Michael Sutton: Fragments from the Oath of Cave Ardales

I he you made mounds. When the river
went out of fashion, woundsap swept locks across the cosm[?]
a fascination, forcing a wig of thick long locks on the sphere

[_______________] seek the quaking trees and fall
[___________________________] singing . . . signs in the rings

they, we I called long upon [
] holes in the skull [of the beast]
and dreams released in spasm

The Translator gazes through the fog to find a Brocken spectre, both self and not-self staring back, re-mimicking. The Translator holds the power; the power of change, the power to ignore, taking a razor to the mind and altering with the violence of subtlety. Ultimately, unconsciously, the self is disposed and reborn in the Brockengespenst, a rediscovery of self-consciousness (appearing new) through the other. The Translated, whether living, dead (or extinct) is also—ignored, unwitting—sucked into this loving sublimation of selves. Be it an oeuvre, or a single stanza on a wall, Translator and Translated become forever unified in lingua-consciousness. This is love, and like all forms of love, it is a complicated struggle. As any good relationship councillor will tell you, trust is key to any loving bond.

*

Holding the balance of power, the Translator must trust in the requisite lumps. They must let themselves be guided by the words of the self they have become, while the Translated trusts the Translator to ‘do justice’ to their work, soothed in assuming the Translator has no intention of ‘self-harm’. Even though there are no Neanderthals extant to critique our translation, we still felt an immense sense of duty to them and their ‘words’, just as the modern translator of Dante feels beholden to that long-dead author. Despite the initial uncertainties in the meeting of two selves, the trust of the unified lingua-consciousness, Translator and Translated, modern man and Neanderthal, is a potent, inter-subjective event built on compromise which challenges the enslaving trust-illusions of the broken (spectre) systems that permeate modernity, providing a radical map for the renegotiation of modern-prehistoric power dynamics.

[_______________] wandering [_______________________________]
cavorting cove to cove to
spread the ledge[?] of forms. She, those of the Garden,
gave great pleasure and [pause for thought] among homebirds
absorbing . . . in secret shames [
____________________________________________________________]

*

[_____________________________________] I like to lie on the floor.
[(____________________________)] I he she we like to lie on the floor casting
[_________________________] come to the rainslick steps of the library where
[_________________________] light a white flame round the corpus
of nocuous [______________________] cast rays across [__________________________]

(gap of about 14 lines)

[_________________] and sends wasps to sting us in our dreams
hunting for a healthy wound (a healthy sleep)

Due to the lack of grammar or form in the poetry of Neanderthals, I am sure you will forgive the liberties we took with punctuation and line breaks in order to provide a digestible representation. We only sought to serve our prehistoric collaborators who, of course, took significant liberties with their own premiere translation of the world. The unwritten Oath itself was a stranger-collaborator whose intentions were fogged within the chaos of potentials. It was only by translating the untranslatable that Neanderthals were able extract these intentions and ease the angst of invention. Was this how God felt when conjuring the universe? Heavens, earth, winds and waters, light, sky, seas, seeds and fruit trees, and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.

And God saith, ‘Be fruitful and multiply!’

[. . .]

And God saith, ‘Lo! the people is one, and one language is to all, and they hath built this terrible tower; therefore come ye, go we down and shame we there the tongue of them, that each man hear not the voice of his neighbour!’ And the Lord separated them from that place into all lands, and they ceased to build the tower. And therefore the name thereof was called Babel, for the language of all the earth was confounded there.

But man fought back against his tormentor: he learned to translate, to make one language into another (conserving the meaning). Now the many scattered tribes of the world could comprehend one another and share their religions, constitutions, philosophies. They even turned to translating the very Word of God that got them into their predicament in the first place. . .

*

[________________________________________] voices, vortices
[________________________________________] in mourning
[________________________________________]
[________________________________________]

(gap partly filled, partly overlapped by the following fragments
found on a splattered stalagmite)

Walk past the disembowelled crane. Should I
remember this forever? [________________________]

Then, no, leave it
alone. Let go of the feathers
__The pattern of the feathers [
_))_______] a mirror of immense length

These mirrors not only reflect but contain their own reality. Just as consensus reality is reduced by boundaries, physical and psychic, natural and manmade—intellectual limitations and cosmological horizons—so too is the reality of the mirror curtailed. The mirror must be lengthened again. Dismantle the walls and, brick by brick, the reality of the mirror is extended. With a long enough mirror, the whole wall-less universe can be reflected, but this could only reflect (be a reflection of) pure, sourceless light. No foreground, no perspective. Thus, the mirror is transformed into an entirely new universe, un-traversable beyond the one-dimensional space of its surface. Here, amid the lapse of matter and light, the familiar essence of reflection is maintained as the events closest to the mirror reflect the clearest. Look in the mirror. Your human face is the focal point of all reality. All that exists around you is latent transcendence. As soon as you exit the mirror, light floods in. And you are usurped.

*

[_______________________]
[_______________________] I he she we [
_____________] and then we will descend upon another ear to scream
the sound of flesh on flesh [
______________________________________] earth sets on a speck of a dust

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These translations were produced following a visit to the Cueva de Doña Trinidad in Ardales, Spain, home to the oldest known cave markings. The poet wishes to thank Philip Terry for lending the notebooks of Jean-Luc Champerret, offering vital insight into the translation of prehistoric signs.