​The Mind’s Eye, by Ron Wetherington

Lascaux Cave Painting (France) c. 20 000 BC. EUX, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

​The Mind’s Eye

We cannot be sure what they had in mind, these ancestors, as they daubed out the features of the animals on the cool limestone walls. But I know this, at least: these are stories, and those who made them were storytellers. These are not decorations, not the random sketches of idle artists.

We call it cave art because, of course, we know what proper stories are, written in proper languages and properly syllabic. Gilgamesh pressed in cuneiform on clay tablets, The Iliad on laid papyrus strips inked with pens of reed. No pictures here. 

These first written stories, that taught us linear thinking and how to see forward and back and those other rules of grammar, also taught us to leave pictures to the mind’s eye alone. To reserve the mind’s vocabulary for sentences laid out in order and imprinted.

But images came earlier, you see. And these, traced with care on cave walls, were lined and filled and colored by patient storytellers intent on sharing a message. Do not forget, children, this is the one we saw next to the rock-fall. Can you see, children, this fearful look in his eye? Do you remember how we cut him off from the others? How he bleated as we drove him off the edge?

These are stories to see, and they retell themselves whenever watched by the flickering fire that illumines them in the cold dark. The images move in the memory, and the tale unfolds once again, as the muscles tense and the forces emerge, and the magic is rekindled. 

We call them cave art, these ancient stories. How benign! This is where magic began, you know, in the darkness, concealed behind the lids, cautiously hidden beneath the mind’s eye.

Ron Wetherington

Ron Wetherington is a retired professor of anthropology living in Dallas, Texas. He has published a novel, Kiva (Sunstone Press), and numerous short fiction pieces in this second career. He also enjoys writing creative non-fiction and ekphrastic prose and prose-poetry.. Read some of his work athttps://www.rwetheri.com/