… Oh what is
this light that
holds us fast? …
‘An Image of Leda’, Frank O’Hara1
I was about to move house and the move was happening quickly. My new home was just four miles east but I was leaving the part of London where I was born and had lived for most of my life. Although the reasons for moving were happy ones, I hadn’t anticipated the level of unsettlement it would bring about. One day, feeling overwhelmed by the detail of it all, I decided that it would be a lot simpler to live in a cave. I was walking past a cinema and went into whatever was showing just to be able to sit in the dark. It was a film about a cave.2
The Chauvet Cave was discovered in 1994. It had long ago been sealed off by rockfall, leaving its 32,000-year-old paintings perfectly preserved. The pale walls are covered in bison, horses, rhinoceroses, lions and bears. They are strikingly fluid – a lion’s profile is given in a single six-foot-long stroke – but the artist has done even more to bring them alive. The cave is full of outcrops and recesses, the walls ripple and dip, and the animals have been drawn accordingly. One bison has been given eight legs and a rhinoceros six horns to indicate, like a series of frames, that they are moving. Seeking a cave, I had entered a cinema where I was watching a film about a cave that was a cinema.
The archaeologists and historians mapping and researching the cave had the open mind, and open imagination, that perhaps comes from operating so far beyond the ordinary human scale. One said that he dreamt of lions. ‘Real lions or painted lions?’ ‘Both.’ He sounded surprised to be asked to make the distinction. Another tried to explain how the world might have been perceived 32,000 years ago, describing an everyday condition of metamorphosis: ‘A tree can speak … a wall
