"The decay can only be arrested, not stopped"
Featuring excellent horses, reverse erasures, lil cowards, five-year plans, Joan Crawford, and the corrosive effects of certainty
/ Now at AC: Addison Zeller, 3 Paleolithic Stories
THE CAVE OF THE EXCELLENT HORSES
I dreamed the cave was full of Upper Paleolithic paintings. There was nothing important about the dream and I don’t remember what the paintings looked like—only that the cave had a charming name: the Cave of the Excellent Horses. Most of the real caves are closed now—Lascaux, Altamira—human breath is so bad for them, and they’re opening faithful replicas instead. It’s too late, I understand, to save the real ones, they were doomed as soon as we found them, the decay can only be arrested, not stopped. The good thing is, with no one to see, we never have to know when the paintings have disappeared. We can pretend they’re still there, comfortably blanketed in the same old darkness. As if they were never disturbed at all, as if the animals in them, the aurochs, the excellent horses, have all resumed their long hibernation. Much the way we remember things or people that have gone, and they don’t seem so far away—we can still see them almost clearly in our heads, perhaps their faces and voices have changed imperceptibly, we can’t be sure. In fact, they’re totally safe, well beyond the corrosive effects of certainty: they’ve escaped back underground, to the land of potential. And they’re so full of animals—no people—that they flow together in the memory after all, they’re almost indivisible, like parts of the same thought. It’s said the human figure is almost absent from the art of deep time, if art’s the word for something at least half magic. You do have tracings of hands and feet, there are little figurines of women with exaggerated breasts, vulvas, and no faces. There’s a carving of a man who has a face, the face of a lion. In only one painting I know of, a hunting scene, a man falls down, a man with a vast erection, I say a man but I mean a stick figure, five or six black strokes, nothing like the exquisitely natural beasts he chases, and his face is beaked—he is either masked or has the face of a bird. A bison nearby is dropping its organs in the grass from a wound in its belly, but it seems unperturbed to be losing so much of itself. And why shouldn’t it be? Lucky bison, to be given such astonishing organs by your loving cave painter, who couldn’t bring himself to paint a human face: we’ll never forget you, even if sunlight and a little breath make you crumble from the cave wall to the cave floor and wherever atoms swirl to. You’ll still appear in a million copies of several hundred books, and when anyone mentions the disemboweled bison in the cave painting you’ll flicker in their mind and in the minds of whoever hear them, there can be only one such bison, and there you will be, imperfectly, of course, but vividly yourself, while we fall into the grass, we lose precision, our faces aren’t even ours.
“Lucky bison, to be given such astonishing organs by your loving cave painter”: a, this is a phrase I am likely to say to myself on multiple occasions in the future (and in fact have already said to myself more than once today); b, if you can read that sentence and not click through to the full suite of three stories, I don’t even know what to say to you. In three short pieces, Addison Zeller displays a sentence-by-sentence ability to astonish. Read “The Cave of the Excellent Horses,” “The Conservators,” and “The Record of the Horses” at AC now.
/ From the Archive: Dan Brady, “Anthropocene”
What’s the opposite of an erasure? An apparition? A revelation? Dan Brady’s “Anthropocene” features seven iterations of the same text, each surfacing more words from the original. What the hand of the artist originally rendered invisible at the poem’s beginning comes into focus across these repetitions, confronting us with with that which we “refuse to notice.” Yet the earlier iterations—the erasures—contain their own beauty and stern wisdom, particularly in the moments of linkage between sections (“all is choice // all is reduced”).
/ Elsewhere
“It’s like Peter Pan gone wrong”: Max Restaino interviews AC contrib Matt Lee on The Backwards Hand.
There is no talent in growing a life.
The life grows with or without your consent.
Oh hey! It’s AC editor Andy Farkas at Vol. 1 Brooklyn!
“My friends, flamed up in meth or psychosis, I saw them rot, I untethered myself.” AC contrib and George Romero enthusiast Glenn Shaheen at ANMLY.
AC contribs Nam Hoang Tran and in8 iĐ featured at Petrichor.
Bluesky kinda exploded this past week, huh? Yeah, you can find us there. We even put together a starter pack of AC contributors/editors/friends, in case you want to follow some weirdos. We’re still on Twitter for the moment, but it’s starting to feel like that part of the party where everyone knows they’re making bad decisions.
Addison Zeller came triple correct