The Dead of Long Ago, and Today
NB: I didn’t write this post - it was written by another Kerry, a dear friend who periodically posted here - he’s an artist and has an amazing giant brain that runs rings around the rings of Saturn and those zoomy quantum trails that quarks leave in their wake.
I just started teaching an art history survey course at a community college. This is the survey that races like a souped-up rice burner from the caves of Lascaux (30K years ago) up to the gothic period (1200s or so). Although I’m an artist and (long ago) weathered this subject matter as a student myself, to teach it is something else again. This is grokking at a new level.
And in my grokky state, being in that prehistoric point of the course, and sneaking in my political reading on the side, I’m finding that figuring out how to make students care about marks on the walls of a French cave made so long ago provides a fresh look at the immediate urgencies in my own life.
Bluntly, for myself it means that nothing matters except what you pass along, or leave behind, that might help another lost soul make sense of the black madness around us all. That might mean throwing oneself even more passionately into the exterior tumult of the moment, or it might mean stoking the fires of personal passion by withdrawing from the outerworld altogether.
The bison on the walls of those ancient caves are long dead, as are the humans that made their pictures. Something mattered enough to them that they crawled into the darkess underground and left a record of…something. It’s unlikely that they thought of anything beyond their moment as they rendered those leaping, running beasts, but they made them just the same. Not a message in a bottle, but in a cave.
So now I’m left to reflect, what is in my life that would impel me to a like effort, a like record of my experience?