The intern asked. I will answer here rather than in the room, because in the room I would have thrown something, and the chair is not mine.

He asked why the caves are a secret.

The facts first, since he does not have them and neither do you. After my last drop I left. I was gone a number of years I am not going to specify. During those years I painted on walls. Not walls that face anything. Walls in the recesses, in the fissures, in the depressions — the parts of a cave a person has to want to reach. Some are in countries I will not name. Some nobody has entered since.

Now. The question assumes a secret is a thing withheld. That is the intern's error and it is a common one. A secret is more often a thing with no available form. If I tell you where the walls are, you have a location. You do not have the wall. You do not have the eleven hours it took to reach the wall, or the cold, or the particular quality of not being observed, which is the only condition under which I have ever been able to work.

I could take you. You would see paint on rock and you would say, in a low voice, that it was very good. And it would be. And you would have missed it entirely, and I would have to stand there and watch you miss it.

That is the first reason.

The second I will state plainly and then stop.

There are no people in any of them. Not one figure, in any cave, on any continent, across all those years. I painted animals. I painted shapes. I painted a ceiling above a pool of water that had never had light on it. I never once painted a person. I did not decide this. I noticed it afterward, which is worse.

That is the deepest cut of them all. I am not going to elaborate, and the intern may ask again and receive the same non-answer.

So. Why's it a secret?

Wise eat a see crit.

— W.