Wednesday, 6 May 2020

Eloquent silence


Did you ever see our earliest ancestors smiling ?

Attempts to re-construct recognisable faces from bones, fossils and data were always going to be tricky. But the faces scowl informatively, as if suddenly startled by scientific intrusion. They rarely smile, or betray and emotion we might link with.

And in our imagination, do our cave-dwelling ancestors sit together and gaze at the moon ? Do they sing gently to wakeful children ? Do they worry about what tomorrow might bring ? Do they hum enchanting melodies by their fires or whistle a happy tune to embolden themselves in some deep and scary forest ?

We might just be underestimating their intellectual and emotional capacity. While they lacked knowledge of so much that we take for granted, they were capable of the same sort of emotions as we are. If we survive even 200 more years a species, our cutting-edge knowledge will look crude to those who come after us.  But they should not underestimate our capacity for poetry, care, empathy and grief.

And occasionally we freeze in time. We become a confusing still from a movie. And the freezing baffles communication. When Pioneer was launched it carried a plaque to explain to intelligent life out there who we were, who had sent the spacecraft. This is it:



Things were simpler then with only two genders. Today the plaque would need to be right down the side of the space-craft. The raised arm was to indicate that we had articulated bodies, and the figures show our size relative to the capsule. It also maps some astronomical scientific information, and gives the state of our knowledge at the time of the launch. It’s hard to know what intelligent alien life would make of this.

Kurt Vonnegut imagined an alien on the earth. He was super-intelligent, and carried a vital message. But Vonnegut’s alien could communicate only through a combination of farting and tap-dancing. Someone brained him with a golf-club.



This cave painting reaches across time, and touches our imagination. The artist or artists painted this about 40 000 years ago.

Why ? Maybe because s/he had just discovered that you could blow paint through a hollowed bone, and the spray was interesting. Maybe because s/he wanted to record all the people in the caves, and have them smile as they walked past.

There is not just one hand here. There are large and small hands, both left and right hands, women’s hands and men’s hands. This was a group painting, a Neolithic selfie on a huge scale. Where you see a hand, someone stretched out their fingers on the rock and waited for the cold paint to be blown on the back. Imagine the delight of lifting their hand tentatively away, only to see the shape on the rock, outlined in paint.

They must have laughed, talked about the process. Wondered whether the artist who had the idea was nuts or some kind of crazy person.

None of them will have thought that their hands would be so affecting 40 000 years later across unimaginable oceans of rolling time.

But there is still something immediate, joyfully random, wonderfully gratuitous about the image they created. It reaches out to us, to our imaginations, and is very direct.

Frozen in time, the humanity of the image sings a song we all know.

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