THE ANGEL OF BASALT

Nineteen Caveats On Looking Around

This text is written to serve as the foundation for a discussion that will take place in Toronto as part of a diffuse ongoing project called Tomorrow; in short, Tomorrow aims to counteract nihilism through actions and events. Tomorrow is impossible to define; it is an ever-growing, intersubjective organism. At root, it is an instrument that people can use to show love for one another and to strengthen community. 

If you are curious to learn more or participate, please contact the committee: tomorrow.committee@gmail.com.

Tomorrow is grateful to APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL for carrying this essay.

For Tomorrow Process #11: The Earth as an Artwork
Tues, Oct 20, 6:30PM
Toronto

“To express is to sing the glory of God.”

All is darkness, and there is no sound. The shaman, immersed in solemn concentration, takes another careful step forward into the darkness, crouching so they don’t hit their head on the ceiling of the narrow passage. As the shaman slowly advances deeper into the cave system, their hands remain firmly planted on the walls of either side; each lithic ridge their fingers follow conjures the image of an ibex spine; each dimple in the rock describes the eye of a bison. Having fasted for several days, and now becoming deprived of oxygen, deep underground in total darkness, the undulations of the rock face are beginning to call forth the muscular waves of running animals; the shaman can faintly hear the hooves. 

Because the central pendant of the shaman’s necklace is the canine tooth of a cave bear, they are certain that carrying the mark of the predator announces to all that they, as supplicant a shaman as any, carry the respect of all, both predator and prey; the prey respects their own role in the great silent drama of equalization, just as they respect that of the predator which before long will also quietly be called back. 

The world that lies beyond, which is separated from ours by only the cold murmuring rock face serving as its thin membrane, is one with which this shaman is intimately acquainted; it could be said they are even more at home in that world, having many times sought its poetry on behalf of their clan. 

Certainly, it is not known if this shaman could have envisioned beforehand the marks they would presently make on the cave wall, in bright red ochre, signifying the act of communion. The horses which have suddenly begun to materialize, galloping in hypnotic rhythm, signal assent to their imminent self-sacrifice for sake of satiating this shaman’s clan; emerging as curved lines and blown shading, their arrival in the shaman’s world soon to be consecrated on the rock-face at the site of their emergence from the lithic womb. Sixteen, twenty muscular legs all disperse the cold, thick anechoic air of the narrow cave chamber. The shaman, their feet trembling with the turbulence of the quaking ground, carefully removes from their pouch a tallow lamp; a hollowed out stone filled with animal fat. Once alight, its braided moss wick will entertain a meagre glow.

In the faint flame, a cyclone of horses’ hair blurs the shaman’s vision; threads of glistening light, blistering. Having stopped advancing some time ago, stunned by the force of the beneficent contact, now crouching in the cave, the shaman regains their bearings and begins mixing pigment with their spit, needing now to simply record the details of the blessing.

1.

It is understood by the shaman (and by their clan more broadly) that the inner earth is home to the life-force of our world. Several hundred centuries later, the Algonquin of Canada will term this manitou. The force springs to life sometimes in the form of a vole, sometimes in that of a lion. But deep inside the earth is its home. The shaman cannot help the fact that they and their people can access the agents of the manitou in ways impossible to define and often difficult to repeat; they must rely upon ritual, unwieldy phenomena, and chance. But it is known that this breathing sphere, possessing as it does effervescent life-energy, vast stores of latent power, must, for whatever reason, express itself, putting this immense charge to use. And thus, the groaning mountain reaches for unification with the cloudless sky, while the shaman and their clan tend the yawning interstice that will come to be known, 24,000 years later, as northern Spain. What are they meant to do? What is their purpose? There is no ambiguity: even children of the Upper Paleolithic know that their anointed duty is the worship of the cycles of life and death—for their own kind, yes, but much more significantly, for the benefit of the animals, who are undoubtedly more important than they. 

Many years later, lost souls who, when asked their cause, would answer ‘structuralism,’ will wonder why the shaman and their people went to such trouble to paint animals in such dangerous, inaccessible places. They would ask if their objectives had been totemistic; was it possible that clans would take a certain animal as their icon, and that scenes of animal copulation or combat could represent togetherness or turmoil? The truth is much harder to describe. The word ‘purpose’ could scarcely be applied: the painting is much too important for that. 

2.

Homo sapiens—the shaman, us—evolved alongside other hominid species, most relevantly the Neanderthals. David Lewis-Williams has claimed that the religio-cultural difference between the two lies in the extent to which sapiens evolved with a more powerful thalamocortical system, which allowed for the interpretation of more complex sensory input. It allowed for the considered study of phenomena such as dream and hallucination. The religious practices of the sapiens became so sophisticated because they were given the facility to socialize through language and imagery sensations which may have ‘come and gone’ for the Neanderthal. It seems metanoia and sensory consciousness go hand in hand.

The Neanderthals produced artworks, the earliest being marks on an ox-bone which dates to about 200,000 years ago. They practiced burial rites, they made clothing, they used stone tools, they practiced medical care. But it was sapiens who first identified another world through mythology, and structured life around it; the Neanderthals seem to have seen the world as intrinsically holy without seeing much need to produce articulations of it.

With sapiens, as seen in their cave works, humanity’s struggle to reckon with the dilemma of complex consciousness had begun. In creating this earliest of worlds, we had begun our journey out of the sense-world and into the labyrinth of images that the 21st century would find us feverishly pacing, desperately starved for meaning. 

Georges Bataille has shown that the work of Upper Paleolithic artists announced the birth of our conundrum; the shame of separation from the world, and the commencement of our quest to resolve the resulting burden; the task of reconciliation with our surroundings.

3.

In the 1960’s, as in our time, a numbness stills the night. In nightmares, the fraught search for logic disturbs the sleep of the French structuralists; humanity’s collective body is itching all over, unsettled by the gnawing realization that it’s seen too much. 

But, by the grace of God, on the other side of the ocean—in Toronto—small children will fly kites.

Those children will—transfixed by the articulation of God’s body that the kite’s tail illustrates—be swallowed by the sky, against which the illustration is posed. Below, deep within the nervous system of the earth, cold air and particulate moisture emerge from crags in the rock face; delicate song from a world just out of reach. It is the same song heard by the kite. In the sky. The beauty of our shaman’s painted horse, like that of the kite’s song, is unavoidable. Both proclaim that humans—the shaman’s culture had first announced—must strive to be creatures of a most high humility; before the sacred beasts, as beneath the blue sky, our capacity for clamor necessitates, most seriously, that a deadly silence become law. This silence is the only worthy articulation of love. 

4.

At a certain moment the kite’s movement, signaling the change of the wind’s direction, is one of a steep downward drop, coinciding perfectly with the angle of the hill on which the child is standing. Facing south, the child, whose fingers are attentive to the expressions transmitted through the string, whose eyes now know the breath that moves the kite's fabric, notes the coordination of the kite’s declension and the hill’s angle in the sudden slackening of the line. What happened? The child wonders if the kite noticed the hill’s slope and mimicked it. The child wonders why the hill is even there. Is its slope, crowned now by Broadview Avenue, the surfacing of a great subterranean tumult, originating with a simple transgression? An ancient phantasmic auroch stepping on the tail of a truculent lion, causing layers of till to break through the skin of the earth? Those ghostly beasts are individual agents of a larger unified movement, which animates the earth’s expression through geology, necessitating the hill’s harmony with the kite’s drop. Surely the earth, an elemental artwork, poses the kite as a fundamental instrument. The wind is there to whisper the outlines of the artwork. How else could the kite-flying child conclude that the dream is all around them, asking to be expressed?

5.

In our age, it’s customary to accept more desiccating explanations for what we see and feel when we look around. Without some effort, our life becomes a mythology of anti-mythologies. For example, when you sit on the hill by Broadview, if a friend of a friend tells you that the story of the hill begins 1.4 billion years ago; that its story begins with Precambrian limestone formed in an ancient unnamable sea, that’s fine. But what about the Great Serpent of the Olmec cosmology, whose body was the emergent spine of every mountain range, and whose mouth was every volcano? For the Olmecs, a person’s life was inseparable from the animating story of the earth. One sustained the other; every one of their footsteps imprinting on the story of the cosmos. Now, when we are sitting in the grass, hearing our friend of a friend describing the drama of vibrant volcanic eruptions which deposited ash in the bottom of that ancient unnamable sea, and the mountains of 440 - 448 million years ago eroding into those subtropical seas, it evokes more of an appetite for meaning than it does any actual meaning. It is a story without a story. There is no giant snake, there are no essences or cosmic moral dramas. Almost as if the details of science’s mythology describe a body without a face.

But here: metamorphosed by heat, pressure and tectonic movement, the land now known as Toronto rose as a mountain chain long ago. You look into the sky and see a swooning kite, beyond it, in a cloud, the curvature of the belly of an ochre-illustrated mammoth. But here: hundreds of millions of years ago, on this spot, an ancient hurricane churned a shallow subtropical sea, carving storm channels into the bedrock which would blanket the Precambrian Canadian Shield and filled with sand and skeletal fragments of snails, moss, animals and crinoids.

6.

Later that month you’ll float on your back where far below the Canadian Shield sleeps. It’s a beautiful day; it’s the day after the summer solstice, there in the Ottawa Valley. The water was cold at first. Once you got comfortable floating, looking up at the sky, you realized that the flows of water seem to be moving your body along its surface at about the same pace—and in the same direction—as the clouds are moved across the blue sky. You didn’t realize it then, but the shaman (their body’s carbon having oxidized and thereby become etherealized as carbon dioxide, integrating with the atmosphere) was floating within the cloud, mirroring your similarly floating body. Soon the shaman’s discarnate form would, for the thousandth time, fall to the earth as rainwater, carving out limestone rock, forming new caves.

7.

Inside the cloud: all is light, and there is no sound. The shaman’s hands are disarticulated. They’re simply airflows. The sky is a mosaic of such airflows which form a near-total artwork: it is completed by our contemplation of it and the resulting poetry. Floating, you’ll wonder: Is this why the sky constitutes the majority of our vision, almost all the time? As a constant challenge to the ground-weighted world of reproductions that swallows our imagination?

8.

Before you can wait the several days it will take for the answer to become clear, you suddenly find yourself in a glass rhombus. You can see trees outside, and beyond them the sky is darkening. Your ears start ringing when the air conditioning is turned off; it’s almost closing time. You’re coming back to your senses, feeling a wooden horizontal cylindrical object in your hand. It’s a railing. Before you, on the other side of the railing, is a polished white crystalline limestone face, nearly horizontal but sloped. It is a broad rock face protected by this glass container you’re inside of.

The limestone face is covered in carved drawings which are thought to depict the discoveries of shamanistic trances or to serve as a cosmological record. 

Before, you’d read in a book that in Algonquin thought, certain types of geological formations were preferred by the spirits. Environmental anomalies rise out of the earth towards the sun for a reason; they’re different because they’ve been favored somehow. This has to be taken seriously when considering the Peterborough Petroglyphs. The broad horizontal limestone surface upon which they are carved, the earth’s skin rising from below, bearing its crags which entice fingers and ears toward them. The smooth openings mystify the visitor—you—on levels deeper than thought; the almost-exposed nervous system of the world can be felt. Its pulse is the millennia-spanning rhythm of rainfalls, which erode limestone, gradually exposing its heart. It is thought that the Algonquin of 900-1400 AD would have heard the trickling of hidden water in the face’s crags and identified the site’s subterranean porosity as a semi-occluded source of spiritual potency. 

The Canadian Shield began to articulate itself just before the beginning of the Paleozoic, when the Precambrian Basement took shape. As the Shield offers more rocks of granite and gneiss than anything else, white Crystalline Limestone here is rare. It is unsurprising that the site of the Peterborough Petroglyphs, which faces the sunrise, was sanctified. The Vastokases state that this site “served a purpose in Algonkian culture similar to a temple or a cathedral in socially stratified and technologically complex societies. As in all forms of sacred architecture, where men commune with their God, where the design of the structure embodies the universe, the site may be seen as a holy place, a center in the Algonkian universe, the meeting place of earth and sky, the point of access to the underworld, and the seat of visionary experience and supernatural counsel.”

Minority opinion holds that the glyphs were carved as far back as 3,500 BC. The discovery of worked flint chips, a stone gouge, and a ground slate point at a site 2.5 miles southeast of the glyphs can indeed prove that Laurentian hunters were present in the region then, but the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) peoples know for certain that their Algonquin ancestors were responsible for the creation and use of this sacred site, called by them Kinoomaage Waapkong, The Teaching Rocks.

9.

Back in the Ottawa Valley, the cloud’s dark distinct shadows move across the heavy green treetops of distant mountains. Every cloud has several earth-bound mirror images; the shadow is one, you are one, and yet another is every astonishing non sequitur (‘what function did magnetism serve in the religious philosophy of the Olmecs?’). Anything that bewilders is the mirror of a cloud. The carved glyphs of the Peterborough site tell the story of the world in the same way the clouds do when they cast shadows across the treetops. The burning hole in the sky animates the great silent drama in a revolving dialectical relation to its opposite, the deep freezing cavities of the earth. When you were in the water, each time you looked up, there was a new composition, a condensate constructivism mixed with the world’s spit and blown across the sky, revolving in the glow of the tallow sun; its contours grew more emphatic as the forms moved closer to the sun, a source so beautiful that you cannot look at it. The beauty of the cloud is the mechanism that draws your attention towards the sun.

10.

“No geologist, no scientific person whatsoever, can tell you how this gold under my hand was brought into this cleft in the bdellium; no one knows where it was before, or how it got here: one thing only seems to be manifest—that it was not here always.”

80,000 years ago, when “the climate in the Toronto area was subarctic and an ice sheet was beginning to expand across Canada,” ice sheets drove themselves into the ground, carving the earth’s face. And when the last great American glacier, the Laurentian Ice Sheet, began creeping north towards Quebec about 13,000 years ago, it left a deep and cold lake blanketing Toronto The Good. Many of the ravines and depressions all over Toronto—like one by Broadview Avenue that you’re sitting on—started to take shape during this period, gradually deepened and personalized by processes of erosion and sedimentation. The ancient lake formed by the departure of the Ice Sheet, called Lake Iroquois, claimed as its shoreline Davenport Road, which would begin around 9,000 BC to host small bands of nomadic hunters who “often settled on ancient shorelines where they could spot large game such as caribou, mastodon or mammoth in what was then a tundra-like environment similar to that found today in the subarctic region of Canada.” Further south from that ancient shoreline, centuries later and deeper in the basin of that lake—two stories above the concrete encasement that entombs sewage lines and hides mysterious tunnels, further below which is concealed ancient layers of glacial sedimentary deposit sleeping above the primordial Precambrian bedrock—you look around. You look across your apartment’s kitchen, out the window, framing as it does the purple clouds streaking across the sky in bands of inaudible music. That night you had a dream.

11.

Your dream: on some elevated terrain, you were looking around. You looked down, finding deep pits of glittering green quartz. People around you were throwing paper money into the pits, as if hypnotized by their beauty which overpowered them. In the dream, you were certain that the earth had grown impatient with civilization’s pridefulness. It demanded humility through sacrifice. When I heard about your dream, I felt like I knew of some kind of analogue to the dazzling quartz pits of your dream. I thought about it for a while and walked around. Eventually I realized what it reminded me of; I wondered, ‘have you ever heard of the Oak Island Money Pit?’

A curious sinkhole discovered in 1795, on a small island in Nova Scotia, the bottom of the Money Pit remains an open question. Does its bottom even exist? Our fascination with the pit lies in the extent to which it seems to have been very deliberately engineered. It appears to be braced with oak timbers, its vertical shaft staggered with floors of timber and even stone, and it appears to be booby-trapped. It is said that the excavators who blasted through its floors found that they had tripped mechanisms that allowed rushes of ocean water to flood the pit. Depths of 200 feet were reached before the original location of the pit was lost entirely; so many hungry explorers had attempted to circumvent the booby-traps by digging beside the pit, that it is no longer known where the original pit even was.

Several artefacts have been found in and near the pit, such as wrought-iron scissors that appear to be Spanish in origin, dating from before the 1800’s as well as units of Spanish currency, Maravedis, dated 1598. These finds bolster the popular theory that conquistadors engineered the pit to hide looted Aztec treasures. Other popular theories as to the pit’s purpose include the concealment of pirate booty, Viking loot, or Templar treasures (i.e, gold, the Holy Grail, or the Arc of the Covenant.)

Possibly the only certainty that the Oak Island Money Pit can offer is that it has unleashed a profusion of human creativity. The originality of the theories and the imagination involved in interpreting the landscape contributes to the feeling that this story is a mosaic poem or artwork produced by hundreds of people in concert over the course of two-hundred years. It is a parable of humanity’s desperate desire to recover meaning.

For example, there are five (or six) large granite boulders on Oak Island which reflect modern man’s thirst to once again call granite our friend; a distorted ancient recall of the time when the minerals were barely separated from our bodies. These boulders called to us in the 1980’s, and were interpreted as forming a Christian cross 360 feet wide and 867 feet long:

“Architect and researcher Brian Pharaoh identified sacred proportions (144, 288, 360, 432, 720, 864) matching Chartres Cathedral and the Temple Mount, and demonstrated that the formation encodes equinox and solstice alignments… Petter Amundsen predicted and found buried stones at positions calculated from a Kabbalistic Tree of Life projection. A matching five-stone formation exists on confirmed Templar land in Yorkshire, England.”

The human of the 20th century, desperate for solemn concentration, progresses further into the throat of the world. Paranoid, we see no ibexes but are assailed by the hooded specters of Rosicrucian mathematicians and Templar geomancers. 

Are the boulders an imprint of Christ’s sacrifice blasted into the memory of the world? No, Nova Scotian land surveyor—and discoverer of the cross—Fred Nolan was not one to contemplate nature’s compulsions towards collaborative historiography. 

Perhaps a conquest resulting in discovery of an empty chamber at the bottom of the Pit is exactly the revelation he and his cohorts have needed all along. It’s just like your dream; those green quartz pits are a sublime riddle that offers nothing but the reward of sacrifice. That’s all there is. Our purpose lies in our attempts to know the world.

As for the Oak Island Money Pit itself, let’s consider its geologic make-up. This part of the planet has been worked over many times by very energetic glacial formations during the ice ages of the Quaternary period. In their movements across the land, glaciers deposit all kinds of organic materials and collections of minerals which collect in depressions in the ground and then become compressed under the weight of the ice. The organic material compresses into limestone, which is soft and erodes. So the earth deep below Oak Island is riddled with eroded limestone caves, pockets of glacial sediment, flows of water, peat and pond deposits.

Limestone quarries are “noted for the finding of, for example, mastodon remains that are found in isolated steep-sided depressions. These depressions, or sinkholes, on the limestone surfaces, were places where sediments could accumulate and, protected by the depth of steep-sided holes, not be eroded by passing glaciers. These holes often contain thick deposits of clay and sand; this material can be quite old, predating the last advance of glaciers. It is in these holes, for instance, that a mastodon could become trapped and remain for later discovery…”

So could it just happen ‘on its own’…?

The major challenge to the ‘natural anomaly’ theory of Oak Island is that it’s unlikely that fragments of wood and stone would arrange themselves in such ways. And yet, spiders spin elaborate geometric webs without contemplation. Couldn’t trees swept away in a glacial movement, acted upon by the same forces as the spider, also find their way into a similarly elaborate arrangement, especially one destined to set alight the atrophied imagination of modern man? Couldn’t the flows of constellating mineral granules also find coherence in advance of a crucible of the age, in which the facility of understanding and information, put to use, show that they are in fact useless to reconstitute the relation between humanity and terrain? Those trees, battered by ice and rock into positions we would later identify as geometrically coherent were—thousands of years ago—locked into position, secured to be identified as timbers which fortified the burial shaft of an immeasurable wealth.

The Money Pit’s treasure is its discovery. Re-enchantment is the reward. Its bottom does not exist. The un-understandable hole in the center of understanding is the ultimate treasure of those acolytes of intellect who long ago became stultified by their separation from the world, who have spent centuries in the dreamless sleep of knowledge. Oak Island is an effective revelatory artwork, produced collaboratively by the earth and the people of the world.

12.

“‘All visual things are emblems,’ because they are created in correspondence with Divine ideas.” 

Our project Tomorrow propounds kite-flying as a practice. We aim to continue the work of those artists of the past century who sought to reintroduce natural processes as that which is most worthy of our attention. For example, the massive holes created by Michael Heizer in the Nevada desert are essential to consider. These earthworks attempted to reignite the chthonic imagination at a time when humanity needed its riddle the most—the 1960s.

Re-enchantment is always the reward. The earth’s—and our—objective is human astonishment. You stare into the sky. You think about the things that are likely to remain questions forever, never crystallizing into pallid information. Did the brains of Neanderthals contain clusters of magnetite, in the same way as that of birds? You aren’t sure. You just read it in a book once and it got stuck in your head. That author claimed that since Neanderthals were a nomadic species, they may have been able to navigate by their ability to ‘see’ the earth’s geomagnetic lines, the same way birds migrate. Homo sapiens lost the cranial magnetite through evolution. You think about the author’s claim that Neanderthal man would have worshiped magnetite as a mineral, since he would have been literally magnetically drawn to this mineral property of the earth. What really stuck with you is the fact that, when magnetite, a type of iron oxide, is exposed to oxygenated water and air, the magnetite oxidizes into the mineral hematite (anhydrous ferric oxide). Hematite (“bloodstone”) is the primary coloring agent used to create red ochre, which was the sacred pigment—the blood of the earth—used by our shaman and many other shamans like them. It is thought that even the preparation of the ochre was charged with profundity, it was such a valuable material. And it was known to derive from magnetite. So maybe this property had been sacred for a hundred thousand years before it became a crucial artistic medium. So what function, you wonder again, did magnetism serve in the lives of the peoples of the past? What about in the religious philosophy of the Olmecs, who carved their famous mysterious colossal heads out of basalt, which is naturally rich in magnetic iron?

All these thoughts form mosaics of possibility, cloud-like airflows, passages of the peoples of the world’s interpenetrating devotion to the miracles of looking around, doing things with other people and looking at the sky. When we wonder about the immense efforts of the builders of megalithic monuments of the Neolithic period, the world wonders about those efforts too. Did the earth feel itself smaller, when human beings stopped roaming its expansive body and began building settlements, developing agriculture and closed cosmologies?

13.

“Megalithism, an earth-oriented religious attitude, has at that stage become megalithic science—civilization.”

The shaman of the Neolithic, like our shaman of the Paleolithic, would have also found themselves advancing through narrow subterranean passages on a quest. Their fingertips would have flitted across patchworks of cobbled stones which made up the walls of the passageway, lined by tall orthostats which hoisted granite lintels supporting the ceiling. The passageway’s gradual decline eases the shaman into the underworld, which lies at the end of this gradually declining geometric and rectilinear tunnel. There, the shaman is comfortable; they will be among departed loved ones and the heroes of generations past; their clan’s originating farmers and ancestral healers there offer their otherworldly wisdom. 

The ceiling is declining gradually, on a perfect and seamless grade, because this tunnel has been built not by millennia of flowing water carrying grating sediment and acidic waters, but by working people under the supervision of builder-priests. Those old limestone caves of the Paleolithic don’t quite suit the rites of the Neolithic zealot. In this age, what matters most is the understanding of the human afterlife; it is there that the shaman retrieves the wisdom (and confirmation of the efficacy of their daily ritual) that their clan needs. Chambers of departure and communion require a calculated orchestration of space which the caves of old simply cannot accommodate. It is here we find our Neolithic shaman: deep underground in total darkness, in the grip of powerful sensory deprivation, the spirits of history beginning to whisper the familiar incantations of the past. 

This shaman was educated by their parents, who would journey to the land of the dead by entering trance-states. From them was imparted the knowledge of those stages of transformation within the afterlife and the importance of proper burial. This shaman oversaw the completion of this colossal mound work tomb, which was begun several decades earlier. This shaman can be assured of the value of their embellishment of their clan’s practice. A lavish and pragmatic burial is at once an appeasement to the prominent deities and a display of faith in the cosmological order, and it is necessary to send a person off with all the offerings they will need to advance through the stages, making a good impression on behalf of their clan at every step. Understanding this is crucial for the shaman’s people. Understanding in general is a matter of life or death. Understanding the movement of the stars goes hand in hand with protection from loss of domesticated animals and the prevention of disease. Commercial prosperity and bodily health are both struggles that are bound up in the religious dedication of a community. Everyone is counting on our shaman, presently reaching the end of the tunnel, stooping so they don’t hit their head as they pass under the last granite lintel, entering a large chamber which is the site of burial of several chieftains past.

The tunnel lies within an artificial mountain, in what would much later be called Ireland. In this age, some five and a half thousand years ago, many such monumental works of land architecture were employed as a “mapping of ideas onto the landscape,” which embodied a group’s understanding of celestial movement, and also in a sense made that movement ‘their own.’ Aside from burial tombs, like the one within which this tunnel lay, megalithic monuments were important sites of ritual and worship. The religious importance of such sites could not be disentangled from their political importance, especially for megalithic monument sites that would have been pilgrimage destinations; markets would have sprung up around them, customers coming from far and wide. A clan’s dominion over ritual and sacrifice can be seen secondarily as a guarantee of their economic sustenance but mostly it reflected their dominion over cosmology, which determined the existence of all.

14.

In the 30,000 years since our Paleolithic shaman fixed their control over those horses by eternalizing their image on the cave wall, nothing has changed. Not in the cave, at least. Those horses are still on the wall, but no longer activated by light. The cave lies in darkness. The horses are now dreaming of the moment that the shaman’s faint glow will once again incarnate them, allowing their reemergence into the theatre of meadows. Back then, when the shaman had first lit their moss wick, at once a series of small descending outcroppings had cast a line of shadows on the cave wall that seemed to present itself as a horse’s mane; the shadows presaged or retrogressively mirrored the marks the shaman was about to make. Holding the flame in that position, to keep the shadow in place, the shaman had begun to reconstruct their vision in order to secure their control over the materialized horses. They didn’t need to paint the mane of that central horse since the rock had already done so. The great mind of the lapidary spirit world had already conceived the work. But in such a collaboration, a deeply symbiotic relation is cemented:

“An important reciprocity is implied by these images born of light and shadow. On the one hand, the creator of the image holds it in his or her power; a movement of the light source can cause the image to appear out of the murk; another movement causes it to disappear. The creator controls the image. On the other hand, the image holds the creator in its power: if the creator or subsequent visitor wishes the image to remain visible, he or she is obliged to maintain a posture that keeps the light source in a specific position. If the viewer tires and as a result lowers the light, the image seems to retreat into the realm behind the membrane.”

There can be no doubt that the religious practice of the Paleolithic, in stark contrast to those of the Neolithic, had to do with fusing oneself into the productions of the world. That the world was already divine, and all that a shaman and their coreligionists needed to perfect was the act of becoming part of that divinity.

It took work. It took perceptive acumen. It took lots of time spent looking around, noticing things. Listening to the poetic messages conveyed by inner worlds of the trees and rocks.

 What we see in the progressions of the Neolithic, as religious practice involved constructing monuments and settings that projected shared religious convictions, is that an inwardly-oriented quest for meaning was beginning to predominate. The discoveries of these quests were then realized on massive physical scales which competed for awe with natural geologic forms. People’s communities were becoming constructed microcosms of the greater world, whereas in the Paleolithic, the greater world was home and home was infinite.

15.

The construction of settlements guided by religious belief catalyzed the symbiotic nature of human-planet creativity. The world issues its replies in riddles; we make the earth look like people, so it makes the earth look like people, too. In the Badlands of Alberta, for example, wind and water have eroded the soft clay-rich stratum of one of Canada’s gas fields to form the visage of “what looks to be a native North American … complete with a feathered headdress.” The head, known as the “Badlands Guardian,” is 255 metres across and 225 metres long and it can only be seen from the sky. One wonders if the memory of the world absorbs our histories, mimicking compulsively its forms in phenomena that we call mimetoliths or petrasomatoglyphs. Like the spirit-horses responding to the call of the shaman, through the face of the rock, so too does our memory call to us, backwards and forwards through time, through the geology of the world, which is the supreme instrument—the kite, if you will—of the iteration of life’s story, like the Ojibwa god-figure Nanabijou—the Spirit of the Deep Water—who gifted the Ojibwa people the resource of silver, which they used in their tool-making and jewelry. But once the source of the silver was revealed to the colonialists, Nanabijou flew into a rage and visited a storm of biblical proportions upon the peoples of Lake Superior, settler or otherwise.

Once the “water filled the Europeans boat, killing them … Nanibijou laid down, arms crossed over his chest [with] the mine under his feet… There, Nanibijou lies to this day, protecting his gift.” Nanijibou, resting, half-surfaced above the placid surface of Lake Superior, is formed of ancient molten rock which forced its way between layers of sandstone and shale some billion years before the significance of the geology’s resemblance of a supine human being revealed itself. 

Throughout history many groups such as the Silver Inlet Mining Company have attempted through various legalistic means to take control of the land called Canada and to subordinate it to a merely economic or ideological function. Tomorrow claimed in our paper The FLQ, Love and the Revolutionary Process that the founding of the Dominion of Canada was little more than an aristocracy’s attempt to cement land-rights so they could benefit from extraction of resources and revenue from that land’s use more broadly. But their lack of passion never convinced the land, which always seems to have seen the spiritual poverty revealed by their claims to its treasures. The silver at the bottom of Lake Superior and the mystical depths of Oak Island tell the story themselves.

16.

 Efforts to make something out of Canada even brought some of the great conceptualists of the 1960s to their knees. Admired artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Dennis Oppenheim both hit the proverbial wall when they left the discourse-dense United States and tried to ‘say something’ here. Oppenheim, who “[saw] the connections he makes between his own body surface and the land surface as a means of ‘activating’ the earth and at the same time being activated by it,” completed his work Time Line here in 1968, driving a snowmobile along the line which demarcates the two timezones of Newfoundland and Labrador and Maine. The work cerebrally intends to make tangible (tracks in the snow) the intangible (time). Oppenheim did not know that the colossal Canada doesn’t really respond to concepts like “time;” here the staggering monumentality of geologic processes has delegitimized civilizational preoccupations for so long that a question like “what do our socially accepted conceptions of time even mean?” falls on deafening stone. Here we don’t really find “time” that interesting; we’re interested in the way beauty destroys civilized time. 

And Lawrence Weiner went to the Arctic Circle and blew apart a stone with a shotgun.

But Canada has also been the site of contemporary art that is of use to us, namely Ian Wilson’s Chalk Circle on the Floor (1968), executed here at least once in Vancouver in 1983. This is an artwork whose authorship is universal. Anyone can become part of the originating body. The instructions for making this artwork are as follows: 

“Attach a white china chalk pencil to one end of a 3-foot-long thin wire (the actual chalk centre would be 3/8 of an inch before sharpening). At the other end of the wire attach a nail. After hammering the nail into the floor, draw the circle around the nail, keeping the wire taut. Using the enclosed photo of the density of the white chalk, gradually build up the line until it is 1/2 inch thick. When the circle is drawn, remove the nail from the floor. From time to time using the above described method, redraw any portions of the circle that have been smudged, keeping the circle as clean and well defined as possible.”

Wilson offers us a dissolution. A chance to enter into an imaginal space co-created with others; into the cave wall. To become part of something bigger and more intersubjective than an isolated reaction to an installation in a gallery. To make something happen with your own hands and to know you’re doing it with other people who were merely strangers until now. 

In our very secular world, one without ritual, it is artworks like these that we need more than anything, because they fuse minds in activity. These artworks are crucial today when contemporary art is, more than anything, a repository of apocalyptic fantasy and misanthropic individualism. Mostly what one finds there are diagnoses of the malignancies of civilization. But those diagnoses won’t save us; beauty will. Rebuilding social bonds will. Then—once we’ve regained meaning—will an image of a better world appear to us. Then we’ll know how to build towards it.

Contemporary art as an economic market has an interest in limiting human expression to the individual, because that type of expression will never lead to anything beyond the gallery. The gallery is a container for energy. Artwork that activates social cohesion would result in the building of public monuments, even public infrastructure or housing; it would result in works that nullify the purpose of the gallery; it would result in the building of our world. True social expression would have no need for a gallery because the world would be a gallery. Several artists could be named who, I believe, guided art towards this direction in the 1960’s and 70’s by rescuing expression from the occulted space of the gallery and from commodity and placing it squarely back in the domain of the world and of human sense-perception. To say it another way, these artists reaffirmed that the earth is the only artist; that the human beings we call artists merely point at the existing all-encompassing artwork.

17.

In the world—in the suburbs of Toronto—exists Richard Serra’s artwork Shift (1970-2). Because the work lies on what is now private property, its exact location is not publicized. Some friends and I were able to get coordinates, but it was still unclear if we would be able to navigate successfully through the forest, or if we’d be turned around by some authority or another.

Over a tall fence lay a forest. There was no path. It was raining. We moved through the forest, holding back branches for each other. In retrospect the path was encoded but real; downed trees acted as bridges traversing rivers. Eventually a clearing appeared.

A vast muddy field, open in the grey April morning, is split by Shift's low walls of concrete. Because the field rolls, the low walls do not. The tops of the walls are entirely straight and horizontally level, dramatizing the natural curvature of the site. Shift is a work that transfigures space. You look at it from all angles, you walk backwards, you crouch down, you close one eye, you look at the sky. Everything moves because of this monumentally static concrete disruption of organic form. The geometric angles imposed on the organic undulations of the earth are splitting reality into pieces that refract perception. Suddenly everything is to be studied. I can’t describe it in words. The trees at the edges of the clearing present new angles of coherence for the linearity of Shift to disrupt. There are several large heron nests in the bare tree tops; they form a line which slopes up. With the base of the tree-line’s horizontality, the tree cover is like Shift inverted; it presses upwards, while Shift’s walls seem to move down because the ground declines. Shift doesn’t move at all though, really. It just makes the rest of the world move. Everything is in motion, sacralized, gushing. For the rest of the day everything I saw looked like an artwork, exploding with meaning visually and ontologically. 

Michael Heizer said he’d “like to see art become more of a religion … in the sense that it wouldn’t have a utilitarian function anymore.” Heizer’s work functions on such a massive geologic scale that it, like Shift, strips away the ineffectuality of secularism. It reinvigorates sensory perception, in a return to Neanderthal experience of the world. It inspires awe. And nothing else. His negative sculptures, gigantic holes in the desert floor, beckon us; we’re entranced by the possibility of getting a clean view of the swirling inchoate life-force beneath—the phantasmic dazzlement of the depths. But we can’t get too close—what if we fall? We inch closer to the edge… 

The work of the artists of the Paleolithic was similarly an expression and expansion of human feeling; it was an articulation of a desire to be more through pious activity. To be full of the world, and to be embedded in its movements. We can see that the works they considered successful would have been the works which entirely voided individual agency; works in which one became the world:

“The method of spit-painting seems to have had in itself exceptional symbolic significance to early people. Human breath, the most profound expression of a human being, literally breathes life into a cave wall. The painter projected his being onto the rock, transforming himself into the horses. There could be no more closer or more direct communication between a work and its creator.”

The anguish of the desire to do, to become, is what separated Homo sapiens from their predecessors. Their sense of possessing a deficit—the sin of appetite and the requisite killing—seems to have been a powerful motivation. Their need for absolution involved a dedication to know and honor the realms of the animals, which lay beyond the rock face.

“Especially in the early periods of the Upper Paleolithic, people made hand stencils by placing a hand, and sometimes a whole forearm as well, against the rock face and then spraying paint, possibly by blowing it out of their mouths, over and around the hand. When the hand was removed, a clear negative outline remained … it was the act of covering the hand and the immediately adjacent surfaces with (usually red but sometimes black) paint that was important. People were sealing their own or others’ hands into the walls, causing them to disappear beneath what was probably a spiritually powerful and ritually prepared substance, rather than a ‘paint’ in our sense of the word. The moments when the hands were ‘invisible,’ rather than the prints that were left behind, were what mattered most.”

18.

“When a soul has attained a love filling the whole universe indiscriminately, this love becomes a bird with golden wings that pierces an opening in the egg of the world.”

There is light all around, from every angle, and all I can hear is the noise of Dufferin Street. Sirens, music coming from cars, and passing conversation. You haven’t said anything in a while. On my wall there is a framed photo of Shift that I think was taken in the 1980’s. In the photo, it is winter. You looked at it. You’d been leafing through The Deep Hot Biosphere. On the table is Charles Stankievech’s book The Desert Turned to Glass, and a biography of Walt Whitman. We’d talked earlier about the conversation in the Stankievech book between him and Barbara Sherwood-Lollar, wherein they discuss the Tagish Lake meteorite, uniquely frozen, which rests in the Royal Ontario Museum. No one knows how to study it without thawing it, so it just sits there, frozen. We imagine that it is deep beneath street level, under Bloor Street. 

We talked about the time we went to Oakville to see Stankievech’s show; that’s where everything started. The sculpture of the meteorite suspended in the air, the child who fell to earth. The pull of prehistoric memory; the call of the primeval. Like the center of the earth, which fascinated the Maya as they stared into those deep holes. The Neolithic peoples of Çatalhöyük—among the first to build settlements and construct dwellings—built structures that held their most sacred rooms the deepest underground, attesting to the powerful human need to embrace the center—the source. 

19.

We’ve argued that artwork should only exist to inspire awe; when it evokes glowing barely-comprehensible invocations of a resolved world; when it is similar to a cloud. We strongly believe that art cannot ‘say something about society,’ it can only point towards all that society denies us. 

The perfect world—which it is our task to build—lies encoded and frozen in moments of sublime beauty; delicate song emanating from crags in the rock face; a tangled kite-string; moments when time is destroyed. The world worth building has yet to be described, as has our approach to building it. When the nascent ravines of Toronto were still jagged prehistoric rivulets, our purpose was cast in the concretizing sedimentary processes realizing themselves therein; it’s to wrest beauty from the gallerists and return it to the world; it’s to make Maura Doyle the mayor of Toronto.

When the last Ice Age subsided, freeing up moisture which could evaporate and turn into modern clouds, the images of our freedom were encoded into the particles of moisture so that one day we would look into the sky and understand what we’re supposed to do next. Like the sacralized hardened magma spit forth by the volcanic deity that the Olmecs worshiped, so too will our future be recognized in such unhewn stone, and carved in the image of that being. The unshaped basalt contains the form of that resolution. Our future is the shadow cast across our souls by the movement of the great artwork called earth.

Works Cited (by order of appearance)

1. Deleuze, Guattari, “A Thousand Plateaus” 1980.
2. Lewis-Williams, “The Mind in the Cave” 2002.
3. Hadingham, “The Secrets of the Ice Age” 1979.
4. Bataille, “Lecture, January 18 1955,” The Cradle of Humanity, 2005.
5. Bataille “Meeting in Lascaux,” The Cradle of Humanity, 2005.
6. Freeman, “Formed and Shaped by Water: Toronto’s Early Landscape” 2008.
7. Ruskin, “Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapses of Waves, and Life of Stones” 1875-1883.
8. Eyles, “Ravines, Lagoons, Cliffs and Spits: The Ups and Downs of Lake Ontario” 2008.
9. Williamson & MacDonald, “A Resource Like No Other: Understanding the 11,000-year Relationship Between People and Water” 2008.
10. Steele, Fader, “The Oak Island Mystery Solved” 2018.
11. Trobridge, “Swedenborg: Life and Teaching” 1968.
12. Gooch, “Cities of Dreams” 1989.
13. Lewis-Williams, “Inside the Neolithic Mind” 2005.
14. Lewis-Williams, “The Mind in the Cave” 2002.
15. Lippard, “Overlay” 1983.
16. Lippard, “Art Within the Arctic Circle” 1969.
17. Ken Lum, “Ian Wilson: From Chalk Circle to Full Circle” Dia Art Foundation, NY, 10 December 2013.
18. “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson” (1970), Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp.
19. Lorblanchet, “Spitting Images: Replicating the Spotted Horses of Peche Merle” 1991.
20. Lewis-Williams, Clottes, “The Shamans of Prehistory” 1998.
21. Weil, “Waiting for God” 1950.
22. Stankievech, “The Desert Turned to Glass” 2023.
23. Lewis-Williams, “Inside the Neolithic Mind” 2005.

-- Robert Voyvodic is an artist living and working in Toronto.