The Endless Cave and Other Stories
Today’s reflection…a seemingly endless essay about the Endless Caverns, Plato’s Cave, and asking a better question than “so, what do you do” complete with a rather ham-fisted ending!
➨ There once was a cave…
Once, on a family vacation, we visited a cave. Actually, this isn’t exactly true, family vacations often involved visits to caves. There were no spelunkers in the family so I’m not sure whether these sojourns stemmed from passion or practicality. It is possible, that my father, a philosopher turned psychologist, who had a fascination with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, wanted to compare the experience of visiting an actual cave against the idea of the allegorical one.
Whatever the reason for the visit, I appreciated the experience of it: descending into the cool darkness, sometimes via rickety wooden staircases accessed by a nondescript door tucked at the back of the gift shop. There was an element entering a magical otherworld.
💡There was a guide
The guides, because there was always a guide, (of the human variety vs the paper kind) and their patter, usually involved, at some point turning of the lights, punctuated by the ellipses of the diminishing glow of the light bulb’s filaments cooling and then…nothing but a blackness and stillness, so enfolding, it felt like you disappeared into it. The abyss.
There was also usually the requisite oohing and ahhing over spectacular stalactites and stalagmites, followed by an introduction to the stalaculator (stala…+ calculator).
Question: If said stalagmite is x feet/meters tall and y amount per year, how old is it?
Answer: Really fucking old. Incomprehensibly old. Old enough for all of us go back in time to the black abyss of unfolding before we were all anywhere but were then somehow everywhere.
🕳️ There was an Endless Pit
When I was six, we visited the Endless Caverns in Virginia. If the wily beast of memory is to be trusted, as I recall it, there was a feature of the cave called the Endless Pit or maybe it was bottomless. To demonstrate said endlessness, the guide tossed a coin into the gaping maw of the pit with no end and invited us to listen to see if we could hear it drop. I waited and waited to hear the sound of the proverbial coin drop but never did. Instead, I imagined the coin, surrounded by darkness, turning over and over again, till it reached whatever was at the end, but that end was so far away, that we never heard the sound of contact.
I sometimes wonder that with writing when I release it into the world. The magic coin toss of send. Words converted to bits and bytes, turning, moving across time and space. Maybe they never land, maybe they do. Maybe they just keep turning. I confess there can be an absolutely beautiful terror in the uncertainty of never hearing the sound of contact.
⛲️ There was a fountain of youth…
In the cave, there was also a fountain of youth, and since I was still a youth, I wondered what would happen if I wished, would I no longer age, just float through time and space for eternity. Is there aging in the abyss?
❓Which leads to a question
When you are a kid, people ask you “what do you want to be when you grow up”. I always found this a deeply unsatisfactory inquiry. One: how would I know when I was grown up? And two: why, why, why in this world of so many possibilities, why would I choose just one thing to be?
🧳 Is it wrong to want a life that is a suitcase packed full possibilities?
Then you become an adult, or at least resemble an idea of what an adult might be, and suddenly, it shifts from describing what you want to become, to describing what you became, and in that becoming, you are reduced even further to what you do.
Suddenly what you do is what you are.
In so many parts, it is conversational currency. That question is where begin a conversation, further fixing us in the amber of our existence.
And to be sure, the appropriateness of this question “what do you do” as something to even ask (and what the answer means) varies from place to place. Here in the US, we are encouraged to compact a lifetime into a blurb, a tagline, a headline, a brand.
⁉️ There is another way to ask the question.
And oh, would it not be so much more interesting, if when we asked “what do you do” we didn’t limit ourselves to job, or profession, or occupation?
Arguably what do you do is a great question, with the addition of a “when” or a “for” or an “about”.
What do you do when you are stopped in traffic signing to the radio and you look over to the next car and realize someone observed this moment?
What do you do when there are so many fewer visible stars in the sky? And you know they are there, but the ironic light of the night sky obscures them. What is it to live in a world full of stars you cannot see?
What do you do about climate change?
What do you do when tragedy and disaster appear in your own life or the lives of others? When it feels like there is no soft landing at the bottom of it all.
What do you do for a world where the scale of observable anguish exceeds our ability to comprehend it?
What do you do when you see a moment of kind human interaction that at once breaks you open and heals you back up. Healed because it happened, broken because it doesn’t happen for everyone all the time.
What do you do to make the world kinder?
What do you do the create a quiet enfolding darkness and stillness?
Just what do you do?
That question, like that coin, turns over and over again.
Just what do you do?
🕚 Once upon a time there was a cave
In reality, that coin that was tossed so many decades ago, likely made a soft landing at the bottom of the not exactly endless pit. Alternately, the guide expertly palmed the coin or maybe we were all still in the dark when the whole thing went down.
Perhaps there is a version of this story, this world, where the coin continues to tumble through the infinite darkness. I wished at the fountain of youth and never had to grow up and the question remained, what do you want to be instead of “what do you do.”
🕚 Once upon a time there will be a world
Perhaps we can create a world where we expand the question of “what do you do when…?”
Perhaps we can create a world where, for those wanting such questions, we can ask, “what do you want to be?”
Perhaps, for all of us, there is a version of this world, where each of our suitcases of possibility remain packed and ready to go for the adventure that is this lifetime.
Perhaps to be a bit heavy handed and obvious, we are all coins silently rotating through the darkness hoping for a soft landing.
And speaking of landing, I’m struggling a bit figuring how to bring this one home.
And speaking of struggling that brings us back to…
✨The Allegory of the Cave*
In Plato’s Cave there is no guide, no dramatic dimming of the lights or coin plummeting into the abyss. Instead, it is described thusly:
“Behold! Human beings living in an underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.”
In my father’s telling of the Allegory of The Cave, one of the objects was a toy horse with square wheels. It is a whimsical addition to the story. As a graduate student, he taught the allegory of the cave and, as the story goes, there were a generation of students who believed that the horse with square wheels was part of the original work.
But I digress…one day, as the actual (aka horseless) allegory goes, one of the prisoners is freed and forced to leave the cave. Initially, he is blinded by the sun and struggles to understand what he sees. Gradually, he realizes that the shadows were only a distorted version of reality, and there is a much richer, brighter, and more complex world outside the cave.
The TL/DR version, as summarized by a non-philosopher, is seeing the light, seeing reality is as the story goes. A struggle.
🕚 Once upon a time there was a cave…
And speaking of struggles. It can be had to believe that the past is gone. Sure, we have bits and baubles and places and spaces, but there is an element of the allegorical puppet show about all of it. Are these memories but shadows on the wall? And to be sure, for some parts of the past I say good riddance, but for others I don’t want to let go.
I hold a certain tenderness for these memories: for believing that the pit could be endless, and that youth could be wished into existence. For my family, before it was broken apart by the death of my father.
I hold a certain tenderness for so readily being able to embrace entering a magical otherworld that I felt every time I descended into a cave on these trips.
I hold a certain about of tenderness for being able to fearlessly descend into an abyss of blackness and quietude and find it comforting.
🕚 Once upon a time there was world
An important element of the Allegory of the Cave is that once the prisoners are released and leave the cave, they understand the world in a different way, they must travel back to help others. And this brings us to a ham-fisted lunchbox of an ending but I’m curious what a world would look like if we asked:
💭 What do you do (when, for, about)?
💭 What do you want to be?
And then listen, really listen, rather than letting the answers fall silently into the abyss.
So what do you want to be?
______________________
Notes and Sources:
Notes
*in case it isn’t glaringly obvious, I am not a philosopher
I might be combining cave visits into one memory
Sources:
ChatGPT (for help summarizing allegory of cave — Meh)
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-allegory-of-the-cave-120330
https://faculty.tamuc.edu/jherndon/documents/plato.pdf
Images:
AI generated images made in collaboration with Mid-Journey using prompt: a rabbit in the Endless Caverns in Virginia. The rabbit is dressed as a tour guide and tossing a coin into the endless pi
