Vertical Landscapes

These red line-drawings do not conform to European aesthetic preferences and instead seem to share techniques and style with many other indigenous and ancient paintings in what is now Colombia.

My friends say — imprecisely— that the Chicamocha paintings are pre-Columbian, but it is not clear to me that they necessarily are; nor when those paintings began to be made, nor when they finally stopped being made.

But since I first heard about them, when I think of the cliffs of the Chicamocha Canyon, other things come to my mind that I have indeed seen and about which I do know something from my own experience. I have seen Sufi devotees who dance for hours, retracing a single circle with their steps, mindlessly, carefully.

Try it now if you dare, try to turn around a vertical axis, a hundred times, or a thousand, or ten thousand, to see if concentrating—or perhaps not concentrating—you can do without your own vestibular system and continue dancing in circles, not because you have control over yourself, but rather, because you do not have it, and the one turning is a body without a will.

I also know of a Greek priest who danced on the edge of an abyss to commune with superhuman forces, who danced with lakes that suddenly appeared and with dead volcanoes, for whom a slip, too, would have been fatal.

I imagine we have all seen infants laugh on a swing, exstatic, feeling their spleen and the rest of their organs stop being theirs for an instant as they fall.

I think that an assault on the sense of proprioception, an attack on the sense of balance, is part of what were after—the people who made the cave paintings and also those who climb the the cliffs of Chicamocha to see them today.

The painting were worth painting because they border on the abyss and on death. At least that is what my friedns, who have seen them, say.