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Horse Figurine
—one inch by one point nine inch, 32,000 to
35,000 years before Giacometti’s famous horse
A hallowed tiny horse, but missing legs,
Comes down to us impossibly, or near
In its impossibility. No dregs
Of artistry such items are. They jeer
At us for thinking we are at the top
Of art. Picasso could have learned a thing
Or three from this one sculpture. More a flop
Our Modernism is. This stallion’s sting
Kills off our arrogance. Made more than three
Times ten millennia ago, it neighs
Perfection Dali would have envied. See
Ourselves as others see us this one nearly brays.
_Just look at it and try to hold your gasp
__Back. Modern arrogance is hard to grasp.
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The Women Trapped
in a Convex Volcanic Mirror
Obsidian, a lump of ancient black,
Is held against a woman’s palm. She grips
Its roughness in her hand, its flesh quite slack
Inside her skin. She folds her fingertips
Around the rock and turns it so the lens
Can show its other side to us. It’s sleek
As curved can be. In vain attempts to cleanse
It of its darkness, polishing made bleak
The stone except that she can slightly see
Her face there in the surface. She then tries
To see the faces hidden by decree
Of eons, tries to see those other eyes
_That peer from blackness many thousand years
_vAgo. Alone she sees their long-trapped tears.
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Phillip Whidden is an American living in England who has been published in America, England, Scotland (and elsewhere) in book form, online, and in journals.
I had not realized the horse figurine depicted was that old. Gracefully carved, it certainly predates and excels over so much modern art that is a mess. I really appreciate your thought of modern arrogance of art being put in its place. My grandfather’s hobby was polishing stones and making jewelry. I loved looking at obsidian. It seemed so dark and mysterious, yet the light came through. I enjoyed these two poems.
Roy Eugene Peterson, you are quick off the mark with your response. Are you a racing stallion? Thanks for the praise of the poetry implied in your remarks. Yes, that tiny sculpture long, long, long pre-dates the most famous, ancient (and most excellent) cave paintings in Europe, which, by the way, are shockingly perfect. I would be thrilled to poetic bits if even one of my sonnets were a perfect as those paintings–or as perfect as that horse before it lost its legs. The message? Even if art descends into utter darkness, thousands of years later it may be resurrected to what it should be in human minds and eyes. I hope your grandfather knew about the Vogelherd horse.
Phillip, thank you for these sonnets, especially the first one. I believe you are making an aesthetic point here about the current state of our civilization, but it gets at a much larger question about civilization models. The model that humankind today seems to latch onto is the upward trajectory with some backpedaling in the Dark Ages. The prevailing attitude is that progress and technology are natural, good, and always, more or less, upward. Artifacts like this exquisite horse and many other prehistoric ones (discussed by Graham Hancock among others) demonstrate that there was an advanced civilization in the past and the current timeline of textbooks is only partially correct and is, in the larger scheme of things, mostly wrong. Deeper still, is that one of the roots to the unwillingness to let go of the textbook timeline is that it is necessary for Darwinian evolution, giving it enough time to occur and for civilization to emerge at most 10,000 years ago. What’s really going on is that human civilization runs in cycles, the last one probably being destroyed in the great flood and ours now seemingly heading toward a close.
A very meaningful topic for a sonnet and well executed.
Thank you, Evan Mantyk, for that long and thought-filled response to the first of those two sonnets. I’m too lazy with numbers to check out the length of your reply, but a good guess is that it is longer than either of the two paired sonnets, though maybe not as long as their total wording combined. My point? You have weighed in fully. That is good not only in and of itself but also because (for whatever reason[s]) only one other person has commented. Often the sonnets by me that you publish garner more comments. Linear or cyclical (or whatever), the history/histories of civilization(s) is/are almost, I suspect, almost completely unknown to most of us in Christendom and the Western world–not to mention all the other histories/worlds outside our usual focus. The horse stunned me. My sonnet was a weak attempt to respond to it, its meaning and the meanings you and I are dealing with in our conversation here. Mind you, I am often stunned with revelations from outside of my limited view. (How could truth be otherwise?) I am working today on a sonnet about Humaea which I had never heard of until yesterday. My ignorance is astronomically tiny. I very much appreciate your final praise of the sonnet itself, “well executed.” I wish I could say those words (or even stronger ones) to the artist who made that horse figurine. He or she totally outdid my sonnet. I am not a historian. I am supremely unqualified to comment on controversies in the discipline of history. I suspect very strongly that I and my sonnets will be obliterated by time well before 35,000 years from now. Thanks again, Evan.
How easy it is for us to forget Atlantis and Lemuria. All we can reconstruct is Gondwanaland.
Thank you, C. B. Anderson. The figurine was found in Swabia in 1931. The local artistic culture which created this horse figurine was, so far as I know, utterly forgotten. To find the sort of height that Modernism had reached, go to this link: https://magazine.artland.com/art-movement-de-stijl/ . It shows a “painting” from 1929.