FENN'S IN MEDIA'S RACE

THE RHINO OF CHAUVET

There he is, the Rhino of Chauvet. That baby is thirty thousand years old.

Hol' up now, I said thirty thousand years. We're talking Paleolithic, we're talking cave people of the Pleistocene era, but most important, we're talking a drawing that was made by the first emerging human being.

Human Being, I said. No, not some monkey who stands on his hind legs and has an opposing thumb. Not some animal that figures they're going to start eating meat and climbs out of the trees. None of the above drew that rhino on that cave wall thirty thousand years ago.

It took a Human Being to draw that rhino ... an exercise of human consciousness, a mind that had the notion of a thinking "I" as separate and distinct from the general world. A mind that could imagine things that were not.

Thirty thousand years ago, some cavewoman perceived a rhino in her life, reflected upon the horror of her husband speared on that huge horn, then had the creative idea that she could pick up some charcoal and scratch an image of that beast on the cave wall.

Then, she knew, she could show that image to her children and say, "When you see that horn, know that it is dangerous. That is the horn that killed your father."

When that cavewoman drew that rhino ... in those sacred, magnificent moments ... the greatest single entity in the Universe, the human consciousness, was born.

That cave woman ran the whole river of consciousness: Perception of the animal in her life, Reflection about what it meant to her, Creation of an image she could render and Communication of that vision to her children.

She followed the river of thought, a process more important than intake of food or air, digestion, and aspiration. Animals perform these last functions, only the human performs the big PRCC combination necessary to produce that drawing.

Thousands have given their lives rather than surrender the right to freely follow this river of thought - Joan of Arc, Socrates, innumerable ex-slaves who persisted in exercising their voting rights which is Communication, the final delta of the Perception, Reflection and Creation river.

This mind river is a component of our DNA. It is not a learned process from schooling, it is something as deeply ingrained as a sense of rhthym, as the sexual drive ... and just as universal.

It is why this webpage, devoted to "the life examined," exists. It is why Shakespeare wrote his plays, Tolstoy wrote his novels, Woodward and Bernstein wrote their columns in the Washington Post, Jefferson penned the Constitution, Frank Lloyd Wright created his buildings, DaVinci his paintings. In short, it is the bottom line of all Civilization ... the universal mantra.

That's why my desktop screen has this image ... the Rhino of Chauvet ... to remind me, every time I boot up, of what I'm doing with my life. - John Fenn