The Evolution Of Creation
For a million years
hunkered
around the fire
the ancestors kept the Dreamtime alive
Sheltered from the
harsh ice age weather in caves
they evolved a new kind of consciousness
just to survive
Passing on word
of mouth memory visions
they interpreted
the language of omens and dreams
conceived
an oral tradition
of songs sung in their mother tongues
and initiated the original underground art scene
With a little lamp
light
flickering on smooth limestone cave walls
hushed voices whispering
echoes
through a maze of dangerous passageways
the ancestor artists
descended to the Underworld
into cool subterranean galleries
Hunting magic
in underground vision quest rituals
minds expanding
wide open with wonder and fear
hallucinating weird totem animal spirits
in the supernatural atmosphere
Bone flute music
echoing spooky acoustics
Deep trance voices
chanting strange magic words
reverberating harmonic vibrations
up from the mysterious spirit world
The minds of the
makers inspired by magic
projecting lucid mental images on the rock face
tracing visions
in red ochre and black manganese oxide
they painted magnificent masterpieces
The curve of the
stone etched with mystical symbols
the vaults of the caverns alive with art
Murals of bison,
wild horses, ibexes,
extinct wooly mammoth spirits frozen in time,
aurochs, rhinoceros
and strange metamorph sorcerers
engraved on the cave walls
into a thin film of lime
Flashes of colour down long, narrow crevasses
Abstract patterns
appear
in the play of shadow and light
With a trick of
perspective they shape shift
becoming fabulous animals
Stone age special effects for some sacred rite
How on earth did a bunch of scruffy, flea-bitten
cave dwellers
cultivate such a refined intelligence
as to invent distorted anamorphic projections
twenty thousand years before the Dutch Renaissance?
Did some primitive instinct
unique to the species
inspire our ancestors
to create such great art?
or has a naturally selective sense of aesthetics
been a part of Creation's evolution from the start?
Some kind of consciousness
deeper than language
awakening in
their homo sapiens brains
to evoke primal memories
more ancient than human
out
of the real time of their dreams
Was it the emergence
of immanent psychic abilities
from
reading omens as they hunted for food?
A gut feeling in the entrails?
or
the discovery of magic mushrooms
like a divine spark
in the primordial animal meat soup?
Was it an omnipotent
Big Bang Creator
or mere random nature over a long span of time?
or some other interdimensional sentience
that gave our ancestors
the gift of creative minds?
Who knows?
maybe alien genetic
experiments
were messing
around with their DNA
but whatever the
case the old ancestor masters
created art which
has never been surpassed to this day
© 2006 Gary Lee