Before entering the cave I wear sunglasses, eyes closed, so that my pupils can begin to dilate and prepare for the dark. I am one of five who are permitted 35 minutes inside Lascaux. For all that I will see, there is a
reservoir of images I won’t even begin to comprehend. I want to siphon
Lascaux into my emptiness. I want to curl up and sleep inside. To lie on my back and look up. To touch. When I enter I am bombarded with images — so many it is mindboggling. It is exquisite. I now know that art
came full-born into this world.

Whenever I emerge from a cave there is a shock to being aboveground. The smells are heavy and wet. Green. Light is strong and warm. Even on a day of milky skies and clotted clouds, the brightness is intense.

Water formed this system of caves that aerates the land beneath the golden soil of the Dordogne. Sediment dissolves, accretes, freezes, breaks apart, mostly through the force of water. Water is the milk of the
Earth. It is the coil, the vortex, the invisible spine.

I have been inside of the skull, not just skipping over the hair and eyes and mouth of grasses and openings and mounds.

It is as if I had crawled in through a socket and could see where the brain’s cortex has left a pattern on the shell — those wiggly lines that indicate intellect etched into the skull.

I have been in the darkest places, where the first marks were made, where memory and narrative were first given physical form. Mark- making is ingrained as deeply within us as these drawings are embedded in the underbelly of the earth.


LASCAUX