Fugitive Colours by Liz Lochhead

Author:Liz Lochhead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Polygon

Way Back in the Paleolithic

Long long ago

What do you know

Even back then

In them caves of Lascaux

More than thirty thousand years ago

Way back in pre-history

This was already the essential mystery:

Art, art, what is it for?

To bring into being what never existed before.

It’s that elemental

Artistic vibe

That binds us together as part of the tribe –

Every father, mother, every sister, every brother

Every man and every woman

Needed them animals on the cave walls

To define themselves as human.

Art, art, what is it for?

To bring into being what never existed before.

Way, way back and long ago

In the caves of

Chauvet, Altamira, Lascaux

Those first folk –

Those first about-to-be artists – had to face

That blank wall only Nature so far had had a go at

Somehow put it in its place.

So they bravely turned their hand to it,

Stencilling in its outline with the spatter and the spark

Of the spat and blown pigment

That drew so clearly where their hands both were and weren’t

And they made their mark – with Art!

Art, art, what was it for?

To bring into being what never existed before.

In the Cueva de las Manos,

In Chauvet, Altamira and Lascaux

Already this fundamental inclination

That drives pro creation

Forced those folk to fashion

Something beyond religion or ritual – Art!

Art, art, what was it for?

To bring into being what never existed before.

Fetishes of priapic phalluses,

Amulets of big-bellied round-hipped split-vulva-ed Venuses,

Objects of clay, bone, antler, stone

For they knew man could not

Should not

Live by meat alone.

No they were

Not just hunters tasked with bringing home the bacon

But artists

With a mammoth undertaking!

Images of aurochs, bulls and bison,

Ochres, oxides, charcoal, mineral pigments,

Fierce felines, fleet equines, bear and deer –

Made from the life

And from imagination’s figments.

Because their truest impulse was

To capture something

Soon running wild on the walls were

Hordes of realer than real creatures

The torches in the firelight

Flickered into the first motion pictures.

Did they dance?

They danced themselves to trance.

How do we know?

Bone flutes we found, stone drumsticks tell us so.

In the firelight, in the cave, beyond

All the other ordinary passing glories,

Beyond the fugitive music and the stories –

On the walls

Their Immortal Art!

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