Two years ago, right about now, we were in Paris. We’d been to the Vézère Valley, where we visited three of the many cave systems in the area: Font-de-Gaume, Rouffignac, and Lascaux, though of course the actual cave at Lascaux is not open to the public so we spent most of a day at Lascaux 1V, one of the replica sites. in real size, with display rooms and so much information that it took us hours to make our way through. It was the most wonderful experience, staying in Sarlat, exploring the caves, eating duck in more iterations than I would have though possible, all of them delicious. Somehow I felt that the work I’d been doing for almost 50 years was sort of beside the point. I hadn’t gone deep enough. When we were led into Font-de-Gaume, I cried (quietly, to myself) as the guide stopped to shine a tiny light on galloping horses or the two reindeer facing one another, the female lying down, the male with huge antlers licking her forehead. The paintings are around 17,000 years old.
I’ve dreamed of that cave so many times. I was surprised at myself: I am usually kind of claustrophobic, feeling slightly panicky in contained spaces; even driving on the ferry makes my heart race. But that experience, having to bend low at some places in Font-de-Gaume, was entirely right.
So being in Paris afterwards was strangely anticlimactic. I love Paris, have been to the beautiful city 6 or 7 times, and always find a new Paris, if that doesn’t sound too twee. But on that particular visit, I only wanted to look at ancient images. The Musée de Cluny, where I’d been several times in the past, somehow fit the bill. The 15th c. Lady and the Unicorn tapestries were more beautiful than I’d remembered and I spent ages looking at them closely. In the Musée de Cluny, you are allowed quite close. You can examine the exquisite details–the mille-fleur backgrounds: cornflowers, daisies, buttercups, gillyflowers, poppies, hyacinths; and the little moments of animals: dogs, birds, and the engaging bunnies, not to mention the unicorns, lions, monkeys, and other heraldic beasts. You can see the weaving techniques, tiny mistakes, starry tents, and trees laden with oranges, acorns, holly berries, pinecones. I remember walking from the museum to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre where we hoped to buy tickets for a piano concert that evening and sitting on bench across the street to wait for the person to arrive with tickets to sell, and thinking that the world was so much more than I was somehow prepared for. In a way I’ve felt like that ever since. How do we meet the responsibility of encountering these things — a cave opening at the top of a path lined with ivy-leaf toadflax, harebells, bee orchids, tiny ferns in cracks in the stone (I made my amateur botanical notes as we ascended); tapestries so rich and beautifully worked that I sighed, in regret for never having learned to weave, and joy for being allowed to be so close to them; a church begun in the 12th century on the site of a more primitive basilica destroyed by the Vikings in 886 — and opening our hearts and minds to truly know them as they deserve to be known? I think about that often. These are only a few examples and our lives are both long enough and too brief.
It’s November, the wind has been gusting since last night, the tops of the trees bending more gracefully than you expect them to. No sign of the morning Steller’s jays (in my tapestry, they would insist on place of honour) or the chickadees who arrive in flurries like tiny leaves blown from the vines. We won’t be travelling this month but at my desk I am taking myself back to that entrance to Font-de-Gaume, the church with its slab of Roman road preserved against the facade, and last year’s transcendent walk through olive trees, cork and holm oaks, almonds, on rough ground, to Ribeira de Piscos in the Côa Valley in Portugal to meet the animals incised on rock faces between 12,000 and 30,000 years ago. I am remembering the 2 horses whose faces overlap, tenderly, their sturdy necks pecked by someone who loved them, I’m sure. I am taking myself to that company, hoping to be welcomed. It felt like a sanctuary of magnificent isolation. I think now of a line from James Wright’s poem, “A Blessing”, and somehow these are the words I want for this moment. “There is no loneliness like theirs.”
