Prompt: "A song about a tree"
Selected by Pat
"Black Horse and the Cherry Tree"
KT Tunstall
Eye to the Telescope, 2004
I watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams a few weeks ago. Some 35,000 years ago, a bunch of humans began making pictures of the world around them in the Chauvet cave in Southern France.
There's not a lot of art that touches me like cave art. The people who made it were anatomically identical to us, but lived in an unthinkably harsh world. It was cold, dry, and full of much bigger animals. Not only did these people survive, but they took the time to create something beautiful.
These handprints moved me like nothing else. Researchers were able to determine—based on the crooked pinky finger—that one adult man made most of the handprints in the cave. There's a record of a specific person who lived 32,000 years ago. That's probably the oldest identifiable individual, and we know he existed because of his art. Not because of how rich he was, or strong he was, or how many people he killed or fucked. It's because he took the time to express himself.
Every time you and I take the time to write for this blog, we're carrying on our human legacy. To create new ideas. To express ourselves. To contemplate a world outside our line of sight. And I think that's beautiful
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