WE ALL HAVE our Alice-moments in actual life.
We know that an amazed but curious British girl somehow slipped into a rabbit-hole and found herself in a totally strange place that defies the logic, sanity, sterility, order of a conventional adult world. I call it the typical Alice-moment. An instant when you discover suddenly something big, something extraordinary or very exciting or path-breaking or, in some cases, even a new territory for your king. Archimedes called it his eureka-moment. Galileo, his sun-moment; Newton, his apple-moment; Columbus, his America-moment; Marx, his Capital-moment; Joyce, his Ulysses-moment; Spielberg, his Jurassic-moment and J K Rowling, her Harry Potter-moment…well, the list just goes on. The ordinary guys also have their Alice-moments. They find something extraordinary by accident.
The underlying point is simple, yet profound: inevitably there is an element of irrational to some of the great rational discoveries. I am not referring to some kind of a strict binary involved, but talking of a crazy or silly or sad moment that often attends or precedes the birth of a great idea or breathtaking find; some kind of apparent illogicality that suddenly leads us—or, at least, some of us, the more gifted/ imaginative ones—to a heightened sense of lucidity; a dark moment, let us say, followed by a sudden clarity that illuminates the entire complex quest and delivers the desired result in most simple terms. I mean Archimedes going to his bath and discovering his principle of buoyancy there, while lying naked in the bath-tub! Yes. It is an Alice-moment: a drab scenario leading abruptly to a remarkable new discovery. Or, Columbus leaving Alcazar castle in Cordoba, in1492 in utter despair, rejected by Queen Isabella and then called back by the King Ferdinand and getting their approval for his fourth voyage. Imagine the surprise of the dejected man going on a mule and then getting the message from the King to come back for a final talk. And then getting royal decree for a voyage long on choppy seas. The world never remained same after the turnaround in the life of this adventurer who brought Americas in contact with Europeans at a historical point of emerging modern imperialistic search for new colonies and the plundered profits from such pre-Columbian nations. A new world for everybody, at least, in Europe. Same way, little Alice found a new world for herself and revelled in her solo discovery of the fantastic, the bizarre. Discovery of a novel land. In fact, the prim little girl found a perfect marvelous place that all the sane humans have been searching in every age and culture. Her El Dorado thing. It was a fabulous territory very remote from a stiff Victorian world of prudery, sexual control and smugness. A kind of amazing retreat from everyday regimented reality of frightening proportions and where she is the sole navigator. An autonomous finder of things weird that make no sense to a rational mind but perfectly understood and accepted by the fertile mind of a child. She is on her own and finds creatures strange like the Cheshire Cat and a floating grin sans the cat or the talking rabbit or the mad tea party; a country upside down, where everyone is refreshingly mad and admits it freely, sans any fears of being committed to a mental hospital for being mad. But then madness is the armour worn by the incorrigible questers everywhere. Madness is the DNA of every new-territory-seeker and gives the nutty search a ring of red-hot passion, pure white energy, a strange fixation. Great discoverers know this paradox very well. Columbus knew this. Our beloved Don Quixote, the crazy fellow, knows this truth as well.
BUT ALICE IS fake.
Most literary characters may appear like that to some of the cynical critics. To others, they may not. It all depends how you look at literature and literary characters. Hamlet is unreal for your worldly agnostic disillusioned fifty-six-year balding pot-bellied pa but real for twenty-two-year dreamy you, still untouched by the great worldly skepticism around you. Literature is imagination refined by realities around the recording mind. It talks of unreal lands deliberately. Then, why this insistence for realism in fiction? They reveal profound truths, the great works of art and profound truths are profound in whichever form they are artistically presented. Homer saw gods and heroes and makes us see them again, upon reading the sacred Homeric texts. The epic Mahabharata reveals the basic lessons of life still relevant to us. A world co-inhabited by gods and heroes, now vanished forever. Heaven was never inaccessible to our forefathers; we, the Homo sapiens have permanently lost that vision, that natural ability to see the celestial spheres from a terrestrial perspective. We, the moderns, see infinity of blue sky only. Math teacher Lewis Carroll could see strange realms that challenge our ordered rational worlds and seriously mock the desire for rationalism. Cervantes did that earlier for us. The more regimented and rational a society, the more it is headed for madness of different political kind. Ask Hitler, if in doubt. Literature is altogether different.
It is all about creating magical worlds that are more real than the sordid stinking real. It transmits trans-national and time-defying truths. It is revelatory. Joycean epiphanies.
Anyway, these meditations on truths artistic and their general validity should not detain us further in this fictional account of a strange journey undertaken by the author indicated by the conventional first-person singular number I. The author is a character here in this strange narrative of a romantic journey into the dim past of the human species. OK. Some bald facts first. As I stated some Joes can have their magical moments and discover hidden lands exotic. I, too, had my electrifying Alice-moment. The route to it was different. I had not slipped through an unending rabbit-hole, of course, but rather stumbled upon a yawning old ordinary cave that contained some unexplored treasures artistic. The cave-paintings, unexpectedly found, opened up an abrupt passage to a past that very few beings can tread these days…unless, they have a sympathetic imagination.
Here is the how of it for the inquisitive fellas who want to know what can happen to historical persons or real narrators in imaginative narratives and realms exciting, linguistically and neatly recreated and reordered for the interested readers. I was travelling on a lonely highway and had a break-down there and almost hypnotized, in a trance, wandered into a nearby thicket that was swaying invitingly before me and then…
…I found myself in the middle of a large and wide dark cave and found a wonderland as fascinating as the Alice-land teeming with strange creatures. Certain discoveries happen by chance or by the divine design or both. Anyhow, I stood there in that damp cave, alone and bewildered. As I said my car had a sudden break-down on the gleaming deserted highway and I had wandered, nay pulled by some force, into a nearby thicket and a gaping cave had appeared suddenly before my startled eyes and sucked me inside, like some huge magnetic field!
It was my destiny, of course!
A strange territory presenting itself to me suddenly.
No kidding. It just happened like this only; believe it or not.
As I adjusted my shocked eyes, I saw in the faint light, a series of very primitive cave paintings in a cobwebbed virgin cave. I had trod upon the sleeping centuries. Almost ushered back into a primitive past by some mysterious force.
The paintings were beautiful.
Small hunting scenes that looked simple line drawings of great originality. They had their own vibrancy of colours and a subdued intensity of raw felt emotions. The energy frozen inside the series of cave drawings—done largely in ochre and on the walls—radiated outside and touched me profoundly. My soul got affected by that instant. Simple scenes of everyday life were depicted through the paintings. Small and broad, bearded and matted-hair men—Neanderthals?—bent over the tools and hunting ferocious animals by circling and trapping them collectively. I felt seduced by the raw energy being transmitted directly from a lapsed era.
I looked closely—AND THE ALICE-MOMENT STARTED—and saw, believe it or not, the matted man suddenly look up and wink at me! The basic vertical-horizontal criss-crossing lines got suddenly animated and enlarged; the circle of squat swarthy hairy men inside the painting became alive and moving. Before I could react, I got sucked again into their circle, landing bang in their middle like a piece of human meteor hitting the earth harmlessly.
My alien presence surprised the small compact well-knit group of the early humans. Some stared at me malevolently, holding their glinting wooden spears and sharp-edged tools, about to charge. A blast of frozen wind buffeted me on my freshly-scrubbed clean oval face and the icy tentacles of the heavy wind cut through my thin cotton T-shirt and cotton denim jeans. I started shivering in that cold desolate hostile cruel place—vulnerable and defenseless individual intruder against a jabbering group. They said something in their tongue and then a strong muscular short man raised his spear to kill me. I shivered violently—due to cold and elemental fear.
Just then entered the commanding Eve. An old wrinkled woman with strong body and lined face, clad in animal skins. They became quiet. She looked at me and said something to the group. After few seconds, they beckoned me. I followed. We all entered a nearby huge cave and sat down before a dancing fire. Surprisingly, I could understand their strange language fast and became conversant with it. I spoke their language, a gibberish earlier, now a dialect easily understood, and they accepted me as one of their own, not an intruder, thanks to the caring Eve. The group was huddled around the fire for warmth. It was huge dark cave inside, faintly lit up by the dancing tongue of a brilliant fire. Babies were bawling. A wounded man was being tended to by a squat woman. Bones of animals were littered about. Some men were working on the gleaming clean bones, fashioning out some spear or a hunting tool. It was warm inside. The human numbers reassured me. A group of thirty-forty people living as a close-knit clan. There was warmth that I had never seen in my adult life in the metros of the modern world that I had exited a few minutes ago. This sense of community and concomitant bonding in a primitive wandering group was surprising. We, the tech-tribals living in open-office cubicles in the day and small serviced apartments in the night, could never experience this lost sense of intense solidarity. We just celebrate loneliness and make a virtue of solitary existence in the vertical cages of tall buildings, totally aloof and cold, swimming in our solitude of metro lifestyle.
Their close emotional ties, their coordinated manual movements, their functioning as an overall well-oiled team, in and out of dangerous situations, was again demonstrated to me shortly after.
As we sat there in the comfort of the cavernous cave-enclosed womb—like in a restricted place with a high ceiling and rough floor, having an opening in the front that doubled as both entry and exit and presently covered by a huge boulder and guarded by few hefty men—a shrill sound pierced the outside cold air. It chilled my heart. The sound was terrible and high-decibel, not heard in the urban centers. The men immediately grew silent and alert like a pack of attacking hunters. The lead man, a solid muscled wrestler of a bloke, motioned for everybody to be silent. Then, he gestured and picked up his spear and axe. The group followed. They removed the boulder aside and tiptoed outside. Hypnotized, I too followed the group and again came outside into the open. It was a raw day. A blanket of snow was sweeping the dull landscape in soft whiteness. In the background could be seen some craggy hills and a vast floor of blinding white snow was spread out before us. And before us stood the mammoth.
A huge creature emitting blood-curdling sounds from its deep throat. I had never seen such a gigantic creature in my life. It must have been a 14-foot high woolly creature, weighing 14 tons, with 3.4 meter tusks. The group was elated by the sight of the big game—enough food for few days in the cold hilly country for them. The men surrounded the mammoth towering above them on the high ground. A blast of wind from the hills beyond blew across the uneven terrain. I stepped aside, scared by the towering hulk over me, my modern instinct for danger and survival not that sharp as my primitive ancestors were. They were all covered in two-three layers of skin and fur, their feet wrapped up in the skin of the mammoth or the bison, tailored to meet the requirements of the extreme cold climate of the north Europe. The animal was facing a group of experts, the hunters of the big game and it was a classic one Vs the many strategy of the early humans. The Neanderthals attacked the tusker, flanking the trumpeting elephant and impaling it with sharp tools of pointed bones and flints. For me, it looked like a perfectly choreographed killing ritual by a team of specialists whose skills and killing instincts were honed by the shared experience of collective hunting for food. They were many beings but presented themselves as one fused human body with tens of hands, eyes and feet—very much like eastern many-limbed, multi-armed gods. The synchronization of these arms, feet and eyes was superb and rhythmic. Danger has united them. Food needs have made them stick and act as a unitary body of single desires for survival and security. After killing the woolly mammoth, the triumphant group returned to the warmth of the yawning cave set deep inside the face of a huge rock looking up at the sun. The men drew the boulder back and covered the mouth of the cave with the large stone that no predator could easily dislodge. We all were safe inside the womb now. Eve then took over. The meat was enough for the group. They were happy with the result of the day’s expedition. The men talked while the women cooked. Some younger ones tended to the babies. It was a happy large family.
Then I saw the painter.
He was small and compact man. Highly engrossed, immune to the noise around in the dimly-lit merry cave, the painter was painting scenes of the everyday tough life of these early survivors of the species, battling daily odds to remain alive, cheating death and disease in most hostile environment, creating cave paintings of stark beauty and simplicity. More than 40,000 years ago, these early humans or hominids, found art as a release and as a totem. I approached the silent painter. He ignored me and went on doing his work. A couple of junior painters were assisting him in the task of painting by grounding colours, fetching the water or sharpening the crude painting tools. These were line drawings and colours were very bright. I watched fascinated. His hands moved swiftly, creating patterns out of the simple lines, on the rough surfaces of the cave wall. Big game started emerging: bison, woolly mammoth, rhinoceros and reindeer. The junior artists just gaped at the subtle transformation of the rough surfaces into an intensely-felt scene of live and dangerous battle between the gigantic animals and the puny humans functioning as one entity. The painter moved on to the other parts of the wall and created more such scenes of beauty. As I trailed, the bearded and dreadlocked painter of low receding forehead and snub nose looked up and glared. “Oh, sorry, master! I do not intend to disturb you,” I blurted. He gave me a puzzled look. I understood. I switched from English into the Neanderthal dialect. “No masters here. We all are equal. We all work for the clan. We hunt and gather food. I love to draw the life around. It is then completed by others. I have no right over the paintings here. They belong to us all,” he said, wiping his tools on the rough animal skin worn by him. Amazing! The most primitive clan producing the first artists of the pre-literate societies. Unwittingly leaving their anonymous prints for future. “These are magical lines and circles,” said the painter solemnly. “These lines and circles protect our hunters from danger and put a spell on the big game. They give us power over the predators.” I got the idea. Art was not empty, anemic, sterile but loaded with symbolism and meaning.
It made sense to them, the early humans, trying to control the hostile external environment through crude representation of the world. They were trying to sort out. The very act of artistic cognition of the world and its linear rendering made them superior to the animal order. The hugely-proportioned animals were no match to the brainy bipedal beings who had the ability to think in symbolic manner. Mimetic art evolved over the centuries, becoming more complex and rich, transiting gradually from its communal origins to idiosyncratic individual view of the felt immediacies.
A SUDDEN JOLT and I was ejected from that magical circle of the Neanderthals into a gross world.
“You had fallen asleep, Sir,” said the mechanic to me smilingly. “The car is ready.”
I smiled at him. Alice-like, I was back again into a dull world. There was no trace of the wonderland. A gleaming highway loomed ahead.
Art has allowed me a rare glimpse. The recovery of that precious sensibility or moment was, in itself, rewarding.
Sunil Sharma is a bilingual critic, poet, literary interviewer, editor, translator, essayist and fiction writer. Some of his short stories and poems have already appeared in prestigious journals like: Munyori, the Bicycle Review , Muse India, Kritya, the Seva Bharati Journal of English Studies, Indian Literature, Indian Journal of Post-colonial Literatures, and Prosopisia; and have been anthologized in national and international collections. His debut novel—The Minotaur—dealing with dominant ideologies and sociopolitical realities of the 20th century was published from Jaipur (India) in 2009. He has edited, along with Dr Jaydeep Sarangi, an anthology of shorts, The Editors’ Chioce: Contemporary Short Stories in Indian English, published by Gnosis Publications, New Delhi, 2010. He is one of the editors for the NFJ (New Fiction Journal). Contact him through email at: drsharma.sunil@gmail.com
We know that an amazed but curious British girl somehow slipped into a rabbit-hole and found herself in a totally strange place that defies the logic, sanity, sterility, order of a conventional adult world. I call it the typical Alice-moment. An instant when you discover suddenly something big, something extraordinary or very exciting or path-breaking or, in some cases, even a new territory for your king. Archimedes called it his eureka-moment. Galileo, his sun-moment; Newton, his apple-moment; Columbus, his America-moment; Marx, his Capital-moment; Joyce, his Ulysses-moment; Spielberg, his Jurassic-moment and J K Rowling, her Harry Potter-moment…well, the list just goes on. The ordinary guys also have their Alice-moments. They find something extraordinary by accident.
The underlying point is simple, yet profound: inevitably there is an element of irrational to some of the great rational discoveries. I am not referring to some kind of a strict binary involved, but talking of a crazy or silly or sad moment that often attends or precedes the birth of a great idea or breathtaking find; some kind of apparent illogicality that suddenly leads us—or, at least, some of us, the more gifted/ imaginative ones—to a heightened sense of lucidity; a dark moment, let us say, followed by a sudden clarity that illuminates the entire complex quest and delivers the desired result in most simple terms. I mean Archimedes going to his bath and discovering his principle of buoyancy there, while lying naked in the bath-tub! Yes. It is an Alice-moment: a drab scenario leading abruptly to a remarkable new discovery. Or, Columbus leaving Alcazar castle in Cordoba, in1492 in utter despair, rejected by Queen Isabella and then called back by the King Ferdinand and getting their approval for his fourth voyage. Imagine the surprise of the dejected man going on a mule and then getting the message from the King to come back for a final talk. And then getting royal decree for a voyage long on choppy seas. The world never remained same after the turnaround in the life of this adventurer who brought Americas in contact with Europeans at a historical point of emerging modern imperialistic search for new colonies and the plundered profits from such pre-Columbian nations. A new world for everybody, at least, in Europe. Same way, little Alice found a new world for herself and revelled in her solo discovery of the fantastic, the bizarre. Discovery of a novel land. In fact, the prim little girl found a perfect marvelous place that all the sane humans have been searching in every age and culture. Her El Dorado thing. It was a fabulous territory very remote from a stiff Victorian world of prudery, sexual control and smugness. A kind of amazing retreat from everyday regimented reality of frightening proportions and where she is the sole navigator. An autonomous finder of things weird that make no sense to a rational mind but perfectly understood and accepted by the fertile mind of a child. She is on her own and finds creatures strange like the Cheshire Cat and a floating grin sans the cat or the talking rabbit or the mad tea party; a country upside down, where everyone is refreshingly mad and admits it freely, sans any fears of being committed to a mental hospital for being mad. But then madness is the armour worn by the incorrigible questers everywhere. Madness is the DNA of every new-territory-seeker and gives the nutty search a ring of red-hot passion, pure white energy, a strange fixation. Great discoverers know this paradox very well. Columbus knew this. Our beloved Don Quixote, the crazy fellow, knows this truth as well.
BUT ALICE IS fake.
Most literary characters may appear like that to some of the cynical critics. To others, they may not. It all depends how you look at literature and literary characters. Hamlet is unreal for your worldly agnostic disillusioned fifty-six-year balding pot-bellied pa but real for twenty-two-year dreamy you, still untouched by the great worldly skepticism around you. Literature is imagination refined by realities around the recording mind. It talks of unreal lands deliberately. Then, why this insistence for realism in fiction? They reveal profound truths, the great works of art and profound truths are profound in whichever form they are artistically presented. Homer saw gods and heroes and makes us see them again, upon reading the sacred Homeric texts. The epic Mahabharata reveals the basic lessons of life still relevant to us. A world co-inhabited by gods and heroes, now vanished forever. Heaven was never inaccessible to our forefathers; we, the Homo sapiens have permanently lost that vision, that natural ability to see the celestial spheres from a terrestrial perspective. We, the moderns, see infinity of blue sky only. Math teacher Lewis Carroll could see strange realms that challenge our ordered rational worlds and seriously mock the desire for rationalism. Cervantes did that earlier for us. The more regimented and rational a society, the more it is headed for madness of different political kind. Ask Hitler, if in doubt. Literature is altogether different.
It is all about creating magical worlds that are more real than the sordid stinking real. It transmits trans-national and time-defying truths. It is revelatory. Joycean epiphanies.
Anyway, these meditations on truths artistic and their general validity should not detain us further in this fictional account of a strange journey undertaken by the author indicated by the conventional first-person singular number I. The author is a character here in this strange narrative of a romantic journey into the dim past of the human species. OK. Some bald facts first. As I stated some Joes can have their magical moments and discover hidden lands exotic. I, too, had my electrifying Alice-moment. The route to it was different. I had not slipped through an unending rabbit-hole, of course, but rather stumbled upon a yawning old ordinary cave that contained some unexplored treasures artistic. The cave-paintings, unexpectedly found, opened up an abrupt passage to a past that very few beings can tread these days…unless, they have a sympathetic imagination.
Here is the how of it for the inquisitive fellas who want to know what can happen to historical persons or real narrators in imaginative narratives and realms exciting, linguistically and neatly recreated and reordered for the interested readers. I was travelling on a lonely highway and had a break-down there and almost hypnotized, in a trance, wandered into a nearby thicket that was swaying invitingly before me and then…
…I found myself in the middle of a large and wide dark cave and found a wonderland as fascinating as the Alice-land teeming with strange creatures. Certain discoveries happen by chance or by the divine design or both. Anyhow, I stood there in that damp cave, alone and bewildered. As I said my car had a sudden break-down on the gleaming deserted highway and I had wandered, nay pulled by some force, into a nearby thicket and a gaping cave had appeared suddenly before my startled eyes and sucked me inside, like some huge magnetic field!
It was my destiny, of course!
A strange territory presenting itself to me suddenly.
No kidding. It just happened like this only; believe it or not.
As I adjusted my shocked eyes, I saw in the faint light, a series of very primitive cave paintings in a cobwebbed virgin cave. I had trod upon the sleeping centuries. Almost ushered back into a primitive past by some mysterious force.
The paintings were beautiful.
Small hunting scenes that looked simple line drawings of great originality. They had their own vibrancy of colours and a subdued intensity of raw felt emotions. The energy frozen inside the series of cave drawings—done largely in ochre and on the walls—radiated outside and touched me profoundly. My soul got affected by that instant. Simple scenes of everyday life were depicted through the paintings. Small and broad, bearded and matted-hair men—Neanderthals?—bent over the tools and hunting ferocious animals by circling and trapping them collectively. I felt seduced by the raw energy being transmitted directly from a lapsed era.
I looked closely—AND THE ALICE-MOMENT STARTED—and saw, believe it or not, the matted man suddenly look up and wink at me! The basic vertical-horizontal criss-crossing lines got suddenly animated and enlarged; the circle of squat swarthy hairy men inside the painting became alive and moving. Before I could react, I got sucked again into their circle, landing bang in their middle like a piece of human meteor hitting the earth harmlessly.
My alien presence surprised the small compact well-knit group of the early humans. Some stared at me malevolently, holding their glinting wooden spears and sharp-edged tools, about to charge. A blast of frozen wind buffeted me on my freshly-scrubbed clean oval face and the icy tentacles of the heavy wind cut through my thin cotton T-shirt and cotton denim jeans. I started shivering in that cold desolate hostile cruel place—vulnerable and defenseless individual intruder against a jabbering group. They said something in their tongue and then a strong muscular short man raised his spear to kill me. I shivered violently—due to cold and elemental fear.
Just then entered the commanding Eve. An old wrinkled woman with strong body and lined face, clad in animal skins. They became quiet. She looked at me and said something to the group. After few seconds, they beckoned me. I followed. We all entered a nearby huge cave and sat down before a dancing fire. Surprisingly, I could understand their strange language fast and became conversant with it. I spoke their language, a gibberish earlier, now a dialect easily understood, and they accepted me as one of their own, not an intruder, thanks to the caring Eve. The group was huddled around the fire for warmth. It was huge dark cave inside, faintly lit up by the dancing tongue of a brilliant fire. Babies were bawling. A wounded man was being tended to by a squat woman. Bones of animals were littered about. Some men were working on the gleaming clean bones, fashioning out some spear or a hunting tool. It was warm inside. The human numbers reassured me. A group of thirty-forty people living as a close-knit clan. There was warmth that I had never seen in my adult life in the metros of the modern world that I had exited a few minutes ago. This sense of community and concomitant bonding in a primitive wandering group was surprising. We, the tech-tribals living in open-office cubicles in the day and small serviced apartments in the night, could never experience this lost sense of intense solidarity. We just celebrate loneliness and make a virtue of solitary existence in the vertical cages of tall buildings, totally aloof and cold, swimming in our solitude of metro lifestyle.
Their close emotional ties, their coordinated manual movements, their functioning as an overall well-oiled team, in and out of dangerous situations, was again demonstrated to me shortly after.
As we sat there in the comfort of the cavernous cave-enclosed womb—like in a restricted place with a high ceiling and rough floor, having an opening in the front that doubled as both entry and exit and presently covered by a huge boulder and guarded by few hefty men—a shrill sound pierced the outside cold air. It chilled my heart. The sound was terrible and high-decibel, not heard in the urban centers. The men immediately grew silent and alert like a pack of attacking hunters. The lead man, a solid muscled wrestler of a bloke, motioned for everybody to be silent. Then, he gestured and picked up his spear and axe. The group followed. They removed the boulder aside and tiptoed outside. Hypnotized, I too followed the group and again came outside into the open. It was a raw day. A blanket of snow was sweeping the dull landscape in soft whiteness. In the background could be seen some craggy hills and a vast floor of blinding white snow was spread out before us. And before us stood the mammoth.
A huge creature emitting blood-curdling sounds from its deep throat. I had never seen such a gigantic creature in my life. It must have been a 14-foot high woolly creature, weighing 14 tons, with 3.4 meter tusks. The group was elated by the sight of the big game—enough food for few days in the cold hilly country for them. The men surrounded the mammoth towering above them on the high ground. A blast of wind from the hills beyond blew across the uneven terrain. I stepped aside, scared by the towering hulk over me, my modern instinct for danger and survival not that sharp as my primitive ancestors were. They were all covered in two-three layers of skin and fur, their feet wrapped up in the skin of the mammoth or the bison, tailored to meet the requirements of the extreme cold climate of the north Europe. The animal was facing a group of experts, the hunters of the big game and it was a classic one Vs the many strategy of the early humans. The Neanderthals attacked the tusker, flanking the trumpeting elephant and impaling it with sharp tools of pointed bones and flints. For me, it looked like a perfectly choreographed killing ritual by a team of specialists whose skills and killing instincts were honed by the shared experience of collective hunting for food. They were many beings but presented themselves as one fused human body with tens of hands, eyes and feet—very much like eastern many-limbed, multi-armed gods. The synchronization of these arms, feet and eyes was superb and rhythmic. Danger has united them. Food needs have made them stick and act as a unitary body of single desires for survival and security. After killing the woolly mammoth, the triumphant group returned to the warmth of the yawning cave set deep inside the face of a huge rock looking up at the sun. The men drew the boulder back and covered the mouth of the cave with the large stone that no predator could easily dislodge. We all were safe inside the womb now. Eve then took over. The meat was enough for the group. They were happy with the result of the day’s expedition. The men talked while the women cooked. Some younger ones tended to the babies. It was a happy large family.
Then I saw the painter.
He was small and compact man. Highly engrossed, immune to the noise around in the dimly-lit merry cave, the painter was painting scenes of the everyday tough life of these early survivors of the species, battling daily odds to remain alive, cheating death and disease in most hostile environment, creating cave paintings of stark beauty and simplicity. More than 40,000 years ago, these early humans or hominids, found art as a release and as a totem. I approached the silent painter. He ignored me and went on doing his work. A couple of junior painters were assisting him in the task of painting by grounding colours, fetching the water or sharpening the crude painting tools. These were line drawings and colours were very bright. I watched fascinated. His hands moved swiftly, creating patterns out of the simple lines, on the rough surfaces of the cave wall. Big game started emerging: bison, woolly mammoth, rhinoceros and reindeer. The junior artists just gaped at the subtle transformation of the rough surfaces into an intensely-felt scene of live and dangerous battle between the gigantic animals and the puny humans functioning as one entity. The painter moved on to the other parts of the wall and created more such scenes of beauty. As I trailed, the bearded and dreadlocked painter of low receding forehead and snub nose looked up and glared. “Oh, sorry, master! I do not intend to disturb you,” I blurted. He gave me a puzzled look. I understood. I switched from English into the Neanderthal dialect. “No masters here. We all are equal. We all work for the clan. We hunt and gather food. I love to draw the life around. It is then completed by others. I have no right over the paintings here. They belong to us all,” he said, wiping his tools on the rough animal skin worn by him. Amazing! The most primitive clan producing the first artists of the pre-literate societies. Unwittingly leaving their anonymous prints for future. “These are magical lines and circles,” said the painter solemnly. “These lines and circles protect our hunters from danger and put a spell on the big game. They give us power over the predators.” I got the idea. Art was not empty, anemic, sterile but loaded with symbolism and meaning.
It made sense to them, the early humans, trying to control the hostile external environment through crude representation of the world. They were trying to sort out. The very act of artistic cognition of the world and its linear rendering made them superior to the animal order. The hugely-proportioned animals were no match to the brainy bipedal beings who had the ability to think in symbolic manner. Mimetic art evolved over the centuries, becoming more complex and rich, transiting gradually from its communal origins to idiosyncratic individual view of the felt immediacies.
A SUDDEN JOLT and I was ejected from that magical circle of the Neanderthals into a gross world.
“You had fallen asleep, Sir,” said the mechanic to me smilingly. “The car is ready.”
I smiled at him. Alice-like, I was back again into a dull world. There was no trace of the wonderland. A gleaming highway loomed ahead.
Art has allowed me a rare glimpse. The recovery of that precious sensibility or moment was, in itself, rewarding.
Sunil Sharma is a bilingual critic, poet, literary interviewer, editor, translator, essayist and fiction writer. Some of his short stories and poems have already appeared in prestigious journals like: Munyori, the Bicycle Review , Muse India, Kritya, the Seva Bharati Journal of English Studies, Indian Literature, Indian Journal of Post-colonial Literatures, and Prosopisia; and have been anthologized in national and international collections. His debut novel—The Minotaur—dealing with dominant ideologies and sociopolitical realities of the 20th century was published from Jaipur (India) in 2009. He has edited, along with Dr Jaydeep Sarangi, an anthology of shorts, The Editors’ Chioce: Contemporary Short Stories in Indian English, published by Gnosis Publications, New Delhi, 2010. He is one of the editors for the NFJ (New Fiction Journal). Contact him through email at: drsharma.sunil@gmail.com
