Stone Diary

Caves are apertures for inward travel into realms we associate with the dream state. Half-seen revelations proliferate. We angle into surreal environs that summon our own nascence, now approached in reverse, from the detailed and edged world in the light without to the shrouded evocations within. This is the sticky, primal birthplace of the collective unconscious, where inchoate traces of shape and colour move in and out of the mind’s view.

Werner Herzog tied such elements of obscured imagining together in titling his 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, on the archaeological finds at Chauvet, France. Using movie lights that briefly banished the enveloping shadow, Herzog caught Chauvet’s exquisitely rendered depictions of animal figures. The images dazzled. Yet these works were fully realized manifestations of human consciousness. In Canadian scholar Genevieve von Petzinger’s debut book, The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest...