The Shape of a Pocket

took over as host and master.
    Working alone, the painter knows that far from being able to control the painting from the outside, he has to inhabit it and find shelter in it. He works by touch in the dark.
    In your studio the light, towards evening, changes, and the canvases change more than anything else which can be seen. (Far more than the crumpled paper with the two words.) Exactly what changes in them? It is hard to say. Their temperature perhaps and their air pressure. For they do not change in this light like paintings. Each changes like a familiar terrain outside a door. Like places.
    How does a painter work in the dark? He has to submit. Often he has to turn around in circles instead of advancing. He prays for collaboration from somewhere else. (In your case from the wind, the termites, the desert sand.) He builds a shelter from which to make forays so as to discover the lie of the land. And all this he does with pigment, brush strokes, rags, a knife, his fingers. The process is highly tactile. Yet what he is hoping to touch is not normally tangible. This is the only real mystery. This is why some – like you – become painters.
    When a painting becomes a place, there is a chance that the
face
of what the painter is looking for will show itself there. The longed-for ‘return look’ can never come directly to him, it can only come through a place.
    If the face does come, it is partly pigment, coloured dirt: partly drawn forms always being corrected: but, most importantly, it is the becoming, the coming-towards-being of what he was searching for. And this becoming is not yet – and, in fact, never will be – tangible, just as the bison on the walls of the canvas were never edible.
    What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which, without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
    The painter’s continual search is for a place to welcome the absent. If he finds a place, he arranges it and prays for the face of the absent to appear.
    As you know, the face of the absent can be the backside of a mule! There are no hierarchies, thank God.
    Has something been saved? you ask.
    This time, yes.
    What?
    A part, Miquel, of what begins again and again.

4
The Chauvet Cave

    You, Marisa, who have painted so many creatures and turned over many stones and crouched for hours looking, perhaps you will follow me.
    Today I went to the street market in a suburb south of Paris. You can buy everything there from boots to sea urchins. There’s a woman who sells the best paprika I know. There’s a fishmonger who shouts out to me whenever he has an unusual fish that he finds beautiful, because he thinks I may buy it in order to draw it. There’s a lean man with a beard who sells honey and wine. Recently he has taken to writing poetry, and he hands out photocopies of his poems to his regular clients, looking even more surprised than they do.
    One of the poems he handed me this morning went like this:
    Mais qui piqua ce triangle dans ma tête?
Ce triangle ne du clair de lune
me traversa sans me toucher
avec des bruits de libellule
en pleine nuit dans le rocher.
    Who put this triangle in my head?
This triangle born of moonlight
went through me without touching me
making the noise of a dragonfly
deep in the rock at night.

    After I read it, I wanted to talk to you about the first painted animals. What I want to say is obvious, something which everybody who has looked at Palaeolithic cave paintings must feel, but which is never (or seldom) said clearly. Maybe the difficulty is one of vocabulary; maybe we have to find new references.
    The beginnings of art are being continually pushed back in time. Sculpted rocks just discovered at Kununurra in Australia may date back seventy-five thousands years. The paintings of horses, rhinoceros, ibex, mammoths, lions, bears, bison, panthers, reindeer, aurochs, and an owl, found in 1994 in the Chauvet Cave in the French Ardèche, are probably fifteen thousand years older than those found in the Lascaux caves! The time separating us from these artists is at least twelve times longer than the time separating us from the pre-Socratic philosophers.
    What makes their age astounding is the sensitivity of perception they reveal. The thrust of an animal’s neck or the set of its mouth or the energy of its haunches were observed and recreated with a nervousness and control comparable to what we find in the works of a Fra Lippo Lippi, a Velazquez, or a