October 21, 2022
One way of explaining the course of my life is to say that I am an introvert whose impulse is to run to ground, to burrow. My natural direction is downward and inward. Here, in my semi-rural retreat in North Royalton, Ohio, I am the friend and feeder of burrowing animals such as groundhogs and raccoons. Perhaps we recognize each other as kindred spirits.
One way of explaining my scholarly career is to say that my interests have revolved around the re-orientation, starting with the Romantic movement, of mythical quest journeys in literature. A traditional mythical journey was an ascent, even if (like Dante’s in the Inferno) it necessitated a preliminary descent. A post-Romantic quest is a descent. The imagination in our time gravitates downward, towards the immanent and psychological rather than upward towards the transcendent and supernatural, which is the reason that depth psychology, especially that of C.G. Jung, is so pertinent to the study of modern literature. Hence the prominence of the imagery of caverns and buried worlds.
That my temperament coincides with my scholarly interests is of course hardly an accident. But mine is not the only imagination drawn to the depths. In The Night Country, a book that shows up in this newsletter with some frequency, Loren Eiseley has an essay on his own orientation depthward called “The Places Below.” “Choices, more choices than we like afterward to believe,” he tells us, “are made far backward in the innocence of childhood” (15-16). And, as with me, his temperament determined or coincided with his vocation: he became a paleontologist, an explorer of caves. He claims there is a small band of those drawn to the depths, citing “an elderly professor” in the 1920’s who dug a whole network of underground secret passages under his house, discovered after his death. Eiseley deems him “one of us”: “To have set out alone with a shovel shows the depth of his need” (16), the deliberately bad pun acting as a sort of ironic yet sincere salute.
Unlike Eiseley, my connection with caverns is almost entirely literary. I did go, as a child, with my parents to the Ohio Caverns near Dayton, and can still dimly remember the guided tour, especially the moment when the guide turned off his flashlight so that we could experience what truly total darkness was like. I remember the stalactites and stalagmites, and I remember being fascinated at a young age by accounts of the strange living things that dwell in total darkness. Eiseley was fascinated by them too: “There are blind fish that have chosen this world and prefer to live there. There are crickets as white as the fungi under rotting boards” (18). There are also, as he says, the bats: the bats of the Bat Cave in the Batman comics I read. But that is about it: I have been gripped by an archetype, not imprinted by an actual experience. Incidentally, there is no agreement on the Internet about the difference between a cavern and a cave. Some people say caverns are larger, or fully underground with no surface entrance, but the geologists quoted seem to regard the terms as synonymous.
The imagery of caves or caverns modulates into other images, including the human-made caverns of sewers. There again I find a strange parallel with Eiseley, who once as a child explored a sewer system under the streets: in high school, a group of us explored maybe two hundred feet back into a sewer or culvert underground, lighting the way with matches, which we also used to burn the leeches off our bare feet when we came out. Not exactly Phantom of the Opera, but after all this was Canton, Ohio, not Paris. I remember Northrop Frye telling me once what an impact the silent film of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), with its dreamlike scenes in the sewers beneath the Paris Opera House, had on him when he was taken to see it by his sister Vera at the age of 12. Sure enough, it turns out that he too was “one of us.” In his Third Book Notebooks, he records his influence by Gertrude Levy’s The Gate of Horn (1948), originally titled Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age, concerned with the symbolism of underground caves and labyrinths. Of Levy, he says, “she’s really one of the wise women” (71). He also says, “Everybody has a fixation. Mine has to do with meander-and-descent patterns. For years in my childhood I wanted to dig a cave & be the head of a society in it—this was before I read Tom Sawyer. All the things in literature that haunt me most have to do with katabasis [the descent journey]. The movie that hit me hardest as a child was the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera” (76).
Popular mythology connects caves with the origin of humanity in the image of the “cave man,” a kind of simplified version, perhaps, of the type of Creation narrative called an “emergence myth,” in which humanity originally lived underground and was finally led to the surface by a culture hero. In Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864, 1867 revised), Jules Verne portrayed the descent into the depths via a series of caves and tunnels as a descent into a surviving prehistoric realm. The association of early humanity, at least in Europe, with caves took three forms, which may provide us with a rough typology of cavern symbolism, ranging from the profane to the sacred, to use the terms of Mircea Eliade. First of all, caves were, indeed, shelters, human burrows, and the hobbit in us remains nostalgic for that form of dwelling. I think the Peter Jackson films of Lord of the Rings do a good job of suggesting the warmth and coziness of those hobbit habitats built into hillsides. I have not thought of it before now, but it occurs to me that my present house is in fact rather burrowlike. While not set into the ground, it is nestled almost hidden between two ridges much taller than the house is. Access is by a curved driveway 450 feet long, and the whole property is ringed by woods. It is a low, ranch-style house, a semi-rural hermitage. While the leaves are on the trees, you cannot see any neighboring houses.
We may note in passing that there is reason to claim Tolkien as “one of us.” A significant portion of his storytelling takes place underground. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is dragged from the warmth and comfort of his burrow, more or less conscripted by a company of dwarves in a quest to reclaim their ancient home, the Kingdom Under the Mountain, from the dragon Smaug. In the process, he gets lost in goblin tunnels in the Misty Mountains and acquires the ring of power. In The Lord of the Rings, a crucial point in the quest occurs in the mines of Moria, in which Gandalf seemingly dies, though he later reappears. My family has its own association with mines. My Polish grandfather was a coal miner, and my Italian grandfather a carpenter for the coal mines. I have written a memoir, Banish Misfortune, whose opening scene is the time I visited, with my father, those old mines, by then closed down and abandoned, yet with the tipple and other structures still standing in vacant fields. It was for me an image of the transience that is perhaps the ultimate subject of any memoir.
Second, the prehistoric caves were not just residences but gravesites. The grave itself is a kind of cave, and, mythologically, graves are not just bone repositories but openings into the land of the dead. Indeed, in the associative logic of metaphor, at times they are the land of the dead. The initial stage of the descent journey is downward into the realm of death: thematically, it is the undoing of a repression, the confronting of what Ernest Becker called “the denial of death” in his famous book of that title, the recognition that the natural self and everything it has created is going to die, vanish, and leave, as Shakespeare’s Prospero says, not a wrack behind. This is the memento mori of Hamlet holding the skull of Yorick in the graveyard. There was no immortality in the Christian sense in either the Old Testament or Greek mythology: in both, the only afterlife was as a shambling ghost in a dark underworld. The Hebrew word for that underworld, sheol, is sometimes simply translated “the grave.” Odysseus visits the Greek version in book 11 of the Odyssey and speaks to his great warrior comrades from the Trojan War, including Achilles, the greatest of them all—and they are all utterly miserable, their earthly glory availing them nothing in that gloom. In fact, Troy itself has gone down into the ground, razed and entirely buried until excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in the 19th century. The fascination of archeology is that of excavating “lost cities and vanished civilizations,” the title of a nonfiction book from my childhood by science fiction writer Robert Silverberg.
On its lower level, the underworld turns infernal and becomes hell. The Greek underworld had a sub-basement level called Tartarus, where the Titans were imprisoned after losing a ten-year war with the Olympian gods, who also used it as a torture chamber for certain mortals who had especially annoyed them, such as Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Ixion. In the 6th book of the Aeneid, Virgil remodels the Homeric underworld along the lines of Orphism and some of the other mystery religions into a system of justice. The good souls go to one place and are rewarded, the bad to another place where they are punished, but with reincarnation offering a chance at rehabilitation. Dante incorporates and Christianizes some of this in his depictions of hell and purgatory. Hell is still a pit, descending nine levels to the center of the earth, but Dante for symbolic reasons turns purgatory inside out into a 7-story mountain. I am thinking that someday there will have to be a newsletter trying to figure out why certain Christian writers, from Dante to C.S. Lewis, insist so adamantly on eternal damnation and punishment. It was, after all, the hellfire and guilt trip stuff that impelled me to walk away from the Catholic Church many years ago. I still wonder what it says about the Divine Comedy that two thirds of it is a description of grotesque and agonizing tortures. “All hope abandon, ye who enter here,” says the inscription over hell’s gate. In the Mark Musa translation, Dante the character says to Virgil, “Master, these words I see are cruel.”
The secular counterparts of supernatural hells are prisons and dungeons, sometimes with torture chambers, sometimes places in which victims are walled up and forgotten about, buried alive. Poe, whose work amounts to a typology of the demonic, gives us a torture chamber in “The Pit and the Pendulum” and the horror of living burial in any number of stories, including “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Premature Burial,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (“They have put her living into the tomb!”). Innocents who are walled up and whose keepers have thrown away the key include Dr Manette in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the hero of The Count of Monte Cristo, and the falsely convicted protagonist of the film The Shawshank Redemption (1994), based on a Stephen King story, who tunnels his way out over 19 years. The prison scenes for the film were shot in Mansfield, Ohio, not far from me. On a level of undisplaced myth, being buried alive is metaphorically identical to being swallowed by a monster, like Jonah by the big fish. While in the belly of the fish for three days and nights, Jonah prays to God: “out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice. For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas” (Jonah 2:2-3). That is the King James version, but the word translated “hell” is actually sheol and the deep is tehom, the chaotic waters of Genesis 1. So, in archetypal logic, the big fish or leviathan, the sea itself, hell, chaos, and the grave are modulations of one image, objective correlatives for a psychological state of clinical depression, the solipsistic state that Blake called Ulro. As Milton’s Satan says, “Myself am hell.” David cries from similar depths of the spirit in some of the penitential psalms.
Death, imprisonment, physical and mental torture, isolation and despair: the way down involves confrontation with all the horrors of the human condition. But that is why the central Christian symbol is the Crucifixion, the image of a tortured human form nailed to a cross. However, the Crucifixion is not just one emblem but rather a narrative, the Stations of the Cross, in which Christ himself endures the full range of human torment, not just physical but mental, from the agony in the garden to the despairing cry on Golgotha, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” After which he is walled up in a tomb.
Death, with or without the afterimage of an underworld, is the boundary of the human condition, the bottom line in all senses of the word. But prehistoric humanity made a third use of caves, one so different from the utilitarian functions of residences and graves that we still do not understand it, though it haunts us. In southern France and northern Spain, a series of Paleolithic caves were painted, sometimes engraved, with hundreds of breathtakingly vivid images of animals, with occasionally a human figure surmised to be a shaman. Over a span of perhaps 20,000 years, beginning about 35,000 years ago, these images—some of them as powerful and haunting to my mind as any in the history of art—were created under the most fantastically difficult conditions. In the system known as Trois Frères, one chamber can be accessed only by crawling on hands and knees through a narrow tube in pitch darkness, for there would have been no way to hold a torch.
The theory is that the images were a system of hunting magic, but that is about as adequate as saying that the purpose of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, also created under trying conditions, was to provide impressive architectural decorations for a rich and powerful Pope. It was—but art is usually overdetermined, and the surface motives do not exclude much deeper ones, so deep that perhaps the artists themselves do not, to use my own bad pun, quite fathom them. Some people find Joseph Campbell’s prose style overly rhetorical (by which they mean not sufficiently academic), but it is effective at capturing the effect the Paleolithic caves have had on any number of people:
And without exception these magical spots occur far from the natural entrances of the grottos, deep within the dark, wandering, chill corridors and vast chambers; so that before reaching them one has to experience the full force of the mystery of the cave itself. Some of the labyrinths are more than half a mile in length; all abound in deceptive and blind passages, and dangerous, sudden drops. Their absolute, cosmic dark, their silence, their unmeasured inner reaches, and their timeless remoteness from every concern and requirement of the normal, waking field of human consciousness can be felt even today—when the light of the guide goes out. The senses, suddenly, are wiped out; the milleniums drop away; and the mind is stilled in a recognition of the mystery beyond thought that asks for no comment and was always known… (305-06)
Whether or not there is something after death, there is something below it. I am glad that my parents took me to the largest system of caverns in Ohio so that I could experience what it was like when the guide turned off his flashlight, even if there were no images. In one of my favorite poems,“Speleology,” in the significantly titled volume Being Here, published when he was 75, Robert Penn Warren remembers how, at the age of 12, he descended into a Kentucky cave and cut out the light:
I thought: This is me. Thought: Me—who am I? Felt Heart beating as though to a pulse of darkness and earth, and thought How it would be to be here forever, my heart In its beat, part of all.
Warren, now old, says that he sometimes lies awake and asks, Is this all? What is all? The poem ends with those questions in the darkness and the silence.
By a synchronicity that happens so frequently to this newsletter that by now I almost take it for granted, when I first had the notion to write on the present subject, my subscription service emailed a reprint of a strip from the brilliant comic strip Cul de Sac, by Richard Thompson, who left us far too soon. In it, the little boy character Petey is asked by his sister Alice, “Petey, what’s underground?” Petey answers, “Well, there’s dirt. And caves and wires and pipes and lava. And sewers and dead people and bats. And blind fish and spiders. And dwarven kingdoms and mole people. And somewhere there’s a cavern with left over extinct giant ground sloths.” A very good answer, to my mind. But I always tell my students to follow the aphorism of Theodore Sturgeon and “Ask the next question.” Which in this case is, “But where did all those things come from?” Loren Eiseley has an answer—not really an answer but an evocation of the mystery—in his great essay “The Mind as Nature,” in which he speaks of
the dichotomy present in the actual universe, where one finds, behind the ridiculous, wonderful tent show of woodpeckers, giraffes, and hoptoads, some kind of dark, brooding, but creative void out of which these things emerge—some antimatter universe, some web of dark tensions running beneath and creating the superficial show of form that so delights us. (196-97)
He goes on to add something crucial: “I believe that in one way or another we mirror in ourselves the universe with all its dark vacuity and also its simultaneous urge to create anew, in each generation, the beauty and the terror of our mortal existence” (196). Later in the same essay, he adds this:
Directly stated, the evolution of the entire universe—stars, elements, life, man—is a process of drawing something out of nothing, out of the utter void of nonbeing. The creative element in the mind of man—that latency which can conceive gods, carve statues, move the heart with the symbols of great poetry, or devise the formulas of modern physics—emerges in as mysterious a fashion as those elementary particles which leap into momentary existence in great cyclotrons, only to vanish again like infinitesimal ghosts. The reality we know in our limited lifetimes is dwarfed by the unseen potential of the abyss where science stops. (214-15)
Is this some kind of modern metaphysical notion, a fantasy of what Kant called the noumenal realm of the “thing-in-itself” beneath the phenomenal world? No doubt. But the Kantian lingo translates into German philosophical jargon the Norse myth of Ginnungagap, the void that existed prior to the creation even of the gods. The deepest cave, the cave that contains all the other caves, is the cave of the mind itself, the cave of the imagination. Northrop Frye’s never-completed magnum opus, which in his notebooks he called the Third Book, was based on a mandala diagram he puckishly called the Great Doodle, a circle containing crossed vertical and horizontal axes. At the nadir point of the Doodle, the descent reaches its end in Nothing, the void. Freud said that there was an umbilical point at which any dream was anchored in mystery, and thus became uninterpretable. This is that point. In Words with Power, which was quarried from the Third Book notebooks, Frye mentions the Paleolithic cave paintings in chapter 7, “The Cave,” speaking of “the intensity behind them to unite human consciousness with its own perceptions, an intensity we can hardly imagine now” (250). Consciousness united with perception, subject with object: he goes on to say that the verbal unit of this buried world is the oracle.
Myth critics speak of death-and-rebirth patterns, but arrival at that ultimate depth demands more than dying. It is achieved through what I have called decreation, One of the oldest poems we have recounts the descent of the Sumerian goddess Inanna to the netherworld. She descends seven levels, and at each level she is forced to divest herself of a garment that signifies some aspect of her divine power, arriving at the underworld naked and dead. This ritual striptease is a descent from the level of the divine to the human, and has a Christian counterpart in a theological understanding of the Incarnation based on Phillippians 2:7, which says that in order to become human, Jesus “emptied himself,” divested himself of his divine nature: the Greek word is kenosis. Both Inanna and Jesus die, yet death is not the end of the journey. The ultimate goal is the decreation of the natural human self which, in Christian terms, is fallen. Redemption would be at once its undoing and the liberation of an unfallen spiritual self, that ascends when the natural self disappears. Because the ego finds it difficult to distinguish between decreation and destruction, it is tempted by various ironic parodies of decreation, from the ascetic practices so popular in the Middle Ages—the “mortification of the flesh” through fasting, flogging, hair shirts, and the like—to suicide understood as a liberation from this mortal coil into spiritual freedom. There is a reason that Sylvia Plath’s final volume of poems was titled Ariel, after the airy spirit that Shakespeare’s Prospero liberates at the end of The Tempest. But there is a better way to achieve spiritual freedom than by sticking your head in an oven.
Shakespeare’s King Lear is another one who learns decreation the hard way, so to speak. He begins by carving up his kingdom and giving it away to two of his daughters, who thereupon begin to divest him systematically of everything he has left, until he is finally out on the heath in a storm with only the clothes on his back. When he sees Poor Tom the mad beggar, image of the natural self, he asks, “Is man no more than this?” and begins to tear off his clothes. As Frye has put it, the question in King Lear is, how much can you take away of what someone has before you start taking away what they are? This divesting of a self appears in Yeats’s poetry as the image of unwrapping a mummy—my associative brain has it permanently linked to the image in the film The Invisible Man in which Claude Rains unwraps the bandages around his head—and there is nothing under them. Another way to descend through becoming less and less is by shrinking. As all the popular culture versions of it show, from The Incredible Shrinking Man to the various shrinking superheroes such as Ant-Man and the Atom, to shrink is to shift worlds. Alice in Wonderland began as an earlier manuscript significantly titled Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, the descent being accomplished in the final version by falling down a rabbit hole. But her descent journey has to go further than that. She finds a tiny door, which she can only enter by drinking from a bottle labeled “Drink me,” whereupon she shrinks.
As I laid out in The Productions of Time, while more unreflective Creation myths show the world as being fashioned out of some kind of stuff, there is always the potential question of where the stuff came from. Therefore, some Creation myths begin with a prior step showing the emanation of the entire cosmos, including nature and the gods themselves, from a Monad, a point or center that is beyond both being and non-being. What I am calling decreation reverses that original unfolding, enfolding reality back into the original center or point. The cartoon character jumps into a hole and then pulls the hole in after himself. To the natural self, this pointless point is simply Nothing, a word that recurs endlessly in King Lear. Yet it is not so simple after all. Lear complains that “Nothing can be made of nothing,” but he is quite wrong. Nor is this necessarily just the kind of irrationalist mysticism that humanities types go in for. The pointless point is the first axiom of Euclid, and out of it emanates the whole world of geometry.
Who travels the decreative journey? In a sense, we all do, willing or unwilling. It says something about God’s sense of humor that the most difficult of all quests is the one we undergo every night, as we fall into that cave of myths and archetypes that we call sleep. In the penultimate chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the protagonist Leopold Bloom climbs into bed and falls asleep, as the narrative voice becomes oracular:
When? Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler. Where?
And below those words, a single dot hangs in the white space of the page. The dot is the enfolded form of the fabulous egg, roc’s egg, the mandala (square round) out of which the cosmos expands and contracts in the most fundamental of all human rhythms, that of breathing.
We put a dot at the end of a sentence to signify “the end.” But in fact there is no end, as Joyce’s next book, Finnegans Wake, symbolized by a final sentence that winds around and is completed at the book’s beginning. In my end is my beginning, as T.S. Eliot says in Four Quartets. In editing the Frye notebooks, my co-editor Robert Denham and I kept running across references to the “Seattle epiphany.” It gradually emerged that in 1950, in Seattle, Frye had what Abraham Maslow would call a powerful peak experience, a revelation that had something to do with a transformation that occurs at the bottom of the descent journey. He never fully explains it, but always says that it has to do with the passage from oracle to wit. Here is a typical passage from the Third Book notebooks:
I’ve known since Seattle that the S. gate was oracular & witty. I associated it then with the lyric. But perhaps wit is the epiphany of oracular mystery—hence the recovery of the power of laughter in the cave of Trophonius.
To which we may say, well, that’s oracular, all right. But the reference to the cave of Trophonius is glossed in The Secular Scripture (85), which says it comes from Plutarch by way of Pausanias. (How does he find these things?). Those who descend to the oracle’s cave might, after three days, recover the power of laughter. Pausanias says that the experience in the cave was so frightening that many people repressed it and could remember nothing. The demonic entities in H.P. Lovecraft are often as not buried, as in At the Mountains of Madness, where they are at the “South gate” of Antarctica, the nadir of the world. Therapy, especially analysis in the tradition of depth psychology, is a descent into the roots of madness—but it can be a decreative experience, peeling off the layers of the onion, only to find that at the center there is nothing. In Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus is chained in a cavern under the earth for having defied the tyrant Jupiter. The moment of his liberation is the moment he takes back his curse against Jupiter—because it was his curse, his hatred, that kept Jupiter in power. In other words, Jupiter was a projection of some imprisoning factor in his own mind. The “cure” is the discovery that the demonic entities are not there, that there is nothing—precisely nothing—to be cured of. Except oneself. It is at that moment that we begin to laugh.
References
Campbell, Joseph. Primitive Mythology. Volume 1 of The Masks of God. Viking Penguin, 1959.
Eiseley, Loren. The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Frye, Northrop. ‘The Secular Scripture’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991. Edited by Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. Volume 18 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 2006. Originally published 1976.
Frye, Northrop. The ‘Third Book’ Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964-1972. Edited by Michael Dolzani. Volume 9 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 2002.
Levy, G. Rachel. Religious Conceptions of the Stone Age and Their Influence upon European Thought, Harper & Row, 1963. Originally published by Faber & Faber as The Gate of Horn, 1948.