Handprints on a Cave Wall

The Marks Left Behind

My handprint on the wall touches your handprint, from eons ago. We touch, separate yet connected. I cannot hear your voice, but perhaps I can feel your intention, the curiosity of your touch, the inquiring into what might be, or what you might imagine. 

The coolness of the wall, is it a little bit dank? Or is it dry, like the desert? No, I think it is underground, and with that, there is water. I will imagine it summer, and the coolness is a balm. For me the quiet is a balm. But perhaps for you, the quiet is simply an extension of all time. The world was quieter then.

Can I see my world through your eyes? Would you feel wonder, or simply overwhelm? I am often overwhelmed.

There is space around each sensation, a slowness to time. No cell phone in your pocket pulsing with the message that may be urgent, but probably is not.

Or perhaps you are hungry, and that is what takes your attention?

In The Grammar of Fantasy, acclaimed Italian children’s book author and  teacher Gianni Rodari talks about the playfulness that is central to imagination. He uses the example of a stone thrown in a pond, the ripples it makes. “A stone thrown into a pond sets in motion concentric waves that spread out over the surface, and their reverberation has different effects, at varying distances, on water lilies, and the wreaths, the paper boats and the fisherman’s buoys. Each of these objects was standing on its own, in its tranquility or sleep, when awakened to life, as it were, and compelled to react and to enter into relationship with one another.” (Rodari, The Grammar of Fantasy, p.35)

Similarly, he says, “a word, thrown by chance into the mind, produces waves on the surface and in the depths. It provokes an infinite series of chain reactions, and as it falls, it evokes sounds, and images, and analogies and recollections, meanings and dreams in a movement that touches upon experience and memory, the imagination and the unconscious.” (Rodari, The Grammar of Fantasy, p.36)

Our minds can riff off of a word, like ‘stone’. Stone, rock, the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger, jagged edges. Or slippery stone sets sail. And on and on. Then there is also what Rodari names the “fantastic binomial” – add another unexpected word to stone – like stone and hairy, or stone and rooster, and see what possible stories might emerge.

The rooster and the stone, a love story. The stone who fell in love with a rooster. Or maybe, the rooster who fell in love with a stone.

Lateral thinking. Flights of fancy. Play.

We distinguish play from work. One has Value, earns Money. The other we relegate to childish things, we make optional, trivial, unimportant.

But that is where delight and wonder and creativity is found. In play, in a serious sort of unseriousness.

In her artist talk titled ‘I Saw Three Girls’ Amber Scoon says “if you are concentrated on whether or not it is ‘true’ you will miss the story”.

Sitting here now, I hear the chiming of the church bell, a metallic ringing, and my mind leaps to the channel marker at the mouth of Gloucester harbor that makes a clanging noise, slightly capricious, moved by the wind.

Now I smell the salt water in my imagination, I can summon it up, the movement of the water under the boat. My mind jumps to swimming in the ocean at Plum Cove yesterday, when the current was so strong that I was pulled out towards the mouth of the cove, unable to resist, until the undertow turned, and swept me back in.

Today I am without my cell phone. I left it in a friend’s car and have not gotten it back yet. There is a quiet, a spaciousness that opens in the phone’s absence. A reduction in urgency. No device pulsing in my pocket, whispering that the world is on fire. No messages, either urgent or innocuous, waiting for an answer, an acknowledgement.

No-phone feels a little bit like the hand on the cave wall, the imagined connection with the being from long ago. Neither of us waiting for a response, instead tenderly querying, wondering, and in the silence, embracing the possibility and imagined experiences of the person across time.

Entering into imagination, allowing, not forcing – partnering with the elements, and what arises. Allowing play. The world, and all it is made up of, rocks, trees, houses, people, all animate. Animal speech is understandable. Time is no barrier. There is delight in magic, and magic is found looking into the unknown without seeking names or explanations.

I was here too in the time long ago

I was here too in the time long ago. I was a hand on this wall. I was a voice in the dark. I was a body in a cave. I was a writer of poems in cuneiform, I was Enheduanna, I was a hunter, I was a gatherer, I was a farmer, I was a baker. I was a mother, a father, a sister, a brother. I was a no one and in community. I was here and there was no word for artist because artist was just being, being-with. It was being and speaking.

Rodari, Gianni: The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories, translated from Italian by Jack Zipes, Enchanted Lion Books, 2025

Scoon, Amber: I Saw Three Girls.  Visiting Artist Lecture at Western Connecticut State University 4/7/2025   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cj2pfnri7I