Kim Stanley Robinson and David Brody on the Chauvet Caves

In 1879 remarkable paintings of bison were discovered at Altamira, a cave in northern Spain. Their antiquity was debated, but as more and more cave paintings were found in southwestern Europe, improved archeological dating kept pushing them further into the past, culminating with the discovery of Chauvet in 1994. There, in caverns sealed for millennia by rockfall, some of the most exquisite cave paintings ever found turned out to be among the oldest. Artists today can hardly remain neutral about the fact that refined and individualistic practice already existed in remote pre-history. For many, the cultural purpose of those paintings and the artistic mindset behind them is a matter of insatiable curiosity.

Shaman, a 2013 novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, takes place during the Ice Age and portrays the artists of the caves–– the who, how and why of them–– with convincing verisimilitude, never mind that Robinson is better known for books set in the future. In the words of a recent profile in The New Yorker, “Robinson is often called one of the best living science-fiction writers. He is unique in the degree to which his books envision moral, not merely technological, progress.” His widely discussed 2021 novel The Ministry for the Future, about possible responses to climate disaster, was described by Jonathan Lethem as “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.”

I reached out to Mr. Robinson because of my interest in Shaman’s depiction of the life and times of the Ice Age artist, and he was kind enough to agree to answer some questions. Our exchange follows:

David Brody: Shaman is a kind of reverse-engineered, roman à clef about the astonishing 32,000 year-old paintings of animals in Chauvet Cave in France— as one comes to realize when one of your characters paints the famous lions on the hunt, and another the four overlapping horses. A “bison’s pizzle,” as it is called in the book, corresponds to a much studied bison-man/vagina conjunction painted on a hanging protrusion in the cave, while a “Stone Bison” bridges the river valley below just as a natural arch, the Pont d’Arc, does near Chauvet.

How did you get here, in the distant past when all your other novels are set in the future? Were you inspired by Werner Herzog’s 2010 film about Chauvet, Cave of Forgotten Dreams? On the other hand, as a deep thinker about human societies and climate change, I can imagine you must have had an abiding interest in what life was like in the Ice Age, and Shaman presents a vivid, moving and plausible account of the triumphs and tribulations of its characters. Still, in this context you deliberately took on the challenge of explaining, as it were, the genesis of those mysterious paintings–– which is to say, the origin story of art. Was this your aim?

Kim Stanley Robinson: At first it was, to a certain degree. One early working title for this book was The First Artist, but I soon realized that this was not even close to true, since my characters were carrying on a very ancient tradition, even then. So that title was just a way to grab attention, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but not good when inaccurate.

I had wanted to write about Paleolithic people for a long time. This was partly because of my reading, partly because of my time in the Sierra Nevada, which included snow camping, and encounters with petroglyphs. Then also, because science fiction as an overall project is about “the histories that we can never know.” This means the future, mainly, but also alternative histories, and then the deep human past. This last, the time before written history, relies on the science of archeology (and now of genetics) to add any solidity to our speculations. This reliance on science is one of the reasons I consider Paleolithic fiction to be a kind of science fiction—without science you have nothing to base your story on. So, for a long time I wanted to write a novel in each of the subgenres of science fiction that interested me, and this was always one of them.

What made it an active desire for me was the discovery of the Ice Man on the border of Italy and Austria, who turned out to have died around 5,000 years ago, and for a while was named Ötzi. His well-preserved equipment (which included a copper ax, so he was not technically Paleolithic) was very familiar to me from my backpacking gear, which was all the same in its design as what we still use now. And I had spent time in the Alps near where his body was found, so this discovery really interested me. 

Then came the discovery of the Chauvet cave. Images of its paintings were well-distributed almost immediately, and we learned they had been made around 32,000 years ago, so they were almost twice as old as Lascaux and Altamira, but clearly in the same style or tradition. That kind of continuity over thousands of years, with only painting and talk to sustain it, fascinated me. How did they do it?

I had already begun work on my novel before the Werner Herzog movie “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” came out. I saw the movie twice in theaters, in 3-D, then bought a DVD of it so I could watch it frame by frame at home. It’s a very good movie, especially in the way Herzog trusts the cave and its paintings to be the items of interest, so that he pans back and forth across them repeatedly. His usual array of eccentric commentators don’t really impede the success of the film. Along with a great number of books on the Paleolithic and shamanism, that movie was one of my chief aids when writing my book.

DB: A great virtue of your writing, whether in science fiction or paleo fiction, is that it conveys the strategy and tactics of traveling through a landscape, often in dire weather. You’ve written a book, The High Sierra, about your lifetime of exploration in the mountains of California, with forays into the Alps. Your sojourns in the Antarctic are well known and one can guess that you’ve gone spelunking; your off-trail expertise is apparent in the way Shaman’s protagonists are always thinking and evaluating like chess players, many steps ahead. Shaman’s epic narrative allows for a survey of the landscapes and ecosystems of Ice Age Europe as the characters hunt, or are hunted, or simply trek through tundra, forest, mountain and ice cap, as well as on the porous limestone massif of southwestern France, their home range, where cave systems proliferate.

Cave paintings by modern humans from the same time as Chauvet and even earlier have been found as far away as Indonesia, and the use of pigments goes back long before the first expansions out of Africa; art making was part of the tool kit of Homo sapiens from the beginning. But something we can identify as nuanced, self-conscious artistic expression seems to emerge for the first time at Chauvet, Lascaux, Pech Merle and other caves in the area. Obviously, paintings sealed deep in the earth will tend to be preserved, while those on exposed rock will vanish. And one has to be careful, therefore, about adopting an arguably Eurocentric world view about the special artistic status of Chauvet, et al. On the other hand, the unique landscape of the region is inextricable from those paintings, as Shaman makes vividly clear. It’s notable, for example, that while the cave artists of Shaman suffer near starvation every year before the antelope return, the northerners they encounter, who hunt seals in the ice year round, fare much better calorically. Yet these more organized packs of northerners ruthlessly take slaves, while the small cooperative bands of southerners, at the mercy of the herds, are moved to express themselves with dawning artistic genius.

KSR: Yes, I was speculating about these ideas, some of which I had read in the literature, and some of which were my own, including the notion that the domestication of wolves into dogs might have inspired a somewhat similar origin for humans enslaving other humans.  Also, that when a surplus of food was created, in effect by refrigeration, this would begin the process of property, hierarchy, and patriarchy, shifting things from a more scarcity-based and thus egalitarian Paleolithic band society, to bigger Neolithic and agricultural town societies, where the split into classes began. It occurred to me that in the freezer-box of the Ice Age’s far North, next to the fecundity of the ocean, humans could stockpile food from the sea and make a big surplus, thus perhaps causing a bit of a population surge, and then the differentiation into classes would soon follow.  That differentiation had to have begun well before it became full-blown. Then also, while I was writing the novel the dates for the domestication of dogs kept getting pushed back, while the survival of the Neanderthals kept getting set later and later in time, until the two crossed each other (in certain estimations). I found this interesting and wanted to use that historical juxtaposition, and it could plausibly be placed in the time the Chauvet cave was painted.

As for art, I think it likely that much of the world was painted by humans as they moved out of Africa, with paintings on every mural face they could reach; but most of it has been washed away by rain, leaving only the cave paintings, and petroglyphs. For a long time archeologists saw a “creative explosion” around 40,000 years ago (which is why Gary Snyder started dating his letters and poems and essays with 40,000 years tacked onto our date, back in the early 1970s). Now I think that was artifactual only, and not some cognitive leap of the “end of the bicameral mind” type, nor even any kind of major cultural leap. It’s just a matter of available evidence, and the timing of the occupation of the European continent by modern humans. The Neanderthals apparently didn’t do much cave art, but modern humans did. Thus the “explosion” of 40,000 years ago; it was probably just an arrival. Elsewhere in the world, petroglyphs and some pictographs show people were probably painting everywhere they went, as soon as they got there.  As you say, Homo sapiens began as an artistic species.

DB: Shaman’s depiction of gender roles is complex. In ways, the pack is matriarchal, with marriages and other social relations being entirely the prerogative of women, on pain of death by poisoning. Women rule the roost. An elder medicine woman, Heather, is the wisest member of the pack and employs the scientific method to test new potions; a young mother, Elga, proves the strongest under duress. But it seems that only men can be shamans, and only shamans can paint in the caves. Indeed, the very act of painting is an expression of male sexuality. From the vantage of the young apprentice, Loon, you write: “Now they were truly in the womb of Mother Earth, the kolbos, the sabelean.… They were moving inside her. The walls around them were slightly slick with damp, as it was in Elga’s vixen. Their paintings were impregnating Mother Earth with her most sacred animals; it was as clear as could be. Thorn would paint her kolby’s walls with his paint, and she would birth the animals as he painted, and on they would go.” It’s worth mentioning that sex in all its manifestations from unashamed lust to spiritually transcendent lovemaking is a frequent part of the stream of consciousness, so that frank descriptions of the cave as a literal womb seem true to character (as does the fecundity of language).

But the question of whether the painters were male or female or both is not settled by current archeology. You are known as a dedicated activist (thank you!) not only for climate sanity but on the side of democratic socialism, and you are surely aware that contemporary art, after decades of struggle for gender equality, is, if anything, currently dominated by brilliant woman artists. The heroine of 2312, your book previous to Shaman, is an artist famous for her interplanetary asteroid art and occasional “goldsworthies and abramovics on the land and her body.” Yet you chose to exclude women from the caves at this (I might as well say it) seminal moment in art history. Care to explain further?

KSR: I regret that my novel gives this impression, although I can see why it might happen, because my characters Loon and Thorn could be seen as typical, rather than simply the individuals I wanted to focus on. I think there were women shamans in my novel, at the Eight-Eight festival where many bands of people congregated in summer; but this is a small point compared to the prominence of the two main characters. Women were also inside the caves in all the group’s cave-visit ceremonies. Everyone was returning to the womb of Mother Earth, not just men. So I hope a close reading will show that I wasn’t trying to say only men could be shamans or artists at that time. That would be inaccurate to the historical record, as far as we have it (footprints and hand prints). I should have made that clearer, and I wish I had known the word “shamanka” which apparently is the female form of the word in some languages where the original word came from. I would have been very happy to have that word in there.

I did want to show that although gender roles were pretty defined then, and there were some separations in people’s social life and roles by way of gender (as in first people societies still living today), men and women were equal in social power. This was a pre-patriarchal time—or so I wanted to assert, and I think I did, and I think it makes sense given what we know. Heather is in fact a different kind of shaman, doing the part of the shaman work that makes her into their medicine woman. From our perspective she can look like an early scientist, since she employs some aspects of the scientific method, and has that kind of mind—using trials and checking on results, applying medicines, and so on. So in some ways I thought it was interesting to suggest that the first scientists were perhaps mostly women, while the first artists were mostly men, just to reverse our usual gender biases of today—although in patriarchy I supposed we tend to think of men as first at everything, except childbirth. But in the Paleolithic there were probably defined gender roles for certain daily activities. In a lot of this I simply followed indigenous practices that seem to date back to before modernity changed everyone.

Some women readers have reported to me that they feel a bit left out of the interiorities of the novel—there are only a couple of chapters told from the point of view of Elga’s thinking, providing the briefest of glimpses into a woman’s interior point of view, with her social life among other women depicted. But most of the novel is a bildungsroman tightly focused on Loon. We never get inside Heather’s mind, but we never get inside Thorn’s either. It’s Loon-centric, the novel has high protagonicity, as the narratologists would say. I wanted that. But a little more care would have helped me to be more suggestive on gender issues in that era. More than one woman reader has suggested that I should write a sequel from the women’s point of view. That would be bold, and is a good idea, but I don’t want to write a sequel to that novel, or to any of my novels. I don’t believe in sequels. 

DB: If not a sequel, perhaps a trilogy, like your Mars novels? I love your suggestion that women may have invented science, although perhaps that only lends weight to the idea of segregated gender roles, and thus of men as the first artists, especially given your dramatization of male shamans entering the womb of Mother Earth in order to impregnate Her by painting there. In a different context, Thorn observes that “People think just like they fuck, women inward and men outward.” Taking him up on that, if a shamanka such as Heather were to paint, would it be with a different set of metaphors? Do you see art, at its core, as transmuted sexual energy?

KSR: No, I don’t see art as transmuted from other human energies, I think art has its own dynamics, and comes out of its own impulses in us. No substitution or transference theories, please, which quickly lead to Freud’s diagnosis of the artist as neurotic. I much prefer Jung’s sense of inner depths, and a collective unconscious that artists are tapping into, if we want to psychologize the artistic impulse, which I don’t. 

More than once I described the whole pack of them re-entering Mother Earth at special times. It was not a male thing, or a sexual thing—or, not procreation but rather a return to the womb. But also, a crossing into a different realm entirely, as in shamanistic practices all over the world. I think it was pretty common to regard the Earth as the great mother figure, you see this in many origin stories from all around the world, with the sky as the father and the Earth the mother. I was following tradition, in terms of how it must have felt, and I don’t think my novel excludes women from the experience of going into the caves, or of making art. Women are gathering the grasses and reeds and weaving all the baskets, with patterns in them—are you saying this was not art? I don’t think that old art/craft dichotomy holds very well now. So the women in my novel were artists too—they just weren’t Loon and Thorn.

DB: Okay, perhaps I am guilty of confusing your point of view with that of your characters, each of whom, man or woman, has their own strong take on things. Moving on, the apprentice, Loon, and his teacher, Thorn, are shown eating mushrooms and smoking a hallucinogenic mixture in order to conjure spirit animals and prophetic visions, including when they enter the deepest part of the cave to paint. There, you convey the further disorientations of sensory deprivation, as well as the cinematic and holographic effects of existing paintings when they appear out of the darkness. You also depict the terror of Loon’s visions, as when he feels his hand being pulled into the wall of the cave, and has to be rescued by Thorn.

You’ve written about your own experiences with LSD in your youth. I’m guessing you also read the Castaneda books, beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan–– a gripping account which, if it is fiction, surely warrants Nobel consideration; otherwise, it must be taken as an uncommonly lucid transcription of a shamanic apprenticeship, every hallucinogenic lesson of which is steeped in existential terror. (At the end of the Teachings, Castenada writes that he is too frightened to continue; only several years later did he resume the apprenticeship, as recounted in A Separate Reality and the rest of the series.) In light of Don Juan’s version of shamanism, not to mention my own youthful experiments with hallucinogens, including while trying to paint, I find it hard to imagine Thorn and Loon rendering the alert faces of those animals in Chauvet with such keenly observed naturalism while in a proper shamanic state. Is it a matter of dosage?

KSR: Good question. I’m not sure, although I can report that my own experiments with writing poetry while under the influence of psychedelics were ridiculous. Also, I agree the Carlos Castaneda books are powerful stories, whether fictional or not; they impressed me when I read them. In keeping with Don Juan’s teachings, I think making art is best done in a state of alert lucidity. Not that it always happens that way, but given the flickering torch or lamp light that had to have lit the caves for the cave painters to see what they were doing, one thing that impresses me is the paintings’ fine proportions and their realism.  

That said, the only painted cave I’ve ever been in myself, Pech Merle, has the famous “Spotted Horses” panel, very trippy, and also a clever compound creature’s head, which has distinct features of both a boar and a bear, as if it were a pun in English—obviously not the case, but the creature depicted very clearly has the features of both animals, and is pretty clearly a joke, though not a pun. You don’t have to be tripping to make such a joke, and as for the gorgeous horses, there might have been actual spotted horses back then, like appaloosas now; we don’t know, as we don’t have any remains of their coats. So these horse paintings could have been a realism, or a joke or game, or a psychedelically-inspired vision. No way to be sure. 

I do think The Mind in the Cave, and the whole case for shamanic psychedelics that was made by Jean Clottes and David Lewes-Williams, with psychedelics of different kinds being one of the identifying features of shamanism worldwide—is pretty convincing, even though it must remain speculative, given the thousands of years separating us from the cave painters. In my novel I tried to suggest that it was indeed a feature of their lives, but not a primary feature. It was shaman stuff and even the shamans differed in their practices.  And certainly, I think the artists’ work in the caves generally suggests a clear and still eye, hand, and mind.  But who knows.

DB: Art-making is woven into the epic narrative of Shaman. After a climactic rescue and return, Thorn dies, and Loon, the new shaman, journeys alone for the first time into the depths of the cave to paint. The episode serves as a kind of coda, one with its own rescue. But more than the narrative, per se, painting, its materials and practice, is integrated into your ongoing exegesis of landscape and technology, while its subject matter is foreshadowed by a continual evocation of how humans consider themselves cousins to the animal tribes they live among.

As Loon begins to paint a horse, his innermost mind takes over for a while— the Third Wind, as it calls itself, addressing the reader in the first person. When the Third Wind had appeared previously, it was to save Loon from exhaustion and starvation, commandeering his flagging body. But here it makes a “mistake” and then withdraws to let “him” (i.e., Loon) fix it. In Loon’s experience, he had been “painting without looking.” Now he sees a problem with the set of overlapping horse heads which he had intended as a single animal in sequence (a kind of proto-animation). The “mistake,” though, opens up an unexpected world of visual puns and syntactic ambiguity: Maybe it is both a single animal in motion and four separate horses. Or one horse, but at different stages of life. More revelations emerge from the process itself, until “the story he told was not his problem. He just needed to draw them, and after that they would tell their own story. He wouldn’t be sure what he would get until he drew it.”

The overlaps and metamorphic quality of Paleolithic cave paintings are often interpreted as attempts at a kind of cinema, as here, or as ignorance of the rules of occlusion, or simply the result of multiple painters at different times. But you are adamant on the point of the artist being self-consciously punning and ambiguous, even humorous at times, and of the entire process being fundamentally improvisational and spontaneous. In Heather’s account, the strange bison-man/vagina is less a matter of some mythic dogma lost to time than a naughty, proto-Surrealist souvenir left behind by her obsessed former lover, who can hardly paint anything else. “He had it in him,” she says.

Picasso famously remarked that the cave painters had invented everything. I think what he meant was precisely this combination of metamorphic freedom, psychic obsession, and self-conscious ambition. Many leading painters today––for starters, Kara Walker, Amy Sillman, Dana Schutz and Shahzia Sikander, and plenty of men as well–– might be said to practice still in the tradition of these Ice Age breakthroughs, as you convincingly render them here. Three ideas seem especially relevant: The idea of the artist going in and out of ordinary awareness, of sometimes heeding a bicameral inner voice. The idea that mistakes (in whatever state they occur) are the means to discover the true subject, much as mutations are necessary for adaptation and evolution. And lastly, the related idea of painting as an abstract theater in which function follows form, with purely visual considerations leading, and symbolic content following— or not. “Things overlap” explains Thorn about the paintings: by “things” he means not just animals, but concepts, events, beings, stories.

Did you derive all this insight into how an artist thinks merely from close analysis of the paintings? If so, you seem to have reverse engineered not only the plot of the novel, but also the birth of artistic consciousness.

KSR: Well, but maybe not the birth of artistic consciousness—just the exercise of it, in an individual, and in a young artist at that, maybe feeling it working well for the first time.

Also, I don’t think reverse engineered is the right term here or above. We deduce aspects of past life from material traces, then imagine what it would be like if we were there.  Maybe that’s what you mean.

You can see why Picasso would have been stunned by Lascaux, in a way that someone like Bonnard wouldn’t have been. Bonnard was about color and fuzzy edges.  Picasso was about line, and color for him was not a major pleasure in its own right. So when Picasso saw Lascaux he must have felt a powerful sense of affirmation.  His inner artist had already seen these kinds of images, he now had confirmation that he had been tapping into something very deep.  I can imagine him being mind-boggled and thrown into an ecstasy.

All the aspects you ask about in your question came into play for me, yes. The Third Wind was particularly important. This narrator of the novel is some kind of spirit being.  Early on I realized that the narrator of this novel needed to be not me but rather some entity from that time, explaining aspects of that time to its listener—who was listening, because the story was told, not written. This was important—Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy was crucial here for my thinking. These epic poems that got recited by shamans and poets and maybe everyone, were memorized, and then spoken aloud.  The written versions came hundreds or thousands of years later, and a story like “the Swan Wife,” which Loon recites, has versions told all over the Arctic and all the way down the Americas—it has to be extremely old. Also, as oral beings only, these stories could never be checked against a “correct” version.  They had to be recreated with each telling. 

So my novel needed to be a transcript of someone talking to us. When I understood that, I had to abandon an early draft, luckily not very far along, and start over again. In those years I was very much enjoying the creation of my novels’ narrators, who were not me but rather characters in their own right, either within the novel’s story, as with Cartophilus in Galileo’s Dream, or Ship in Aurora, or else some curator or knower of the story, who knew things I don’t know, and eventually came clear as some entity telling the story or writing the novel—this is true of 2312 and New York 2140, which has many chapters from a ranting New Yorker called “the Citizen.” 

It was a productive game to play, and never more so than in Shaman, where the Third Wind was a crucial discovery. After the Third Wind showed up and took over, my job was to get out of the way. Although I did need to keep a close eye on language, and not use words that came from our time and would be foreign to that culture. I realized my earlier narrators had the habit of starting quite a few sentences with the subordinate clause, “In fact.” But a fact is not a concept from the Paleolithic, it is a modern notion. I needed to say “In truth” perhaps, and in general, to look for Anglo-Saxon words for things. And even Anglo-Saxon wasn’t good enough sometimes; we use those terms for sexual organs for instance, with alternatives from Latin—both were wrong for my people, weighted by us with values that weren’t theirs—I needed Paleolithic words that wouldn’t carry our judgy modern ideas about these parts of ourselves, so I looked to Basque and Proto-Indo-European, or to animal metaphors.

All this was my version of paying attention to my artistic materials, in the way that my characters were making their paints. And as a result of that, to me the novel reads poorly in French, precisely because French is all Latinate, and can’t deploy an “older” or more basic vocabulary (older here is not an actuality of linguistic history but rather clouds of connotation).

Back to the Third Wind—getting out of the way, channeling other voices, letting the hand be guided by spirits rather than conscious intentions—yes, all these aspects of art were very much on my mind. And in doing all this, it occurred to me pretty often what a huge advantage visual artists have over writers, in that a visual artist can step back mid-process, and simply look at the work—judge it from a different part of oneself, more conscious and critical, then step back into the process and let the—the what? The other, the artist, the creator—go back to work, while the person involved (the curator or the critic) tries to stay out of the way. So there’s a moment where you can look at your work and like it or not. Reading sentences, one doesn’t get that same angle of judgment, of how it looks or hefts, it’s much more abstract and suggestive and unsatisfactory. With a cave painting you could pause and say, That looks right, so continue.

But then if you were to look and say, Oh no! That looks wrong! There would be no chance to erase, in the cave. You’d abandon that panel (you can see that sometimes) or else try to incorporate the error by changing the goal. For Loon, the great painting of the four stacked horses (or is it five); you can go to French websites that show the order of the painting of it, horse by horse; and it seemed to me that there was a single line of the next to topmost horse’s head and back that could have been on purpose, to show movement in cartoon style, or else it was simply a mistake and the artist decided to turn it into a semi-seen horse’s top, wedged between two fully depicted horse heads. And also, the artist didn’t really have to decide about this, but merely paint on. I thought it was interesting. I am pleased to say that many hours of looking at just that painting, and also the website sequence of the painting happening in the order of the heads as they were painted, gave me these thoughts. I thought they were interesting enough to share in this way.

DB: I stand corrected: reverse engineering is what the archeologists did to decipher the stroke order, whereas you bring the archeology to life––and rich veins of anthropological conjecture as well. I suppose what I meant was that you begin by treating the artistic process with the same analytical zeal that you bring to landscape, technology, and political relations. And when the evidence changes, your analysis changes: a later scene shows Loon angrily making handprints in the shape of a bison in order “to stick Thorn’s spirit to the wall.” Here Loon becomes something of an avant-garde expressionist, inventing “a new kind of stump drawing” by channeling his rage. The exquisite spotted horses of Pech Merle would presumably elicit another state of artistic consciousness, more along the lines of Bonnard, perhaps. (I’ve seen those amazing horses too, and in fact, it was a guide at the site who recommended Shaman to me.)

As for orality, I can attest that Shaman works splendidly as an audiobook. I hadn’t thought about why some of your other books with more complex syntax seem better read to oneself. (I did read Shaman myself after listening, but of course by then my own inner voice had been influenced by the interpretation—an unavoidable trade off, even though the reading by Graeme Malcolm is excellent.)

In any case, hearing rather than reading brings out the steady pulse of the prose, which can easily modulate into the poetic stanzas of ritual stories told around the campfire. Rhythmic punctuation is added by numerous proverbs which salt the characters’ speech––including that of the narrator, aka the Third Wind. These mnemonic cadences are no less integral to the preservation of collective knowledge than the stories. Ostensibly well-worn, the proverbs are practical but also philosophical; for example, “After dark, every cat becomes a lion.” Some seem to have been handed down through the generations to today, such as, “The eyes speak what the tongue can’t say.” In a similar way, your book imagines that key aspects of the artist’s practice have been handed down as part of this human “toolkit.” Perhaps the most important of these is the spirit of invention, so evident at Chauvet, but as you say, likely already an age-old tradition. Either way, the spirit of invention can only be handed down by reinventing it with each new generation—shaman to shaman, artist to artist. Perhaps that is the lesson of the book.

KSR: In an oral culture, passing along learning and expertise seems to have happened in part by way of proverbs. I gathered a lot of books of proverbs from various traditions, many of which could easily be thousands of years old. I particularly liked “Never fall asleep when your meat is on the fire,” which had the ring of deep time. I made lists of these proverbs and sayings, and included as many as I could fit in.  

Then also the oral epics that took all night to perform, these had to be remembered by the rule of threes and other narrative devices, including foreshadowing and then dropping back in the story to add something that might have been forgotten, and so on. Then also song lyrics, where a tune would have helped fix the phrasing, and vice versa. So all these were opportunities to add to the story in various ways. 

One favorite for me was Pippilouette’s story of trying to find the east end of the world.  Another was the Third Wind’s poem that gets added to one line at a time through the course of the story, until the last line makes it a direct address to the listener/reader of the book. Also the ritual poems for greeting spring, for burials, and so on. After so many science fiction novels in which I was inventing a culture, or some future events, it was a deep pleasure to keep thinking as I wrote, something like this had to have happened. It felt like tapping in.

I’m happy to hear that the guide at Pech Merle recommended my book to you. I think he was my guide there too, as my visit was arranged by my French editor, an American named Tom Clegg, who took me to Pech Merle after sending the new French edition of the book to the English-language guide there. That visit was one of the great days of my life, and the guide took extra care to show me things and tell me his theories; he knew I cared.

Also, I agree: the audiobook version by Graeme Malcolm is superb. That meant a lot to me. I can’t really read my books, they are too close to memorized, and also I tend to keep rewriting them as I read, or skip ahead to parts I like, etc.; it’s odd enough as a process that I don’t even try anymore. But hearing an audiobook version is really different. I can’t see the text, and the words come into a different part of my brain, the ear part not the eye part, and often my ear mind is surprised by what I hear, especially if the reader is good, as here. Malcolm chose to do the older characters in a strong West Country British accent, then the younger people have more ordinary British accents. I wrote him a thank you letter and asked him why he chose to do it that way, thinking maybe that was just the way he talked, but no; he wrote back to say he had a friend with that accent, and it just seemed right to him—sounded ancient somehow, or simply right. He told me that it had been a special book for him, partly because the book he had recorded right before it had been a cookbook!—an easy act to follow! Anyway, for me, listening to him telling the story in my ear, while out in my garden weeding, was really a powerful experience, very like the Third Wind actually talking to me, especially during Thorn’s death. More than ever I felt like this story had come from somewhere else, that this was not something I myself had done. I had gotten out of the way and it had come pouring through. Surely this is the great feeling for an artist. People make a mistake when they think that art is about self-expression—some artists also make this mistake! For the kind of novels I like, it’s really more a matter of getting out of the way.

I wonder if this is a feeling that hits visual artists more than writers, just because of the materiality of the medium, and also the embodied nature of doing it. It seems to me the artist must watch their work of art appear in the world with the same sense of surprise as the people who look at it later. Intention is all very well, but how do we even know what we intend until we see it? This is a joy for any artist, I think. To be a conduit to something human but not personal to oneself.

David Brody, City of Industry, 2023, Oil on linen, 60”x50"

David Brody is an improvisational painter, abstract animator and sporadic writer, living in Brooklyn. He and Francis Cape named a remote waterfall in the California Sierras in honor of Kim Stanley Robinson.