Eric Chevillard - Prehistoric Times

And besides, little does it matter how, the hand that works uses five fingers in the business, whatever the business, and as a result on occasion it loses one or more of the fourteen phalanges that had made up its initial endowment. Goodwill is never lacking, nor is noble ambition, nor fierce determination, the heart is in it, but our numbed extremities betray us. Only my foot slipped as I was walking along the ledge. My hand will not be helpful as long as it cannot grasp running water like a rabbit by the scruff of its neck. I put my finger in the secret gears that tirelessly turn the pages of this catalogue and here I am, trapped, cornered, carried away against my will by the mechanical movement, anyone could take my place, any finger, I don’t count anymore, and if I were an animal, I would be the waterwheel donkey, if I were an edifice, I would be a mill, as a vegetable I am the artichoke that one pulls the leaves off, I am also a shutter that flaps, a wave covering a wave, a meat cleaver. The pages turn, and now we see a copy of the negative hands disseminated throughout the cave — the artist applied an open palm to the cave wall and projected red or black powder onto this surface by blowing through a hollowed bone, then took his hand away — and these hands have been groping around for fifteen or twenty millennia, and mine gropes with them, I can pull it away, my print will remain. I have touched the back wall and I shall stay stuck to it, I won’t go beyond it either, impossible; it’s already lovely to have got this far, it was not without sufferings, look at all those twisted, mutilated hands, deformed by arthritis, decalcification, eaten away by frostbite or gangrene. All these old man hands groping along until the catalogue’s final pages. Then finally one of them closes it.

Sometimes I am a little bit hard to follow — but so-called “born leaders” are mostly shadowed by jealous men armed with knives waiting for the right moment — and it is precisely because my limp causes a deviation in all my trajectories and reroutes me three times over three meters that I was chosen to lead and comment on the guided tour through the Pales cave network. I am no fool. Only a lucid mind can understand the principles of the labyrinths dreamed up by architects and manage to get out of them, but it takes a system of thinking that is sufficiently confused and delirious, or excessively logical, to orient itself in the mazes dug out by rivers. Glatt and his ilk did not appoint me by chance. True, they are beginning to regret their choice. According to them, I’ve done nothing since I’ve been here, the dead Boborikine is more active than I am, more efficient, and at least he has remained faithful to this vocation. He is worried about the future of paleontology. He is exchanging molecules. He is becoming mineral. His remains already contain less carbon 14 than they did before, and this progressive diminution will allow us periodically to take a bearing. And so we shall not let ourselves be fooled by the speeding up or slowing down of History; we need only examine Boborikine’s bones scientifically to know the time and situate ourselves very precisely in it. For — and perhaps you’re hearing it from me first — dread death occurs at least forty thousand years after the official death certificate is written, when our last atoms of carbon 14 are eliminated. Only then do we cease to emit radiation and only then is the fate of our soul sealed for good. May God on that day welcome Boborikine into his holy keeping.

IS IT BECAUSE I am an archaeologist — trained as one and derailed as a result — that I am surprised that so few widowers, widows, and orphans are sufficiently affected by the unbearable absence to break into the dead person’s grave a few days after he or she was buried to see his or her face one last time even in this sorry state, even through their tears, to embrace the body one last time before it will truly be too late, and to verify that it really belongs to the person they thought it did and reassure themselves that he or she has not regained consciousness? This all too rapid resignation smacks of consent. There is something offensive about this instant acceptance. If the greatest grief is so sensible, we can appoint it a judge, it will not lead us astray, we can put ourselves in its hands to let it wisely govern our lives. But I am speaking as an archaeologist oblivious of everything I owe to grave diggers. I am getting carried away by my passion for my job. I want to move too quickly. The minute the dead are inhumed, I want to dig them back up. Patience. It is always too soon to unbury the dead. Never did a paleontologist worthy of his name dig up a dead man. We bring to light fossilized bones, nothing but stone, let’s not get emotional, the dead are no longer there. A skeleton needs living marrow to grow bigger and stronger, but its true adventure, its adventure qua skeleton begins later, slowly, under the right conditions it turns to stone and it’s a crying shame that consciousness cannot participate in the skeleton’s adventure all the way to the end, for it is a wonderful adventure, the kind of adventure consciousness loved, like meditating or remembering, a static adventure regulated by the passing of time with, at the end, peace.

But we are irremediably, not to say very superficially, creatures of the surface, and it is always difficult for us to admit that history in reality is being determined beneath our feet. For the past (what is putrefied and petrified) and the future (what engenders and endures) are in effect buried: passing time is subterranean. Our senses do not perceive it. Our spirits do not conceive it. All those antennae only give us information about space, or the current moment, that is, today’s weather conditions. We know, however, that the prosperity of a region depends on the resources belowground, and we also know that any history of horology, from the very first ticktock, is meaningless on the scale of time that produces the following riches: quartz, hydrocarbons, diamonds, every ore. I have done a lot of digging in my time, deep digging, I have thrust myself down into the earth like a tree all the while deploring the fact that I cannot travel in every direction at once, unlike the tree that plunges and pushes its roots ever farther, branching them out rather than having to choose between two diverging roads so as to explore them both. I would also have liked to possess the ability to dig in two places simultaneously without having to split myself in two, without separating my blood, with the blind but perfectly controlled perseverance also typical of moles.

I have often had occasion to see them at work, I know them well, or, let me say in passing, I know the ones who usurp their name — for they are never totally moles, fully moles, absolutely moles, they are missing gloves, mole gloves in order to be one hundred percent moles, entirely moles, worthy of the name “mole” even if, as such, despite their tiny hands that are always clean, they are already almost moles, more mole than any other animal in any case, the shrew for example compared to the mole, the shrew in point of fact is nothing like a mole, the shrew must be redesigned from tail to snout to obtain a mole and that is why, while awaiting the mole with mole fingers, lacking this actual mole, I propose to continue to use the term “mole” for all the pseudomoles, approximate or incomplete, that can give the impression of moleness, they have proved it, and I’ve often had occasion to see them at work, therefore I am very knowledgeable about and I admire and envy their remarkable sense of direction: naturalists are in the habit of slipping a radioactive band onto one of their tiny paws and following their underground movements with a Geiger (Hans, German physicist, born in Neustadt in 1882 and died in Berlin in 1945, for those among you interested in his trajectory) counter. These experiments show that moles navigate very well in their tunnels. They never get lost despite the daily growing complexity of the network; they do not wonder which way to turn at a crossroads and they are so sure of finding their way that they lay in a food supply in several places, on different levels, before bifurcating again, whence this interminable digression that allows me to describe them in their natural surroundings with all the rigor and honesty that one rightly expects from science.