An Immersive Experience: The Magic of Belief

When we read a novel or watch a movie, as adults anyway, we typically engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief," as the English poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it.  We know what we are reading or seeing is not real, but we pretend, on some level, that it is, helping us to have an emotional or intellectually stimulating experience.

What if we didn't have to suspend anything?  What if we could just plunge into some artistic expression — a story, a movie, a painting — and feel it authentically?  What if we could just . . . believe?

I recently had the extraordinary experience of visiting the Niaux Cave, home of cave paintings that have been dated around 14,000 B.C.  Our prehistoric ancestors, Homo sapiens sapiens living here in the region of the Pyrenees in southwestern France, painted dozens of images of animals, such as bison and horses, as well as geometric figures.  We may never know exactly why they painted them or what they meant, but some of the speculation is fascinating--and suggestive.

Most of the paintings we saw — just some of the ones that have been discovered in this extensive cave in a mountainside — were located in a large natural dome, under a ceiling some 25 meters high, where the acoustics were good.  Our excellent guide got us to thinking about what may have taken place there.  He even invited someone to sing.  (I did not volunteer--a blessing to everyone present.)  He also pointed out that flickering torchlight would have had a different optical effect, perhaps seeming to animate the figures. 

Today, in the age of CGI, flickering torchlight might seem like merely a very primitive form of "special effects," but what if the effects were not intended to be a trick at all?

Before seeing the Niaux cave in person, I had read a bit about cave art in a book on the history of art, as well as a few articles, including one written by the director of the Altamira Cave, Jose Antonio Lasheras.  I find this speculation from Lasheras particularly intriguing:

"A few dabs of black paint and the shadows created by lamplight are enough to suggest the startling appearance of eyes, brows, and other facial features.  By applying such techniques, the Altamira residents converted solid rock into beings that almost seem to live and breathe.  Perhaps the artists of the Magdalenian era saw in these rocks something latent that, once revealed, might bring them closer to the sacred.  This capacity to bring out something normally hidden to the community suggests that the painters of Altamira might have also served as priestly figures--shamans or intermediaries--who used their mastery of artistic techniques to bridge the human world and the holy, linking the everyday with something more powerful and spiritual" (Lasheras 35).

I came across similar speculation by author Louis-Rene Nougier.  In Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Frederick Hartt explains that Nougier "has suggested that to the cave artists artistic creation may have seemed identical with actual creation, and that by their activity in paint they were somehow making these animals who moved through their forest world."

Put all of these details and speculation together, and we have what I think is an appealing experience, one impossible for us.  Imagine . . .

You and your family members hike deep into a dark cave--a half-mile or so into the belly of a mountain.  (As my wife, Lisa, observed during our visit, perhaps these people conceived of the mountain as a living thing itself, an entity that could be entered through an opening.)  There, seeing only by torchlight, you watch a special person — an artist/shaman — paint animals into existence.  The animals seem to move in the flickering light, and the artist is integrating his or her painted lines with features of the rock, so that human artistry and nature are working in tandem.  The depicted animals seem to be born out of a huge uterus-like cavity in the mountain.

Long before even rudimentary science, it would have been easy to believe, I think, that you were witnessing an actual act of creation, that one of your tribe was crafting a living thing into existence.

I'm glad that we have science today.  I'm glad that we recognize facts, document them, and use them to make sense of the world around us.  In terms of health, government, and more, we are better off because we have these things.  Still, as a lover of literature and the other arts, I find this scenario appealing.  If art and life came together in this way, these prehistoric people had access to something unavailable to us: a truly immersive artistic experience.