The Awakening. (Chapter 2)

(Rock art from an 8 000 year old site in Utah.)

Waking up in my tent on the Wild Coast, I knew the day would be long, hot and still. Outside, the mirrors of last night’s downpour lay glistening at the gnarled knees of the Milkwood trees crouching along the shoreline, and the tent-cover sparkled as the sun slowly rose from her bed of night, tossing her pink and violet sheets across the glassy sea.

I knew I should get going soon, because I wanted to visit the caves at Mount Fletcher, known as KwaBhaliwe, a Xhosa name meaning “place where it is written". This site is well-know for its well-preserved rock art and I wanted to see it for myself, having studied many photographs of the paintings.

But I wasn’t really in the mood to pack up and take a rough five-hour drive right now.

I was content and at peace, and justified my procrastination as time to do more research, as I had all the digital means at my disposal.

I decided to go and throw a line in at the river mouth, just as the local boys

arrived with their slim crayfish catch and generous sunny smiles. They complained that the years had been mingy with the tide’s usual harvest since my last visit.

I bought two crays for the pot and buried them in my cooler box and took another two along as bait. I left one of the youngsters at the campsite to gather wood and watch my things, grabbed my Assassin Sabre bait-casting rig, locked up the tent and headed for the river, followed by the other boys and their handlines.

The tide was beginning to turn by the time we reached the mouth and the boys spread out looking for prawns and crabs in the calm of the shallows.

I went through my usual rigging rituals, which I always found a calming and gratifying process, and soon my line was in the water; and, as always, the opening lines from Norman MacLean’s magnificent work “A river runs through it” spilled into my thoughts: The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

For me, these words had a profound effect the first time I read them and they have stayed with me since.

On the wings of this perfect point in time and place, my thoughts drifted over the gently-pushing tide, across the ancient rocky coastline, to the mysteries and secrets still sleeping all along these dreaming shores.

As I looked around, my mind erased the blots of modern tourism which have so quickly stained this coast since my first visits here as a child. Soon, I was back in the times and places that have always haunted my deepest thoughts.

Although the paintings in the caves at nearby Mount Fletcher appear to be representations of the activities and the animals of the period in which they were created, it was the expression of the spiritual cognisance of our early ancestors that most tugged at me.

The paintings at the KwaBhaliwe site capture, in exquisite detail, animals such as Eland and smaller buck species; but more significantly, there are depictions of Shamanic Therianthropes, half-animal, half-human, and an Eland which appears to be entering a crack in the cave wall, through the veil into the Spirit World, which the Khoi San, and other far-flung ancient cultures, believed to be in a realm behind cave walls.

(Khoi San rock art, Cederberg.)

This particular phenomenon has been discovered in other sites in Australia, Mexico, France, Peru, USA – where common features such as human, animal, Therianthropic figures and even some paintings which resemble alien beings and craft are portrayed moving into or out from natural fractures and features in the rock.

At KwaBhaliwe, there are also human and animal forms with “threads of light” connecting their bodies to fissures in the cave walls.

Since finding the ancient fishhook many years ago, curiosity and passion have driven me to question the mainstream hypotheses that these ancient cave paintings are simply the hunting diaries of prehistoric savages.

The archeological record shows that while our most ancient ancestors had the limited capacity to make and use tools (homo habilis - 3.2 million years ago), it wasn’t until much later (homo erectus - 1.8 million years ago) that the first symbolic gestures emerged as they spread out from Africa into new environments. These were mainly grunts, facial expressions and the mimicking of animal sounds. Over time, the brain circuitry of early hominids progressed out of necessity to communicate, in order to form social or communal bonds, but these were still limited to whistles, grunts, lip-smacking and perhaps a broader vocabulary of growls and hand signals.

200 000 years ago, archaic homo sapiens used fire to cook and keep warm, and this may well have been a tipping point in the evolutionary process, as we all know that sitting around a fire at night has an intense effect on the mind.

But it wasn’t until around 40 000 years ago that the homo sapiens sapiens (human) began to demonstrate evidence of higher-level consciousness.

“For a brain to be self-conscious it must be able to represent the world symbolically, which implies the use of symbols such as marks, visual shapes and patterns, rhythmic and tonal patterns. Extended memory is a primary requirement for a self-conscious brain. By definition, a self-conscious brain must also include language, with an innate set of grammatical rules, or syntax. For a brain to be self-conscious, it must be able to think abstractly, question, predict, generalize, categorize, and reason.” John Holland, Professor Emeritus in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

So up until this point, our early human ancestors had developed none of these characteristics of consciousness that differentiate us as a species. Then, in a sudden spark of awakening, our imagination dawned simultaneously, and with common themes, symbols and dreamscapes, in cave art and contextually creative artefacts at sites the world over.

Just then, my thoughts were interrupted by a long, slow pull on my fishing line, and next my rod was bucking as something in the deep channel tore the line from my reel.

Fifteen minutes later, I had landed a 5kg Spotted Grunter. Catch and release would not be the rules of engagement this day.

Later, after I had cooked the crays and the fish, shared it with the boys before sending them home for the night, I sat alone at the campfire, and my thoughts went back eight months, not 40 000 years. I had recently separated from my soulmate and lover, and I poured my ambient pain into the shimmering ghosts of fire that swarmed the darkened coastline creeping in on my camp perimeter.

Fire has a magnetic pull on the soul, it illuminates and intensifies moments, moods and memories that are finning just below the surface of our consciousness.

As I threw more sticks on the fire, and as I watched the flames sashay slowly against the deep darkness behind, I was pulled into what seemed like a wake dream-state where I saw my old college buddy, Sebastian Eede, standing on a high windy cliff, pierced by a crown of Gannets, stumbling back toward the edge, as a diminutive ape-like figure frothed and stamped at his feet, pushing him back. I felt a glass-paper wind tear riptides in my mind, as time dragged its curled toes along the brittle edges of my consciousness, gashing shiny wounds into memories I never held, but which shivered bright in my immediate nightmare.