for Robert Bégouën
bundled by Tuc's tight jagged
corridors, flocks of white
stone tits, their milk in long
stone nipply drips, frozen over
the underground Volp in which
the enormous guardian eel,
now unknown, lies coiled--
to be impressed (in-pressed?) by this
primordial "theater of cruelty"--
by its keelhaul sorcery
Volp mouth--the tongue of the
river lifting one in--
to be masticated by Le Tuc d'Audoubert's
cruel stones--
the loom of the cave
Up the oblique chimney by ladder to iron cleats set
in the rock face to the cathole,
on one's stomach
to crawl, working against
one, pinning one
as the earth in, to, it, to
makes one feel for an instant
feel its traction-- the dread of
WITHERING IN
PLACE
--pinned in--
The Meat Server
masticated by the broken
chariot of the earth
*
"fantastic figures"--more beast-
like here than human--one
horn one ear-- one large figure
one small figure
as in Lascaux?
(the grand and petit sorcerer?)
First indications of master/
apprentice? ("tanist" re. Graves)
the grotesque archetype
___ _________ _________
vortex in which the emergent
human and withdrawing animal
are spun--
____
grotesque = movement
(life is grotesque when we catch
it in quick perceptions--
at full vent--history
shaping itself)
the turns/twists of the cave
reinforce the image turbine--
as does the underground river,
the cave floats,
in a sense, in several senses,
all at once,
it rests on the river, is penetrated
by it, was originally made
by rushing water--
the cave
is the skeleton of flood
images on its walls
participate, thus, as torsion,
in an earlier torsion--
Here one might synthesize:
1) abstract signs
initiate movement
brought to rest in
3) naturalistic figures
(bison, horses etc)
In between, the friction, are
2) grotesque hybrids
(useful--but irrelevant to systematize forces that must have been
felt as flux, as unplanned, spontaneous, as were the spots/areas in
caves chosen for images--because shadowing or wall contour
evoked an animal? Any plan a coincidence--we have no right to
systematize an area of experience of which we have only shat-
tered iceberg tips--yet it does seem that "image" occurs at the
point that a "naturalistic" ibex is gouged in rock across an
"abstract" vulva already gouged there, so that the rudiments of
poetry are present at approximately 30,000 BC--
image is crossbreeding,
or the refusal to respect
the single, individuated body,
image is that point
where sight crosses sight--
to be alive as a poet is to be
in conversation with one's eyes)
What impresses at Tuc is a relationship
between river
hybrid figures
and the clay bison--
it is as if the river (the skeleton of water = the cave itself) erupts
into image with the hybrid "guardians" (Breuil's guess) and is
brought to rest in the terminal chamber with the two bison i.e.,
naturalism is a kind of rest--naturalism returns us to a continu-
ous and predictable nature (though there is something unnatural
about these bison to be noted later)--takes us out of the discon-
tinuity, the transgression (to cite Bataille's slightly too Catholic
term) of the grotesque
(though the grotesque, on another level, according to
Bakhtin, is deeper continuity, the association of realms, king-
doms, fecundation and death, degradation and praise--)
on one hand: bisons-about-to-couple
assert the generative
what we today take to be
the way things are (though with ecological pollution,
"generation" leads to mutation,
a new "grotesque"!)
*
to be gripped by a womb of stone
to be in the grip of the surge of life
imprisoned in stone
it is enough to make one sweat one's animal
(having left the "nuptual hall" of white stone breasts in which
one can amply stand--the breasts hang in clusters right over one's
head--one must then squirm vertically up the spiral chimney (or
use the current iron ladder) to enter the upper level via a cathole
into a corridor through which one must crawl on hands and
knees--then another longish cathole through which one must
crawl on one's belly, squirming through a human-sized tunnel--
to a corridor through which one can walk haltingly, stooping,
occasionally slithering through vertical catslits and straddling
short walls)--
if one were to film one's postures through this entire process,
it might look like a St.-Vitus dance of the stages in the life of man,
birth channel expulsion to old age, but without chronological
order, a jumble of exaggerated and strained positions that corres-
pondingly increase the image pressure in one's mind--
while in Le Tuc d'Audoubert I felt the broken horse rear in
agony in the cave-like stable of Picasso's Guernica,
at times I wanted to leave my feet behind, or to continue
headless in the dark, my stomach desired prawn-like legs with
grippers, my organs were in the way, something inside of me
wanted to be
an armored worm,
one feeler extending out its head,
I swear I sensed the disintegration of the backbone of my
mother now buried 12 years,
entangled in a cathole I felt my tongue start to press back-
wards, and the image force was: I wanted to choke myself out of
myself, to give birth to my own strangulation, and then nurse
my strangulation at my own useless male breasts-useless? No, for
Le Tuc d'Audoubert unlocks memories that bear on a single face
the expressions of both Judith and Holofernes at the moment of
beheading, mingled disgust terror delight and awe, one is stimu-
lated to desire to enter cavities within oneself where dead men
can be heard talking--
in Le Tuc d'Audoubert I heard something in me whisper me
to believe in God
and something else in me whispered that the command was
the rasp of a 6000 year old man who wished to be venerated
again--
and if what I am saying here is vague it is because both voices
had to sound themselves in the bowels of this most personal and
impersonal stone, in which sheets of myself felt themselves cor-
rugated with nipples-as if the anatomy of life could be described,
from this perspective, as entwisted tubes of nippled stone through
which perpetual and mutual beheadings and birthings were tak-
ing place--
*
but all these fantastic images were shooed away the moment
I laid eyes on the two bison sculptured out of clay leaned against
stuff fallen from the chamber ceiling--
the bison and their "altar" seemed to be squeezed up into
view out of the swelling of the chamber floor--
the sense of culmination was very severe, the male about to
mount the female, but clearly placed several inches behind and
above her, not in contact with any part of her body, and he had no
member--
if they were coupling, and without deep cracks in their clay
bodies, they would have disappeared into their progeny thousands
of years ago, but here they are today still, as if Michelangelo were
to have depicted God and man as not touching, but only reaching
toward each other, caught in the exhaustion of a yearning for a
sparking that has in fact never taken place, so that the weight of
all the cisterns in the world is in that yearning, in the weight of
that yearning is the real ballast in life, a ballast in which the
unborn are coddled like slowly cooking eggs, unborn bison and
unborn man, in the crib of a scrotum, a bone scrotum, that
jailhouse of generation from which the prisoners yearn to leap
onto the taffy machine-like pistons of shaping females--
it is that spot where the leap should occur that Le Tuc d'Au-
doubert says is VOID, and that unfilled space between two fertile
poles here feels like the origin of the abyss, as if in the minds of
those who shaped and placed these two bison, fertilization was
pulled free, and that freedom from connection is the demon of
creation haunting man and woman ever since--
we crawled on hands and knees about this scene, humbled, in
single file, lower than the scene, human creatures come, lamps
in hand like a glowworm pilgrimage, to worship in circular crawl
at one of the births of the abyss--
if I had stayed longer, if I had not with the others disappeared
into the organic odors of the Montesquieu-Avantès woods, I am
sure that I would have noticed, flittering out of the deep cracks in
the bison clay, little winged things, image babies set free, the
Odyssi before Odysseus who still wander the vaults of what we
call art seeking new abysses to inscribe with the tuning forks of
their wings . . .
