I sometimes abuse ampersands

Dear kind and generous anonymous person who gave me paid time, words cannot convey the full extent of my gratitude. The option to correct my endless typos in comments! The icons, oh, the icons! And the possibility of creating polls that will be amusing only to me! But, most importantly, beyond all that, I'm very grateful that you thought of me, and decided to make my day better - I can only flail and send virtual hearts in your direction <3 <3 <3 - and that still won't convey how much I appreciate your kind thought. May I write you a fic of your choice, or a review of something, or anything else? (unless I mixed some settings up, anonymous commenting is on, IP logging is off)

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The weather's really great here - no idea why spring thought it was time to arrive, but I fully endorse its decision! - but I switched to dresses and nice coats too soon, and came down with a cold from hell. Having spent two days curled up under the blankets, making sadfaces at my life, I realized that I had tickets for Werner Herzog's movie, and, seriously, when will be my next chance to see that on big screen? So I went to see the movie: and the cold, ignored in such a brutal fashion, made a sadface of its own and magically went away! Even the common cold doesn't like to be ignored - who knew.

And Werner Herzog is great. I mean, his public persona is not everybody's cuppa, but I find it endearing: to the best of my knowledge, he's the only person who can pull off teenage machismo endemic to sixths graders without looking stupid most of the time, because he's just that good a yarn-spinner. This is the guy who thinks that forging documents and breaking locks are essential skills to directors' craft. This is the guy who films the last speakers of disappearing languages. This is also the guy who valorizes travelling on foot, this link to traditions of pilgrimage, and has the following story about it: when one influential French film critic was dying in Paris, he walked to visit her from Munich (a thousand miles, give or take) - and she pulled through, somehow. Fast-forward another decade: she's in her 90s, blind and sick, and she calls Herzog: "Werner, I cannot die, but I want to, so walk to me again to lift your curse" - and he does, and she gets her peace, finally. (I don't care if it is literally true. It's a good story.) Oh, and, when he was filming a story of a guy who pulls a 30-ton ship across a mountain to fund an opera house, he did indeed pull a 30-ton ship across the mountain himself. That was unnecessary, from the technical point of view; he went over the budjet, he spent years in the jungle, but he did it, because, if you are making a work of art about somebody suffering for his art, you gotta have it in you to do the same. And when the lead actor of that movie flipped his shit (who wouldn't?) and decided to leave, Herzog calmly informed him that he has a gun: 8 bullets would be the actor's, and he'll save the last one for himself. The actor believed him, and stayed (and, again, who wouldn't).

Well, anyway, so, the movie I saw the other day was The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I'm afraid that Herzog let his natural penchant for melodrama run loose with the sound, which led to some unintentionally tacky scenes, but it was still very touching. I even teared up a couple of times, but then, I'm very sentimental.

It's about Chauvet Cave. It was discovered in 1994; the paleontologists who found it didn't trust their eyes at first, the paintings inside it looked so modern (just google "Chauvet Cave", they are beautiful). Those are the oldest paintings we know of today, some 30+ thousand years old. Nobody ever lived in that cave, and there's nothing in its antechamber, where there is some light. Down in the darkness, however, there are pouncing lions and horses, and a bizon clinging to a naked woman. People kept coming there for a long, long time, adding animals of their own: the paintings span some 5 thousand years. At the time, Europe was covered with a glacier a mile deep, roamed over by rhinos and mammoths weighted down with wet fur; and there were lions and hyenas in caves. To imagine that humans, so perishable and vulnerable at the time, with no reliable means of communication, had managed to preserve this sort of continuity through millenia and understood each other better than we would have understood somebody who lived even 500 years ago is just unimaginable. (however, the myth of a bull and a woman survived, thanks to the Greeks: and each time you are reading that, there is this darkness of time underneath)

On one of the walls, there are hundreds of handprints left by one man: we can identify him by his crooked pinkie. We can trace his way through the cave by his handprints. We know where he stopped, where he crouched to dip his palm in clay; we know that he broke his pinkie. He died 28 thousand years ago.

At the moment and for the forseeable future, only the scholars are allowed into the cave. Herzog was hired by the French ministry of culture to do the movie. A good choice, that: he has a knack for finding wonderfully weird people. For example, he stops the archeologist at the phrase "My background allows me to understand..." with the question about said background. The archeologist smiles, "Well, I'm a historian. Before that, I worked at the circus."

I cannot stop thinking about how many horses there might yet be, unfound, waiting under the earth, pounding painted walls with painted hoofs in the darkness.