What the Cave Painters of Chauvet Can Teach Us About Self-pity

Some truths from our long and ancient lineage

Panel of the Lions. Chauvet Cave. PC: Bradshaw Foundation.

It is election day in the United States. I did not write this essay with any political angle in mind, but the context — 30,000 year old paintings — seems fitting. A bit of wisdom from our ancient forebears would go a long way at present.

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We painted cave walls before we invented the wheel. The significant fact is that when we suffered pain, doubt, uncertainty and death in the ancient world, we did not wallow in woe-is-me – we became artists.

Let us look over the shoulder of a proto-Frenchman some thirty-thousand years ago in the French cave of Chauvet.

The man left his wife, children, and the other families in the band near the cave opening and walked deeper into the blackness. Their sobs slowly silenced behind him. His candle cast a yellow glow on his mangled beard and lined face as he crouched into a domed stone room. He placed the candle down on a slight ledge, careful not to upset the horse grease that could snuff out the juniper wick flame.¹ He stopped for a moment staring at the floor. It was negative ten degrees outside the cave. He knew the sobs would still be heard around the fire over the bands most recent loss. He thought about the children that did not make it, the children still alive, and the suffering they would endure in the trials ahead. His muscles ached. He wanted to lay down, wrap himself warmly in his woe, and never move again.

Then he looked up. The flickering candle light made the ancient paintings of deer, rhino, lions, horses, and bison appear to run across the walls and ceilings. The paintings sparked his mind with the sounds of panting breath, the give of mossy earth beneath swift feet, the pounding of his heart in his ear drums, the feel in his fingertips of a spear cutting through the hide and muscle and bone of a bear. For the thousandth time in his life, the paintings filled him with an awe so visceral he could feel it in his gut.

He shook away his sorrow and placed his palms on the stone above feint outlines of lion heads, feeling its undulations, its coarseness, its potential, its “what if.” He grabbed a bit of charcoal.

I will finish it today, he thought to himself. They will like this.

What then? Art does not appear essential to our survival. We must expend calories for it, yet we can neither kill the enemy with it nor cook it over a fire and eat it.

A question hits me every time I look at the paintings of Chauvet and my mind’s eye is flooded with images of the brutal trials that filled the painters lives: did they feel self-pity? I suspect they did and that they did not kneel to it, which raises another question: why did they paint animals of all things, and with a feeling so intense that it still strikes the soul tens of thousands of years later? And this too: what can we learn from them about the rising rates of self-pity at present?

Well, what would follow if our Frenchman with the gnarly beard decided not to paint at all? What if his intuition were to indulge in his sorrow instead of channeling it into images with charcoal and red paint? Let us reduce this idea to absurdity. Suppose a loved one dies and he sits by a tree. If he cries woe-is-me in the midst of cannibals and carnivores, what will happen? He – and his kith and kin – will be eaten. What if he scoffs at the glacial blue ice to the north, curses the herd of horses galloping up the powdery snow mountains to the east, and ignores the setting sun with its pastel tendrils of red and orange and purple reaching across the horizon to the west? He – and his kith and kin – will starve. “I cannot do this.” The bone hand of death reaches for him and his band. “Why me?” The bone hand rests on his shoulder. “Painting is for losers.” The bone hand tightens its grip. It seems then our response to death is to live, at the very least, for the sake of others.

So much for not painting. What if he decided to fend off his self-pity by painting something else, like a cubist Picasso, or a splattered Pollack, or a ghoulish landscape with frowning clouds and a tiny stick figure all alone in the world? Well, who looks at a Picasso painting and feels the urge to grab a spear and rage in defense of kith and kin? Who looks at a Pollock painting and suddenly feels the need to channel their family’s grief into wonder? Is that not madness? Even if the last remnants of some spacefaring refugees were to endure a grueling voyage from Andromeda to earth and saw a 1909AD Picasso side by side with a 17,000BC wall from Chauvet, does anyone doubt they would rather meet the knuckle-draggers in their caves over the madmen in their luxury? It seems then that our innate response to ancient hardship – of claws and cold and caves and cosmic misery – is beauty and not ugliness.

We may be on to some crucial truth of the human condition: we did not paint beauty despite our suffering, but because of it. Which means that the plague of death-at-any-moment that demanded of us beauty has been replaced by the blessing of do-whatever-you-want that demands of us nothing – and allows for a rot of the soul.

D.H Lawrence wrote, “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.”² I agree. But I also never saw a bird or a bee or a bear drop to its knees in awe. I never saw a bear say “No” to the silky cocoon of woe and “Yes” to the brutal burden of being. I never saw a bee rise above its self-pity and choose the path of suffering in life over the path of peace in death for the sake of another. I never saw a bird look at the paintings of its ancient ancestors who walked the earth millennia before itself and say, “I am part of something far more vast and ancient than I alone.” Maybe it is our ability to overcome our self-indulgent suffering for the sake of others that makes our species worth a damn.     

In the end, it is irrelevant that our ancestors felt self-pity; it is significant that they did not submit to it. Self-pity, then, is not dictated by external events, but by internal – the essential point is that it is a choice.

Now we come to the big question: why does self-pity flourish in ease and safety but wither and die in the cruel caves of Chauvet? I believe when the ancients felt the warmth of self-pity flood their bloodstream, nature gave them an if-then equation: if self-pity, then death for self and others. They would be dead in minutes whereas we and those we care for can drift among the living-dead for years. But once the cold bone hand of death brought the full weight of their mortality down upon them, what then? Staying alive in hardship required a specific mode of mind. I believe in my marrow that this mode was to hone in on a profound sense of awe for the world that was constantly trying to kill them. The greater the threat to life, the greater their sense of awe at the beautiful things in life. In sum, self-pity was once merely “self-indulgent dwelling on one’s own sorrows,” but is now also a zombified ignorance of death and awe.

What then is the antidote to self-pity in a world both blessed and cursed by ease and safety? Our Frenchman, holding death in one hand and awe in the other, might lock his eyes on ours across the chasm of thirty-thousand years, and ask, “What more do you need?”

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1. This and other minute details are from: Bahn, Paul G. and Jean Vertut. Journey Through the Ice Age. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997.

2. My Frog Brother

Adam Karaoguz

deemed it wise that I include this scene from Ridley Scott’s GI Jane. I concur.