Into the Cave
... ima jedna pecina stroga
The cave was like other caves. A grotesque mouth gaping ugly from the ground, giving you a buzz of anxious excitement, inviting you to enter the belly of Mother Earth. Is that why caves are unnerving? I don't know if I felt more like Forster's Adela or Mrs. Moore in one of the Marabar Caves: was what I felt a young woman's thrilling sense of an otherness generated by a glimpse into the inarticulate stillness of the foreign underworld, or an old woman's stifling presentiment of a finite death transpiring through the implacable walls of the cave? Adela goes on to experience a delirious encounter with a boogieman in another cave a couple of hours later -- the foreign underworld turns out to be intimately familiar though overwhelmingly irrational; Mrs. Moore dies on a ship a few weeks later, fleeing from the unwelcome realization that the universe is no wider than the oppressive entrails of a cave.
I don't think I was aware of any premonitions, though perhaps I should have been. I was skipping from one boulder to another, trying to keep the hems of my pants from getting wet in the underground stream making burbling sounds amplified by the dark echo. A little too practical for a symbolic person; most certainly not thinking of Prufrock rolling up his trousers at the edge of the ocean where mermaids refuse to sing to him as he is getting old, getting old. Practical because afraid, really. I never liked darkness. As my childhood friend Ana said once while we were walking down the stairs in our ten-storey apartment building and the landing lights switched off automatically: you never know what might emerge from the dark. That made us fumble nervously around the wall on the next landing, looking for the switch. I never liked closed spaces either. Like those elevators in our building. Once the power started going out whimsically every once in a while, I'd never even look at them, I always took the stairs. The small windows above the apartment doors let out enough light to help you navigate until your own floor. One of my worst nightmares was about my mother, wearing a black sleeveless cardigan, stuck between two floors in the elevator for hours.
The cave, like other caves, had a secret and kept it with a poker face. I sensed it on the tingling skin of my bare arms, and in the layered thickness of our resonating voices - my brother was there too; he had got down to the cave before me, and then waited so we could go in together. Our shouts and laughter rang out like a tin drum in the cave but didn't dispel the secret which hovered, fully at home, all around us. When we got out through the luminous mouth, the outside world was too brilliant and too loud although there were no other visitors and not many sounds. It felt like taking out the earplugs and suddenly being sensitive to the smallest murmur in the leaves. The red clock on the table showed 1:50, which meant that we spent only about 20 minutes in the cave. Then we clambered all the way up to rejoin our parents who stayed by the car, my brother with much more ease than me ("That Srdjan, he is like a goat," my mother had said earlier with a typical mixture of pride and disapproval of his skipping up and down any rocks he could find).
My heart thudded dully, from the heat and from the ascent. Also from a feeling that something happened but that it escaped me because I didn't linger on it. Something about finiteness, and how soon (immediately, now, every second) it manifests itself. Something Mrs. Moore understood in that Marabar Cave and it took the breath out of her sails. But, funnily, it is also something we begin to be prepared for early on, with that nursery rhyme about the ogre in the cave. Sadly though, a child's way -- pretending not to be afraid of the ogre -- does not always seem to work later on.
u kojoj zivi Baba Roga...
It wasn't that my heart was faltering with the heat-sick molecules of a scorching late spring day, or that after a few minutes of a steep descent on the crumbling rocks in the suffocating greenery I couldn't hear anyone ahead or behind me any more. What got to me in this breathless loneliness was the sight of a small oval table covered with a green plastic tablecloth at the foot of the break-neck trail and right in front of the entrance to the cave. On top of it was a round red alarm clock, like a red alarm. Showing real time. I've always dabbled in symbols, I make my living off of them, so I thought Dali. I thought Quentin, and the timepiece his father gave him and instructed him to break. Break time. Mostly because it will pass and make you not care about the things you care most about in the world right now. It will make your electrifying hurt and pain an unacceptable stagnant lake of stale memories. Like the memory of a smell in a vacuum.
The cave was like other caves. A grotesque mouth gaping ugly from the ground, giving you a buzz of anxious excitement, inviting you to enter the belly of Mother Earth. Is that why caves are unnerving? I don't know if I felt more like Forster's Adela or Mrs. Moore in one of the Marabar Caves: was what I felt a young woman's thrilling sense of an otherness generated by a glimpse into the inarticulate stillness of the foreign underworld, or an old woman's stifling presentiment of a finite death transpiring through the implacable walls of the cave? Adela goes on to experience a delirious encounter with a boogieman in another cave a couple of hours later -- the foreign underworld turns out to be intimately familiar though overwhelmingly irrational; Mrs. Moore dies on a ship a few weeks later, fleeing from the unwelcome realization that the universe is no wider than the oppressive entrails of a cave.
I don't think I was aware of any premonitions, though perhaps I should have been. I was skipping from one boulder to another, trying to keep the hems of my pants from getting wet in the underground stream making burbling sounds amplified by the dark echo. A little too practical for a symbolic person; most certainly not thinking of Prufrock rolling up his trousers at the edge of the ocean where mermaids refuse to sing to him as he is getting old, getting old. Practical because afraid, really. I never liked darkness. As my childhood friend Ana said once while we were walking down the stairs in our ten-storey apartment building and the landing lights switched off automatically: you never know what might emerge from the dark. That made us fumble nervously around the wall on the next landing, looking for the switch. I never liked closed spaces either. Like those elevators in our building. Once the power started going out whimsically every once in a while, I'd never even look at them, I always took the stairs. The small windows above the apartment doors let out enough light to help you navigate until your own floor. One of my worst nightmares was about my mother, wearing a black sleeveless cardigan, stuck between two floors in the elevator for hours.
The cave, like other caves, had a secret and kept it with a poker face. I sensed it on the tingling skin of my bare arms, and in the layered thickness of our resonating voices - my brother was there too; he had got down to the cave before me, and then waited so we could go in together. Our shouts and laughter rang out like a tin drum in the cave but didn't dispel the secret which hovered, fully at home, all around us. When we got out through the luminous mouth, the outside world was too brilliant and too loud although there were no other visitors and not many sounds. It felt like taking out the earplugs and suddenly being sensitive to the smallest murmur in the leaves. The red clock on the table showed 1:50, which meant that we spent only about 20 minutes in the cave. Then we clambered all the way up to rejoin our parents who stayed by the car, my brother with much more ease than me ("That Srdjan, he is like a goat," my mother had said earlier with a typical mixture of pride and disapproval of his skipping up and down any rocks he could find).
My heart thudded dully, from the heat and from the ascent. Also from a feeling that something happened but that it escaped me because I didn't linger on it. Something about finiteness, and how soon (immediately, now, every second) it manifests itself. Something Mrs. Moore understood in that Marabar Cave and it took the breath out of her sails. But, funnily, it is also something we begin to be prepared for early on, with that nursery rhyme about the ogre in the cave. Sadly though, a child's way -- pretending not to be afraid of the ogre -- does not always seem to work later on.
posted by Tijana | 1:41 AM
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