Emptiness: Reflection on Caves

Thirty spokes
meet in the hub.
Where the wheel isn't
is where it's useful.

Hollowed out,
clay makes a pot.
Where the pot's not
is where it's useful.

Cut doors and windows
to make a room.
Where the room isn't,
there's room for you.

So the profit in what is
is in the use of what isn't.

~Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Le Guin translation)

...

As I plumbed the depths of Entering Darkness by Sam Anderson I kept thinking about the roles of caves, depths, abysses, and the like. The most obvious to a philosophically minded type is Plato's Allegory of the Cave in which the inquiring and gradually enlightened soul frees him/herself (Plato was pretty progressive for the an Ancient Athenian) from the chains and illusions of a subterranean world. Anderson, though, raises the topic of ancient cave drawings and the ways in which caves allow for mystical encounters with the more-than-human or even the primally human world. (Anderson opens up with Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams.") Just such a mindset shined a novel light on Plato's Allegory.

If caves are places of encountering the mystical - even Anderson points out the tradition, shared by Plato's contemporaries, of building shrines in caves - but are philosophically considered realms of illusion, then what exactly is Plato suggesting we escape from? Is their a historical subtext in the Allegory that Plato is stripping away not just the ever-changing reality of immediate experience for the "ideal forms" he propounds later in the Republic, but attacking a more foundational reality of his society? Anderson himself waxes about the magical experience one haves within a cave, fascinated by the artifacts and impressions of previous travelers (footprints and handprints captivate him) as much as the shrouded, dank world of strange life found therein. Does Plato argue that this is purely illusory? Are these experiences less than genuine?

But I think that either this reading or this evaluation - my fault or a critique of Plato - is misinformed. Or rather, it is rational but ill-advised. Lovecraft writes in "At the Mountains of Madness,":

It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings in that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry - that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is especailly true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings.

The peculiar perversity of the "primal masonry" is mirrored by Anderson, "A cave is a paradox: a placed defined by its absence. It operates on a time scale that we can't even begin to coprehend - a time scale that is, in fact, obscene to any species that cares about life and tends to measure things in minutes and years and decades." Anderson even touches on the point of the Tao Te Ching - though I believe he misidentifies a paradox - in that emptiness is where function, where meaning exists. I think Lao Tzu (and Le Guin) would appreciate the cave as a place of peculiar meaning and clarity for this sort of emptiness.

Lovecraft, though, will not so easily be brushed aside. The magic that Anderson experiences, both in childhood memory and more recent recollection, taps into the abyssal, alien, even cosmic knowledge that torments Lovecraft's protagonist(s). The knowledge that is revealed by caves, why I believe that captivated Paleolithic and Neolithic humanity so much (Herzog's project is as much these people as what remains of them) is profoundly interior and potentially tormenting. Anderson writes, "A cave, in other words, is time showing off. Most geological features form slowly, of course, but caves seem extramiraculous because of the intricacy, the beauty and the delicacy of the structures — all created not by plate tectonics or giant rivers but by individual drops of water. It’s like painting the Sistine Chapel with an eyelash." This encounter with the near infinity of geologic time impresses one with the minuscule reality of human existence, one of the hallmarks of Lovecraft himself.

Lovecraft's frightful tension is the result, I believe, of a modern mind confronting the immediacy of a magical universe. Caves and how they reverberate in our psyches is in part because they place us simultaneously in ourselves and in our world. The travel inward, into the Earth itself, is an exploration of our world as it reflects who and what we are. In the alien, we acknowledge the unknowns of who and what and how we are. These are the foundational philosophical inquiries. (Anderson comments that caves remain unknowns, remain "deep" and "profound," the latter coming from the Latin profundus: "before the bottom"; which I'd like to add shares its root with to found, as in a city or building, and foundational, as in the bottom or bedrock.) I recollect Thoreau saying of Walden Pond, "A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows." But if that is the case, what then can we make of a cave?

The cavernous opening is deeply startling. Anderson refers to one as "a black hole," which is scientifically speaking a gaping whole in the fabric of the cosmos. The cave mouth is the entrance through the our usual earthly world. From within, though, Anderson sees that the mouth becomes a mimic of the sun, a strange source of light in the distance. The mouth is a hologram, a play of light that from one side is Nothingness and from the other is Sky, is Cosmos. Spinoza writes of a worm in the bloodstream, unaware of being in a body that is its entire universe; from the vantage of the cave, we are able to explore the body of the world within the within. (An odd corollary to Bruce Sterling's blog, Beyond the Beyond.) Strangely, I think Thoreau and Lovecraft are in unknowing agreement about the anxiety beneath the skin of the world; it is within that our mystic connection, that our earthly cosmos is most intimately experienced and most obviously contradicting our contemporary rational minds. From within we can no longer tell ourselves we are outside - an objective world, an objective Nature, a spiritual landscape - and then as we resurface we know our own amazement at the world anew.

...

"(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"
~from The Amazing Day by e.e. cummings