Lascaux to France, Redux

Painting by Constant Troyon

Musée d’Orsay, Paris

January 30.

Dinner last night with old friends in Paris.

An apartment near the Louvre; courtyards, venerated staircases, improbably narrow doorways that one’s furniture many not quite fit though. The genuine warmth of greetings.

As is so often the case, conversation turns to inner work. Everyone thinks they know something: above all, folks proudly claim that they know we don’t know anything. My friend P. gently proffers an argument that this isn’t actually true: there are things we can know... but alas, dogma does not permit such observations. The cloud of unknowing is apparently immune to critique. It does make an excellent dodge; no matter the situation, one can always hide behind it and claim the high ground—without, mind you, doing any real work whatsoever.

Later in the evening, I’m advised I should “sometimes” (translation: this time) check my mentation at the door. I quietly advise that I try to work with all three parts. It isn’t listened to. In Gurdjieff murder mysteries, it’s always the intellect that did it... with an idea... in the head.

I decide to say little for the rest of the evening, reminding myself that those who make negative remarks about how others think typically reserve for themselves the unabridged right to think all they want, and talk about it all they want to. It is what they think about and talk about that grants them immunity; of course it’s always this way with we human beings. Myself included. What I think about is always superior to what others think about; what I talk about is always superior to what others talk about. I see this in myself all the time. 

This is how we all are. Even when we’re having fun.

Only the receiving of a true capacity for feeling can put this right; one decides to simply listen and receive. 

My friend P. and I, who are admittedly of somewhat like minds, establish a rough parity on matters intellectual and manage to have a well enough balanced exchange while the women (by their own choice, and our intentional and pointed exclusion from same) are in the kitchen. We have divided, more or less at their request, into traditional roles: the men in the sitting room, discussing philosophical questions, the women making food.

Maybe the whole point of it is to highlight the way we men discuss useless things while the women engage themselves in practical matters. I hadn’t thought of that before, but now that I have it occurs to me that this was probably how the caves at Lascaux got painted with bulls. The men went down into the darkness with pigment and ideas; the women rolled their eyes back in their heads,  chopped up mastodon and vegetables, and made stew.

No bull.

We were at the Musée d’Orsay yesterday and ran across more than a few pastoral landscapes populated with bulls. Nothing more than a common fixture of Northern European period genre painting, one might think; and therein lie the dangers of thinking.

Neal asked me what the paintings of cattle were all about.

“You don’t see it,” I replied. “These aren’t romanticism. They’re Mithraic.”

The cult of the bull has never truly left us. Our concierge at the hotel in Amiens cheerfully advised us, while we were being treated to the spectacle of the star cow Ideal from the upcoming agricultural trade show in Paris, that this particular show draws a bigger audience than all the others in France, including those for huge industries such as automobiles. It’s one thing when one thinks about this in American terms: sure, we have (I think) big cattle shows in Missouri; but not in Washington, DC, which is paradoxically filled with intellectually bovine beings on two legs, rather than four. It’s another thing with the French; they get it.

Cows matter.

The point here is that man’s connection to bulls and cattle is an ancient and powerful one. We never left it behind; the iPhone and the internet haven’t severed our connections to this visceral past, and they can’t. No matter what we do, our connection to agriculture and pastoralism, along with the animals that mediate it, remains stubbornly mythical. We may drive around in electric cars, but we secretly yearn for an ancient past filled with bulls and carts, myth and meaning. The movies and games of our popular culture rip the veil of technological sophistication off our faces: even as churches and religions are abandoned in large number, folk still want to believe in magic. In secret powers, inner and outer. It’s as though no matter what we do, the sense that hidden, higher truths underlie our superficialities can’t be exorcised. 

Of course this is what P. and I were discussing while excluded from the kitchen, where the ancient, secret inner superpowers of women’s cooking were being practiced. Bulls didn’t exactly come up, but we were surrounded by mythically abstract paintings (some of them outsized and magnificent) that gave the room a feeling not unlike Lascaux itself. The bulls were in the room with us. They may not be visible, but they provide the inner meat of our lives and drive us forward. Fecundity, ferocity, intelligence, presence: the bull has it all; and it implies a mastery we lack. Even when the noble bull is reduced to the centerpiece of a romantic landscape painting, its power can’t be denied. 

The ice age is still with us; we may think we’ve tamed our inner natures, made them food for our imaginations, but their docility is a lie... beneath the surface, we haven’t changed much in all these many millennia. 

The bull-gods are still here in us; and in some poorly understood way, some portion of humanity: our tattooed children, perhaps—is trying to reclaim that hidden nature. The beginnings of this may be as primitive as the roots: a geometric pattern here, a dash of strange garb there—but I believe the cult of the bull is on a path to comeback. 

Call me a romantic, if you will (I don’t deny it) but we can still be moved by this deeply human past, if we but embrace it.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.