The Cave |
Issue 18
|
|
A place of refuge. A place of eternal rest. Home to Calypso and the Cyclops, the Sibyl and the King of the Winds. Where Night hides during the day and Plato’s shackled prisoners undertake their ignorance for truth.
The earliest human fossils to be found in caves are probably not the remains of those who lived there but rather of those who were dragged into the caves by carnivores, to be consumed in peace. With only a few exceptions, ancient human beings never lived in caves, for they were damp and dark, uneven and dangerous, home to lions and bears. Eventually, however, our Paleolithic ancestors learned to exploit these caverns as sanctuaries of the human spirit. Artist-shamans squeezed themselves into chambers far underground to engage their religious and symbolic preoccupations in a dialogue with the rock walls, painting radiant frescoes of bison, aurochs, and other creatures of the animal world of which they saw themselves a part. The adventurous spirit of these prehistoric artists does not seem to have been dampened by fear of their fat-burning lamps going out, leaving them alone in darkness more than a kilometer from the entrance to their cave. They were occupied with a gesture of harmony, an undertaking that elevated them into a world of ideas and art. Today people enter caves for the purpose of sightseeing. A paradox, no? To enter willingly a place of darkness in order to see. Nevertheless, one sunny day in the lovely town of Sagada in the mountains of the island of Luzon in the Philippines, my beloved and I ventured into Sumaguing Cave, the most famous of the 60 caves discovered underneath the town. We were guided by a kind young man, who led us through the entrance and down, deeper and deeper into the cave. We walked on wet limestone and wiggled through narrow openings, the trail becoming steeper and slipperier as we went along. We saw beautiful rock formations, stalactites and stalagmites, and natural pools of ice cold water, lit by the lantern carried by our guide. bat cave the feel of darkness in the wet walls The mantle of a lantern generates incandescent bright white light when heated by a flame. It is a fragile thing, brittle as the dust it becomes when, with the slightest shock, it crumbles and the light is gone. How dark is dark when the lantern strikes against wet rock and the light goes out? There is no natural light in the eternal darkness of the underworld. A cave is a natural void in the ground, and as such, it is not dissimilar to a grave – that dark realm which is no place to be, a void to avoid. In an instant our cave became a place of transformation, a latent tomb, a subterranean sepulcher. Metamorphoses – the Earth’s unending cycle of life, death, and – yes – rebirth. Like the Magdalenian artists of prehistoric times, our guide had brought along a survival kit, containing a spare mantle and the waterproof matches we needed to make it light. There would be a resurrection, and we would rise from the darkness back into the light of the sun, the Form of Goodness that shone in the bright blue sky above a small town in the mountains. the newborn wakes in mother’s arms sunbeams in a spring sky |
ROBERT WITMER, now an emeritus professor has taught courses in poetry and short fiction at his home university in Tokyo and also in India. His writing appears in many print and online journals. He has also published three collections of poetry: Finding a Way; Serendipity; Sunrise, in a Rabbit Hole
|