Writer Goes On Holiday
January 8th, 2010
I was trailing through a huge limestone cave complex the other day. I shuffled along at the back of the group who were eagerly lapping up the guide’s talk. I was filled with curmudgeonly thoughts along the lines of, ‘Ooo, look over there, an exciting stalactite. Not.’ And, ‘I wish that person behind me would stop breathing so heavily.’
Maybe I’ve been in too many – I’m a jaded habitué of limestone caves - maybe marvelling at a hole in the earth is just not my thing and it’s time I face up to it. As a kid my parents dragged me through these caves, I went on school excursions to the caves and now it seems only fair that I inflict caves on my own offspring
As I gazed with lacklustre eyes at the thirteenth rock formation shaped like Mickey Mouse’s nose (and look over there, it’s Minnie!) I wondered what would make the excursion interesting for me - apart from a fight breaking out among the group or the lights failing – and suddenly perked up when the guide began to speak of the first Europeans to enter the cave. He spoke of two local men, schoolteachers, discovering the entrance to the cave in the eighteen twenties and going in with only candles, and by the time the eighteen fifties came along both men and women were exploring with candles and ropes, and then as they became a little more familiar with the cave layout they began to picnic in there and bring in musical instruments and moved onto string quartets and then a full orchestra and dances under the huge archway outside. Now this got my attention.
The road to this cave complex is difficult even for modern cars – steep, narrow, winding, long drops into the valley below and yet these people would come to these caves, presumably in their cumbersome clothes, women in corsets, numerous petticoats, hats, buttoned up sleeves and so on, on wagons drawn by horses, no way of cooling or preserving their food - and they had fun. Well, you have to presume they did because they kept coming. And as usual, I think of the women and their conditions. Tight corsets laced at the back might be a novelty these days, something for your partner to unlace with his teeth, but even tight jeans can ruin a whole day for me.
These people were far more interesting to me than the cave structure. I found myself looking around and trying to imagine what they were thinking - did the enormous physical effort to get here dampen their enthusiasm? Were there any family groups? Were there any unresolved tensions in the group? Crushes, love affairs, rivalries, antagonisms? Did anyone smother the urge to push another into a crevasse? And what did they see with their candles?
I was with a group of primarily European tourists with very fancy cameras who took pictures of everything. As the only Australians in the group we stood out because we leaned on the rails whenever we could and didn’t take pictures. My mind wandered back to the present and I speculated on these photos. What were they going to do with their photos when they got home? Who would they show them to? Did they have anyone who’d be interested enough?
It was the people rather than the cave that entranced me – and that’s what I suspect most novelists get excited about – people and characters and why they are doing what they are doing, and what would happen if a six metre cockroach scuttled through the cave – who would take charge, who would scream and who would photograph it and then scream?
Earlier that same week I had an arrangement that required me to wait for some friends for an hour and a half in a cinema foyer. Concerned for my boredom threshold they offered to change things, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I was secretly pleased in fact. One and a half hours in a cinema lobby watching people and daydreaming is a great opportunity for some quality notebook time. If my friends had asked me to wait in a big empty limestone cave maybe I’d have a problem. But I soon would have peopled it in my imagination, constructed scenarios for them and be panting with eagerness to write it all down when I got back to my study.
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Categories: culture, on writing | Tags: creativity, culture, memory, writing
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I had the same experience in caves in France last year, Phillipa. We went into one that was limestone formations, but I couldn’t really get excited about them, and even found some almost repulsive! We also went into some caves with wonderful cave paintings of all sorts of ice age animals, and some were covered with Victorian graffiti. And the pictures were brilliant and really made you wonder about the people who made them, what is it inside the human soul that drives us to creativity under such difficult circumstances, I mean these were miles underground! And the same urge with the Victorians who had rather defaced the paintings in places, with their names and dates written with candle smoke, but that urge of people to make their mark is universal, isn’t it?
Tricia, caves with ice age paintings in them have me drooling with excitement. I must see them some day or my life will be incomplete. I have an excellent book by an archaeologist, David Lewis-Williams, called The Mind in the Cave and he writes about the cave as the unconcious and the hallucinatory visions the ice age shamans reproduced on the walls of these caves. Now I’m drooling even as I write this. You must tell me where these caves are.
Glad you enjoyed the time in the foyer and the time in the caves - all those monumetnal excursions of the early 20th late 19th centuries were amazing - all the organisation and management issues - like everyone I’m sure they all calculated the pros and cons - a new experience always outways the con of the effort
Ah, Phillipa, that last para brought it home to me, what I miss now that I live out in the sticks. I used to hang round railway stations (specially in Europe) and airports, just to people watch. Find a bench and sit down and watch and listen. Those snatched fragments of dialogue, a sudden smile, arguments, tears, laughter. Tics and habits and reactions. They’re all meat and drink to the cannibals we writers are. And the hunger never goes away. R