Needless to say, we cannot know who this artist with the bent finger was. He was a member of one of the earliest, but hardly the first, waves of immigrants from the African continent. We cannot say what role he played in the group of 100 to 150 people to which he belonged – but as various groups have allowed him to decorate the walls of different caves, it is reasonable to guess that they saw in him the same things as we do: a man able to capture in a drawing the essence of a living creature and to reproduce it in a credible way.
Was he young or old? Did he have any assistants? Who prepared his paints for him? Was he married? Did he live with one woman, or was he a member of a group of polygamists? Did he have any children? Did he do anything else apart from painting the walls of caves? Did he go hunting with the rest of his group or did they supply him with food? Could he carve ivory or was he just a painter?
Did he have a name? Did anybody have a name at that time?
We don’t know. In the Rift Valley footprints are preserved intact after early humans walked in volcanic ash that had not yet cooled down; in France there are these handprints with the bent finger. No archaeologist can work out who he was, how he lived and how he died. But my guess is that nobody forced him to depict those animals deep down in those caves. If there was any compulsion it came exclusively from inside himself. And the feeling in the group that he lived with that the paintings could be an invocation to improve their hunting success, if I am thinking along the right lines.
There is a common denominator in nearly all the cave paintings that exist, and it is also characteristic of our own rock carvings in Sweden: the animals depicted are created in great detail. Their eyes shine, their movements are reproduced dynamically. But when human beings are depicted they are mostly no more than unfinished sketches. Matchstick figures hastily produced, as if more detailed pictures were not necessary. One can speculate about the reason for that, of course, but in all probability it is simply because the animals were more important. Human beings lived by hunting and eating them.
Nowadays we no longer paint on the walls of caves. Instead we use explosives to create large cathedrals deep down in rocks that are billions of years old so that we can store and protect the waste produced by our civilisation.
Perhaps we shall post notices on the cave walls warning future generations to beware of the radioactive death that is lying there inside its copper containers and inviting investigation.
But how does one speak to people living 100,000 years in the future? After an ice age? People who know nothing about our history?
What should such a warning text look like?
The step from the cave painter with the bent finger to the people today who need to create symbols to warn people who might be living here many thousands of years hence is very long indeed.
Or is it?
18
The floating rubbish dump
Just outside Sveg, in the province of Härjedalen, the small town with a population of about 2,000 where I grew up, there used to be a communal rubbish dump. In the early 1950s, when Sweden’s most recent polio epidemic was at its height, it was forbidden to go there. Only the rubbish collectors, who still used horses and carts, were allowed to go there and disturb the many crows that were always present. There was something frightening about the invisible viruses or bacteria hidden away there. Sometimes when I woke up in the mornings I hardly dared to straighten my legs, afraid that they might have been paralysed during the night. And I wasn’t the only one with such fears.
The most horrific thing I could envisage was my breathing being affected. If that happened to anyone they were placed in an iron lung and might have to lie there motionless day and night until they died many years later. Needless to say, the breathing machine saved a lot of lives; but in pictures it looked as if bodies were being kept in a shortened black locomotive.
I never heard any discussion about the need to enlarge the rubbish dump. Rubbish didn’t necessarily expand with increased consumption. Most food was wrapped in materials that quickly disintegrated after use. I have lived long enough to remember that a day’s food waste could be wrapped up in an old newspaper that was placed first in a rubbish bin and then somewhere where the contents simply decayed without any further action being necessary.
I grew up in the ‘cardboard age’. It was some time before we entered the ‘plastic age’ in which we now live.
I have clear memories of how everything changed. I used to spend the summers a long way from the northern inland, in the archipelago of Östergötland in eastern Sweden, just south of Stockholm. Like all the other children I would run along beaches looking for objects that had floated ashore from passing ships. My most common finds were bits of cork from fishing nets and trawling equipment. Spending a day without finding any cork was unthinkable in the 1950s and 60s.
I occasionally struck lucky. Several logbooks had been thrown into the sea from a German freighter, registered in Hamburg. I never discovered if the skipper had been drunk or angry, depressed or desperate, when he threw the ship’s most important documentation overboard, but the logbooks washed up onto the beach were like a visit from one of Jules Verne’s books.
Almost imperceptibly at first, then more obviously, plastic floats started turning up among the pebbles on the beaches. Eventually the very last cork float was washed ashore, and after that they were all plastic. Then came plastic milk cartons and water bottles, but neither I nor anybody else collected those. Plastic felt dead in my hands, while cork always felt alive.
When I was young the sight of waste and rubbish was routine, nothing to get excited about. That was also the attitude of adults around me. Especially during the summer when we were holidaying on the east coast and most meals comprised the contents of tins, which were heated up on stoves. Traditionally a day came at the end of the summer when a rowing boat was filled with empty tin cans. It was rowed out into the bay, the cans were filled with water and then sank slowly down to the bottom.
They are still lying there today – hundreds of them from my family alone. Some of them will have rusted away, of course, others will not. It is unlikely that much in the way of dangerous substances harmful to the environment was used in the manufacture of the tin cans, and the attitude was straightforward: whatever sank to the bottom of the endless sea was done and finished with, and would never bother us again.
That has doubtless always been the attitude. When the English sailed to India in steamships during the nineteenth century, ladies accustomed to such voyages would discreetly advise their less experienced fellow travellers that it was a good idea to take with them old and perhaps worn-out underwear if they were not accompanied by servants who could wash the garments during the voyage. If you were travelling alone you could throw out used underwear through the cabin porthole. English underwear was always floating around in the wake of these ships. And when Thor Heyerdahl sailed on his Kon-Tiki around the islands of the Pacific Ocean and along the coast of South America, he and others on board saw worryingly large amounts of human waste and rubbish floating around. That was in the 1950s. And I recall from my time as a sailor in the Swedish merchant navy that all rubbish was thrown over the railings aft into the sea, the only special requirement being to ensure that the wind would not blow all the crap back on board.
I was fourteen years old when Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring came out, and started a necessary reassessment of our world, which was increasingly being used as a rubbish tip. I recall how sea eagles disappeared because their eggs were damaged by DDT and they didn’t produce any young. But it was passive knowledge as far as I was concerned: I still regarded it as good fun to fill empty tin cans with water and watch them sink slowly down to the bottom of the sea.
Human beings have always produced rubbish. One of the most exciting and challenging kinds of research sites archaeologists can hope to find is thousand-year-old rubbish dumps piled on top of one another, layer upon layer. They find bones from various animals and fishes, but also
burnt remnants of other substances in layers often a metre or more thick, which can reveal the eating habits of generations, and how they change. Rubbish dumps that are excavated and analysed can supply an astonishing amount of information about how those people lived.
But we don’t only discover what people ate. We also learn about difficult times characterised by starvation and hardship. We can see how society was split up into classes with very different ways of life. We can see that some people lived much better, with access to more nutritious food, than people who might have lived only a few hundred metres away. One family or tribe ate well while others starved.
Our rubbish dumps nowadays look different, and also tell different stories.
The biggest rubbish dump in the world is not on land: it is in the Pacific Ocean. Between Hawaii and the Californian coast one can find millions of tons of rubbish floating around on the sea’s surface. Sailors talk about hundreds of kilometres of rubbish that they are forced to sail through. Ninety per cent of this rubbish is plastic, which takes an incredibly long time to decompose. Most of it is small fragments, sometimes barely visible to the naked eye, which many fish eat. We can well imagine the consequences of that both now and in the future.
I have a photograph of a sea turtle that has found a plastic bag in the Pacific Ocean. The bag is partly full of air, and the turtle is in the process of sticking its head inside it. I don’t know if it manages to do so, that is not clear from the picture; but if it does it might well suffocate inside the bag.
Needless to say, there are a lot of people working nowadays to reduce the ever-expanding amount of rubbish we produce. And we have a comprehensive system of recycling that didn’t exist twenty years ago. The most damaging forms of packaging have been banned, and in many countries people are fined for fly-tipping. We also burn rubbish as part of a scheme to create new energy, especially for the heating of our homes.
But all this is not enough. Especially worrying is the fact that we still haven’t found a way of disposing of the most dangerous rubbish of all, i.e. nuclear waste. The really big exploiters of nuclear power, such as China and the USA, have barely even begun to build temporary storage stations while waiting for eventual solutions to be discussed and decided upon.
What is happening – or rather, not happening – in a country like North Korea is something I would rather not think about. But I do.
Civilisations have always left rubbish behind. When a culture or an empire collapses, nobody tends to think about clearing up the mess they leave behind. However, neither the Egypt of the Pharaohs nor the Holy Roman Empire left behind dangerous or deadly rubbish.
But we are going to do so.
One of these days I myself will also be turned into waste matter – but my body is more reminiscent of cork than of plastic. It will start decaying as soon as normal bodily functions have come to an end.
Since I was diagnosed with cancer I have occasionally gritted my teeth and read about the decaying of human bodies. The knowledge I have acquired has given me a degree of calmness despite everything. Dying is the greatest of all human traditions. The actual moment of death varies, depending on one’s age and illnesses, but then everything happens to everybody in the same way. The only difference is whether one has chosen to be cremated or to allow time and the earth to combine and transform one’s body into new molecules which will always survive but in new combinations.
I assume that one day I shall be cremated. I have wondered whether it would be better for me to request more space, more cubic metres, so that my body can be sunk down into the ground in a coffin. To be buried in traditional style. But I don’t think I shall. Even the smoke from the crematorium releases molecules that combine with others.
Eternity and its continuing cycle are everywhere.
19
Signs
In the 1980s I lived for a few years in Zambia, close to that country’s border with Angola. It was 350 kilometres to the nearest shop, and during British colonial rule the place where I lived, Kabompo, had been used as a place of banishment for African rebel leaders who had been fighting for the destruction of the racial colonial system.
During my time in Kabompo there was a presidential election in Zambia. All the candidates were represented by drawings depicting animals – partly because that was the tradition, and partly because a large proportion of citizens were illiterate. The ruling president, Kenneth Kaunda, had a majestic African eagle as his symbol. His most dangerous opponent for the presidential post had been given a miserable-looking little rat as his symbol.
There was no doubt about what the outcome would be: Kaunda won, of course.
In today’s society we are surrounded all the time by warning signs and indications that things are forbidden. The number of signs in public places instructing me how to behave has grown steadily during my lifetime. This is due to the fact that our society has become more and more complicated. In order to avoid chaos, for instance, the regulation of traffic has involved a steady stream of new signs.
On one occasion while I was in Africa I showed a good friend the standardised warning triangle that in Sweden indicates danger of radioactivity, and asked him what he thought it meant. He reflected for a while, then said that what the symbol reminded him of most was an electric fan. Or perhaps it was an aeroplane propeller in motion? He eventually decided it was a warning not to get too close to dangerous aeroplane propellers.
If I put one of my index fingers over my mouth, everybody will probably understand that it means they should be quiet. A sign depicting a finger over a mouth means the same thing. I have never come across anybody in Europe, Africa or North America who didn’t understand that. Which is not surprising. A closed mouth means it is impossible to talk – that is a fact for all human beings. You don’t need to wonder if this and many other symbols come from some ancient common language. The same signals are understood by everybody even if there has been no inter-cultural contact. No human beings have vocal cords in their ears or in their fingertips.
Signs and symbols are powerful tools. But who will understand the meaning of those symbols 100,000 years into our unknown future?
It is difficult, to say the least, for those working today to warn people a thousand years from now that nuclear waste is radioactive. Is it in fact impossible for anybody to understand what a warning sign should look like in order to be effective when they know nothing about future people’s language, culture and understanding of what is dangerous? It is bound to be a mixture of a highly qualified guessing game and the most advanced thinking our brightest scientists can produce, combined with various elements of the experience and knowledge we possess.
The image of the rear-view mirror recurs. We need to be able to see backwards in order to see forwards.
There have been lots of suggestions for what these warning signs should look like. One was to write an appropriate text in every language spoken in our world – but that would result in an enormous mass of text. There is some hesitant agreement that the best solution would probably be a mixture of images, sounds and texts; but many wonder if there is any possible solution at all.
Another suggestion was to turn to the world of art. How would future human beings react to a copy of Edvard Munch’s The Scream if it was reproduced in the primary rocks? Would the image of the screaming woman on the bridge make observers realise that they were being confronted by something horrific and dangerous? That is how those of us living today would interpret it.
I once showed a photograph of Munch’s painting to a friend in Maputo. He immediately interpreted it as an expression of extreme angst. But we can only guess at the reactions of future human beings to Munch’s picture.
What sound could we select to drive future people away from caves containing nuclear waste? Perhaps the kind of sound-bomb that produces noises that are unbearable for human ears, which the American military has developed and now has in its arsenal? Is that the way forward? But we know nothing about the nature of futur
e people’s hearing. Perhaps the inferno of noise would be ineffective? And who can guarantee that a solution based on present-day technology would still work 100,000 years from now?
So what do we do if there is no sure way of warning future generations? The only thing left to us is an illusion. To pretend that there is nothing there in the underground caverns.
The only tool we have available is man’s capacity to forget – and that really isn’t something we should rely on.
Forgetfulness of facts and lies often go hand in hand.
20
The raft of death
It is the early summer of 1816. Napoleon has finally been defeated and will eventually be poisoned to death with arsenic on St Helena, the windswept rocky island in the South Atlantic where he is being held captive.
France is ruled by a king belonging to the Bourbon family. Four ships from the French navy have been ordered to sail southwards. Their goal is Senegal on the west coast of Africa – as part of the transformation of Europe after the Congress of Vienna, the port of Saint-Louis will be handed over to the French by the English.
On 17 June, the little armada departs from Rochefort. Keeping a group of sailing ships together is an almost impossible task, and they soon lose contact with one another. But all of them know their ultimate destination.
One of the ships is the three-masted frigate La Méduse: there are almost four hundred people on board. Half of them are sailors, the other half are civil servants who will take over the administration once the Tricolore has been raised.
The captain of the ship is Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys.
He is inexperienced, and has hitherto spent most of his time working for the French customs authorities. Moreover, he has been an opponent of Napoleon. As most of the sailors on board were supporters of Napoleon, he is immediately disliked and despised by the crew.