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(Some theories concerning the intent behind the paintings at Lascaux suggest that the animal figures there are acts of “sympathetic magic,” early humans’ attempts to influence reality through representation, the way modern practitioners of voodoo still do today. This theory suggests that the Paleolithic hunter made her first kill on the walls of Lascaux to prompt the kill incarnate to present itself on the hunt. Others have suggested that, as at similar sites, the symbols placed upon the body of the drawn animal detail effective wound placement—the first art recorded and instructed in successful killing techniques. These theories suggest that each drawing marks an expression of early human desire, that together the figures display a chorus of individual hopeful voices, of unique signatures moving in a pack.)
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1940 CE, outside Montignac, France: September. A village myth: A small dog named Robot wanders away near the Vézère River. He leads the four teenage boys in search of him to the mouth of a cave where perhaps no human foot has padded for tens of thousands of years.
“We have learnt nothing!” exclaimed an exasperated Pablo Picasso upon his visit to La Grotte de Lascaux the year of its discovery. This encounter with early human art would have been especially unnerving for the famous postimpressionist who favored bulls both in his early paintings as a child and in his best-known works as an adult. The rendering of figures at Lascaux was also uncannily similar to the thick black outlining favored by Picasso and his contemporaries who were nicknamed les fauves, the wild beasts.
The bulls that Picasso noted were actually the aurochs, an extinct species of massive oxen among the most dominant species at Lascaux. The site’s Great Black Bull panel, depicting a seventeen-foot aurochs, is the largest animal painting ever discovered in cave art. Long after its first known rendering, the aurochs served as an important game animal and attained mythic significance for numerous human cultures. Like domestic cattle, the aurochs carried a cross-shaped bone in its heart, believed to be a sign of its magical powers.
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(The figures at Lascaux present a unique puzzle for modern visitors and historians. They are singular but overlapping. Differing species are placed in procession alongside one another. Some decorated panels contain only one very small or large figure; others hold many. Because two entrances once existed, it is difficult to discern in which order the paintings are intended to progress. Though fossil records of the Périgord show that the animals depicted there lived in the cave’s vicinity, by no means are all species accounted for upon its walls. Initially, finding no clear patterns in their rendering, historians entertained the theory that the paintings at Lascaux were doodles, were created as art for art’s sake.)
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1900 CE, the cave of Mas-d’Azil, the southern French Pyrenees: In the deep corners of a cave through which a highway will someday run, French explorers discover the skull of a young girl with her teeth removed, with circular reindeer vertebrae set within her empty eye sockets. They find a reindeer horn carved with three detailed horse heads. The first carving depicts an intact equine head, its flared nostrils clearly delineated; the second shows a head stripped of most tissue, its skull deeply shadowed; the third head has been lightly skinned, so that the contours of the surface muscles can be detailed. These carvings reveal that the earliest human artists were curious about the inner parts of creatures, about how life resulted in the combination of physical structures, and was absent in their separation.
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(The cave paintings at Lascaux are read as a kind of bestiary by prehistorians who understand each species as a symbol or allegory—like hieroglyphics, like an alphabet, like pixels. Each animal there is linked associatively to form our most ancient recorded narrative spanning the entire cave system.)
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1491 CE Florence, Italy: A teenage Michelangelo describes his carving process as one of bringing existing figures out from within slabs of raw marble. The moody young Italian was among the first artists to conduct dissections of cadavers to better understand anatomy, was practiced at seeing its inner forms. Michelangelo first considered a section of stone, imagining the statue encased within it, and then began to delicately excavate the curves he saw beneath its roughened surface, revealing a crooked knee joint, a draped hand, a lifted heel.
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(The aurochs, after stags and equines, are the species most numerous in Lascaux imagery. Absent from the paintings are reindeer, which prehistorians believe to be the primary food source of the Lascaux artists. It seems, to these researchers, that the creatures the upper Paleolithic artists chose to represent were those formidable in size or capabilities, those they feared or interacted with closely but did not consume, the beasts they respected, those they thought a match for their newly conscious minds.)
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2009 CE, outside Minneapolis, USA: I sit tucked into an obscure corner of level 3½ at Rolvaag Library studying art history. My hands rest, claw-like in LED light, as the seventeen-thousand-year-old cave paintings from Lascaux float across my screen to eerie, echoing notes via the official French website. The caves were first closed to visitors in 2008, during attempts to battle a black fungus that began to crawl across the walls after the introduction of AC units, high-powered lights, twelve hundred daily breathers and their bacteria. This year, they were closed permanently, indefinitely. The entrance was locked, and a replica of two halls was buried two hundred meters away. Cross-legged, I am studying the earliest example of human art in the only way a human can these days—via replication. The official website is fitted with an interactive virtual tour that winds the visitor’s gaze through tunnels rendered in pixels. From my vantage point, I can consider the paintings the way I might with my nose inches from the curved walls they rest upon. Under a camera’s spotlight, evidence of alterations and edits are visible in the faded aging of a stag’s amber pigment. Long extinct felines lurk in low profile in the small, darkest corners of the painted world, the way they did in life. A bull bends its shoulder into the sharpened edge of a crevice as if it had grown just there. Scattered among these creatures and upon their flanks rest slender hook and arrow symbols, laced patterns, stacks of orbs. Missing entirely are any representations of the surrounding cliffs or river, any fore or background landscapes, renderings of any kind of vegetation. The theories behind the paintings are numerous, farfetched, contradictory, impossible to enumerate. Few pre-historians can agree on basic interpretations, and I feel no inclination to choose among theirs.
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(Two existing photographs taken a decade apart capture Pablo Picasso wearing a bull-head mask. One was taken for the cover of LIFE magazine and the other by Edward Quinn. In each photograph, Picasso is bare chested and gesturing with his arms. Some have speculated that the mask is a reference to Picasso’s Spanish heritage and the country’s association with bullfights, while others suggest that the hybrid portrait references the presence of the bull as a symbol throughout his work.)
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2012 CE, Tucson, USA: On-screen, a small black girl stands inches from a massive bovine whose wide nostrils stare back into her eyes. Earlier in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, children living in the mythical Bathtub, a piece of land below sea level mirroring coastal Louisiana, are warned by their Creole teacher of the coming of the terrible aurochs. This teacher, who bears an aurochs tattoo upon her thigh, describes to the children a boar-like beast that consumes humans and will soon be freed from the melting icecaps in which it was imprisoned during the ice age. In one scene, the protagonist, Hushpuppy, climbs inside a cardboard box as her home burns down and records her life on its inner walls. She wonders, “How’re people going to look back on my civilization?” Later, Hushpuppy’s father instructs her in survival techniques by encouraging her to crack a crab shell without the use of a knife, to lure a catfish with her tiny wiggling fingers, to pluck it from the water just as it clasps har
d above her knuckle.
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(In Beasts, the aurochs is painted as an apocalyptic beast, a predator accompanying disaster that serves as a symbol for a number of narrative themes. Among them: evolution, extinction, human fear, and the human grappling with the order of the cosmos. This twentieth-century film echoes themes that earlier prehistorians recognized in connecting biological behavior to cosmic pattern at Lascaux. In these theories, the real aurochs processing in lines among other painted species symbolized the progression of seasons and, alongside other beasts, represented the rhythm and circular, regenerative cycles of nature and time.
Early humans were perhaps the first beings to contemplate natural systems, parts of the cosmos they could not comprehend. Art served as these creatures’ first method of ordering the world, of articulating their newly complex human fears and desires. They drew what they were decidedly not—the beasts they had been. They pointed at the line between and toed back across it. They engaged in just what their minds were built for—in making meaning from component parts.)
Some Early Exxxperiments in Behavioral Science: A Bird’s-Eye View
James Morrow
AT LONG LAST THE PRAYERS of this humble rock dove have been answered. Electric typewriters have come on the scene, which means I can employ my hunting-and-pecking skills to tell the whole story of my brave lab mates, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, and our collaborative effort to cripple the German Navy during the Second World War.
Rest assured that I intend to give B. F. Skinner, dean of behaviorists, all the credit he deserves, though you won’t find herein much enthusiasm for his argument that the mind of any given pigeon—myself, for exxxample—is merely an epiphenomenon of its body. (I apologize for the above typo; the xxx key on this machine is sticky.) By the time my tale has ended, I hope to have convinced you that every member of my species enjoys an inner life and aspires to the condition called dignity.
I needn’t remind you that over the centuries your earthbound race has sustained three major blows to its self-esteem. First Nicolaus Copernicus dislodged you from the center of the universe, then Charles Darwin demolished your myth of special creation, and soon thereafter Sigmund Freud dashed your hopes of ever knowing yourselves in full. Now circumstances compel me to heap a fourth humiliation upon your head. It concerns the natural ability of pigeons to communicate telepathically with humans. To be perfectly frank, every time we read your thoughts, we become bored to tears. Evidently my species has little to learn from an animal that cannot travel at thirty-eight miles per hour under its own power, navigate by a planet’s magnetic field, or spread its wings and fly. I don’t mean to give offense. That’s simply the way it is.
Call me Reuben. Hatched on April 17, 1938, I came of age in Professor Skinner’s laboratory, back when he was teaching college students and exxxperimenting with allegedly lower animals at the University of Minnesota. At first my generation was happy to let Skinner believe that a rock dove is essentially a black boxxx with feathers. As long as he kept the rewards coming—the popcorn, the coconut flakes, the Chexxx cereal—we gave him ostensible sovereignty over our psyches, allowing him to train us to play ping-pong, knock over tiny bowling pins with marbles, and engage in other inane activities. But then Hitler invaded Poland, and kibble became the least of our concerns. You would be hard-pressed to find a more patriotic vertebrate than the pigeon. Our military exxxploits are the stuff of legend. We have not always fought on the morally superior side, but we invariably perform our duties with distinction and élan. I think especially of a female Great War veteran named Cher Ami (not Chère Amie, for her gender became known only after her death). On October 3, 1918, during the battle of the Argonne, this fearless bird soared across German lines bearing a dispatch from a lost battalion: WE ARE ALONG THE ROAD PARALLEL TO 276.4. OUR OWN ARTILLERY IS DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE STOP IT. Cher Ami arrived at Division Headquarters shot through the breast, blind in one eye, and covered in blood, the leg holding her message capsule dangling by a tendon. Army medics immediately went to work on Cher Ami, saving her life and fitting her with a wooden leg. Her heroic flight delivered 194 American soldiers from annihilation by friendly fire, a feat for which she received the Croixxx de Guerre and, when she left France for her home in New Jersey, a personal send-off from General Pershing.
Not long after the Nazis went on the march, a consensus emerged within the community of Skinner’s winged exxxperimental subjects. We would devise a scheme for thwarting the Third Reich and then, breaking our vow of silence, solicit the great psychologist’s aid in implementing it. This plan, we agreed, should go far beyond the usual employment of pigeons as an organic telegraph system. Our beau geste, when it came, must be unprecedented and classy.
Months passed. No strategy suggested itself. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing America into the war: a catastrophic event, though one that would surely reinforce Skinner’s patriotism and hence his sympathy for our cause. We passed the early days of 1942 letting Skinner believe he was conditioning us to peck out tunes on a xxxylophone, but our minds remained fixxxed on Hitler and the abominable things he was doing to the doves of central Europe.
The breakthrough occurred one chilly Minneapolis morning when a pallid young entrepreneur named Victor Peabody appeared in the lab seeking Skinner’s opinion of his nascent scheme, Project Canine. Peabody hoped to dazzle the research department of the state’s largest industry, Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, with his design for an antisubmarine weapon: depth charges strapped to dogs conditioned to follow faint acoustic signals emanating from the hulls of U-boats. Was the renowned author of The Behavior of Organisms willing to endorse this idea? Skinner said it sounded feasible, and he would write to the 3M people, urging them to give Peabody a hearing.
My lab mates and I later learned that Project Canine never got off the ground, largely because the president of 3M had a tender spot in his heart for dogs. But a spark had gone to flame in our collective avian imagination. The longer we mulled over the essentials of Peabody’s brainstorm—lightweight missile, sentient navigation system, suicide mission—the more convinced we became that Hitler might be checkmated through an astute deployment of self-sacrificing pigeons.
For a full month we researched Der Führer’s arsenal. By persuading the US Navy that its most coveted enemy targets were vulnerable to bird-controlled bombs, we reasoned, Skinner would acquire the necessary funding in a trice. Eventually we set our sights on the German fleet. Although the formidable Bismarck was now at the bottom of the North Atlantic, her sister battleship Tirpitz still roamed the seas, preying on Allied shipping, and the heavy cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst also remained at large.
On the morning of his forty-first birthday, after ascertaining that he was the only human in the lab, we entered into telepathic communication with Professor Skinner. He behaved exxxactly as one would exxxpect of such an organism, stammering incoherently and dropping a tray of white mice. The container hit the floor, and the startled creatures scurried toward a familiar habitat, a rodent-scale maze in the far corner. Skinner flopped into his favorite lounge chair, stared at the ceiling, and moaned. Prematurely bald around the temples, he was a slender and agile man, with a gracefulness not normally found outside the Columbidae family. I genuinely liked him, and not just because he occasionally rewarded us with euphoria-inducing cannabis seeds.
“Am I losing my mind?” he asked the skylight.
“Tut-tut, Doc, you know that the mind is nothing but a scientifically uninteresting phantom of the central nervous system,” my little brother, Sasha, reminded him acerbically.
“Give us a moment of your undivided attention,” pleaded my comely cousin Hannah.
As the clan’s official ambassador, I apprised the psychologist of our resolve to help secure an Allied victory. Somehow Professor Skinner must convince the US Navy to underwrite the development of pigeon-guided missiles intended to blow Kriegsmarine vessels out of the water. If
our dream failed to become a reality, we’d never be able to look ourselves in the mirror again.
“I can’t believe I’m communing with pigeons,” Skinner averred.
“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your psychology,” I retorted.
“I appreciate your antifascist sentiments, Mr. Pigeon—”
“Reuben.”
“Reuben, but you see before you an exxxtraordinarily busy man. I’m teaching three classes this semester, supervising a major rat exxxperiment, and trying to be a good husband and father.”
“Gneisenau is out there, causing untold misery,” my cousin Thomas proclaimed. “Also Scharnhorst and Tirpitz.” He pivoted toward me. “There’s a gang of mites in my bib.”
Promptly I removed the parasites from Thomas’s throat feathers, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck.
“Thus far the good guys in this war have failed to devise a single servomechanism capable of delivering a payload to its target,” noted my scrappy sister, Elvira. “The US Navy aims its torpedoes and hopes for the best. The RAF drops its bombs and prays for a lucky strike.”
“If the War Department needed the services of an exxxperimental psychologist, I’d be the first to answer the call,” Skinner asserted. Tugging on the ends of his bow tie, he rose defiantly from the lounge chair. “But I don’t take orders from birds—even birds who’ve somehow conditioned themselves to engage in telepathic verbal behavior.”
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