DOOGE

The Mesolithic Metroticket

Having just spoken of the caves of Monte Circeo, another cave in Italy holds the remains of a very different activity.  Blanc’s reading of this second bunch of remnants is as follows:  “In the cave Basua (Savona) a vaguely zoömorphic stalagmite has been used by Neanderthal man (evidenced by its footprints, identified by F. Pales) as a target for a presumably magic ceremony consisting of throwing clay pellets at the target.  This practice occurred in the innermost chamber of the cave (the cave being a cave bear’s den, littered with cave bear bones), 450 meters away from its opening: an extremely uncanny environment.  The hypothesis of a game should not be considered, but rather one of a magic ceremony in which it appears for the first time that Neanderthal man used unmodified zoömorphic natural features of caves for magic purposes, long before the birth of art by the so-called Homo-sapiens, an art that sometimes consisted of the intentional modification, by the addition of engravings upon vaguely zoömorphic stalagmites or cave walls” (124).

I think there is a simpler explanation, more simple even than magic, though if it were elaborated enough it could evolve into magic.  These Neanderthals were after a cheap thrill – cheap as a pile of dirt.  If I were a stone-ager, I think it would be an intense jolt to imagine myself fighting a bear ten times my size, and the key to my survival was to hit the tip of a stalagmite with this feather-light, impossible-to-control, crumbling lump of clay.  What a rush!  If I hit, I live.  If I miss, I die, but all in the safety of cave-cozy make-believe.  This stalagmite is not a bear.  It is not going to tear me into quivering lumps and devour them while they are still quivering.  But the pretending makes the feeling real.  It is the thrill of surviving from one moment to the next, heightened by the imaginative and focused slinging of dirt.  It is nearly the same as the thrill millions of people get from watching the ball drop on New Year’s Eve, and in that case the outcome is pre-determined, or watching some crew win the Super Bowl, in which case the outcome is not.

Habits such as these: throwing clay pellets, watching Felix Potvin tend goal, waiting with nerdly anticipation for the apotheosis of some bombastic symphony by a German Romantic composer, buying a prize horse at auction, decapitating a Neanderthal, crossing the Rubicon, or tweaking into madness before the DJ goes “dooge” on the record, all contain the same basic element – it is the thrill of a moment when something happens to heighten it.  The enhancement of the relentlessly moving Now.  Or, as Saint Augustine writes, “and thus passeth it on, until the present intent conveys over the future into the past; the past increasing by the diminution of the future, until by the consumption of the future, all is past” (129).  I cannot speculate on the length of Creation, but the creation of an art piece most definitely ought to have an end – it being the cumulative result of many of these Augustinian “present intents” until as much time is consumed as is necessary to finish it.  The planning becomes the past, the execution becomes the moment, the result belongs to the future, which suggests a new plan for the next step.  To make a fresh mark on an art surface is to take on the danger of the unknown.  If the mark hits, it goes “dooge.”  The tension of the past becomes the release of the future.  This danger, and the consequent thrill of success, is especially true in graffiti art and tattoo art, where there is very little room for error, and if you mess up, everyone will know it was you who failed, and there won’t be any hiding it (one could say these are examples of “extreme art ” or maybe “art sports”).  But even outside graffiti and tattoos, the thrill of the Now is a regular part of the artistic process.  A mistake is costly, wrong stitch takes nine hours to undo.

Music uses time to create transcendent moments. Visual art puts materials through a process in time, and freezes each transcendent moment into something static after the fact.  Still, it runs on the same fuel that inspired our ancestors to throw clay pellets, and moreover, to ritually cannibalize each other, and, moreover, to represent this cannibalism symbolically after the ritual had passed through an ethical crisis.  Action enhances the moment between tension and release.  This moment between tension and release is pervasive.  Elias Cannetti has a term for it with regard to the behavior of crowds – the discharge.  “The most important occurrence within the crowd is the discharge.  Before this the crowd does not actually exist; it is the discharge which creates it.  This is the moment when all who belong to the crowd get rid of their differences and feels [sic] equal” (17).  It is the human equivalent of tornado – nature’s way of ironing out the wrinkles and turning disequilibrium into balance.  The discharge has analogies in many realms: including weather systems, bordellos, arenas, Italian caves, operating theaters, funeral homes, riots, music halls, bathrooms and artist studios.