The Truth

[Norman Watts <Norman_Watts@zzzzzzz>]

First, let me say thank you for the extensive and well thought
replies that I have received. To Bill's question, whether there is
even a connection between cultural and environmental issues and stone
carving I can only say, -how can there not be? I'm extrapolating from
scanty knowledge here, but it seems to me that people have always
expressed their major concerns over the ages in characteristic ways.
We can all correctly place a cave painting, a fertility artifact, a
painting of a madonna, and a "modern abstract". Nobody today would
earnestly create the first two, and possibly the first three.  It is
almost impossible to rearrange these art forms in time. Somehow the
obsession of the time seeps out. Its almost as if it has to. Now the
house is on fire. Can man, with his millions of years old genes and
survival instincts, really sit in the living room and not be alarmed
when he smells smoke? Can he really still be chipping away at old
problems? It occurs to me now that maybe he doesn't  respond because
he has never evolved in a situation where there wasn't a fresh new
place over the horizon. Maybe for evolutionary reasons  we have no
way of intuitively responding to a situation possibly as momentous as
our coming to be. Maybe like animals unfamiliar with humans, we
can't fear the hazard when it stands before us. Maybe like George
said, I've answered the question myself. Anyway, thanks again for all
the input.

n