How caves remade my creative life

Caves, echoes, and art as a form of worship

Here is a truly bonkers thing you might not know: prehistoric cave-art sites around the world have been destroyed, under the orders of eminent archaeologists.

What the hell? Well: in most places cave art has been found, it’s been studied, of course. And in order to study it, archaeologists and their teams have often had to move things around, expanding caverns or adding walkways and raised platforms, for instance, so that they can get up close and scrutinise the markings.

This has always been done with the utmost care, any additions or alterations absolutely avoiding painted images or motifs.

The thing is…

The mind-blowing thing is…

… it seems increasingly clear that in many cases, the visual motif was never really the point of these artworks, or at least not the whole point.

Let me explain.

Over the past few decades, research in the relatively nascent field of archaeoacoustics has been investigating the acoustic properties of archaeological sites.

In the case of caves, archaeoacousticians have found, time and again, that cave markings were made on caves’ most resonant walls.

Sometimes, researchers have spent days and weeks yelling or playing noises in caves, at various pitches and angles, and found that the prehistoric markings are placed such that when a shout or drum echoes, it sounds like the artwork itself is talking, is talking back.

You can do with this information what you will. Here is what I would like to do with it:

I would like to imagine a time before screens, before books, before written language at all, before the mechanical reproduction of images, before paper. And, too, before agriculture. A time when human survival depended on hunting and foraging, which means on intimate knowledge of and relationship with the animals and other living beings with whom we share the earth. I would like to imagine that those relationships and that knowledge were fostered through stories, which had to be carried in the memory, which means in the body, because there were no notebooks, no paper, not even so much as a stone tablet. I would like to imagine that those stories were often carried by individuals in the community who had an unusual capacity to perceive things beyond the material field. Individuals with bodies sensitive enough to store stories and to receive new ones from the living world herself.

I would like to imagine that those skilled individuals gleaned some of their knowing by going down, deep down into the belly of the earth. Into caves.

Into places where the earth quite literally spoke back to them.

And that in those resonant places, they would tune into the earth’s echo, into the earth speaking back to them, drumming and chanting and incanting their way to an altered state of consciousness, which allowed them to travel beyond the rock, into the wall of the cave. Into the place that speaks back, the place where sound is born, which means, according to many belief systems, the place where the universe is born. Nada brahma, says the Sanskrit. The world is sound. God is sound.

If the world is sound, and in a cave, rocks talk, the earth herself has a voice, and if a person can tune in to that voice and experience a resonance powerful enough to liquify their own felt sense of materiality, to transcend to a realm of pure sound…

Then what are the markings they bring back with them from that transcendence? The markings they make to help them get there again?

I would like to imagine that those markings—the first ever art—are not decorations or symbols or even memories.

I would like to imagine—no, I fervently believe—that those markings are acts of worship and transcendence. That they embody and facilitate communication with the otherworld; that they encapsulate voices and stories felt and heard in the place beyond the rock, the place where sound and life are born.

Which means that art is not decoration or consumer good or cultural commentary or means of escape.

It means that art is a form of worship. That it makes the world whole again, by enacting a moment when an individual transcended the material realm and felt the whole world—the material realm and also the otherworld, the divine—in their body.

That art, then, requires your whole body. That cosmology—the sense of an ordered universe—is not a cognitive conclusion but a felt sense, something you carry in your bones, inextricable from the feeling body.

That art asks you to believe, to get out of your brain and feel something. Feel your aliveness. Feel god, whatever that means to you.

***

So what does it mean, that eminent archaeologists—arguably the people who care most in the world about uncovering the meaning of cave art—went into caves and destroyed their acoustic properties by expanding caverns and adding platforms and walkways?

It means that we live in a culture that has entirely forgotten this full-bodied, full-sensory way to approach art.

That we live in a culture so visual that every other way to experience the world and art and belief sit in a blind spot.

Modern Western society privileges the visual sense above all else because it’s the visual sense that allows us to read, to put things under microscopes—to advance our most prized form of intelligence, cognition. Because it’s the most disembodied sense.

This is why, for centuries, archaeologists scrutinised every visible millimetre of cave markings, trying to decipher them through sight alone. At the farthest reach of cognitive/visual bias, they developed complex semiotic systems to explain what these markings might mean—passing images directly through cognition to create language, as if that were the only way to make meaning.

And what has been lost, as a result?

When we lose our ability to approach art as whole, feeling bodies, we lose our ability to transcend with and through it. We lose our ability to understand, to feel this world as a whole, ordered cosmos, and so to feel our own place in that cosmos.

Things fall apart.

But things can become whole again anytime.

All we have to do is remember our whole bodies. Remember that god is a felt sense, and that art is how we awaken that felt sense.

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Thanks for reading How to Go Home, weekly newsletters on imagination and the otherworld. October’s theme is The Mind in the Cave: art as a form of worship and transcendence. Later in the month, I’ll be talking about the senses beyond sight to my friend Joe Rizzo Naudi, a brilliant writer who writes, among other things, about his visual impairment. [Substack is refusing to add a link the elegant way here, so here’s some of Joe’s work: https://linktr.ee/joerizzonaudi]

Also, a big shout out to The Emerald podcast, specifically the episode On Resonance, which helped me feel my way to the ideas shared in this newsletter. More themed reading and listening recommendations in the coming weeks.