The Liminal Compass: Fluent in the Dark

“We need to know the textures, the rhythms and tastes of the bodily world, and to distinguish readily between such tastes and those of our own invention. Direct, sensuous reality, in all its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky can we learn how to orientate and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us.”

David Abrams

The darkness of Tayos isn’t the ink black of nothingness. It isn’t the dark, dead grey of nightmares. It isn’t the expansive spray of prussian blue and violet that is the starlight over its mouth.

It is an ochre, sepia darkness with visible breath, dust motes pale and dancing in it’s movement. A barefoot dance of arcs, slow twists and unfolding arabesques. In the air, dust lifted up off the cave floor and peeled like a veil from loose cavern walls moves fast in the small spaces between chambers. Spaces where the roof reaches down to the sloping scree like gills. It pauses, barely shifting, a murmuration of starlings suspended; an inhale before the exhale swoop of a change in direction.

The darkness cups a hand over our eyes and signals silently to the other senses to wake up. Without sight everything becomes more intimate. The approaching sound of a bat flitting through chamber after chamber, emerging from deep into the earth. A brush of air, shifted by wings to roll over our faces: a caress from cheek to ear to the downy hairs on our necks.

The darkness makes our skin come alive; picking out key changes between warmth and sudden cool currents from somewhere deep, deep down. Somewhere where water runs unseen by human eyes along thoroughfares for snakes, spiders, bats, scorpions, a metropolis of cockroaches busy churning soil where the light never reaches.

In darkness, scent opens out. Unfurls. Beyond the major notes of food and smoke and flowers. Into a minor key of water droplets, smelt before seen, sweat on skin announcing human companions, the mineral shift in the air heralding a patch of the strange sentinel plants which exist far beyond the limits where photosynthesis would make sense.

Those plants, caught in the beam of a head torch; single issue sight, one topic at a time. The dark pulls a photographers black fabric backdrop around their still life; like cards on a colour chart denoting a sliding scale of daylight. Samphire at the mouth of the cave, lime at her throat where the direct rays still penetrate, pistachio in the cathedral cavern where we camped, the milky pale of unripe avocado as the descent beyond the dim limits of watery light begins. Then into the true darkness; oyster mushroom, aphid white, the underbelly sheen of scattered bugs at the turning over of a rock. Until finally, an almost phosphorescent glow of life in the landscapes of unending dark.

Darkness moves beyond the headlines of vision, down to the subtle touch and sound and smell of the fine print three paragraphs into the story. It takes the icon and splits it into a million, tiny mosaic fragments, each with their own unique shape, their own hue and glaze, chips and imperfections. Darkness takes the dictionary definition of what is seen and offers up all its synonyms.

Outside, our language for the world, our reading of the land, is received through the frame of seeing. At a distance, observed, so much easier to read as inert. But here inside, in the darkness, we speak five languages at once and we can’t see the frame; where the cave ends and we begin.

In darkness, the barricades between vision, dream and waking become invisible. They are porous. Animated spiders in magenta, peacock green and fuscia creep into dreams, slipping silently through fissures in sleep’s walls, into waking moments, floating in blackness like retinal ghosts when we open our eyes. We are in the darkness, in the cave, and the cave is in our heads, in our mind’s eye in sleep and wandering thoughts. Darkness twists the dial and cycles through white noise into its own frequency; a station that is out there, broadcasting still, even when we move beyond the reach of its airwaves.

In the darkness, the cave sets her limestone back to the world and curls a space around us; the bulk of her backbone and the solid strength of her arms encircling a void still enough to let the dust mote dance take centre stage. She runs her hand through the silt of latent emotions and memories, fears, vulnerabilities and hopes. All the things lying settled under the river flow of our busy, distracting lives, lifting specks of the things forgotten, hidden, suppressed and overlooked up into the slow, soft air.

Under cover of darkness she leaches out wells of tears we didn’t know we had and can’t account for.