Although archaeologists who specialize in rock art "help us understand the ritual practices, ideological constructs, and social identities of prehistoric peoples,"
how can these marks orient us to the mysterious world into which we are born?

I've spent a fair portion of my life walking and scaling wilderness paths, yet always return to the cacophony of cities where, with "mountains I'll never see again" still imagined, I doggedly pursue insightful advances in the various arts.

Enigmatic fluting on the walls of Paleolithic caves, called meanders, macaroni, and serpentines, are impulsively similar to what we pejoratively call graffiti: spraying paint on walls from aerosol cans, instead of pressing fingers into soft rock walls.

Some archaeologists compare the old marks to entoptic phenomena, "visual hallucination produced by the structure and functioning of the human brain when it enters into certain altered states, such as trance." If Cro-magnon people had individual names, they couldn't write them. On the other hand, "the integral characteristics of the graffiti 'kings' are their nicknames and their signatures."

While modern graffiti can be traced to the walls and pillars of Ancient Greece,
the earliest known contemporary 'lay-ups' were made in mid-1960s Philadelphia
by a man who signed his work Cornbread. The cave had become the "inner city," where by the mid-1970s most graffiti was sprayed before migrating throughout
the urban landscape, in an upwardly mobile aesthetics of reinhabitation.