Contest: Journeys into the Underworld
From Orpheus to Duncan Shriek, the descent into the underworld has long been a recurrent motif in world literature. Passing the threshold, the hero undergoes a sort of transfiguration: facing the perils of the nightlands beneath the earth, the protagonist conquers the demons of his own dark half.
Joseph Campbell, in his seminal work The Hero With A Thousand Faces, wrote, “And so it happens that if anyone – in whatever society – undertakes for himself the perilous journey into darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth, he soon finds himself in a landscape of symbolical figures…In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the second stage of the Way, that of the “purification of the self,” when the senses are “cleansed and humbled” and the energies and interests “concentrated upon transcendental things”; or in a vocabulary of more modern turn: this is the process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our own personal past.”
Ultimately, in most tales, the result of this transmutation is a reconciliation of opposites. Conquering his or her shadow side, it is absorbed and integrated into the psyche. The warrior is made whole; capable at last of crossing the final threshold, claiming the prize of his quest and returning to the land of everyday things.
I am fascinated by caves and the underworld – both in their more mundane incarnation and as symbols of transformation and rebirth. Where I live, there are no caves. A powerful statement, maybe, in this context.
I’d like very much to hear of your own favorite anecdotes, stories, thoughts and experiences involving the underworld, both literal and metaphorical. However, I would not expect for you to take this perilous journey into the deep unnecessarily: I am offering a prize: a small collection of books on caves, caving and other speleological pursuits.
I will select one winner from your comments on Monday, my final day here with you at Ecstatic Days, and contact this person to arrange shipping of the books. The winner will be the person who offers the most interesting, entertaining or enlightening entry on the underworld. I may ask Jeff to assist in selecting a winner.
You may comment as many times as you like.
April 11, 2008 at 9:20 am
A nerve wracking experience back in Brazil:
8th grade, and my class was taken on a week long caving trip in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo. We walked into caves that were vast horizontal gashes into the earth, we waded up waist deep rivers along winding tunnels, and had a great time. On the second to last day we took a long bus trip to a series of caverns that were famous for their stalactite and stalagmite formations, and dutifully filed along behind the tour guide, looking at all the rocks and enjoying ourselves. When we reached the final cavern, the tour guide sat down, told us all to take break, and announced that we were done.
“We’ll take a five minute break, and then head back out. Though there’s one last cavern, if anybody wants to go see it. It’s called the Caverna da Santa Maria, because the man who discovered it saw an image of the Virgin Mary appear before him went he first went in. If anybody wants to go, I’ll let you take a look in groups of two and then come right back.”
My friend Matt and I leaped up, and the guide grinned and pointed out a wormhole in the wall. “Just crawl through there and keep going till it opens up to the cave. Then come right back, alright?”
I went first, and Matt crawled in right behind me. It was a cramped little tunnel, too small to do anything other than crawl, and it wound back and forth, up and down. The air grew increasingly stale, and finally I rounded a corner and saw a dead end. There was no cave, and we’d certainly not missed a side tunnel. Confused, I turned my flashlight back over my shoulder at Matt, and saw that he was resting his forehead and the ground. His eyes were closed. He was wheezing, and wouldn’t respond to my questions.
I was trapped. Dead end ahead of me, Matt half collapsed behind me, and the tunnel too narrow to turn around in. Matt kept asking for just a moment, he just wanted to rest for a little bit, and kept lowering his forehead to the ground and closing his eyes. Panicked, I started kicking him in the head, shoving him back, and he grudgingly retreated, shuffling all the way back to the entrance, improving as the air got fresher.
When we emerged, the guide and everybody else was laughing. Matt was red in the face, and I could tell he didn’t want anybody to know about his asthma attack. So we said nothing, laughed weakly, and left with everybody else.
April 11, 2008 at 9:52 am
No real caves here, only metaphorical. I’ve also always been fascinated with underwords and caves, and especially the Greek myth of Persephone. I was always sad that Persephone had to go back to her over-protective mother. My own mother was over-protective, and schizophrenic as well, so I’ve always been slightly alienated from her.
One day, she ran away, flying across the country to Washington DC. (Hey, she’s the President, that’s where she belongs.) The first time, we let her stay there for a while, until finally my dad — a funny, lively Hermes sort of guy– flew out there and had an adventure bringing her back.
Some months later, it happened again. This time, my dad cancelled her credit cards right away, and it was my turn to go. I don’t know what happened to her during that day or so when she had no money or place to go, and whenever I see a crazy homeless person, I think of my mom and feel a little scared, but she ended up, as we knew she would, in the psychiatric wing of a local hospital.
The night before I flew out, my appendix swelled up. It did this once before, and I think stress caused it. I wasn’t going to waste a couple thousand dollars to have a doctor do nothing, so I let it go. I spent a long night in the motorhome on my dad’s lawn in agony, occasionally stepping outside to throw up on the lawn. Morning came, and I felt well enough to go.
I’d never flown anywhere by myself without someone on the other end to pick me up (namely, my grandpa). I was just a girl about to start her senior year of college who was leaving behind her first boyfriend– a guy who wanted badly to come with me, but knew he couldn’t.
The trip itself went well. My appendix didn’t explode, and I only got a little lost looking for my hotel and later, the hospital. Mom was doing well, and I even got in a visit to the Smithsonian, though I did get lost wandering Arlington National Cemetery early one morning. Even then, I came upon the woman’s war memorial, of which i never would have known otherwise, and wrote a note in the book there about my WWII RN grandma.
I didn’t have the dramatic, cross-country chase that my dad went through, but I realized new ways that the Persephone myth applied to me, and how I’d been denying truths all this time. I identified myself with Persephone, and my mom with Demeter, but it’s the other way around. She is, and likely always will be, trapped in the underworld of her own madness. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — there’s a lot of interesting things in there, and her voices are some of her best friends. And here I am, both Hermes and Demeter, taking care of her and fetching her back when things get too bad. I understand the challenge Demeter faced, trying desperately to stop something she couldn’t control. Maybe Persephone was happy in the underworld and needed space to grow, maybe she was just miserable all the time. As Demeter, it’s my job to step back from all that, and as Hermes, to step forward and change the things I can change, even when they’re in a dark and scary place.
April 11, 2008 at 11:45 am
A cave is just a hole on its side – Firesign Theatre
April 11, 2008 at 1:28 pm
I had a similar experience as Phil. It was during a boy scout camping trip where we spent a weekend in some caverns in Appalachia. The same area the movie The Descent took place in (only for real, not on a set in Britain). We didn’t have a guide, or at least I don’t remember one, we just had a bunch of kids and a few dads exploring the caverns. Being a scrawny kid, I decided to see if a small hole eventually opened into a wider cavern. It didn’t. The tunnel just narrowed and narrowed until I was wedged in with my brother wedged behind me. Eventually he unstuck himself and I managed to back out, but only after I emptied my lungs and held my breath to thin myself enough to wiggle free.
We never ran into any C.H.U.D.s. If life is anything like the movie though, they couldn’t be any more frightening than being stuck under a mile of earth with no room to move.
April 11, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Very applicable to my stories, and more especially to my life. Thanks for the words and that great pic.
“Cave is a good word…. The memory of a cave I used to know was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its fleeting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations….”
–Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad
April 11, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Caves are fascinating, I quite agree. Apart from one brief trip to Mammoth Cave years ago, I haven’t really explored any caves here in the US, but when I spent a semester in Spain I visited several. There were the gitano houses built into caves (and then turned into tourist attractions), interior walls painted white. And one time I walked probably twenty km each way to a cave that advertised itself as having been a site where prehistoric skeletons where found. Both of these were pretty well tamed, something to walk through and see, not to explore. Not a perilous journey, not much of a journey of discovery (though admittedly still pretty cool).
Nearer our town (which dated back at least to the Ancient Greeks), though, I wandered along the coast, climbed up to the ruins of a Roman tower, and then beyond to where rumors said there were caves. (Or at least I thought that’s what my hosts had said, though I was very recently arrived in Spain and not yet used to the local accent.) The caves opened to the sea, supposedly, but the coastline didn’t let me get down next to the water. So I walked up and down the edge, trying to get a glimpse…until I noticed a hole at my feet. And then another, larger hole that clearly showed me the cave, open as they’d said to the sea, with about thirty feet of air between the foot or so of rock under me and the water. There was no way to get down into that cave without climbing equipment I didn’t have access to, but after that discovery, the journey to that opening (and repeat visits there) seemed perilous journey enough.
And maybe there’s even some Joseph Campbell, archetypal connection with how near the surface that subconscious labyrinth is and how frightening it can be to suddenly stare down into that unknown. Or if not, at the least there’s the cool factor of imagining Mediterranean pirates sailing into that cave and hiding out the day from Phoenician traders, Roman soldiers, or more recent navies.
April 12, 2008 at 12:00 am
My story about caves begins in the desert. Every year when I was a child my father took me camping. Usually we went to the forest but the first time I saw the desert nothing else could compare. It had the endless feel of the ocean but instead of crashing waves it had an enigmatic silence that captivated me, as if the breeze might, at any moment, whisper its secrets. It left me exhilarated
When I got home I told my mother how much I loved the trip, and without missing a beat she said, “There are people who live in the caves in the desert and at night they come out and kill you.” I was horrified. And skeptical. I was also nine, so not entirely sure what to believe. Mom stuck to her guns: transients and outlaws hide in the desert caves waiting to attack unsuspecting campers who are all alone in the middle of nowhere.
Well, shit.
I still wanted to go back. My father, a rock hound, welcomed the opportunity to look for a new treasure: a shark’s tooth, a smoky quartz, a “big-fat-gold-nugget” (the ultimate). So a few months later we went back, just the two of us. As always.
That night Dad pitched our camp next to an old mine, a fascination of his. He said it went underground and deep into the desert mountains for miles. In mines, like caves, you reach absolute darkness very quickly, even a high powered flashlight doesn’t illuminate much. I stared at the mine’s open mouth as darkness fell and was terrified.
The next morning in the daylight I could see the immense wood beams, most either cracked or splitting, that strained to support the mine’s ceiling, other beams lay broken in the choppy rubble at our feet. Dad wanted to explore but I couldn’t bring myself to go with him, instead I watched him disappear into the mine alone. I can hardly fault him since I suspect a (fool)hardy gene runs in our family, myself included.
I waited by our camper and quietly freaked out. I could hear my mother’s voice whispering the worst. Minutes turned to hours and he still hadn’t come back. I finally went to the mine’s mouth and shouted, “Dad? Daddy? Are you OK!? I’m scared.” Or some such other wussy thing. (It’s amazing how “Dad” becomes “Daddy” when you’re scared shitless.)
Finally, he came back out and my nine-year-old world righted itself again. That is the first time I realized the unknown can be infinitely more terrifying than facing my fears. Standing on the sidelines sucks. Since then my father and I have explored many caves together (but no more mines). In fact, caves have become a passion of mine. And in case you’re wondering, yes, Dad got into trouble with Mom when we got home. So much trouble.
April 12, 2008 at 3:13 am
The first thing I am aware of is the darkness: dank, forbidding, and oppressive. Then I become aware of my own movement, and realize that I am crawling on my hands and knees through rank sludge in a large pipe. I’m in the sewers. My breath is hot and heavy, but I try my best to move and breathe as silently as possible. I sense rather than see movement in front of me. And I know, as surely as I can know without seeing, that you are leading the way in front of me. I followed you into these sewers: the mad Japanese scientist’s daughter.
That your father was Japanese and a scientist are indisputable facts. That you are his daughter is a fact assumed unless and until proven otherwise. That he was mad is my own immutable assertion. Your own state of mind is still open to debate. The fact that I am following you through these sewer tunnels means that your father is dead, and that somewhere in the warren behind us, those snuffling, shuffling creatures are following us.
I sense your hips swaying just in front of my face as you crawl forward quietly, slosh-slosh through the sludge. The image comes to my mind with stark freshness. The tight, bright pink of your dress, just one size too small, snugly wrapped around your ample, plump hips. That too-tight dress stretches alarmingly with the swish of your nylon stockings as you crawl. You left your high heels in the barricaded chamber of your father’s ruined lab before we crawled down the sewer drain, and now your stockinged toes are wet and slick with the scum of the sewers. The tips of my fingers just touch the tips of your toes as we crawl forward through the pipes. Every once in a while, as you turn your head, I can just catch a glimpse of light refracted on your glasses. Where the light is coming from I do not know.
And then you stop. I bump lightly into you from behind. You shush me with a hiss. Then floating softly back to me I hear your words, “There’s a big hole here. We’ll have to jump down.”
“We don’t know how deep it is,” I whisper back.
“Well …. There’s only one way to find out!” And with that you drop like a stone into the hole before I can stop you.
A moment later I hear a splash, and then your voice following the echoing splashes, “Come on! It’s not far!”
I fear falling.
But those snuffling, shuffling creatures cannot be far behind. The splash was immediate, so I know the drop cannot be that bad. I crawl forward and feel the edges of the hole, and I look for you. I cannot see anything. But I can hear your splashes below as you tread water, waiting for me to fall. I make a decision, and I take the plunge.
And I fall.
And fall.
And fall.
I’ve been falling now for much, much longer than the time it took you to make your splash, and I am just realizing this and starting to panic, when finally — finally — I hit the water ….
And I keep plunging down.
My rate of descent is ridiculous as I plummet ever deeper into the water. I hadn’t even held my breath. I descend into the dark murky sewer water, the rate of my fall only slowly tapering off. I try to swim up, my arms flailing in the water, but I can feel that I am still falling down into the depths. After what seems a very long time I slow to a stop.
As I stop, my feet just barely touch the bottom of the deep dark underground chamber of water. And with that, I kick off, using the rebound to propel myself back up again. I am swimming mightily and my lungs are burning. They are going to burst. Part of me spares a moment to cry at the irony of surviving that ridiculous fall only to die from drowning; the element that saved me now bent on killing me.
Then, when my lungs are screaming within me for air, at last, I break the surface.
I break the surface of the water and find myself sitting upright in my bed, drenched in sweat, gasping — absolutely gasping — for breath, lungs aching, and my arms flailing about me in the air.
April 12, 2008 at 11:33 pm
It were all a dream?! IT WERE ALL A DREAM!? I wants me money back, gov’ner.
April 13, 2008 at 11:16 am
I grew up in one of the well-off suburbs of Boston, where even the public elementary schools had funds enough to send students on regular field trips. One of these field trips, in fifth or sixth grade, was to a cave system. I assume it must have been local, except where the hell are the giant mostly-untouched Massachusetts caverns? This isn’t my memory going haywire—we were down in the system for hours, and it was definitely with a school group. But perhaps I’m justifying myself needlessly. Here’s the story. You tell me if it makes sense.
It was with a tour guide. We weren’t alone. If we were alone in the memory, I wouldn’t trust it at all. But we did have a guide, and her assistant, I think. She brought us to the lip of a crevasse, in the woods. An anomalous rocky tear in the middle of your basic New England forest, maybe thirty feet long and ten feet wide. It was too sheer a drop to walk into, so we were hooked up with karabiners and harnesses and ropes and lowered down into the hole.
Twenty feet under the ground, we’re on a mostly flat ledge of rock. It’s slanted very slightly downwards. Not enough so that it’s an effort to stand still, but enough that it’s easier to walk downward than up. To walk further in, than back. Once everyone is gathered down there, they distribute these helmets with headlamps on them, and we begin. It started simply. Just walking underground, as far as I recall, looking around with the headlamps at the natural cave walls, smelling the earth and damp stone. Eventually the passages narrowed, had us walking single file. Just walking, and thinking the cave was kind of neat, but nothing all that much to talk about. That changed. Though not, I think, as much as it would have if everything I remember is correct.
Eventually we start walking through water. They had warned us we would be doing so, and that we should wear clothes we didn’t mind getting wet. When it was shin-deep, that was about what we expected. It was cold, but clean. I expected it to be muddy, but it wasn’t. I assume that after we passed out of the pool, we had wet shoes and socks, but I don’t remember that particularly.
Further in, there’s a room where the horizontal axis opens up and we no longer have to walk in line, but the vertical axis shrinks drastically. The floor rises, the ceiling falls, and ahead of us is the thin opening between the two. It’s thin enough that we can’t just go through – the tour guide demonstrates how we should lie flat on our backs and move our bodies through carefully. She may even have joked (joked?) about the possibility of getting stuck. Going through, I feel like I was staring, eyes open, at the rock above me, thinking how, if my head were a bit bigger, it would scrape off my nose. I remember wondering how the fat girl in the class was going to make it through. Looking back, I don’t remember how she did.
And once we’re through there, the next time we walk through water, it’s deeper. Much. Up to our waists, then our chests. This cold, pure water that had been accumulating in the caves for centuries, up from aquifers or down from rainfall, who knows. I don’t know if any of us expected that. That seemed, well, just a bit too deep. Like, would they really, intentionally, take us on a field trip where we walked, fully dressed, through water up to our chests? Seemed like there might have been a mistake. That’s the only anxiety I remember, though. Looking back, I’m surprised the girls weren’t anxious about their wet shirts clinging to their bodies (though maybe they were; we were always told that girls mature faster), or that the boys weren’t taking furtive peeks at them and then looking away. A more innocent time, then, when we didn’t know wet t-shirts were supposed to be appealing? Or maybe the water just wasn’t quite as deep as I remember.
I don’t think there was a climax to the trip. I went to another cave with my family, once, and after we traveled in a ways by boat, we came to a tremendous, cathedral-like chamber, with a huge vaulted ceiling and walls that sparkled in the installed lighting. After we saw that, they turned us around, because there was nothing more spectacular to see. They did turn the lights off while we were there, though, so we could understand how pitch black it really is, how dark and silent the caves would be if people hadn’t come and claimed them.
There was no installed lighting in this system. And that’s relevant, because on the way back our headlamps started going out. Maybe one had gone out on the way in, and I’m sure they saw it, thought “need to change that battery later,” and kept on guiding. But on the way back, more lamps died. I recall a little urgency entering the guide’s voice. “Come on, guys, let’s keep it moving.” Because maybe we were younger than the groups that usually go through the cave. Maybe we had taken longer to complete the official tour, and the batteries only had so much life. So we picked up the pace, but the lamps kept going out. I am absolutely not making this up. And we all knew how dark the caves would be without the lamps.
In my memory, we made it out with exactly two students’ headlamps still working. I don’t know how this is possible. Surely 18 lamps didn’t stop randomly during the course of a few hours. So maybe it was only a self-selected part of the class there, eight or so kids rather than twenty? Maybe the guides had planned it, to add a shock of adventure to the trip? More likely, more of the lamps remained functional than I recall. And the guides must have carried backup flashlights. And furthermore, plenty of people knew where we were, knew how to get through the caves, and would have come for us if we had been down there much longer than we should have been. But I remember the nervous jokes with my classmates, and the feeling that, if all the lights went out, we would have no way at all to make it out of the cave.
Sixth grade is right on the cusp of adolescence (except it’s impossible to say “cusp of adolescence” without sounding like a bad romance writer), so perhaps the trip was as metaphorical as Campbell’s underworlds can be. Did we emerge changed, more adult? No, not at the time, I don’t think. It was just another field trip, one to giggle about afterward – how the lights had almost gone. But looking back, my strongest emotional recollection is the feeling that the adults didn’t quite have things under control. That the water was too deep, and they didn’t predict how we’d react to it. That they hadn’t adequately checked the lamps, and their lack of preparation was going to cost us. I heard that note of urgency and thought, “Wow, she sounds scared, too.” And that’s a feeling that changes things for a kid. It makes you want to do more of the planning next time. It makes you want to do the research and know what you’re getting into before you get into it. It makes you, in other words, want to take some responsibility for your own life, knowing that, perhaps, adults can’t be completely trusted with it. This is the sort of experience that gives you that knowledge. Or that feeling, because of course the fact was that everything was under control. It must have been. Right?
April 13, 2008 at 1:49 pm
To Skeptic No. 1:
Why, yes, it were all a dream. One of the 3 most intense I’ve ever had in fact. You should hear my one about the sandworms sometime.
The contest asks for “your own favorite anecdotes, stories, thoughts and experiences involving the underworld, both literal and metaphorical”, it doesn’t ask for just true or real-life cave stories. You can hardly get more metaphorical than a dream, so yes, I think my dream counts.
Do you really want your money back? ;-)
April 13, 2008 at 3:33 pm
My journey into the deep took place over the course of the last two years as I witnessed my elegant, graceful, mother’s transformation from a woman of great beauty into a woman caught in the psychological and spiritual throes of an illness which completely disfigured her body. My “cave” became the isolation and utter helplessness I felt watching the woman I came from die a slow death in virtual hiding. Her dying taught and continues to teach me about the unbelievable beauty, vulnerablity, and preciousness of all human beings. It also continues to teach me about the mysteries and possibilities we carry within the human body and how this vessel houses the maps of our most violent and magnificent histories. My Mother died just a couple of weeks ago and I realize how much I had detached from her physical body and had begun to concentrate on her essence instead. I don’t think I could ever feel as unhappy as I have over the last two years. I think the caves I enter will be different now. There will be more light in them, many other people around me and wonderful dazzling presences watching over me like that of my incredibly beautiful and brilliant mother.
April 13, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Jeff, with all our wicked cave-talkin’ skillz did we help give you this dream or is it one from farther back?
In any event, your dream sounds like fun to me…
Now if you will excuse me, I must attend to a nightmare of my own: taxes.
April 13, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Cave dream, a coda:
The cave dream, or really, underground sewer dream, was from some time ago. I recorded it first in a journal, then later rewrote it with the lofty intent of giving it some literary flavor, but the whole dream happened exactly as recorded. It seemed heavily significant to me at the time, filled with mythical and psychological elements:
– A guide into the underworld: the mad Japanese scientist’s daughter.
– A choice to be made: jump or not. Since I have a big fear of jumping from heights in real life, I often wonder how I was able to make the choice in the dream.
– Death and rebirth: It’s a common saying that if you don’t wake up from a fall in a dream before you hit the ground that you’ll die. In my dream, I hit bottom but didn’t die and kept on dreaming. Of course, there was the water to break the fall — and then there’s all kinds of mythic and psychological significance to deep bodies of water.
–Breaking the surface of the water, waking up, being reborn?
It would be really interesting to have a dream interpreter tear that dream apart and see what they have to say about it.
I’ll freely admit that the dream seems to have also heavily influenced by a a work of great literary merit. Anyone who care to take guess what it is?
April 13, 2008 at 11:59 pm
(I hate when I post a typo)
Sentence above should read:
I’ll freely admit that the dream seems to have also been heavily influenced by a work of great literary merit. Anyone care to take guess what it is?
April 14, 2008 at 8:40 am
This is all very much true—down to the least significant syllable—yet a certain tingling sensation in my big toe informs me that my meticulously factual account may be scoffed at. Thanks to Mr. Stagg for providing the impetus to write down this little anecdote, which has been slithering around in the recesses of my memory for some years now.
– W. Vondergeist
Spring Break of my undergraduate sophomore year, I set out early one morning with two friends for a day of gratuitous spelunking. We were all fellow students at the university, and relished whatever moments we could seize away from the stale, weary lecture halls.
“Let’s split up and meet back in an hour,” suggested Brannon. Our journey had thus far led us to an isolated foresty place, replete with silence and swathed in a gentle breeze. We each bore satchels stuffed with flashlights and snacks. “That way we’ll cover more ground faster and can report on any caves we discover.”
So we began moving in different directions. As I turned, from askance I thought I detected a furtive glance—a secret communication—between Brannon and James. But this was a common phenomenon amongst the two; they were best friends and, as far as I could gather, operated on the same wavelength in that mysterious fashion rarely observed in humans but often in the other animals.
The minutes passed as I shuffled past oaks and slipped through clawing yaupon bushes. Off in the distance a bird warbled a solitary melody. The wind snagged on the surrounding foliage, enveloping the wood with a soft, ethereal hum.
I kept my eyes riveted on the ground for the slightest sign of an aperture. Absently I ate from my bag of snacks—an assortment of carrots and cauliflower. One particular cauliflower had a terrible brackish flavor, and, having forgotten to bring water, I cast my gaze about for a natural source of water to wash away the sour aftertaste.
That’s about when I noticed the change. It was subtle, imperceptible at first. The warbling of the distant bird had altered: it was now mutated, like the strangled whistle of a rubber duck when squished. The wind seemed to echo the strained tune.
Then I spotted the stream. A narrow flow of water, it tinkled quietly and winked a hundred glistering winks along it’s shifting surface. I knelt to draw up a mouthful of clear liquid.
“I would not drink that if I were you.”
The voice startled me and I whipped around. Before me stood a cow. Its two watery eyes peered up into mine.
“As I was saying,” the cow said, dipping its head in the direction of the stream, “that water is tinged with an ancient power.” I managed to stammer some inarticulate reply. “See that tree,” the cow indicated a large oak that stooped over the stream. “It was a sapling blown in from the Garden of Eve. The sap it oozes mingles with the spring water here and anyone who partakes of it is transformed. Look what happened to me.”
Somehow the only response I could muster was: “How did a sapling from the Garden of Eve end up here?” I asked suspiciously.
“Oh, space and time are rather overrated, young man,” said the cow. “Besides, an angel appears on every second Wednesday of the month to tend to the tree. You can ask him.” I mentally registered that very day as the second Wednesday of the month and shrank back in terror, fully expecting an angel to sweep down in a windy radiance. “Relax,” said the cow. “You can’t very well expect angels to be working on Spring Break, can you? He should be here next Wednesday.”
The cow chewed its cud, then it spoke again. “At any rate, you’ve come at a perfect time. I’ve just finished composing a poem and I’d like some feedback.”
“Excuse me?”
“You do know what a poem is, I should hope,” replied the cow somewhat testily. “These are abominable times for the most noble and sublime art—poetry.”
“Oh, really?” I could never resist a good debate. “I always understood music to be the most divine of the arts. Orpheus moved gods with his heavenly strains.”
“Yes, yes, but in the Beginning was the Word, not the Note,” came the cow’s immediate rejoinder. I couldn’t think of anything to denounce his logic with, and the sudden realization that I was bantering with a cow left me momentarily baffled.
“It is a point of note,” continued the cow after a pause, “that language is the true gift of God; it is the real ‘knowledge’ that Adam and Eve received upon imbibing that sacred fruit. Before, they were reduced to babbling gits with no language but a cry, to borrow from Tennyson. Pathetic actually. But no doubt they were happier, all said and done.”
“How so?” I argued.
“Well, think about it, young man. Before I partook of that spring water, I was the most content bovine in all the forest. Now, with vast mental faculties thrust upon me, I can fully understand the horrors of the world, and it is truly a ghastly weight to bear. I’d give anything to have my idiocy returned to me. If only those utopian writers could understand this simple concept, rather than assume that modifying human behavior would create bliss and harmony. Only by ripping away language can true paradise be achieved, something they will never admit, being writers and all. I imagine God often plucks the tongue of his heavenly host, to avoid the cacophonous roar of bickering.”
Since I did not seem to have anything relevant to add to this, the cow kept going: “Take the example of Keats.” Here, the cow lifted a heavy hoof from a book it had been reading, presumably a volume of Keats. “What a miserably wretched fate. I was just rereading ‘Endymion,’ and you know, Keats had it all wrong. Beauty is not a joy forever. It’s the other way round: Joy is forever a thing of beauty. In general, beauty—especially physical beauty—tends to wither, usually in a hurry, and where does that leave you? Certainly not joy!
“But joy is eternal! A menagerie of memories for the brief ages of man is the exquisite anatomy of bliss. So that there is some frightful semblance of beauty, even in the sinister mirth of a villain!”
“Madness!” I said, but realized maybe I was referring to both of us.
“Oh well, I would never have made such formidable deductions without the gift of language. Here’s my poem:
There wrapped in golden dew sublime
Where soft soles of seraph tread
And guard the garden gates of time
Sacred trees of Eden spread
So sweet the smell of fruit divine
That drips a deadly fee
It proved a dire and dark design
That cows didn’t first eat of that tree”
I was contemplating the last line when my thoughts were broken by the sudden sound of laughter. Brannon and James were sprawled on the ground nearby, guffawing and writhing in fits of laughter.
“He actually fell for it!” screamed Brannon. For a long time I was oblivious to the humor, but after a great deal of further hysterical giggling from the two I managed to extract two facts. My friends had contrived to smuggle into my bag of snacks a hallucinatory mushroom of incredible potency. Then they had hung back and observed in silent rapture as I raved.
“That was one wicked shroom,” my friends agreed with another round of guffaws.
April 15, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Jeff, you have tempted me to whip out my pop psychology 101, so here is my interpretation…based on absolutely no qualifications whatsoever. I know, I know, the suspense!
The dream says something different to me than death or rebirth, to me it says you feel you can’t follow the same path as others and have the same result. For them it is easy, however you feel you will face greater difficulties taking the same path, but in the end you still feel you will succeed.
My interpretation of the story is different. The way it is written, my first reaction was that the main character was actually captured right when he was about to jump. My impression was that he got caught (by the snuffling shuffling creatures or by someone or something else entirely) and he’s been sedated, that is why his jump felt so abnormally long — his thoughts continued along that path even though his body could not. The waking up could be his waking up from the sedation…