I am haunted by a cave in the Transvaal.
In 2013, a pair of accomplished spelunkers (such a remarkable word!) exploring the Rising Star cave system in South Africa found their way through a long channel so narrow only those with very slender physiques make it through, wriggling on their side with one arm raised above their head, a posture that gives the passage its name: the “Superman Crawl.” Next, they climbed up and over a series of challenging stone ridges called the “Dragon’s Back” to arrive at the furthest reach of the cave. To give his partner space to make a selfie video, one of these cavers stepped down into a narrow crevice, and found beneath his foot open space. Compressing his body, this caver shimmied down a ten-meter channel that was sometimes less than eight inches wide, to drop into an inner chamber. There, he was astonished to discover a cave floor littered with the bones of early hominids.
Known as the Dinaledi Chamber, this remarkable graveyard has now been fully excavated by the Rising Star expedition, the bones brought up into the sun-lit world by intrepid teams of slender-hipped women. Immediately, the find delivered excitement and consternation in equal measure. The bones resemble those of early hominids from around two million years ago, but carbon dating indicates these specimens lived and breathed roughly two hundred and fifty thousand years ago. What explains this remarkable deviation from the evolutionary record? How had this species survived for so long? Also, while it seems ridiculous to attribute cultural practices to such early hominids—culture is typically reserved for much more recent species—there is no evidence that flooding or predatory animals were involved. The only explanation for how the bones reached the Dinaledi chamber is that they were brought there by other members of their social group.
I am haunted by the moment when the caver’s foot discovered that opening in the rock. A random movement that reveals a tiny opening which then leads to remarkable discoveries—this sequence brings to mind all those moments in myth when the earth cracks open to reveal an uneseen realm. The narrow channel evokes the image of birth, and the presence of wonder beneath the surface of the everyday.
The story of Rising Star connects as well to the memorable section of Dante’s Inferno involving an early ancestor of the noir metropolis—the city of Dis. Located at the deepest circle of hell, Dis winds round and round, drilling down toward the ultimate evil, the figure of Satan himself. Sin inside sin, the seventh, eighth and ninth circle of hell constrains those who deviated from divine will by active choice rather than dull habit. These are the heretics, murderers and suicides, the false prophets and traitors, along with the sodomites, panderers and seducers. At the low center of the city, sunk up to his waist in a vast frozen sea, the giant form of Satan rises up. This monstrous, bat-winged creature has three faces, and each one gnaws continuously on one of three egregious sinners: Judas Iscariot, and the pair of Roman senators, Brutus and Cassius, who plotted the murder of Julius Caesar.
Virgil, the blind poet, leads Dante up to the hairy flanks of this terrifying demon. Taking hold of the fur he climbs down below the ice. Reaching the demon’s hips, Virgil turns his body and begins to climb upwards, emerging, Dante in tow, in a cavernous space where Satan’s legs rise up—when he was cast down from on high, this is where the archangel Lucifer struck the earth, becoming Satanic. The passage up from this cavern conveys the two poets through the other side of the earth to arrive at the foot of purgatory, that high mountain. This is where Virgil, who died before Jesus could save his soul, must turn and head back down and up through Hell to Limbo, where he resides.
Emblems of an ultimate compression, those tiny channels in the Rising Star cave and in Dante’s Inferno remind me of the mystery, but also the hope, of revelation and renewal through an engagement with the past. Thrown into the world at birth we are marked by a set of circumstances we did not devise and we are accountable for the harms we cause as we blindly struggle toward understanding and clarity. At some point in our lives we turn and confront our own suffering instead of fleeing from it. Like Dante, we must travel down toward the first cause of our isolation, our separation from others, our shame and our lack, confronting these trauma-forms in full awareness.
As I explored in two earlier posts, this process resembles the dread-infused trajectory of the classic film noir protagonist—played by Richard Widmark, perhaps, or maybe Ralph Meeker or Ida Lupino—struggling toward the truth through a night city full of shadows and unpleasant surprises. I was astonished recently while listening to the podcast This Jungian Life as the analyst Donald Kalsched discussed Dante’s depiction of Satan in the context of trauma. What most caught my ear was how Kalsched underscored the the resonance between Dis and dissociation. While perhaps a linguistic artifact, the resonance is rich indeed, as dissociation plays a central role in the operation of trauma—the famous freeze response in which we shut down and go limp in the face of terror.
A case can be made that dissociative modes of relating to the world play an important role in the straits we find ourselves in as a species. In dissociation, we leave our vulnerable, threatened bodies and inhabit instead an abstracted realm of disembodied ideation. If, as I have argued on this blog, early childhood trauma is so common among human infants as to be considered ubiquitous, and if dissociation is key to how human beings respond to trauma, we could expect to find dissociation playing a leading role also in our social and cultural systems. In our highly technological, alienated world, ruled in new ways by the abstractions of finance, it would not be difficult to locate this kind of ideation in the set of habits that are undoing our future. Dissociation is quite literally killing us.
The narrow, fallopian passage Dante travels connects in my mind to the final channel down into Rising Star expeditions trove of ancient bones. This dream-like echoing evokes also the process of inhabiting negative feeling-states in some of the more transformative meditative practices I first learned through a teacher from the Tibetan traditions—tonglen, for example, but even more so the practices meant to cultivate the expansive “Immeasurable” state of sympathetic joy, not to mention the charnel ground practiced called Chod. In each of these practices, compressive emotions linked to the feeling of lack are engaged with and amplified in order to channel down to the hot, dark root. Experienced fully in awareness, those unpleasant feeling states reveal their own transient, dependently constructed quality, thereby releasing the meditator into expansive, luminous presence.
In each of us, I would posit, there is a hidden boneyard buried deep. Even when we were gifted secure attachment and “good enough” parenting, and were able, in late adolescence perhaps, to free ourselves from reactive patterns rooted in early trauma, the bones still lie there in the dark, as old as the hills. And were they brought up into the light, they would force a revision of our understanding of ourselves, and a new compassion for who and what we were when we ourselves first emerged. The result of this deep healing might be a new internal alignment enabling something entirely different to take place—a new emergent form that was present all along as a capacity, real but not yet actual.
