The Collected Prose

1948-1998

Zbigniew Herbert

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062014306
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Saggi letterari

"One of the finest and most original writers…and one of the greatest Polish writers of [the 20th] century. [Herbert] is a figure comparable to, say, T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden."

—Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker

Polish essayist, poet, and spiritual leader of his nation's anti-Communist movement, the late Zbigniew Herbert is a literary giant whose writings are revered throughout Europe and the world. A companion volume to the author's Collected Poems (Ecco 2007), Collected Prose is the only English language edition of the award-winning writer's prose works collected in a single, beautiful, accessible volume—including in their entirety his renowned Labyrinth on the Sea, Still Life with a Bridle, King of the Ants, and Barbarian in the Garden.

BARBARIAN IN THE GARDEN

translated by

Michael March and Jarosław Anders

LASCAUX

Si Altamira est la capitale de l’art pariétal¹

Lascaux en est Versailles.

HENRI BREUIL

LASCAUX IS NOT on any official map. It does not exist, at least not in the same sense as London or Radom. One had to enquire at the Musée de l’homme in Paris to learn its location.

I went in early spring. The Vézère Valley was rising in its fresh, unfinished green. Fragments of landscape seen through the bus window resembled canvases by Bissière. A texture of tender green.

Montignac. A village without interest, save a plaque commemorating a worthy midwife: “Ici vécut Madame Marie Martel—sage-femme—officier d’Académie². Sa vie…c’était faire du bien. Sa joie…accomplir son devoir.” Expressed most delicately.

Breakfast in a small restaurant, but what a breakfast! An omelette with truffles. Truffles belong to the world history of human folly, hence to the history of art. So a word about truffles.

They are an underground mushroom preying on the roots of other plants. To uncover them you need dogs or pigs, conspicuous, as everyone knows, for their perfect sense of smell. A certain fly also signals the presence of this gastronomic treasure.

Truffles fetched a high price on the market so the local peasants were overcome by a real truffle fever. The soil was burrowed, the woods ravaged; the trees now stand pitifully dry. Large areas of cultivable land became barren because the mushroom produced a poisonous substance. Besides, it was very capricious and more difficult to domesticate than the ordinary mushroom. Nonetheless, an omelette with truffles is delicious and the smell, as the dish has no taste, is incomparable. Just like the poet Tuwim’s mignonette.

One leaves Montignac by a motorway that rises, winds, enters a forest and suddenly ends. A parking lot. A stand with Coca Cola and color postcards. Those who are not satisfied with the reproductions are led into a yard, and then into a concrete cellar resembling a military bunker. Metal valves close like a strongroom door and for a moment we stand in darkness awaiting the initiation. Finally, the second door opens, leading inside. We are in the cave.

The cold electric light is hideous, so we can only imagine the Lascaux cave when the living light of torches and cressets set into motion the herds of bulls, bison, and deer on the walls and vault. In addition, the guide’s voice stammering explanations. A sergeant reading the Holy Scriptures.

The colors: black, brown, ochre, vermilion, crimson, mallow, and limestone white. Their vitality and freshness surpassing Renaissance frescoes. The colors of earth, blood, and ash.

Images of animals, mostly in profile, are caught in motion drawn with both an expansive vigor and the tenderness and warmth of Modigliani’s women.

The images appear chaotic, as though painted hastily by a frenetic genius using cinematic techniques, with close and long-range shots. At the same time they present a coherent, panoramic composition which seems to disobey all rules. They vary from a few centimeters to more than five meters. One finds palimpsests: in short, a classical disorder which simultaneously conveys an impression of perfect harmony.

The first room, called the room of the bulls, has a beautiful natural vault, as though constructed from frozen clouds. Ten meters wide, thirty meters long, it can hold a hundred people. The Lascaux zoo opens with the image of a bicorn. This fantastic creature has a mighty body, a short neck, and a small head with two immense, straight horns. Its small head resembles a rhinoceros, yet it is unlike any living or fossil animal. Its mysterious presence forewarns that we shall not view an atlas of natural history but a region of ritual, incantation, and magic. Historians agree that the Lascaux cave was not a place of habitation but a sanctuary, the underground Sistine Chapel of our forefathers.

The Vézère River curves among limestone hills covered by forest. At its lower reaches, just before it flows into the Dordogne, a large number of caves inhabited by Paleolithic man were discovered. His skeleton, found in Cro-Magnon, resembles contemporary man’s. The Cro-Magnon probably originated in Asia and began his assault on Europe after the last glaciation, some thirty or forty thousand years before the Christian era. He pitilessly exterminated the less advanced Neanderthal, usurping his caves and hunting grounds. Mankind was born under the star of Cain.

Southern France and northern Spain were the territories where the new conqueror, Homo sapiens, created a civilization later called the Franco-Cantabrian culture. It developed in the early Paleolithic, also named the “reindeer” era. From the mid-Paleolithic the environment of Lascaux became a real Promised Land, flowing not so much with milk and mead as with the hot blood of animals. Like cities that later grew near the trade routes, the stone-age settlements were founded on the tracks of migrating animals. Every spring, herds of reindeer, wild horses, cows, bulls, bison, and rhinoceri crossed this territory to the green pastures of the Auvergne. The mysterious regularity and the blessed lack of memory in the animals, who yearly followed the same trail to certain death, was as miraculous for Paleolithic man as the Nile floods for the ancient Egyptians.

A powerful supplication for the eternal preservation of the natural order can be read from the walls of Lascaux. That is probably why the cave painters are the greatest animal artists in history. For them, unlike for the Dutch masters, an animal was not an element in a tame landscape in pastoral Arcadia; they saw it in a flash, in dramatic flight, alive but marked for death. Their eye does not contemplate the object but fetters it in its black contour line with the precision of the perfect murderer.

The first room was probably the site of hunting rituals. (They came here with stone cressets for their guttural rites.) It takes its name from four huge bulls, the largest being more than five meters long; these magnificent animals dominate a herd of horses painted in silhouette and fragile deer with fantastic antlers. Their stampede blasts the cave. In their inflated nostrils, the condensation of hoarse breathing.

The room leads into a blind, narrow corridor. What the French call “l’heureux désordre des figures” reigns here. Red cows, small childish horses, and bucks dance in all directions in indescribable chaos. A horse on its back, hooves stretched towards the limestone sky, gives evidence of a practice still current among primitive hunting tribes: animals are driven with fire and loud noise towards a high cliff and topple to their deaths.

One of the most beautiful animal portraits in history is called the “Chinese Horse.” The name does not signify its race: it is a homage to the perfection of the drawing of the Lascaux master. A soft black contour, at once distinct and vanishing, both contains and shapes the body’s mass. A short mane, like that of a circus horse; impetuous, thundering hooves. Ochre does not fill the body; the belly and legs are white.

I realize that all descriptions, all inventories are useless in the presence of this masterpiece, which displays such a blinding, obvious unity. Only poetry and fairy-tales possess the power of instant creation. One should say, “Once upon a time, there was a beautiful horse from Lascaux.”

How to reconcile this refined art with the brutal practices of the prehistoric hunters? How to consent to the arrows piercing the flesh of an animal, an imaginary murder committed by the artist?

Before the Revolution, Siberian hunting tribes lived in conditions similar to those of the “reindeer” era. Lot-Falck in Les rites de chasse chez les peuples sibériens writes: “A hunter treated an animal as a creature at least equal to himself. Noting that an animal must hunt, like himself, in order to live, man thought that it had the same model of social organization. Man’s superiority was manifest in the field of technology through his use of tools. In the sphere of magic, the animal was attributed with equal powers. On the other hand, an animal is superior to man in one or many respects—its physical strength, agility, perfect hearing, and smell, all the virtues highly prized by hunters. In the spiritual realm animals were credited with even greater virtues—a closer contact with the divine and with the forces of nature which they embodied.” This is still just about comprehensible to modern man. The abysses of paleo-psychology begin with the bond between the killer and his victim: “The death of the animal depends, to some extent, on the animal itself; it must consent to be killed, it must enter into a relationship with its murderer. That is why the hunter cares for the animal and tries to establish close relations. If the reindeer does not love its hunter, it will not bow to its death.” So hypocrisy is our original sin and strength. Only insatiable, murderous love explains the charm of the Lascaux bestiary.

To the right of the room of the bulls, a narrow cat-like corridor leads to the part called the nave and apse. On the left wall a large black cow catches our attention with its perfect outline, and two mysterious yet distinct signs placed under its hooves. These are not the only signs before which we stand helpless.

The meaning of the arrows piercing the animals is clear, since the magical practice of “killing the image” was known to medieval witches, frequently performed in Renaissance courts and even preserved until our rational times. But what are those quadrangles with a colorful chessboard pattern under the hooves of the black cow? L’abbé Breuil³, the pope of pre-historians and a prominent expert not only on the Lascaux caves, saw in them signs of hunting clans, a remote heraldry. Another hypothesis put forward is that they are models of animal traps; another sees in them designs of huts. For Raymond Vaufrey, they were painted leather coats, similar to those still to be found in Rhodesia. Though these assumptions are plausible, none is certain. Also, we are unable to interpret other simple signs: dots, dashes, squares, and circles, and the geometric figures found in caves such as Castillo in Spain. Some scholars timidly suppose that these were the first attempts at writing. So only the concrete images speak to us. Amidst the raucous breathing of the Lascaux animals, the geometric signs are silent; and perhaps will remain silent for ever. Our knowledge about our ancestors is modulated by a violent cry and a deadly hush.

On the left side of the nave, there is a beautiful frieze of deer. The artist has depicted only the heads, necks, and antlers; they flow like a river towards the hunters hidden in the bush.

A composition which trivializes the violence of our contemporary masters: two soot-black bison with their rumps turned to each other. The one on the left displays raw flesh through a torn patch of skin. Heads raised, hides bristling, front hooves thrusting. The painting explodes with a dark, blind power. Even Goya’s bullfights are but a vague echo of this passion.

The apse leads us towards a falling aperture, called a shaft, to a meeting with the ultimate mystery.

It is a scene, or rather a drama, and as becomes an ancient drama, it is played out between a limited number of protagonists: a bison pierced by a javelin, a man lying on the ground, a bird, and the faded contour of a departing rhinoceros. The bison is seen in profile, but its head is turned towards the spectator. Intestines spill from its gut. The man, his image simplified as in a child’s drawing, has a bird’s head with a straight beak, four-fingered hands thrown out and stiffly outstretched legs. The bird, as though cut from cardboard, is placed on a stick of straight line. The entire image is drawn with a thick, black line and filled with only the golden ochre of the background. It is distinguished from the paintings of the hall of the bulls and the apse by its raw, almost clumsy facture treatment. It attracts the historian’s attention not so much on artistic grounds as for its iconographic expressiveness.

Almost all Franco-Cantabrian art is non-narrative. To present a hunting scene one must introduce man’s image. We do know some carvings of faces and human figures, but man is virtually absent from Paleolithic painting.

L’abbé Breuil viewed the scene in the shaft as a plaque commemorating a hunting fatality. The bison has killed the man, but the animal’s lethal wound was probably inflicted by the rhinoceros who joined the fight rather than by the javelin thrown at its back. Perhaps the immense stomach wound was produced by a simple stone-catapult whose vague outline protrudes under the animal’s legs. And finally, the stylized bird without beak and almost without legs is for Breuil a sort of funerary column such as the Alaskan Eskimos use to this day.

This is not the sole exegesis, and because it seemed too simple to the prehistorians, they gave free rein to their imaginations. One interpretation seems interesting and worth summarizing. Kirchner, a German anthropologist, boldly proposed that the scene did not depict hunting. The man on the ground had not died on an animal’s horns, he was a shaman in an ecstatic trance. Breuil’s interpretation did not account for the presence of the bird or the bird-shaped head of the prostrate man. These elements became the focus of Kirchner’s theory, which was based on the analogy between the civilization of the hunting tribes in Siberia and the Paleolithic civilization, and referred to the ceremony of cow sacrifice described by Sieroszewski⁴ in his work on the Yakuts. During this ritual three totems were indeed erected and crowned with figures resembling the bird from Lascaux. The Yakuts usually performed these rites in the presence of a shaman who would fall into a trance. Now we must explain the meaning of the bird in the ritual.

The shaman’s task was to accompany the soul of the sacrificed animal to heaven. After an ecstatic dance, he collapsed onto the ground as if he were dead; so he had to employ an assisting bird spirit, in whose nature the shaman participated, a fact emphasized by wearing a cloak of feathers and a bird mask.

Kirchner’s hypothesis is very striking, but it does not explain the meaning of the rhinoceros, which undoubtedly belongs to the scene, withdrawing peacefully as if proud of the crime committed.

Yet another reason that this scene is important and unique: it is one of the first representations of man in Paleolithic art. What a striking difference in the treatment of human and animal forms. The bison is suggestive and specific; one can feel not only the substance of its flesh, but also the pathos of its agony. The small figure of the man is extremely simplified, a barely recognizable sign of a man: a protracted, rectangular trunk with sticks for limbs. It is as though the Aurignacian painter were ashamed of his body, longing for his forsaken animal family. Lascaux is the apotheosis of those creatures which evolution left in their immutable form.

Man destroyed the order of nature by his thought and labor. He sought to create a new order through an array of self-imposed prohibitions. He was ashamed of his face, a visible sign of difference. He often wore masks, animal masks, as if propitiating for his own treason. When he wanted to appear graceful and strong, he changed his dress and became a beast. He returned to his origins, joyfully submerged himself in the warm womb of nature.

In the Aurignacian epoch the images of man take the form of hybrids with the heads of birds, apes, and deer: for example, in the cave of Trois Frères a human figure is dressed in animal hide and antlers, with large arresting eyes, which is why prehistorians call him the “god of the cave” or “the wizard.” One of the most beautiful etchings depicts a fabulous animal carnival. A crowd of horses, bucks, bison, and a dancing man with a bison’s head who plays a musical instrument.

The idea of an absolute, mimetic animal representation, inseparable from the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Barbarian in the Garden
• Still Life with a Bridle
• Apocryphas
• The King of the Ants
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Labyrinth on the Sea
• Short Prose (1948–1998)
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Other Books by Zbigniew Herbert
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher