveled at the beauty of the painting, at the energy of the designs. He would in a few years teach himself to draw with a similar energy and primal clarity, and would incorporate one of these enigmatic bulls into his largest painting, the Guernica. He was Pablo Picasso.”

One of Davenport’s earliest published stories, “Robot” (included in Tatlin!), is a densely themed mediation on human aggression and the continuity of aesthetic instinct. It’s also an adventure story about four boys searching for a lost dog, the eponymous Robot, who instead find treasure. The Resistance uses the caves to conceal a cache of weapons – another, less benign repudiation of barbarism. The story opens like this:

“Down there the ochre horse with black mane, black fetlocks, black tail, was prancing as if to a fanfare of Charpentier, though it would have been the music of shinbone fife and a drum that tickled her ears across the tall grass and chestnut forests along the Vézère.”

Davenport is no facile believer in progress, aesthetic or moral. We have lost much in the last 50 millennia or so. In the essay “Prehistoric Eyes,” also in The Geography of the Imagination, Davenport writes:

“Man, it would seem, does not evolve; he accumulates. His fund of advantages over nature and over the savage within is rich indeed, but nothing of the old Adam has been lost; our savagery has perhaps increased in meanness and fury; it stands out even more terribly against a modern background.”

The other writer who revels in Paleolithic art as a reflection of human excellence is Zbigniew Herbert. His essay “Lascaux,” in Barbarian in the Garden is, in part, a happy travelogue of a journey into antiquity. His metaphors are ironically Christian. He refers to various rooms in the cave as naves and apses, and describes L’Abbé Brueil as “the pope of pre-historians.” Herbert was a survivor of humanity’s most vile aspirations, yet the conclusions he draws from his visit to Lascaux are remarkably stirring. Based on his close encounter with our species at its aesthetic best, Herbert writes:

“I returned from Lascaux by the same road I arrived. Though I had stared into the `abyss’ of history, I did not emerge from an alien world. Never before had I felt a stronger or more reassuring conviction: I am a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but of almost the whole of infinity.”