Sample of Cave-Lore

You can pack your books up – the cave manager of Chislehurst caves, Jason, tells me during an interview – if you think you know what is happening. He was talking about the cave’s history, but to me it seemed more applicable to life generally. It was true, the future was affecting the past, that a future ‘me’ inside a cave would know why my creative algorithms privileged these expeditions to places that nature hadn’t yet let go of. And because I didn’t quite know why I was there; I was explicitly underprepared. Unknowability is always emotional. As Thoreau said, it’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

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The Latin etymology of the word ‘cave’ is from the word ‘cava’ to hollow out. It is the imperative of ‘cavere’ to ‘beware’ or ‘look out’. Other meanings include to tilt and overturn; to upset. A modern translation of ‘cave’ is to be persuaded into an activity, to ‘cave in’ at a suggestion. These translations all seemed too pertinent. The danger with a cave, as we know from horror literature, is that your footsteps lead toward it, but no footsteps lead out of it.

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For 111 days, Veronica Le Guen sent Michel Siffre her blood, her urine, the readings of the humidity of her skin. Some days it was a struggle to find blood in her fingers. She was required to phone Siffre when she woke and when she was going to sleep. In one cycle, Veronica spent fifty hours awake and thirty hours asleep. Siffre was furious with her and as time wore on, she conceived of him as the arbiter of her torture. He consistently requested more: her dairies, paintings, video-logs, photographs, and drawings. From her journal, it seems it wasn’t the cave itself that eventually divided her mind; it was the constant demand for her spirit, the relentless interruptions; the condition of being unable to rest in a space of restoration.

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In 2020, fifteen people take to Lombrives Cave, France, for forty days under the guidance of Christian Clot. During an interview, Christian tells me scientific studies suggest it takes between thirty to thirty-five days to adapt to new conditions. The word ‘quarantine’ derives from the Italian phrase “quaranta giorni,” meaning forty days, believed to be the obligatory time necessary to stop the spread of infectious disease from one person to another. Christian tells me the phases of embodiment were organisation, lethargy, adaptation. The subjects had no access to the news, clocks, or calendar time. You can’t plan without a clock, but you are liberated to listen to your body and live intuitively. He tells me it became a place for subjects to reassess life, feel things strongly, and reconnect with elements of living that they felt mostly estranged from. They slept at different times and fell into different rhythms. It was an organic organisation of a micro-society, an undoing and remaking of society under a constraint, under duress. They celebrated birthdays and talked about freedom versus constraint. Aboveground, we weren’t celebrating birthdays; it was the first pandemic lock-down and the world lived in a state of inertia, paused, uncertain.

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Christian called the situation that arises from loss of social norms “anime”. The Latin root “anim” as in unanimous, animated, and animosity, as in “mind” or “spirit.” To be animated is to possess or be characterized by life, to be alive, creating new human interactions and new forms of autonomy. Underground, anime meant to chat, rather than plan to chat when the social calendar allowed for the chat.

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Christian underlined how difficult re-emergence was: the caves were a catalyst for transformation. When it was time to adjust back to the psychic temporality of measured time, they found the accompanying sensory overload linguistically indescribable. Many left their relationships or their jobs, struggling to share the experience with their partners, colleagues, and friends. I was struck by a comment made by one of Christian’s participants, who wrote in a personal reflection, it takes three months to feel fully earthy.

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During the time that I’m writing about caves, a friend had a motorbike accident and a few days later over lunch, he told me the same thought he was having before the accident was still playing, like a stuck record whirring, a fragment broken off. He worries it will eternally play, refusing resolution. The mind echoes the disfluency of the body. This is how it is to be a poet, I remember thinking, to always pay attention to the fractured memories that have spliced off, and that are now filtered through a system that is full of the remembered and inherited, full of interruptions. I recall Claudia Rankin, who wrote that the poet as always ‘being broken into (visually and invisibly) by history, memory, current events, the phone, e-mail, a kiss, calls of nature’. The caves were stitched into my fabric, encoded, stored as stimuli, always present, breaking into my thoughts, refusing resolution. How long had the caves been waiting for me to notice them?

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At times, I thought it was no longer about the caves, but the intersection of mind and place. To be receptive to the minutia, to the inconsequential, to the sublime and outstanding, to surrender to the unknown. It was after reading more Jung that I saw that there was a dialogue between the unconscious and conscious  one through which new direction emerges, a coalescing wellspring that emerges between the seen and the unseen, what has been buried and what has been understood, acknowledged, brought into the active mind-space. I was fascinated by this marbling of an idea that is stitched together from intangible thoughts which crash against something poetic. It is like that: exposing the unconscious, bringing it out from the cave, shaking it free from the surface ideas, which tend to dominate our attention. It was about listening to what my psyche was guiding me towards. Mythologizing the caves was to risk something, to lock onto a new discourse.

About Cave-Lore

Cave-Lore explores themes of confinement, human adaptation, ecocriticism, archaeology, performance, and spatial theory. Whilst outlining the resonances of folklore that reside in our collective and cultural imagination, the writing has evolved into a broader exploration of myths, hauntings, magic, gestation, burial, illness, time, and ritual, within the context of cave dwelling. The work addresses the effects of inhabiting spaces that were historically conceived of as sites of sanctuary, whilst documenting the inexplicable, energetically charged, liminal thresholds to other worlds or dimensions that elicit visceral responses. 

I looked to the caves to teach me about the psychological and emotional response of the individual and collective psyche emerging to an altered normalcy, and I was seduced by the idea there might be a solution to re-emergence, a way to adapt to that particular social standstill, the haunting of an alternative timeline that did not happen. Impelled by this interest in the difficulties experienced following our collective re-emergence from the pandemic that turned us all, to some extent, into de-socialised bodies, the writing picks up themes of isolation, incarceration, bodies under duress, and advocates for cognitive reprogramming and offer refuge from the relentless demands of modern life.

Part memoir, part travel journal and geo-spatial investigation, my research, finds caves to be multi-dimensional, atmospheric, immersive spaces, energised by anecdotes, myths, and stories of human occupation. I found that they were energetically charged spaces that we respond to psychologically and emotionally and that my psychological state was irrevocably changed by visiting them.

I discovered a variety of durational underground projects that taught me about human adaptation and resilience in the face of adversity. Following these interviews with explorers, speleologists and cave managers, I appropriate scientific and anecdotal material from these human adaptation and chronobiology experiments. These durational experiments chimed with the ways we had taken to our homes during the pandemic and sought refuge from a virus that threatened to ravage our bodies but had also, crucially, infected our thinking with fears of contagion. In the writing, the cave knowledge collides with artistic expression and poetic sensibility, generating a specific frisson, revealing productive tensions through acts of play, interpretation, conceptualisation, and distillation. 

During the research, I became fascinated with the story of Veronica Le Guen, a 33-year-old American woman, who had intentionally overdosed on barbiturates two years after emerging from a cave in Millau, France — where she had spent 111 days as part of a scientific human behaviour study on her biological and circadian rhythms, an experiment led by Michel Siffre. Throughout, Veronica Le Guen emerges as a pivotal figure and a companion, her story is intricately woven through the text, underscoring the impact of extreme isolation on the human psyche.

This personal writing project has received grants and funding from the British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant, the Arts Council, and Society of Authors.

A forthcoming pamphlet, tentatively named, SLOW DOWN, YOU THIRSTY FREAK for the Seamarks series, a short run of 26 copies, curated by one of the editors of Shearsman Magazine, Kelvin Corcoran, and in collaboration with the wonderful artist David Rees.

If you would like to engage with other disciplines / broaden your thinking beyond the literary landscape of your project, you can book a consultation with me by clicking here.