practical peacehow peace in the moment can make peace in the world |
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LascauxMay 23, 12:04 am I watched Werner Herzog’s new film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the 35,000 year-old cave paintings in Chauvet, France, today and was reminded of the experience of writing this poem. In a poetry workshop we had read W. H. Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts. The assignment was to write a poem, as Auden did, that expressed the experience of contemplating a work of art. Even when I found a coffee-table book as thick as a phone book titled History of Art on a shelf in the prison day room, I didn’t know where to start. I opened the book in the middle, about at the European Renaissance period. I turned over the pages and studied the pictures for an hour, hoping for inspiration. Nothing I saw made me want to write a poem. I remembered that feeling from the years when the nuns tried to teach us Art Appreciation, scratchy slides of frescoes, Giotto this, Fra Angelico that. I was a miserable student, unmoved and unable to memorize by rote. I was about to give up on the assignment, maybe go look at the latest Scientific American instead. But then I happened to open to the very first pages in the art book. I saw, for the first time, the cave paintings from Lascaux, animals that were alive, the way things in the world are alive. I knew that there was nothing else in that book that I could write about. It isn’t tools that made us human. Chimpanzees and elephants use tools. Neanderthals made tools as sophisticated as ours. We became the humans that we are when our brain evolved the capacity for abstraction, the ability to nest one model of the world inside another one, maybe as long as 75,000 years ago. We have been making art ever since. Lascaux You knew I tour museums. I come at last to the cool dim cave of Lascaux |
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About Katherine PowerI didn’t set out to be a terrorist. As a student activist, I moved from protesting the war in Viet Nam to waging guerrilla war to overthrow the government…. |
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I’m Following...Kathleen Dean Moore |
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