Part 4: The Basques, Cont.

Those of us who have dragged a mouse-line across a whiteboard in an invariably futile attempt to draw something - anything - recognizable can appreciate their talent and skill. Animals leap from the stone in perfect, natural likeness; and in form, perspective, color and expression, the visions are marvelous. Their art fascinates, not because of its antiquity, but because when we apply that other standard of art, i.e., that the created work has the power to arouse our emotion, inspire our imagination and engage our reason so that it resonates with the archetypal contents of our own psyche, their work admirably succeeds. Were the murals painted yesterday, we would still look upon them with awe.

Horses and Aurochs bulls. Some of the oldest murals in the world. Chauvet Caves, France.

Surely such demonstrations evidence the societal development of guild structures. The artists had to have painted and trained elsewhere since, particularly under the operative conditions, they could not have acquired such a high level of skill from on-site apprenticeships. Journeymen and master artists require organized and dependable support; and in the caves, the logistical problem was critical.

The artist needed assistants to bring him food, water, paint supplies, and fuel. The caves had no natural source of light and the gallery walls upon which the murals were painted were always deep in the convoluted recesses of the caves’ eternal blackness. Illumination, by torch or lamp, had to be properly positioned, steadily held, and, of course, reliably maintained. If the torches went out there in the dangerous dark, more than just the painting would be lost. Competent teamwork was vital. The Keeper of the Flame could not be somebody’s otherwise useless brother-in-law.

Then as now, the making of reliable light and the generation of heat for cooking and warmth had to require considerable engineering skill. (I recall once attending an evening of desert stargazing hosted by a group of spiritual intellectuals - none of whom smoked and all of whom forgot to bring so much as a matchbook. As the temperature dropped, as it invariably does in the desert at night, we grew desperate. Somebody got the idea of trekking back to a car to use the cigarette lighter to set something on fire, but aside from a few burned fingers and a couple of holes in the upholstery, nothing came of the attempt. We huddled together for as long as we could listening to totally inconsequential prattle about Cassiopeia’s azimuths or some such drivel - when your teeth are chattering you really don’t give a damn about degrees of distance between anything but you and a blanket - until our leader’s shivering speech formed a few four-letter instructions to us and to Orion and we scampered back to our vehicles. I don’t care what the brochures say, nobody ever engineered anything at MIT more wonderful than fire on demand.)

So, these cave painters of twenty and thirty thousand years ago were not technological idiots. And surely they lived in well decorated homes. We have a few of their sculptural artworks... carved ivory, bone and shell, mostly. But their dwellings, no doubt made of wood and animal hides or stone and mortar constructions which abutted a natural rock wall - still the "organic" construction of choice in many areas of the Pyrennees - have long since perished. We assume that their diet consisted of meat and fish, nuts and, in season, berries and other wild vegetation, and that their clothing was exclusively leather or wool. We can also assume that they were stargazers and had more than a passing knowledge of geometry and calendrics.

But their world was changing. The increasing warmth had altered the landscape. Across Europe prairie grazing lands became forested. Coastal lands shrunk away as beaches eroded disastrously. First, a marsh separated England from Europe and then, in 5,000 BC, the Channel flooded permanently. It was no longer possible to walk to Penzance or Avebury or Newgrange.

And from the east and south other human beings were plying the newly formed rivers, invading and competing for the herd animals whose numbers dwindled in inverse proportion to the increasing forestation.

The people adjusted as best they could... which, often, was rather well, indeed. (Stonehenge, an architectural triumph as well as an astronomical one, is dated to 3300 BC.) Today, a Basque living, say, in San Sebastian, Spain, on the Bay of Biscay, can walk northwest for two hundred miles and encounter the calendric stones of Carnac... (were the Channel not there he could walk just a couple of hundred more to reach Stonehenge); but in those days he’d probably have to fight his way past those foreigners... the ones who spoke proto-indo-european or some middle-eastern language.

Now I feel that it is necessary - though I don’t know why I do or even should - to make a disclaimer regarding any conflict of interest. I am not Basque. My father was born in the Netherlands, my mother was born in Hungary, and I, myself, am a native born American. Although I keep pretty much to myself, I’m considered a friendly sort; and, aside from the Bureau of Land Management, I have no enemies. So, unless there be Basques working for the BLM, I am without prejudice in their regard.

Therefore, before we continue with the problem of the bullfight’s connection to the Oxherding pictures of Zen, we have to deal with the people who invented the particular bullfight in question. I simply cannot let this matter pass.

Why does it seem to me that a nasty cultural resentment militates against the Basques? Petty pedantry and jingoistic conceit so color "scholarly" appraisals of these people that even the most casual inquiry is quickly confounded. The first conclusion is inescapable: Nothing, absolutely nothing, is allowed to have originated with the Basques.

Is there, in all of Christendom, a linguist who has not fantasized about proving the inevitable derivation of the Basque language from some other language the speakers of which were allowed to have invented it? Only now when the accumulated failures of so many investigators have congealed to substantiate the immunity of the Basque language to diffusionist contagion can we all relax and let these linguists turn their attentions to more productive enterprises... such as the morphology and syntax of Klingonese. (They are making great headway and deserve, among other things, to be congratulated.)

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