I first came across the idea of Ice Age poetry in a book by Andrei Codrescu, which my colleague Marina Warner lent me, called The Poetry Lesson. It’s a kind of novel, centred around an American professor teaching a group of students about reading and writing poetry. For my money, it’s the best introduction to poetry on the market, and it’s full of sometimes zany ideas to get you writing, such as taking a “Ghost-Companion” to work with – that is, any poet, alive or dead, whose last name begins with the same letter as yours.
The professor assigns two anthologies of poetry to his class: Poems for the Millenium, Volume Two (edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, and published by the University of California Press), and World Poetry of the Stone and Bronze Ages. I knew the first of these, a wide-ranging and compendious anthology of all that is most exciting in world poetry today, but I’d never heard of World Poetry of the Stone and Bronze Ages. I Googled it, only to find it didn’t exist. Apparently, there was no poetry of the Stone and Bronze Ages. There was jewellery, there were swords, there were sculptures, there were cave paintings, there were even musical instruments, but no poetry.
That was when I started to think why not, surely our ancestors from the Stone Age had poetry of some kind? What traces of this had they left? Could they still be discovered, deciphered even? I’d been familiar with the cave paintings at Lascaux since I was a child, so I took another look at these. Alongside the famous paintings I noticed something I had missed before – a vast number of signs, like upside down “v’s”, dots, circles, and so on.
Early commentators on the caves had ascribed meanings to these signs, seeing in them huts, faces, stars. But I quickly discovered that this approach was out of fashion in archaeological circles. Any meanings the signs may once have had, it was widely agreed, were now lost, as we didn’t know the intentions of the people who had originally made the marks. I wanted to speculate about what meaning these signs might once have had, but the way was blocked – this was a path that was out of bounds, or so said archaeology. And yet, and yet – what if we were to think along these lines, where might this take us? If this couldn’t be done now, could it have been done earlier, at the moment the caves were discovered, before the archaeologists arrived?
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It was at this point that I decided that if Ice Age poetry didn’t exist, it needed to be invented, or discovered, by a leap of the imagination. Using a technique that is common in poetry – it was the source of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s greatest work – I decided to invent a poet, Jean-Luc Champerret, who had been there at the moment the caves had been discovered, and who had left his findings in a series of notebooks. Here, Champerret proposes that the cave signs – which subsequent generations have deemed uninterpretable – are to be read as script, as a primitive form of writing, proposing meanings that should be attached to each sign.
A row of vertical lines, he proposes, might represent spears, or a forest, or even rain. An upturned “v” sign (or, rather, two such signs, one on top of the other) might represent mountains, or huts. A line of dots might represent people, or a journey, or faces, or stars, and so on. Such signs, he argues, could be linked together in sequence to form primitive sentences or to carry or pass on messages, were they to be scratched on a stone or a piece of bark, or even scratched in the earth with a stick. Or they might just make a record of a transaction between tribes. So, the sign for mountains in conjunction with the sign for journey would convey, for example, that a hunting party had crossed the mountains. A group of signs representing antlers might record the goods handed over in an exchange.
This, in itself, amounts to a breakthrough. And yet, Champerret’s imagination by no means stops here. He draws our attention to the curious, but frequent, three by three grids of squares that decorate the walls of the cave, most notably in the polychrome blazon below the Black Cow in the Nave of Lascaux.
Taking a leap of the imagination, a leap in the dark, Champerret proposes that these grids, in themselves empty of meaning, act as frameworks for the insertion of signs, thereby acquiring and multiplying meanings. Just as the signs for mountain and journey, placed in conjunction, acquire meanings, so the grid filled with signs, and scratched, for example, on a stone, might carry messages. So, the grid filled with antlers might represent a large consignment of antlers, the grid filled with signs representing the forest and signs for fire might warn of a forest fire. But Champerret goes further than this, proposing that whereas these grids might have originally been used for practical purposes, that they evolved to form the basis of the first written poetry. Champerret, however, is not content with abstract propositions, and so he writes poetry using the signs and grids he inherited.
The technique is simple, the results startling. Beginning with the proposition that nine signs taken from the cave network, and inserted into the three by three grid, will make a poem, Champerret puts his theory to the test, not by writing one poem, but by writing in excess of six hundred. If his hunch is right, then placing signs in the grid will render poems.
His typical method can be broken into five stages: (i) he fills the grid with signs; (ii) he “translates” this minimally into French; (iii) he writes through the first translation, adding connector words, so that the poem reads more easily in modern French, translating the three by three structure into stanzaic form, three stanzas of three lines each; (iv) he writes the first variation on the poem, elaborating some of the lines, and embellishing the detail, as a shaman or an oral poet might vary the bare outline of an inherited story; (v) he repeats (iv) continuing to elaborate and embellish the original, as if a different poet were performing the text, all the while maintaining the stanzaic pattern of three stanzas of three lines each, though here the lines are progressively indented to echo the original three by three structure as it is distributed laterally as well as vertically across the page.
Finally, here is one of Champerret’s poems, in its variant translated forms, beginning with stage (i) and proceeding with stages (iii), (iv) and (v) (the signs represent, in order: eye, bison, sun, horns, bison, spears, legs, bison, club):
The eye
of the bison
is the sun
the horns
of the bison
are spears
the legs
of the bison
are clubs
*
The eye
of the bison
is like the bright sun
the horns
of the bison
are like sharp spears
the legs
of the bison
are like heavy clubs
*
The white eye
of the black bison
is like a star at night
the curved horns
of the black bison
are like sharp spears
the thick legs
of the black bison
are like heavy clubs
The Lascaux Notebooks is published by Carcanet Press
