Which came first?
Tuesday, October 25th, 2005
by Guy Neal Williams

Theres a cave, inland, in the south of France well, there are lots of them, but this is one of the caves with very old paintings in it, a charcoally black, some red ochre and some white pigment thats probably chalk from the seaside. It isnt one of the more famous cave paintings that youd see there, but there are some fascinating things about the rendering: one of those interesting things is that a nearly identical replica exists in a roughly contemporaneous cave quite a few miles away. So someone either memorized the image (its principal figure is a bison) painstakingly, or found some form to copy it by hand on bark perhaps, or perhaps on some flat, thin stone like slate and carried the copied image in order to transfer the drawing to another cave.

An interesting thought.

But not as interesting, some would say as this: in a circle in the dry clay floor of the cave, before the original painting of the bison, are preserved the 50,000-year-old footprints of children. It seems that they were dancing, perhaps in celebration, perhaps in a ritual intended to gain good fortune in the hunt, perhaps in thanks for a hunt that had provided a full meal. We dont know. But we can quite safely assume that eons ago, those children were dancing.

I heard this story from an odd man, a not-very-young Quaker with mostly-white hair and hearing aids in both ears, blind in one eye, walked with a cane, and spoke with the deepest and most gravelly voice imaginable. He told about the cave of the dancing children in a series of lectures (first at his Friends Meeting and then at the divinity school in North Carolina) about art, science, faith and what they have to do with one another. He began the lectures, which lasted a month, with the story of the dancing children and then asked this question: which one came first, the art or the science or the faith?

The cave was dark. The science of fire was needed to make shelter of it. And a science was required to find the pigments to paint the art of the cave walls. But faith was needed to enter the dark, the chilly unknown of the caverns. A kind of faith was needed to ritualize the request for luck in the hunt. Dance is perhaps the most celebratory of the arts. Ashes of cookfires and childrens footprints and a nicely sketched image of a hunt for food all ancient exist within a very few feet of one another. So which came first? That was how the deaf Quaker (and he laughed at himself: how do you tell if a silent Quaker is deaf? Its pretty goddamned hard, he said) began the first lecture.

Eventually, he led us to see his point: theyre so intertwined faith and art and science that theyre best seen as the sides of an equilateral triangle. Remove any side and collapse results. You end up with a flat line. He had no notes, but he had a graduate student at the ready with slides and Powerpoint images Monet (who refused cataract surgery because hed grown to love his blurred eyesight) and the elegant equations of quantum mechanics and theoretical mathematics, and the prescient Magritte images of a man looking out from the back of his head (a tidy rendering of one of the more complicated aspects of Einsteins special theory) and icons hed bought back when Russia was the USSR. Every once in a while hed say, I got to go smoke, folks. Yall sit here and think about stuff while I go outside and burn a Camel. Not many Quakers smoke. Perhaps no other smokes Camels. Then hed take his walking stick and head outside where he could be seen through the windows, although it didnt appear that he noticed, and hed reach into his very Quakerly Volvo and turn the music on. Very, very loud and often with very vulgar lyrics. A beat-up old Friend listening to Social Distortion until he finished his smoke. And then it was back to Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle, the forgeries of much of the New Testament and the necessity of John Coltranes thanks to God, A Love Supreme.

They were unusual evenings.

But he started with anthropology, I suppose is a large part of my point here, and it can perhaps be said that this is the discipline that studies what he was teaching: art and faith and science. And what they have to do with one another. The sides of a triangle.



Then the arrogant old bastard would clap his hands together and say: I cooked! Lets eat. Best chicken and dumplings known to mankind, it was agreed.

So: food, an outlandish tale and a contribution to your blog if you want to use it. Those goddamned dumplings were good. Almost as good as the cigarette afterward.

Love,
Guy