Poetic Sample:

Millau, France: 

[the volunteer] Veronica Le Guen  

fifty hours awake and thirty asleep  

staunch companions & stalagmites  

human chronobiology & body monitoring 

sending up dairies, paintings

blood & urine 

videos, photographs & drawings 

readings of the humidity of skin 

data tracks in little vials 

being a body under duress 

to experience unrest

in a space of restoration 

moving between states of euphoria

to a state of dis-ease 

[the arbiter of her torture] Michel Siffre 

in the myth of rabies  

to inhale the dust from a cave  

& the fungus & paranoia grew  

& the worry through his lungs & hair 

You don't communicate in the cave or with the cave.

You fight. You struggle.  

--Veronica Le Guen 

the body’s edges are to do with passivity and activity 

withdrawing into an acute consciousness  

of the limits as a human 

unworlding & falling sickness 

& with poignant sadness upon leaving 

& with incommunicable emptiness 

The body gives up its intelligence like a convict

-Eleni Stecopoulos

to give up fluids

is always theatrical

the state turns to persecute

& in the symmetry of things

my body turns

unhomelikeness verses harmony

& in the hierarchy of needs

blood finds a way

such is the infection

of modern thinking 

that which loses significance

outside of its own chamber

we waved goodbye to the macro

such was the whelm & welt

we longed for an attentiveness

& entanglement – gave in to the play

mythologizing the cave

is to lock onto a discourse 

to return to memories & desires of the womb  

to continue a childhood preoccupation  

[more fables & less noise] 

to hear the body turn inward

in the thin hour

in the thin place

for fluid analysis

engineered to stimulate

to bridge the outro

the to-and-fro between the living

& the bisecting / the forensic / for-ens

 of & before the forum

Poetic sample of cave-lore:

(previously published in Shearsman Magazine)

v  

I admire the project, though I suspect it is doomed. How to integrate the explorer into the art. The poetic dimensions clash against the self-referential practice which simultaneously installs & rejects, operating as a subversion of the standard exploratory discourse. Who was I to think I could make an authorial comment or elucidate on caves & their ongoing performance?  My observance versus their perpetual existence through time. My capacity to comment or add knowledge. Where I am struggling to exist, caves are simply existing, ancient & for the most part, unchanged, enacting an ongoing, unscripted performance, utterly unbothered by my observations.

v  

People you lose, want to be lost & people who are lost, do not want to be found. In the ambit of the complex, each trace of disturbance is written as a sociality of thought. In German, there is a bird in your head is another way of saying you are mad. If the lyric essay can teach us anything, it is that it all goes in, the anti- narrative which over time chimes thematically so there seems to be a type of narrative functioning, which is a vulnerable type of moral behaviour. In illness, the lyric essay is an undoing of filtered consciousness. In poker, you can move between burning the cards & going all in.

v 

He says I play him like a fiddle, but the assumption here is that I remember the tune & with that I might act dishonestly. To be expert in the art of manipulation. Or the intentions behind actions. Outpouring to the assembly. To take shelter. From the Middle English 'sheltron' or 'sheldtrume' or the Old English 'sċildtruma' or 'sċyldtruma'. These beautiful layers of meaning: a phalanx or company, a tortoise formation. The cave is communal, & I’ll lay it out for you. The fiddle must be kept in good working order, which is not entirely how it feels to play. Today we give reverence to genuflect, from the Latin root 'flectere' to bend or even to reflect light, while 'deflect' means to turn aside.

v  

Don’t close the door on poetry. It is another way of knowing. Where, if I write this for a broader readership, do I place the intellectual reader? How do I structure pleasure? It starts with a body leaving home. The debris of the present against the insistence of something old. That feeling of closed for the winter. Radon, like love, will poison you. Is it love or caves that will help you discover your most enlightened self? That will help manage the inner child who has forgotten how to play?

v  

Honestly — how do we enter the poem, if we are this careless with language. If we cohabit. If fluency flies out of the window. If we forensically trace the drift. Jolted by memory, association, mouthpiece.  Passively acquiesce under our maladies. There is disease & then there are remarks about disease. For the sake of shaping the landscapes, autoethnography is a pushback. It violates classification. The beautiful way the poet collapses into philosophy. The lamenting of a changing world, disintegrating with doubt, hidden in the poem, perceptible in the headlines. A counterpoint are these controlled cave spaces, which remain full of possibility, unchanged, not moving at full-throttle, not so in-flux.

v  

& maybe I do want the audience to be passive, deferential, after all. I am temporally tied, returning to the contoured lines because only they stay the same, because they are out of my realm of knowledge, a haphazard inquiry. Predictable & restful in the face of a world that favours [& values] productivity & systems of knowledge.

Prose Sample of Cave-Lore

 “What do I know in this place that I can know nowhere else? ...

what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?”

Robert MacFarlane

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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?

About Cave-Lore

Cave-Lore is a lament for a changing world. Tracing the resonances of folklore, myth, hauntings, magic, burial, ritual, gestation embedded in our collective and cultural imagination, Cave-Lore was initially interested in the inexplicable, energetically charged liminal spaces that elicit visceral responses. The writing has since evolved into a broader thematic exploration of the ethical and psychological consequences of isolation, confinement, disrupted temporality, re-emergence, human adaptation, ecocriticism, archaeology, performance, and spatial theory.

During my research, I discovered a variety of durational underground projects that highlighted human adaptation and resilience in the face of adversity. In the chronobiological cave experiments, participants’ relationship to time was significantly distorted, indicating that the time-perception is influenced by environmental cues. 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. 

This project builds on my former scholarship, research and publications engaging with themes of illness, time, monitored and medicalised bodies, the histories of systemic practices of incarceration and quarantine within medical and domestic spaces, and the enduring tradition of stigmatisation and confinement of sick bodies. Drawing on my embodied knowledge of autoimmune illness, theories of the performance of wellness, Crip Time, and cultural histories of caves as sites of refuge, punishment, ritual, pilgrimage, and spiritual devotion, the writing also investigates how bodies under duress adapt to confinement.

The writing experiments with collaging fragments of source material, testimonies, and quotations from cave dwellers, cave tour managers and human adaptation explorers, including Christian Clot, who spent forty days submerged in Lombrives Cave with fifteen colleagues. During an interview, Christian explained the cave became a place for participants to reassess life and reconnect with elements of living they felt mostly estranged from. He called this adaptation and the loss of social norms, anime. Underground, anime means to chat, rather than plan to chat when the social calendar allowed for it. It was an organic re-organisation of a micro-society under constraint, under duress. Following emergence, one colleague wrote “It takes three months to feel fully earthy”.

Also embedded in the sequence is the story of Veronica Le Guen, a 33-year-old American woman, who intentionally overdosed on barbiturates two years after emerging from Millau Cave, France in 1988, following a scientific human behaviour study on chronobiological and circadian rhythms, led by Michel Siffre. Made inside the cave Veronica’s artwork reminds us that expression often emerges most powerfully when it is produced at the fray of things, under conditions of limitation and duress, when it transcends typical narratives and embraces the chaotic nature of human experience. Veronica became a medicalised body under duress, heavily monitored and tested; she endured an insufferable regime where her body was decided upon by Siffre, the arbiter of her torture, engendering questions about bodily propriety. As with historical accounts of illness where the body belonged to a medical patriarchy, Veronica’s lived experience of mental pain and suffering was marginalized, hidden and negated, while her biological body was valued as communicable terrain.  

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 and body monitoring on the human psyche.

Disability and illness have long been suspected to be caused by sinful behaviour, possession, and occult practices, so when I fell ill with autoimmunity at sixteen, I believed my illness was a punishment. My childhood was seeded with ceremony, incantatory prayer, sacred words, Latin song, hymns and chanting. As a young child, religious pilgrimages shaped an early grammar through which I understood suffering and healing, fostering a fascination with sites where Catholics continue to seek purification, treatment, and remedy. 

In the sequence, we find Saint Rosalina, who experienced dissociative visions, withdrawing inside a cave in Monte Pellegrino in the 12th century and dedicated her life to prayer and spiritual devotion. Centuries later, her relic was carried through the streets, purportedly ending the 17th century Bubonic plague. 

Also included are the stories of women who have entombed themselves inside caves to heal from their idiopathic chronic illnesses. I will expand on epigenetic theories that suggest that certain environments disrupt our normal immune responses and purportedly lead to illness. In 2011, two women in France, Anne Cautain and Bernadette Touloumond moved to a cave near Saint-Julien-en-Beauchêne because of their hyper-sensitive reactions to electro-magnetic radiation caused by high tension wireless signals and computers. The two women experience unbearable burning skin, fatigue, migraines and difficulty concentrating, among other debilitating symptoms. The only remedy was to submerge themselves inside their cave. This hyper-responsive electro-magnetic phenomenon, initially met with bafflement and dismissal, conceived of as psychological rather than bodily or biological, is now taken seriously and is contributing to new health knowledge on environmental sensitivities.

Following interviews with explorers, speleologists and cave managers, I appropriate scientific and anecdotal material from these human adaptation and chronobiology experiments. Cave knowledge collides with artistic expression and poetic sensibility, generating a specific frisson, revealing productive tensions through acts of play, interpretation, conceptualisation, and distillation. 

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