Too Restless to Conclude: A Review of CHALK SONG by Gale Batchelder, Susan Berger-Jones, and Judson Evans
Their voices appear to emerge from the cave itself , telling a forgotten history that suggests Plato’s cave along with the obscure borders of personal memory.
Traditionally the ekphrastic poem pairs a single still image with a text, creating a tension between the spatial characteristics of the image and the temporal movement of the poem. The poem may perform a variety of functions, explaining, extrapolating, interpreting and setting the image into motion. It can unravel an allegory or develop a narrative that leads up to or completes the frozen moment of the icon.
In Chalk Song, Judson Evans, Gale Batchelder and Susan Berger-Jones apply the tradition to Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary about the Chauvet Cave in Southern France, the oldest site of Cave Art in Europe, a place where art history begins in the shadow of an inhuman geology that both inspires and guides its formation. Their voices appear to emerge from the cave itself, telling a forgotten history that suggests Plato’s cave along with the obscure borders of personal memory.
By appealing to the film the three poets begin with an already moving image, complicating the image/text relation by essentially working beside the film echoing its concerns and animating the cave images themselves. In Chalk Song, everything moves, the text and its immediate referent, leaving no resting place for a definitive interpretation. The poems, while pointing back to the film and echoing each other, refuse resolution, too restless to conclude. The sequence further complicates the ekphrastic framework by appealing to an artwork that itself explores an earlier artwork. The poems then confront a site that has already been cinematically interpreted. Refusing to treat the film as a transparent representation, the poets acknowledge it as another interpretation, another voice in a sometimes cacophonic chorus of voices.
The cave represents a site of origins: of art , of technology, of humanity itself. “The altar was the first machine” writes Evans in a metaphor that sees magic as an early form of technology. Tellingly a recurring analogy in the film sees the cave as a proto cinema, a silent film animated by moving flashlights and headlamps. One expert describes the cave art as a message transmitted from the past to the present and posits the cave drawings as the origin of figuration and a prefiguration of film. The poems follow up on this assertion. Susan Berger-Jones refers to “the way errata blooms/sputtered through silent films”(57). Elsewhere, the shaman in Evans’ “Sediments”, gives way to a “flickering projectionist” an image that neatly conflates projector and projection, art and artist, both of which are obscured by the passage of eons.
Yet the shaman/projectionist remains a palpable absence in the cave’s imagery with its by depictions of animals ranging from horses, ibex, elks, wolves, and hyenas to birds, insects and butterflies. The single exception is a minitour like creature with the body of a bison and the head of a woman. As a scene of origins and emergence, the cave becomes a womb that asserts a commonality with the world of creatures even as it depicts an incipient differentiation between human and animal, nature and art.
The time that haunts the sequence is both the time of projection and the longer durations of history and deep time. In a startling surreal image in Berger-Jones’ “Hunted Circus, “a child is torn from her daguerreotype” and “fields are strewn… with charcoal horses,” a juxtaposition that collapses the history of image-making, as it leaps from the nineteenth century back to the stone age. Elsewhere the poets variously point to more mundane items of the twentieth century as disparate as Polaroids, radios and the internet, all of which hark back to the red hands on the cave walls as marks of ritual and human making.
While inevitably selective, the poems address the full range of the film’s images and information and in the process its interpreters. Gale Batchelder catalogs a number of talking heads zeroing in on their idiosyncratic histories; a circus worker who becomes an archeologist, a perfumier who locates caves by smell, a man who demonstrates archaic weapons. Each is a shaman of sorts sounding of the cave and its history for further information and nuance.
In spite of the myriad voices there’s a sense of continuing enigma, of the impossibility of the full knowledge of origins, of a complete return. Like the bison woman, “you can’t draw yourself out of the rock” and its mystery. “The footprints collapse into deeper footprints” writes Evans. What’s left is a sense of language echoing and, like torches, playing over the surface of a cavern that invites speculation yet keeps its secrets.