1
. Oh what is
this light that
holds us fast? .
'An Image of Leda', Frank O'Hara1
I was about to move house and the move was happening quickly. My new home was just four miles east but I was leaving the part of London where I was born and had lived for most of my life. Although the reasons for moving were happy ones, I hadn't anticipated the level of unsettlement it would bring about. One day, feeling overwhelmed by the detail of it all, I decided that it would be a lot simpler to live in a cave. I was walking past a cinema and went into whatever was showing just to be able to sit in the dark. It was a film about a cave.2
The Chauvet Cave was discovered in 1994. It had long ago been sealed off by rockfall, leaving its 32,000-year-old paintings perfectly preserved. The pale walls are covered in bison, horses, rhinoceroses, lions and bears. They are strikingly fluid - a lion's profile is given in a single six-foot-long stroke - but the artist has done even more to bring them alive. The cave is full of outcrops and recesses, the walls ripple and dip, and the animals have been drawn accordingly. One bison has been given eight legs and a rhinoceros six horns to indicate, like a series of frames, that they are moving. Seeking a cave, I had entered a cinema where I was watching a film about a cave that was a cinema.
The archaeologists and historians mapping and researching the cave had the open mind, and open imagination, that perhaps comes from operating so far beyond the ordinary human scale. One said that he dreamt of lions. 'Real lions or painted lions?' 'Both.' He sounded surprised to be asked to make the distinction. Another tried to explain how the world might have been perceived 32,000 years ago, describing an everyday condition of metamorphosis: 'A tree can speak . a wall can talk to us, refuse or accept us.'
In the cinema - a place of talking walls - we forget where we are and observe where we aren't. It's a brief but powerful form of exemption like that of entering a cave. The world we find ourselves outside can seem wonderfully clear but this clarity depends on the surrounding darkness. Caught up in the act of watching (so much less strenuous than looking), we dissolve into that darkness by forgetting it exists.
In my cinema cave, I was outside the world as it was now conjured and so safe to accept the presence of lions of any kind. I was in perfect relation to a framed and lit experience that I could explore but didn't have to enter into. I was held fast by the light because it held me in place in the dark.
Yet the cinema is 'cruel/like a miracle' as Frank O'Hara says. It overpowers and obliterates, compels our desires and fools us into 'loving/a shadow and caress-/ing a disguise!'3 Like all imagery, cinema is a way of testing connection. It's a rehearsal of contact that might be disappointing or disturbing, but is a point of triangulation with the actual, a way of creating a frame, or framework, that we seem to need.
2
Down the one path .
'Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes', Rainer Maria Rilke4
To come across a cave where you don't expect it is like discovering a secret. The unexpected rupture draws you in. An unannounced point of access is a chance to see further but only if you are willing to step sideways into the dark.
There is a consistency to walking along any shoreline. We tend to do it in a straight line, from end to end, or one point to the next, channelled between cliffs or dunes on one side and water on the other. A cave is an interruption and a release. As a child wandering along the beach, I would be looking for drama: not so much for something to happen as for something to mean something. I'd always enter a cave but not go so far into it that I couldn't see its entrance. The point was being in the dark but able to see the light, and for the lit world to notice that I was gone and to come looking.
In 1998, I was in Slovenia when my hosts suggested that we visit some caves. They were casual enough about the idea for me to envisage nothing more than a series of the minor recesses I knew from childhood. Almost half of Slovenia sits on karst, bedrock perforated by water. There are around ten thousand caves and I was about to enter one of the largest cave systems of this type not only in the country but in the world.
We walked along a river, which suddenly folded itself away below rock. Then we too were folded away, entering a tunnel just big enough not to feel like one. We joined a group with a guide and I stopped worrying because this was now an organised experience. I didn't want the thrill of exploration. I wanted a brief excursion with someone leading me through every step. As we set off into the mountain, I depended on the guide as proof that wherever we were going had been made safe. I wasn't heading into the dark to look at anything (in which case I would prefer to be alone) but as a test of my ability to enter it and remain there. The tunnel was gently and consistently lit, and in order not to panic I focused on that consistency. Everyone else was relaxed, the guide offhand, nothing was going to happen. I concentrated on fooling my body into accepting where it was - not moving away from the world, just following its reach down a well-made path.
I want to say that we were on that gently descending path for an hour but I've found out since that it was only about four hundred feet long. The slowness was in the time it took for me to adjust to the unfolding scale of this journey and my need to keep remaking the decision that I was not going to turn back, which had the effect in my mind of returning me to the start.
As we passed into a cavern the size of a small church, I looked back at the tunnel to remind myself that I could leave whenever I wanted to. At that moment the guide shut a door that I hadn't noticed behind us. It felt as if the tunnel had rolled itself up and snapped back into the earth. The cavern was gently lit and so I set myself visual distractions, moving from one rock formation to the next, and peering closely so as to keep my peripheral vision vague. If I couldn't see a ceiling of rock over my head, there wasn't one.
If there had been painted lions, I might have been able to forget where I was. Instead there were columns and accumulations which looked as if they were being continuously and infinitesimally forced into shape. In even the most eroded form, I insisted on finding something familiar, discerning gods and monsters in the slightest detail. It was a kind of visual making safe - not wanting to be somewhere so unknown and so refusing its strangeness.
There is an exact point at which I find a space too small or too crowded to remain there. My body makes a calculation and its decision is absolute. I've climbed an enclosed spiral staircase in a tower without concern only for the walls to contract a couple of inches making it impossible for me to continue. The tunnel had been just large enough and this cavern's spaciousness was a relief, yet I kept turning towards that door because I could only stay if it were possible to leave at any moment.
The guide then turned off the lights. The darkness was so substantial that I felt as if I could lean into it. It was more than air and less than solid, texture or pressure, a form of touch. I felt it on my skin rather than my eyes, and its effect was to make me give up my body. I wasn't anxious anymore but somehow released.
The lights went back on and I waited for the door to be opened, only it wasn't. This was just the start of the journey. We walked on through a series of caves and I found that my fear had been altered by that interval in the dark. My senses had loosened to such an extent that my usual calibrations couldn't be carried out. I no longer knew how large or small a space I was in, or how far I had walked or for how long. It wasn't that this didn't matter. It didn't occur.
We walked under a river. I stood below its bed listening to the force of the water and the river was as clear to me as if I had seen it. We ended up on a precarious path of wooden planks strung high on the wall of the underground canyon that brought that river back above ground. We made our way back towards the light as if through an aperture, reconstituted, redeveloped, re-fixed.
3
When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of apprehension vanishes .
Edmund Burke5
As a child I spent a lot of time lying awake in the dark. Night was a condition I was obliged to accept, as inexorable as weather or a feeling. It meant stillness, silence and self-reliance. It was also a space in which to think. What does a child remember before they can name what they see? Whatever...
