I have often thought about that moment when I swallowed a few drops of ice-age water. But never so often as now, when I’ve been stricken with cancer. In dark moments I have tried to work out how long I’ve lived and how long I can reasonably expect to go on living, given all the varying circumstances. Will I be a long-term survivor, or do I have only a few years left? How long in terms of days, hours and perhaps minutes? How many more seconds do I have to live? The calculations are pointless. Neither life nor death can be redefined like fractions or second-grade equations. You can count the number of heartbeats and the number or red and white blood cells, but life can never be an expression of geometrical measurement.
Nevertheless, there is a sort of consolation in the memory of that glass of ice-age water I was given by the well-drillers. It puts into perspective how a human life can be stretched or shrunk in so many different ways. Since the last ice age about three hundred generations of human beings have wandered around the Scandinavian peninsula. Ahead of me, way beyond my lifetime, another three hundred generations will wander around there before glaciers once again cover our country and compress the earth’s surface. New pockets of salt water will be formed, and perhaps one day new well-drillers will bore down through the rocky ground.
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My desk is by a window as I write this text, and outside is an ash tree. It doesn’t come into leaf until after the tardy oak has attained its full springtime glory. I sometimes imagine that the ash is the shepherd keeping watch until all the other trees’ leaves have turned green before it comes into leaf itself.
That ash tree was outside the window the day I was born, and it will also be there when I die. Nearly all the trees in my garden, apart from a few slender birches, were here when I was born, and will still be here when I have passed away.
Today I can think that there was a sort of eternity in those small drops of salt water. A lifetime varies. It is misleading to consider measurements of time in connection with one’s own life or that of others. Some people live longer than others. One can regret the death of young people who die before they have even had the chance to start living seriously. But there is no such thing as time when it comes to death. When you are dead you are dead, if you are not religious and don’t believe in resurrection or reincarnation.
Death is life’s great mystery. Today I can think about those well-drillers and wonder how their salt-water pockets deep down in the rocks affected their own view of life. I don’t believe those who maintain that most people brush aside all thought of their inevitable death. I wasn’t the only one who, when I was eight or nine years old, had periods when I thought almost every day about death waiting for me somewhere over the horizon. All children had such thoughts, and still do.
Something that does worry me is the fact that in Sweden today one can spend one’s whole life without ever seeing a dead person apart from on a flickering television screen or in a cinema. If we hide death away, life becomes incomprehensible. I’m not suggesting that pre-school children should be dragged off to mortuaries on study visits, but how can we get young people to respect life if death has been relegated to hospitals and funeral parlours? The fact that death has disappeared in a country like Sweden is a gross cultural lapse that doesn’t bode well for the future.
The well-diggers left the island with their machine. The converted cattle ferry disappeared from view, towed away by a fishing boat with an old, thumping Säffle engine. I had been given instructions about how to drain away the salt water and then allow the water to keep flowing 24/7 until the reservoir had lost all trace of salt.
‘How long will that take?’ I wondered.
The elder of the two men had evidently been asked that question many times before.
‘It’s impossible to say,’ he said. ‘It varies. But taste your way forward. Once the water is completely drinkable without a trace of salt, you don’t need to carry on running it.’
It took about a week before the salt fully disappeared. Since then the water has always tasted as it should – even when the washing machine has been going full steam for days on end, the water has never run out.
I don’t really understand how it all works, but when I am feeling very worried about my cancer I can think about the well-drillers, their machine and the glass of water from an ice age ago, and I feel calmer again. There are no logical reasons for that, no emotional ones either. But that’s the way it is. The water had been lying down there in the rocky ground ever since the covering of ice melted away and the land arose once more from under the sea. Many of those salt-water pockets will remain in the ground and be dispersed only when a new ice age affects our part of Europe.
I am living between two ice ages. The trees that were standing in my garden before I was born will still be there when I have passed away – but they won’t live for ever. They will also disappear one of these days, just like all islands, all reefs, all sandy beaches, all of everything I have experienced during my life.
That’s the way life is: a few drops of salt water in a glass.
50
The buffalo with eight legs
What were the painters thinking when they created their pictures, mainly of animals, on the rocky walls of those caverns that were so difficult to penetrate? The caverns where they sought sanctuary from the worst of the weather and from predators that threatened their very existence – and yet they were also places that they decorated.
Did they have any idea that their pictures would survive and be judged by future generations? Or were the pictures intended to be enjoyed just during their own lives, in their own time? As the brains of human beings developed an ability to think ahead, to make plans, that might have played a role for the cliff-wall painters. But what role exactly? Were the pictures meant to be messages and greetings from one era to another? Or did they imagine that the animals they depicted on the cave walls might eventually come to life and leap out into the real world where they could become food for human beings, not merely mysterious images to which shamans in a trance could appeal in the hope of keeping starvation and illness and predators at bay?
Perhaps the cave paintings were intended to be sacrifices to gods? Instead of slaughtering a bull or a reindeer for that purpose, could the pictures be offered up and the real animals be used as food for humans?
In a cave in the Swabian Alps, at Chauvet, there is a picture of an animal that is dramatically different from those in any other caves known to man.
It is a buffalo with eight legs. It is as detailed and accurate as any of the other paintings around it, apart from the astonishing fact that it has eight legs.
It doesn’t take long to understand why. The artist’s intentions are clear and obvious: he wanted to portray an animal that was moving. In his own way, at least 30,000 years before moving films were invented, he has tried to capture the leg movements of the running animal; the distance between each leg and its changed angle depicts the fraction of a second in which the movement would have taken place in reality.
We know of only one picture of a buffalo with eight legs – it is possible of course that there are other as yet undiscovered caves containing paintings of animals whose legs are moving, but so far we have only this one example. The unknown artist was inspired to attempt something totally new, something he might never have tried before: to depict movement at the moment when it was taking place – something that in the real world happens so quickly that a human eye is unable to detect it.
What happened when the artist completed his painting? What did his companions say when they came and saw the eight legs? What did they think? Were they curious or angry that the artist had broken a taboo? All we can be sure about is that the picture still exists – it wasn’t scratched out, or painted over.
But the picture tells us something more than that. If you study it carefully, you realise that the moving legs and the buffalo’s eyes imply that it is running away from something. Beyond the painting, on the cave wall, another animal or perhaps a gro
up of human hunters might be chasing the buffalo. It is fleeing for its life. The picture is attempting to depict the animal’s instinctive urge to escape from danger and death.
Whoever it was that painted this fleeing, terrified buffalo has created a great and inspired work of art. The whole picture is on the point of exploding, thanks to the animal’s fear of death. It is as if the buffalo is tearing itself away from the cave wall in order to increase its speed and leave the predator or the human hunters behind.
Not a single line seems to have been changed. There have been no attempts to paint over any part of it. The artist knew what he wanted, and had no second thoughts.
This is not the work of a beginner. People in those days seldom lived to be older than about thirty, but this man has obviously been painting for a long time.
Every picture needed time and effort. Just like the creator of the Lion Man, this cave painter must have been fed by others who were happy to let him spend all his time painting.
In the same cave there is another collection of animals, notably horses and rhinos. When I scrutinise the paintings I get the distinct impression that it was the same artist who produced all of them. In other caves one can see that various artists have produced the pictures, but just one man seems to have created all those we can study today in the Chauvet Cave.
The first individuals suddenly begin to emerge from the darkness of history. They are not people, but animals. Before long the first sculptures of individual human faces – discovered by us over a thousand generations later – will begin to be made.
In what is now Slovakia, a five-centimetre-high ivory sculpture was discovered a few years ago. It depicts the face of a woman, and is sometimes called ‘The Original Mona Lisa’. The face is about 35,000 years old. It is a statuette that reproduces all the woman’s features, but especially remarkable is her left eye. Her eyelid is drooping, her eye is injured.
Her mouth suggests the beginnings of a smile.
There was presumably a living model, most probably in the same family or clan as the artist. Perhaps she was the artist’s mother, or his sister, or a woman he lived with? But in any case, from the darkness of history emerges an individual – one of the first human individuals we can really see.
What did she think when she saw this little sculpture depicting her face? She must have been surprised that somebody was able to make a copy of her that was so small. She must have wondered if there was a spirit inside this little piece of ivory that was similar to her own soul.
Her smile has followed me throughout my life since I first saw that little statuette. There is something introspective about her face, as if she knows that she is being looked at.
She also awakens another thought inside my mind. When I first travelled to Africa some forty years ago, I was quite sure I would discover many differences between Africans and myself – an assumption that turned out to be completely wrong. All I found was similarities. I realised that we all belong to the same family. As human beings as a species originated on the African continent, it follows that we all have an ancient matriarch who had black skin.
Whenever I look at that sculpture, created over 30,000 years ago, it occurs to me that the model for it also belongs to my family. She is not a stranger. In that hint of a smile on her lips I can see something I understand and recognise.
It is a fact that we laugh and cry for the same reasons.
I am at home with the cave painters, and they are at home with me.
51
The secret of cave painters revealed
Last spring, when I started on new cycles of chemotherapy treatment, the day before the first infusions I went to a bookshop and bought some books. Doing so gave me a feeling of consolation – or perhaps it was an advance reward for what I was about to go through.
When I lay down on the bed in room number 1, ready to receive the last infusions of the first round of the new cycles, I had in my hand a little book with what would turn out to be the misleading title of The Oldest Enigma of Humanity.
I read through the opening pages somewhat suspiciously, but when I had finished reading it I realised that it was just the title that was idiotic and aimed at selling as many copies as possible. The book itself was fascinating. It threw a radical new light on many questions regarding the origins of art – the paintings in inaccessible caves.
In it a French graphic designer, Bertrand David, poses a series of crucial questions about the techniques used by the cave painters, not least about the way in which they seemed to make things as difficult as possible for themselves. Why did they choose places that meant they had to worm their way along dark, narrow passages in order to get there?
Another thing that baffled him was why the eyes of the animals were often in the wrong place when the rest of their anatomy was accurately reproduced. Then one day David thought he had stumbled upon the cave painters’ secret. He arranged a series of experiments in his cellar and invited others, including children, to take part. The outcome was both surprising and convincing.
He concluded that way back in the depths of time the cave painters chose the darkest space for a very special reason. It was precisely that darkness that they wanted. They placed small carved statuettes of the animals they wished to depict in front of primitive sources of light, and with the help of the shadows cast on the cave walls they were able to trace the outlines in a realistic way. But the eyes of a lion or an ox or a horse did not cast a shadow, and the artist had to place them as best he could.
This is a technique anybody can use. You only need to stand outside your door on a dark winter’s night and allow the light from inside the house behind you to cast a large shadow on the ground; you will be big or even giant-like according to how far away you are from the source of light.
David and Jean-Jacques Lefrère, a literary historian, combined to write the book I was reading as the cytotoxins were infused into my arm. I hardly noticed when Marie or one of the other nurses came to replace an empty bag with a new one.
As soon as I got back home I went down into the basement with the little statuette of an elephant I had brought back from Africa many years ago. I pinned a large sheet of white paper onto the wall, lit a paraffin lamp and placed the elephant in front of it. It immediately turned into a giant with the shadow of its body filling and overflowing outside the paper on the wall. By moving the statuette and adjusting the distance between it and the lamp I was able to use a felt pen and trace the outline of the elephant.
I then drew in the animal’s eye – and might not have placed it in exactly the right position.
Therefore we can assume that the cave painters traced their subjects on the walls. They didn’t even need to have any artistic ability. Although it is unlikely, it would have been possible for children to trace the contours of shadows projected onto the wall.
For me it was a giant step forward into the world we know so little about – those paintings of animals in the darkest corners of underground caverns.
The French graphic designer and his professorial colleague also presented a bold thought about what those animal pictures were intended to be. Rather than creating a world of spiritual or religious symbols, perhaps the painters were creating memories of dead relatives. If people had names in those days – which is probable, although we can’t be sure – the likelihood is that many of them would be named after animals. Could these animal pictures be a sort of gravestone of dead people that the family, the group or the clan wished to remember? That might also explain why over many thousands of years those animal pictures have been painted over with different images. It would be no more remarkable than the fact that in our modern cemeteries the earth is dug over at regular intervals, resulting in the disappearance of old gravestones and crosses.
This possible explanation of cave paintings is of course no more than speculation. But more certain is the shadow-projection technique, which in all probability explains the secret behind the cave painters’ method.
; The only artistic assessment observers can make regarding the unknown, unnamed cave painters is how successful they were in placing such details as an animal’s eye on the shadow projections. Some were more accurate than others, and sometimes not only was the position more anatomically correct, but the expression in the eye was also more alive.
No one eye is exactly like another. The artist who placed it where he did had to make an artistic choice.
This discovery in no way reduces the value of all those animal images that capture our attention nowadays after so many thousands of years, no matter whether we see them in pictures or on film or in the caves themselves.
In other words, art has always been on a journey throughout the history of mankind until it developed into what it is today.
And tomorrow it will develop even further, becoming something new and unexpected.
52
The happiness brought by a rickety lorry in the spring
When I was a child, early spring was the time I used to dream about the imminent arrival of the travelling circus.
Most people of my generation who grew up in small places where nothing unexpected ever happened remember when the snow melted away at last and the travelling circus finally arrived. During the long winters I would occasionally picture in my mind’s eye the painted wagons, the strong men with sledgehammers preparing the ground for the ring and the tents, the strange foreign-sounding languages echoing between the caravans in which the artists lived their mysterious and incomprehensible everyday lives.
Of course it was naive and romantic, and of course it still is. But it was also very real. The outside world had come to visit us. It was a sort of greeting from a country and people beyond the endless forests that radiated out from the little valley with the freezing-cold river where I lived.
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