MUSINGS OF A NEW YEAR

The Cave of Altamira is a cave complex, located near the historic town of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Spain. It is renowned for prehistoric cave art featuring charcoal drawings and polychrome paintings of contemporary local fauna and human hands. The earliest paintings were applied during the Upper Paleolithic, around 36,000 years ago.

No human portraits are to be found among the hundreds of drawings. Aside from hands stenciled, no trace of humans depicted in the cave art of Altamira, nor in the other stunning cave nearby, Chauvet Cave in France. Scholars speculate as to why this is so, especially given the explosion of depictions of humans in rock, sculpture, pottery, funerary art, and death masks over the past few thousand years in six or seven areas of the world - India and China, Mesopotamia and Egypt, Mesoamerica and the Andes.

As a boy, I dug and collected "idolitos" - clay figurines - from the Huasteca/Gulf region of Mexico where I grew up. Many smiled at me from the distance of long-gone centuries. Many had exquisite expressions, some even waved hello. They were scattered and buried on the fields, as if to accompany the miraculous maize in its journey from seed to ear.

Back when the cave art at Altamira and other caves were being drawn, the absence of human figures was not for any lack of ability to realistically depict human anatomy, as the nuanced painting of the bison I posted above clearly demonstrate (which Picasso studied and emulated, by the way). Nor was it for lack of gazing our human companions at close range, or caring for them - we being, above all, social animals, as Aristotle reminds us.

But it's as if our ancestors supremely valued and sought to honor big animals, while they cognitively did not really think much of themselves - not enough to depict themselves even once.

Perhaps there was an indifference and familiarity akin to our present indifference to, say, breathing? Nobody records breathing, though it’s a vital function we literally perform from the day we are born to the day we die. But we do not collect any memory of our breathing sounds, even though we collect those of chirping birds - and our own singing, talking, but no breathing. Too prosaic. Perhaps they thought of themselves as too prosaic a presence in the world of magical beings.

It took most of human history to notice our own magic, begin to see ourselves and our bodies and faces as something interesting, worthy of collecting, depicting, and endeavoring to reproduce aesthetically to leave behind. Nefertiti. The Olmec heads. The Buddhas. The illuminated Persian and Medieval books.

We were before all of that, in a word, utterly un-self-conscious. Those hands stenciled on the walls of Altamira were as far as we went in leaving testimony of our fleeting presence, as if to say to those that came upon the cave art much later, "hi & bye, but check out what magical world we lived in." An epistemology involving the extreme decentering of the creative subject, expressing its witness to the fascinating world around him - the pure gaze of an un-self-conscious mind, but a complex enough one to render exquisitely beautiful representations of what it was gazing in awe.

Boy, have we traveled across that great harbor of the conscious mind. Today, we are trapped in the center of our minds. Today the world is transformed by our relentless depictions of ourselves in it.

The rocks, the sands, the bones, which have silently witnessed this transformation, make up our pyramids, our skyscrapers, our museums. A mastodon gazes back as the child touches its fossilized tusk. The moon let us land on her, after eons of silently witnessing our roaming on Earth.

And now we enter the virtual world, where the mind touches itself.

What will our future virtual caves depict? Already, along some buildings, the roar of the ocean waves crashing grace their exteriors, with no one getting wet.

What will we gaze in awe?