ice cave
Comments Off
six months alone in a cave
I’ve been thinking a lot of about solitude lately. A few months ago I tried to do a cleansing fast and successfully did three days without food before I happily succumbed to a glass of orange juice. Three days isn’t very long, but it is the longest I have ever gone without food and it was tough! But what is the longest I’ve ever been alone? It was three days on a backpacking trip and on the third day some nasty microorganism attacked my stomach and I got terribly dehydrated and was lucky to meet some hikers who shared their electrolytes with me. Three days alone, that’s it! What would it be like to be alone for a month? or a year? What organ would that cleanse? These thoughts were mulling about in my head when I found an article in a 1975 National Geographic about a french geologist who spent 6 months alone in a cave. Now six months of solitude is pretty intense, but to undertake those six months in a cave, cut off from all time, with the stale darkness… that’s madness.
Well, not quite madness. Michel Siffre subjected himself to such extreme conditions by choice, as part of an experiment to learn more about how and why we sleep, and how our bodies react when they’re cut off from the diurnal cycles that regulate our sleep/wake periods. In the finest sense, Siffre was an explorer. An explorer of ‘liminal spaces’ as universe would say. While he ventured no more than a few hundred yards into the cave, the psychological spaces he journeyed through were some of the most demanding and treacherous any human being has ever recorded.
Throughout the course of the 177 days he spent beneath ground Siffre was connected via a battery of electrodes, rectal thermometer, and intercom to the surface. This was before wireless technology so he was literally on a tether of cables the entire time. This tether limited his forays out into the cave and essentially confined him to his small camp. Intercom communication was kept brief to avoid giving Siffre any clue of what the hour was on the surface. He was supplied with fresh water and a sufficient number of pre-packaged meals from NASA to last him through his ordeal. Every day he had to complete a number of routine tests; firing a pellet gun at a target, aerobic exercise on a stationary bicycle, and other procedures that measured his mental acuity, memory, and manual dexterity. Siffre also shaved daily and saved all the trimmed whiskers for later analysis. When Siffre felt tired, he signaled the surface and they turn off the lights. When he awoke, he called and they turned them back on.
This highly structured environment provided a way to pass the days, and in the excerpts of his journal printed in the article his initial entries are stoic, hopeful, and full of phrases like “this marvelous grotto” and “the food delights me.” He read to pass the time and found projects such as sweeping and dusting to occupy him. Initially he had planned on music being a vital distraction, but his record player was broken. I wonder if he might have avoided some of the later psychological trouble if music had been with him. In the first week he discovered that his cave was inhabited by a colony of mice and rather than risk them getting into his food he set traps for them each night. Things were going well but by the 77th day, he had begun to deteriorate.
Interestingly, because Siffre defines his days as sleep/wake cycles, when the 77th calendar day was marked, he had only gone through 63 cycles. At that point his memory began to fail, and unless he wrote a thought down he immediately forgot it. Days were lost, his mind incapable of capturing and keeping experiences. Then two cycles later, he read in a book how Corentin Queffelec emerged from a grueling 3,850ft deep cave exploration and realized that he was 40 years old and could never do that again. In the isolation of the cave time collapsed on Siffre as he read those lines and he panicked, unsure of how many months or years he had been beneath the earth and terrified that he was wasting his entire life in the cave. He grabbed the intercom and called the surface, begging to let the experiment end. His partner on the other end calmly reassured him that it was okay, he was doing fine… and then hung up the phone.
Siffre lay on his cot for several cycles, unable to perform his daily tasks.
Then, on the 72nd cycle (86th day) he believed he had found the perfect solution to his suffering… suicide. He would make it look like an accident so his wife would get the insurance money. He planned an elaborate scheme of electrocution, but at the last minute realized that if he died the enormous debt he had accrued funding his research would be passed on to his already poor parents. He abandoned the idea.
Nearly two months passed, each day a grueling test of willpower. I can’t imagine that loneliness, that disorientation. Then, on the 130th cycle (156th calendar day) he scraped mildew from a magazine and read that bat urine and saliva can transmit rabies through the air. For the past 5 months he had been breathing in the foul ash of dried bat guano and he immediately panicked. He noticed a rash. Gray hairs in his beard. Then Siffre unsteadily scrawled these words in his journal;
“When you find yourself alone, isolated in a world totally without time, face-to-face with yourself, all the masks that you hide behind–those to preserve your own illusions, those that project them before others–finally fall, sometimes brutally.”
Then, during the night of the 135th cycle (calendar day 162) he heard a mouse, and rather than try to kill it, he rejoiced that there was something else alive in the cave! He named it Mus, and spent days watching it, slowly gaining its trust with dried peas. Then three days later he tried to capture the mouse so that he could keep it as his companion. He wrote in his journal; “For the first time since entering the cave, I feel a surge of joy.”
But his physical dexterity had deteriorated to such an alarming degree that when he tried to bring a casserole dish down over the mouse he clumsily smashed it beneath the edge.
“Mus lies on his side. I stare at him with swelling grief. The whimpers die away. He is still. Desolation overwhelms me.”
He suffered through 9 more days, and then on August 10th he received a phone call that told him the experiment was over. The six months were up.
What an ordeal. Analysis of the data later revealed that Siffre had slipped into several sleep/wake periods that were 48 hours rather than our 24. It reminds me that there are as many ways to sleep as there are people and sleep norms are predicated more on culture than human physiology. Despite Siffre’s efforts, much about sleep is still unknown. You can read more about that here.
Siffre pushed himself to the utter limits of what is humanly possible and in doing so stripped his psyche down to the most bare, raw core of self. The complex network of social affect, dissemulation, and studied poses that we present to the world was slowly starved to death by the negation of time and lack of human interaction. I think that the need to maintain a layered self is especially symptomatic of our society that is thick with social networks and rife with the desire to belong, almost religiously, to a clique. We want to belong so terribly that we are willing to alter our personality to do so.
Siffre’s experience in the cave makes me wonder if the true self, the theoretical hard nut of “Me” inside of “me” is only realized when I interact with everyone in the exact same way. What if I succeeded and I was capable of being exactly the same person to everyone I ever met, but I didn’t like who I was? Is that possible? Maybe we have to be different for everyone in order to keep us from having to approach the parts of ourselves that we haven’t learned how to love, or use. In any case, Siffre went through something extraordinary in that cave, and you would think that after such an ordeal he would stay happily on the surface with his family…. but no!
As of the year 2000 Siffre was back in a cave, this time in France, once again spending untold weeks beneath the surface trying to figure out what makes us… us. Or maybe he found something addictive in the caves and the solitude, maybe he found something that he knows for certain is him.
Comments(3)mission to mars
so to those of you who regularly read Harpers magazine this will sound familiar (original article here)a retired astronaut/NASA bigwig has written a brief essay that proposes that we as a planet send a human (or two) to Mars. This isn’t the best use of our earthly resources, I don’t believe, BUT… in the essay he points out that while we currently have the technology to send someone TO mars, it’ll be a long time before we can bring them back. his suggestion? make it a one way trip.
From among the billions on earth, choose one. maybe two, put them on a spaceship and send them out to the red planet with NO intention of ever bringing them home to earth. They would live out their days on Mars, collecting samples, analyzing rocks, looking for microbes, or just staring at the Martian scenery. and then someday they’d die. maybe run out of food or water. or maybe just get old. now, it’s probably just that frontierism kicking in, but I for one wouldn’t hesistate to go. sign me up.