Essay 2: Since Lascaux: Legacies and Likenesses
Images survive us.
They have, since Lascaux. From the dark interior of caves to the darkroom, we have been faithful documentarians of ourselves. At its most basic level, structurally, a photograph is no different from a first step, a first word, or a first kiss. Each is prepositional: a step occurs upon a ground; a word occurs within a fricative atmosphere; a kiss occurs upon another pair of lips. Each act requires the stability and the isometry of an equal counteraction. At least, in the Newtonian sense: the foot requires a surface that will not give way; the word requires a tympanum which will receive the vibrations; kisses do lips require—and photography? The page sensitive to photons. Or the sensor.
However, things leave traces—Derrida deconstructed the politics behind the traces, but let’s name the traces, first: the foot, the footprint; signal and noise; love and union; and, optically, a delightful array of phenomena that the phenomenologist can explore: transmission, refraction, reflection, absorption, absolution…
Why do we create images?
That question has been answered by the little Prince. Because we need a place to put our elephants. Because we need to ask other people if they see what we see. Sadly, it’s a chapeau to most. But to some, our strange images connect. We find our tribes. We find those who see what we see. That is not to say we should all regress to intolerant tribalism…no. Just keep creating art. And sharing. It is enough to make the art.
There is probably not a clearcut answer to why we create images…other than, perhaps, because we can. We can make them. And we can see them. Do we make them because we can see them? Would we make them if we could not see them. Yes. And yes, probably. We likely make images or leave heat signatures and other trails and traces of ourselves that we can’t see. But we probably create art, intentionally and unintentionally. Living. Deceased. We are probably always creating.
Why the cave art? Why the hands and the horses and the scenes of the hunt? Well…I’m going to go with the shadow. With the reflection. With the tricks light can play on us and with the marvelous strangeness of the technology of our eyes…of vision…that we acquired without the co-requisite philosophical capacities to understand what it was we were capable of. Any of our senses is thus so a gift beyond comprehension; were I a chef, I’d be writing this about taste and smell. I am a chef. But I have limited time at the moment—the tomatillo will have to wait until tomorrow. The okra will be okay for the discourse of another day.
Let’s abstract ourselves
Abstract ourselves, anatomically, unto a perfect, squishy sphere. No arms and no legs, no head, not even a nose. We breathe and hydrate and excrete osmotically. We fit in beautiful, seamless tessellation and can withstand infinite compression. We can exist in number infinitely, or singularly—or not at all. We are the metaphysical equivalent of a widget.
What is the point of this exercise? We are going to try to find out what is prerequisite to becoming image makers. Now let us morph—we can either expand or contract, protuberate or ventilate, go out or go in—this is analogous to gendering. We now look like ice-cream cones and donuts, with some cinnamon rolls, madeleines, and Kouign-Amanns.
But now our shapes want shapes, brachiating from ourselves in anatomical fractality, we complete the genetic program for limbs, digits, a head—all powered by our internal development of heart, lung, brain, kidneys, liver—and the line of demarcation? Our skins, the pagination of our species, the unbound volumes in the library of time that float around and occasionally compress, sheets of paper in a vortex, we swirl.
Movement gives birth to time, positionality, to the instant gone. In becoming, do we beget wanting? Do we yearn for images because we have shadows…because we have completed a cellular program, or some kind of sub-cellular program with an alphabet of only 4 letters? Why do we create images? Why?
Well, obviously any answer to a question like that is going to be a kind of Rashomon game coupled with a game of telephone…a thousand blindfolded feelers are experiencing a million-mile-long-elephant-salamander-buffalo-chimera and then describing their patch of the beast in a hushed whisper in the ear of an adjacent participant who in turn whispers what he or she hears to the next in a line of 999 more participants. 1,000 x 1,000 participants later, we have a summary of the beast. It is just so much wonderful and whimsical language in search of its own tail…in search of a pair of eyes…wishing language were science so it could know what it was talking about.
Words are images.
Letters are. In a way, we are all artists who lose art as a result of learning our alphabets. Now I am absolutely talking without scientific authority here. Just thinking how learning to write the same letters strips us of our abilities to write our own wild alphabets…our own asemic signatures. Oddly, calligraphy and the asemic expression of the self is another of my passions. Oddly, image making of that order is much different from photography. But perhaps not, if you allow for post-processing and blurry images.
We may make images so that they may survive us. Images may be both precursor to written language and a post-linguistic subset of oral communication, if that type of paradox is possible, and they may be made so that we might go on with our arcs of existence but still be comforted by the idea that we will outlast ourselves. Our knowledge. Our equations. Our recipes. Our rituals. Our Constitution. Its Amendments. Our instructions for property ownership. Contracts. Law. Law. Without Law, language would only serve to entertain us…to transmit life saving medical knowledge…to designate us…but law…law is the preservative of language. It is also preservative of the non-linguistic world. If it weren’t for law, there would be little need for logic in language. We could all be like Dr. Seuss all the time; less dedicated to reason and more devoted to rhyme.
The image is possibly seen as an alternative to the text…or as an extension…or as another example of a text. Do we read them differently? Images and texts? Do we draw them differently? Wooly wall-mammoths and our memoirs? Is writing so different from drawing or painting? And what of photography? What type of act is that? Perhaps Barthes is the person to read for deeper insights here…Simulacra…it was so long ago…what can I remember of that work now?
I remember the idea he posited about the map…the map that would be of the same size and of mimetic imagery to the topography it was symbolizing. That map…would it be a map at all? Could it exist? Or Foucault. What of his disquisition on Velazquez’s Las Meninas? How deeply have I looked into the system of that painting all these years since, because of that essay? What a departure from the portrait of the artist in a mirror…to paint the painter painting the painting…to have the King and Queen be mirror-people, supplantable by any young observer and a peer…or are the observers lost in obeisant homage to the royal couple, conferring immortality on them and their reign?
A more subtle component
Perhaps there is a more important or perhaps more subtle component at work here…perhaps Wallace’s water is eluding us. What of the phenomenology of flatness? What of the smooth planar surface that makes imaging possible? Well, I guess Abbott explored this. I guess dimensionality and Flatland have been explored. It may be worth mentioning, again, that the ubiquitous illusions of smooth, flat surfaces underwrite our entire programs of written language and art. And since we are in a system with liquid and concavities, the flat surface was unavoidable. There really was no other option but to have still surfaces. Narcissism was inevitable. Not the passive kind…though that, too, was probably a fait accompli at the outset of things. The active kind…the reflection making we have been at since we got our thumbs…the images we created with sound and with symbol.
It was only a matter of time before Shakespeare would give it back to us so poetically and so poignantly, calling us idiots who strut and fret, reducing our linguistic elegance to sound and fury. It was inevitable that Faulkner would seize this and give multiple insights into the harmony and dissonance between cultural and individual programs of perception. Yes. 100 monkeys. Or 1,000. Or an infinity of monkeys. I don’t know how many we need. But our genius, our art, our projects…they might be accidentally producible without us…the infinite drift and arrangement of cosmic dust might, if it were allowed true infinity, arrange itself into all of the letters in all of the words in all of the works by the Bard. Wouldn’t it?
But we have agency. We can accelerate the accidental. And we can lay claim to such accelerations: authorship is the personalization of the accidental. It is beautiful. But sirenic, too. It can lure us onto the rocks…art…all of our pursuits…are they reductions of the actual magic of non-symbolic being? Or is it somehow supernumerary or supernatural? Extra-existential? That sum greater than the parts conundrum? Does our symbolic existence reduce and restrict us? Do we downshift? Is symbolic pursuit a step-down transformer or some kind of transcendent transducer?
Well, I am biased. So I am going to say that the lesser act of symbolic refraction of the magic of life actually and paradoxically increases the experiential dimension of living…put simply, art make us…or me…feel more alive than non-art does. What is non-art? Chapeaus. They are non-art. Don’t feel bad if you got that one wrong. We all do. We age out of perception of magic. But magic is waiting for us to rediscover it…quite hard…quite a commitment…but there like some kind of Einsteinian constant.
Making images is magic.
Or it isn’t. Two people could be taking the same shot with the same camera standing side by side. Same settings. It could be magic for one and not the other. You have to be sensitive to magic for there to be magic. You might have to surrender to it. Don’t worry…logic and science and NO are fine. You can still have all the rules you want. But magic requires a YES without any P.S. or BS. A simple, cosmic surrender to feeling.
This begets bigger questions and East vs. West debates and science and religion and all of the rest of the binary categories of exclusive ideologies. But I don’t see it like that. A yes can be wrapped in a no and vise-versa. Later in this book of essays you will read about the salt-water taffy-making machine and that will describe all of this much better. For now, I’d offer you this riddle:
If a person truly denied the symbolic consensus of arithmetic…that 2 + 2 = 4, would that make it any less true? And what would it hurt, so long as the denier weren’t an engineer? I’m not really for denying such things. But I sometimes wonder about some fairy math, like fairy chess, that might contain an arithmetic where two and two are infinity. Again, to the Flatlander, there is quite a bit of difficulty seeing those in the third dimension.
How could our ancestors know?
How could our ancestors know to communicate to us on their cave walls? How did they perceive these messages in bottles so long before bottles or messages were possible? Perhaps they weren’t thinking of us at all. Who are we not thinking of? What a beautiful time to be alive—so many images. So many images that AI has begun to use them like a two-dimensional-primordial-soup. We literally have images that are no longer reflections or shadows or likenesses or direct products of our own hands; we are grandparents. Our images have learned how to have children. We have been somewhat displaced, in terms of the evolution that has occurred; we and our AI offspring may be of different species. But we have a common ancestor. An artist. A group of artist. Making images. Perhaps many such groups…across what is now Africa and Europe and Asia and the Americas…the convergent evolution of homo symbolicus…a species of artists…let us look at the beginning of the word artificial…art…done in the way of art…as opposed to nature? Perhaps. And let us look at the second word…intelligence. Artificial intelligence is something that we have been doing since Lascaux—all intelligence is artificial…it is the art or us…it is a cumulative, longitudinal self-portrait…not of any one individual, but of all life…and now, it will continue to render itself with or without us, the immortality of art, an eternal gallery of change, a museum with self-painting walls that stretch on and on through time and space, ad infinitum.