Articles Available Online

Caves, sleep, absence of light     1 Oh what is this light that holds us fast? Frank O’Hara [1]   I was about to move house and the move was happening very quickly My new home was just four miles east but I was leaving the part of London where I’d been born and had lived for most of my life Although the reasons for moving were happy ones, I hadn’t anticipated the level of unsettlement it would bring about One day, feeling overwhelmed by the detail of it all, I decided that what I really needed was to live alone in a cave I was walking past a cinema and went into whatever was showing just to be able to sit in the dark It was a film about a cave[2]   The Chauvet Cave was discovered in 1994 It had long ago been sealed off by rockfall, leaving its 32,000-year-old paintings perfectly preserved  The pale walls are covered in bison, horses, rhinoceroses, lions and bears They are strikingly fluid – a lion’s profile is given in a single six-foot-long stroke – but the artist has done even more to bring them alive The cave is full of outcrops and recesses, the walls ripple and dip, and the animals have been drawn accordingly  One bison has been given eight legs and a rhinoceros a series of six horns to indicate, like a series of frames, that they are moving  I was in a cave that was a cinema watching a film about a cave that was a cinema   The archaeologists and historians mapping and researching the cave had the open mind, and open imagination, that perhaps comes from operating so far beyond the human scale One said that he dreamt of lions ‘Real lions or painted lions?’  ‘Both’ He sounded surprised to be asked to make the distinction Another tried to explain how the world might have been perceived 32,000 years ago, describing an everyday condition of metamorphosis: ‘A tree can speak … a wall can talk to us, refuse or accept us’   In the cinema – a place of talking