Caveman
As Pablo Picasso said after seeing 14,000-year-old cave paintings in Altamira, when we think back to where we all come from, “all is decadence.”
Weekly Three
HEAR: You can't go wrong with some Fleetwood Mac. Here’s “The Ledge”.
READ: “Put on the Diamonds” by Vivian Gornick is a complex essay about humiliation. I also loved this story by Sierra Crane Murdoch about the wide-ranging meaning of motherhood, especially across cultures.
VIEW: Here’s a photo of Putnam’s “Cave Man” sculpture, which can be found in the de Young Museum’s Garden of Enchantment. Also, I enjoyed this in-depth and empathetic documentary about Neanderthals.
No. 46: Caveman
If you’re walking through Golden Gate Park and the entrance to the botanical gardens is on your left, you’re near him.
To find him, the way is straight ahead. But if you can pass the Shakespeare Garden without even the slightest desire to see more, this mission is already bust — he and Shakespeare are distant relatives. Take a detour. Read a fragment of Shakespeare's music from one of the metal plaques.
When he was by the birds such pleasure took
that some would sing. Some others in their bills
would bring him mulberries and ripe-red cherries.
Exit onto the same path and continue until you reach the most Parisian scene outside of Paris herself: the music concourse, blotted with high-canopied trees casting shade on metal benches and gravel walks underneath. In the distance, an all-white ferris wheel spins. Head towards the hibernating iron giant they call the de Young Museum.
If you have good intentions, two sphinxes will grant your passage up a set of stairs. Keep your head down as you curve around the the Pool of Enchantment, where lily pads float and a native boy has been spotted peeking his head above the tall grass as he levels his blowgun at a lioness and her cub.
A little further, and you’ve made it.
There, in a shady corner near a pair of penguins, a primitive man sits on the ground, hairy and muscular, contemplating a rock and scratching his head with his free hand. A braid of hair runs down his back.
Titled “Cave Man,” this bronze sculpture, made in 1910 by the Californian sculptor Arthur Putnam, shows a Neanderthal in a moment of deep thought as he considers how to use a rock. Maybe, in a minute, he will use the rock to open a mussel or kill an animal, displaying his creativity and intelligence. Or, maybe, he will toss it aside in frustration and return to picking berries.
He inspires wonder. It’s not often we can stand in front of one of our 40,000-year-old ancestors, examining his ancient body and the earnest expression on his face.
He and I are different in some ways. His protruding brow. His recessed chin. His thick-haired limbs.
But for the most part, we are the same. His hands and feet. His muscular chest and back. His arms and legs. His ears. His confused but determined expression as he wills himself to create something out of nothing.
We’ve come so far from these survivalist days it’s easy to forget they existed. He confirms: We have not always been intelligent, we learned. We have not always been at the top of the food chain, we fought. We have not always been alive, we died.
Admittedly, he is not part of our scientific family, though we are related. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and modern humans (Homo sapiens) coexisted and interbred. Through the lives of these peoples, our species has lived and suffered and loved and died for nearly 430,000 years in an unbroken timeline. This fact both honors and transcends the individual lives that make up that legacy. We live and we die, but we can’t be killed.
To remember our more animalistic origins is refreshing in a modern society that is happy to forget them. Sheltered in houses with stocked refrigerators, seated behind the steering wheels fast cars, immersed in online realities, we forget our connection to the unprocessed, the uncomfortable, the wild and the chaotic. We see ourselves a species above animals, rather than a type of animal among other types of animals. The distance between this modern view and the truth makes us scratch our head like Putnam's cave man when inevitably our animal nature is revealed, whether it be in the form of our fragility, an unwelcome reaction to chemicals and artificial goods, a sudden rise of emotion we didn’t know we could feel.
This detachment from nature is anxiety-causing and alienating. The contemporary world, while built for us, doesn’t suit us (at least not yet) and our contemporary behavior doesn’t suit the world (we're killing the planet). Our bodies haven't yet caught up to our minds, despite pretending they have. The Brave New World might be said to be a little too brave, perhaps. And one of the most unfortunate consequences of “progressive” society is that, apparently, it’s not enough to keep that progression isolated to a single, ambitious group. No, the natives must progress, too. They must believe in our Gods. They must dress in our clothes. They must evacuate Mother Nature’s loving arms despite that she’s offered exceptional care for hundreds of thousands of years. Where we are going, everyone else must come, too. The destination? To be determined.
Still none can extract the wild person inside of us. Our wild nature — those well-attuned natural instincts that guide us when life pushes us beyond our comfortable, man-made cycles — might always be our greatest strength. We can tap in to these reserves intentionally, but this takes effort.
No effort has been made thus far to change so called “civilized” society’s positioning relative to animals. We see ourselves as above them — as apart. Can’t veganism be viewed as a declaration of superiority over other animals, as well as a turning of the head at our own rude animalism? Isn’t the idea of an animal mauling and eating a human is viewed, at first, as something shocking and unnatural? But if we make an effort — if we read about early people and indigenous groups to understand where they placed themselves in the grander scheme — we might see things from a different angle, if only just to know (not necessarily to change our lifestyles). This perspective lives in our blood.
Anti-animal and anti-nature ideas are most obviously the fruit of indoctrination. We have been lead to believe — by philosophers, by churches, by states — that we are apart from nature because we are somehow chosen. Perhaps we are. But if we are, we are chosen the same way a hawk is chosen, a frog is chosen, a panther is chosen.
Conscious life, in general, seems to me, chosen. Thousands of years of “civilized” thought, however, would disagree. Our new user manual says the significance of life and death is ours alone to prescribe. Why have we written off the learnings and experiences of our ancestors? Why must the Native American assimilate? Why can’t we compare and contrast the learnings of the “civilized” and the “uncivilized” societies to craft some better, collective understanding?
Take, for example, the views of the K’iche’ Mayans, who had a strong understanding of the relationship between themselves and the forest animals they lived among. Jessica Sequeira describes this in her essay, “Creatures of the Popol Vuh”.
Instead of a world with a mute god lording over well-behaved people, here are men and gods in a situation of fractured and antagonistic communication, with animals a constant presence in the middle, aware of what’s going on, taking part. Never just background, they are essential to its brimming, throbbing, pulsing world.
[In this society], animals are easily placated by bones and food, killed and tricked, enlisted to aid in others’ projects. The heads of pumas or jaguars are employed for a ball game, fireflies are used to light cigars, and insects and owls are pushed into the harsh world, a postal service free of charge.
What can explain this passivity? [...] In Mayan thought, physical bodies are sometimes treated with nonchalance because it’s the spirit that survives, and bodily transience is taken as a part of life. So on Earth and in Xibalba – the underworld or the place of death where the gods live, divided into six houses: Dark House, Rattling House, Jaguar House, Bat House, Razor House and Hot House – animals constantly meet their death.
Yet within the complex Mayan mythology, animals remain an indispensable and sacred part of the world, with elements of both the humans and the gods. [...] The Mayans accept the animistic and vital force of the animals that surround them, flowing through but not limited to a single physical body.
Might we combine these ideas with our established ones? Might we, one day, feel a part of it all again, instead of separate? With effort, I think we can. The neo-Freudian psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, seems to agree, as Vivian Gornick highlights in her essay about humiliation, “Put on the Diamonds”.
Human beings, [Freud] argued, were at one with nature until they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, whereupon they evolved into animals endowed with the ability to reason and to know that they felt. From then on, they were creatures apart, no longer at one with the universe they had long inhabited on an equal basis with other dumb animals. For the human race, the gift of thought and emotion created both the glory of independence and the punishment of isolation; on one hand the dichotomy made us proud, on the other lonely. It was the loneliness that proved our undoing. It became our punishment of punishments. It so perverted our instincts that we became strangers to ourselves — the true meaning of alienation — and thus unable to feel kinship with others. Which, of course, made us even lonelier. The inability to connect brought on guilt and shame: terrible guilt, outsized shame; shame that gradually developed into humiliation. If there was any stigma that survived the exile from paradise — that is, the womb — any proof that we were unfitted to make a success of life, it was this. How else to explain all the centuries in which human beings have been mortally ashamed of admitting they were lonely?
Where Fromm joins Freud is in asserting that the very development — consciousness — that brought about our rise and then our fall is the only one that can release us from this pervasive sense of aloneness. The problem is that the consciousness bestowed on us is just barely sufficient; if we are to achieve inner freedom, it is necessary that we become more (much more) conscious than we generally are. If men and women learn to occupy their own inspirited beings fully and freely, Fromm posited, they will gain self-knowledge and thus no longer be alone: they will have themselves for company. Once one has company one can feel benign toward oneself as well as others. Then, like a virus that had been stamped out, humiliating loneliness would surely begin to wane. This is a proposition we’re required to take on faith.
The “Cave Man” reminds me of our simpler, but no less beautiful nature, of how far we’ve come, but also of how “far” isn’t very far at all. If we choose to, we might put ourselves in the mind of those early people, our main concern being then to try not to die, knowing that we will, and to strive to live the best we can until that inevitable end comes, as it came to all of our brothers and sisters before us.
No, I don’t wish to promote an old world order. Progress, innovation, education. Our tendency toward the experimental and the new. Our need to chart the uncharted. This is what makes us who we are, and it's the substance of who we are becoming. But who we were is also important. Fromm believed freedom is an aspect of human nature we can either embrace or escape. To me, making an attempt to understand our place in the world and our relation to the living things around us is an embrace of freedom, even when those understandings come from sources thousands of years old (new understandings are just as well). On the other hand, looking only in the direction society would have us aim our gaze seems an escape — a cowering away — from freedom.
As Pablo Picasso said after seeing 14,000-year-old cave paintings in Altamira, when we think back to where we all come from, “all is decadence.”
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