My sister once again succumbed to her murderous instincts this week, when she tried to kill me, this time using nothing but words. You know when they say, sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me? Yeah, well, they haven’t met my sister.
We were having a conversation about how stylish and pretty she was looking that day when she lashed out with her verbal machete.
“You know,” she said, “in another timeline, you’d probably be considered beautiful and popular.”
“Thanks…” said the mouth in my all-but-decapitated head.
“I mean, in another timeline,” she reiterated. “Not like… no, what I’m trying to say is, right, in another time and place, erm, no that’s not it. Hang on… I’m giving you a compliment! I think I am, anyway. You better not write about this on your substack.”
She is right, of course, that in this timeline, I’m deeply unpopular. For example, I heard this week that no one is giving me 100,000 dollars to build a cave in a field and invite artists to have visions in it. Not exactly a huge surprise, I guess, but it would have been nice. Especially given how this project has taken over my life in the last month.
I’ve basically given myself a full time job reading, writing, and talking about Ice Age art and mark-making. It’s all I do. In my defence, all of it is completely fascinating, and every question I ask leads me deeper into mystery. For example, did you know that Ice Age symbols pre-exist the Ice Age by several thousand years and may in fact have a genetic origin? Or that Homo sapiens was almost certainly not the first hominin to work with a complex symbolic system? I’m pretty sure you don’t know that humans 40,000 years ago had a full written language script, because no one really knew that until literally this February gone.
They say you should create the job you want, and I guess that’s what I’ve done, although really I could have negotiated harder on the salary, which at present is… nothing. (You can pay me if you want to, of course. I currently have a vacancy for someone to give me $100,000. Pretty sure that’s how business works, right?)
Anyway, I’m creating a new substack newsletter so I can really get into all this stuff. It’s called Wake of the Ancestors, and I’m launching it on the 15th June. I’m going to write about these kinds of fascinating things, as well as associated art projects like The Ancestral Hearth, where I find or make a cave and invite artists and dreamers to come on vision quests into the deep past and experience some of these Ice Age mysteries from the inside.
If you think that sounds amazing and fascinating and delightful, then you should definitely subscribe and look out for my first post on the 15th June. I’ll be doing a written article roughly every fortnight, alternating with a fortnightly video post. The article will discuss Ice Age symbols and associated mysteries. Then the video post will take an element from the written article and talk about it in more detail, like a side quest, except one that probably leads you to a way weirder place than you thought you’d end up.
I’ll still be writing this newsletter every week, too, so even if you don’t sign up to Wake of the Ancestors, you probably won’t be able to avoid hearing me banging on about it. I appreciate it probably seems like the new substack is getting all the attention, and to be fair, it is. But you’re still important to me. Just as important to me as the new substack. Well, in some timelines, anyway.
If you liked this post, blimmin bloomin ♥️ it! Better still, subscribe! And bestest of all, pay me for writing it like the actually cool and good looking people do.
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