'Events occur, and occurred, but the debris of the past is always repositioned, forever re-emerging as new stems' (from "Unwritten Virtues")
'[Chauvet]’s earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt […] For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served […] must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine' (from “First Impressions”)
Lye conceptions of time generally corresponded with the prevailing planetary mythology (see Harmony). The belief in the planet as a self-rejuvenating, unified organism led to a time of ‘constant presence’. All events were treated as connected and, in a strange way, as a singular and simultaneous Event, where moments were as certain to recur as individuals were certain to remanifest as other ‘stems’ after their physical death. Naturally what followed was a general disinterest in linear, progressive narratives; sequences of events were certainly recounted but invariably within the context of the permanent cyclic patterns of the living world.
The onset of the Decline challenged this notion of the infinite, unlimited Event, and led to the development of new, tentative narratives. Whorrall-Campbell has identified in the drawings of LPA327.314.01 ‘a clear but mysterious sense of narrative progression, as the articles take on new forms and arrangements […] Objects arrive, are transformed, and then disappear, producing a convincing movement from conflict to resolution’, while confessing that their arrangement of the drawings are speculative; nevertheless, its author seems to admit that, whatever is happening (or is going to happen), there will be a beginning, a middle and an end to this story, where things are no longer the same and time has irrevocably passed.