On Caves and Gorges
James Cowan
Dear Friend,

It is questionable whether you will receive this letter at all, since I am writing to you from the entrance to a cave. My nomad friends brought me here in the interest of propriety: indeed they expected me to know where I was even as they left me here alone. For this reason I have chosen to explain to you where I am, in the fond hope that one day soon perhaps you too will be able to sit at the entrance to what is clearly unfathomable. For, you see, this cave simulates origins in a way that makes contemplation all but impossible. In a sense, I have been left stranded at the entrance to myself, a dumb animal looking for shelter from the harsher elements outside.

This is not to say that I am lost. The custodians of this cave are fully aware of my existence. They have simply invited me to partake of a certain solitary condition that they deem important when it comes to understanding exactly where I belong. In effect, they have left me in the company of a wide variety of carefully articulated spiritual patterns that take the form of the rock-face itself, as well as this cave, dominated as it is by a gallery of ancient paintings ochred along the entire length of the overhang. So I am not really alone. Solitary, yes, but not alone. By leaving me to my own devices within this purely iconic environment I suspect that they want me to experience what one celebrated poet called the "ruined ornament" of my soul. As you can imagine, it is an ornament that I have rarely considered worth addressing in the past.

But let me explain. The cave where they have brought me lies deep in an extensive gorge. We had to cross a vast tract of grassland before we happened upon this rather dramatic ed)fice. Eons ago this conglomerate of basalt and sandstone must have been thrust up out of the surrounding plain like a cork from a bottle. Can you imagine the shock of such a cataclysm! Hot rocks steaming in the midday sun, boulders perched among debris like the eggs of monsters! Where once an undulating plain had been, now we witness one of the deepest wounds the earth has ever suffered! When my nomad friends led me along the riverbank into this amphitheatre of stone, I knew at once that I was about to enter one of nature's most painful scarifications. But I heard no cry of anquish, only the still air filled with birdsong.

Clearly it is important that you comprehend where I am. On the floor of the gorge a river flows over smooth black stones. In the river snake-necked turtles warm themselves in the sun on small islands. Waterbugs dapple the surface with air bubbles. And frogs croak, warning us of the hidden menace of eels. On each side of the gorge the rock-face rises sheer to the sky above. In the morning the sun creeps down the sandstone, a gold grimace of light as it pushes back the shadows. Eucalypts cling to the cliff-edge above, their mesh of branches far too transparent to conceal any mysteries from us. While on the floor of the gorge itself palms and poisonous cycads, known as Zamias, rise from the undergrowth, their spiny heads a veritable pin-cushion of leaves.

That is not all. Throughout the valley grow a profusion of shrubs. These compete for my attention with the kangaroo grass, each blossom a splash of colour which makes easy identification impossible. This is because I am overwhelmed by their sheer variety rather than by any desire to single out one species in preference to another. How unobservant I am, you might say. I am incapable of recognizing species that are clearly named! How can I truly appreciate nature without the benefit of scientific knowledge, you maintain. It is obvious that if I were an ornithologist or an orographist or possibly even a paleantologist, I might find myself better equipped to reduce what I see to the level of criteria. But I ask you: would the shock of encounter be more exciting?

. . . . . .

Absurd, you say? After all, time is the only reality according to the way we think. We even equate it with money! We cannot conceive of a reality that predates the beginning of time, hence our obsession with quantifying what is transitory. In fact we have forgotten what it is like to encounter the eternal. We gaze at nature as if it were a clock ticking away in some time bomb. We want it to go off because in that way we can be sure that it has, at the very least, an economic reality and thus an existential life-span. This accounts for why we are in so much of a rush to dig up sacred ground in our search for minerals, or to unleash pesticides on crops. We cannot bear to see nature existing within a timeless vacuum; we would rather see it yield far in excess of its own capacity to grow than to lie there, a lazy reptile filled with all the hibernatory tendencies that make winter such a special event.

I know what you're thinking. Sitting in this cave has caused me to hallucinate! I see shadows on the walls and confuse them with the torsos of spirits. I regard the ochred hands of men splayed before me as if they were individual signatures. I simply refuse to see things as they are, and am always trying to find means by which an ordinary image might be transformed. So? Is this such a crime? If a man of talent prefers a rose-garden or the sound of a harpsichord to that which he can somehow imagine, then he is doomed. In the same way he must never chain his heart to anything less than what he feels. For to do so is to place himself at the mercy of order, a concept as mangy as any flea-bitten dog.
Order, you say? I dare to speak of order when it's plain to see that I have chosen chaos as my helpmate? Well, why not? Even your beloved scientists now speak of chaos lurking below the smooth surface of Newtonian physics. Subject his laws to undue pressure and the Rainbow Serpent of chaos erupts from the deep recesses of its rock pool and claims the tribesman who dares to want to look. That is why the hand is so important, for its numerical valency (five fingers, all closed) makes it possible to actually conceal from our eyes the full horror of such chaos. Or is it beauty? Why not? I am beginning to realize that chaos is at the root of all beauty, a fleshy mandragora of branches that nevertheless deceives us with the illusion of being a human body. If a poisonous plant can duplicate the form of our own special grace -- why then can't chaos create that illusive beauty we associate with order?

Let's take it further. On the wall of this cave, among all these myriad hands, an image of the Rainbow Serpent squirms. For my nomad friends the Great Snake is blessed with a contradictory personality. On the one hand it is the maker of all things, a worldcreator and source of life. Furthermore it has graced this world with all its quixotic beauties, diverse as we know them to be. On the other hand, this fabulous beast is capable of maleficent acts which even my friends find abhorrent. They are aghast when it eats their own kind and then vomits them up again on the bank. Its penchant for cannibalism fills them with disgust. They often ask themselves why the Rainbow Serpent juggles so easily beauty and baseness. Nor do they find a ready answer, either. Except to acknowledge that the Great Snake's character is rooted in chaos, a purely divisive force which, nevertheless, is always yearning to overcome itself. Now do you see why chaos is so important? In the act of destruction the Rainbow Snake is succoured by what we dislike most. Indeed the Great Snake derives its primordial vitality from the most mysterious principle of all -- that of uncertainty.

I know that I am treading on thin ice. You will tell me that I have lost all capacity to discern the difference between order and chaos. To suggest that they are one and the same is to commit a sacrilege in your eyes! But I ask you: is it not you who commit the greater act of impiety when you suggest that order is paramount? Let me put it to you in another way. If order were a straight line in contrast to something
indeterminate and wavy, then listen to what one of your own reputable scientists has to say:

the straight line leads to the downfall of mankind . . . It has become an absolute tyranny . . . something cowardly drawn with a rule, without thought or feeling; it is the line which does not exist in na- ture. And that line is the rotten line of our doomed civilization. Even if there are places where it is recognized that this line is rap- idly leading to perdition, its course continues to be plotted . . . Any design undertaken with the straight line will be stillborn. Today we are witnessing the triumph of rationalist know-how and yet, at the same time, we find ourselves confronted with emptiness. An aesthetic void, desert of uniformity, criminal sterility, loss of creative power. Even creativity is prefabricated. We have become impotent We are no longer able to create. That is our real illiteracy. (1)

By implication, then, order is sterile, a vicious parody of what we wish to see. It has given us the light-bulb, true, but in the process has destroyed what is luminous. My nomad friends are adamant on this point. When we sit around the fire at night they maintain that the stars we see overhead are not mere asteroids fixed in their orbits, but are instead objects which have the capacity to enliven our intellects. They are not interested in the speed-of-light that so readily transmits the scintillance we see, but rather in the invisible light these stars bestow upon the conduct of their lives. This is why they wrap the existence of the Pleiades in an elaborate myth, for they know that in doing so they have superficially ordered what was once a random moment of chaos in the creation of the heavens. The myth makes comprehensible what is no more than a frozen moment in the infinitely slow deliquescence of existence.

Perhaps that is why I have been left alone in this cave. I have been left in the presence of innumerable generations of men who have attempted to ponder the nature of reality. In turn they have placed their outstretched hands on the wall and blown red ochre around the outlines in order to register their own amazement. You see, they perhaps understood as little as I do this curious metaphor that passes for life. I mean, of course, the womb! For in this cave were we not all born at some point in time? I am beginning to sus- pect that where I sit is the fulcrum of the world, a huge hearth whose abundant heat is still capable of igniting those pyres we thought had gone out. What the Rainbow Serpent sees as the fiery nature of myth, the incandescence of its own self-creation. You see how easy it is to allow this cave to do its work! My nomad friends must have known that it was the perfect antidote against the venom of intellectual conceit. Yes, it's true. I had long ago allowed myself to become poisoned by the scepticism of this age. Knowing how much I was a victim, I suspect that the custodians of this cave wanted me to experience for myself this pure act of rebirth that they have long known it to contain.

Boomerangs? Yes, they exist as outlines on the wall here as well. Along with warriors' clubs, emu nets and delicate vaginal shapes cut in the rock. The latter are stroked with the end of a stick, or a stone knife, whenever a tribesman wishes to invoke the spirit of rain. For he sees in female genitalia the perfect embodiment of fecundity! No other part of the body is so deeply embedded in the idea of abundance. Thus by stroking this appendage he is able to make a ritual out of orgasm in keeping with the greatest act of fertilization of which the earth is capable. For him rain masses on the horizon in response to this demonstration of love. Dampness embraces what is dry all around in an act of coition that dispels aridity in yet another pleasurable moment for us all. In doing so the tribesman is able to ensure that this cave wall bearing its endless hierography of pudenda behind me remains a sensual monument to all that is fructive on earth.

Is this so difficult to understand? Or does this cave suggest to you darkness? I know that you are averse to what for many is seen as a rather primitive enthusiasm. Caves, rock, ochred images on walls, incantationary spells -- these are no more than disquieting echoes of where we have come from. As if the inner dynamics of nature were in some way linked to a point of departure and a destination! Is this not a convenient myth to which we moderns so guilelessly subscribe? Are we not enamoured by the prospect of going somewhere? Do not deny it. We are in the grip of a monster more formidable than any Rainbow Serpent, I can assure you. For the monster that strangles us is devoid of any metaphysical significance whatsoever. It takes on the disguise of "progress" and simulates excitement by way of gaudy ephemera and what science continually celebrates as "new" discoveries. What the scientists of today triumphantly announce as their delineation of the "edge of chaos" in their computer graphic images of Mandelbrot and Julia sets (2) turns out to be little more than a very old chaos that has been symbolically ordered in nomad sandpaintings, arabesques, mandalas and in pieces of majuscule script from the Book of Kells. Unfortunately such "simplified idealizations of reality" that the scientist speaks of with evident pride draw their beauty from an abstract mathematical principle rather than from anything that our spirit might turn to for real sustenance.

I know what you are thinking. If Pythagoras considered numbers sacred, then why am I so suspicious of contemporary mathematics? Did not Rimbaud himself argue that today's idea of progress was bound up with a vision of numbers? Yet when I hear an eminent professor from a European university declare that he is "convinced that the rationality of science, expanded properly, is the sole and all-embracing source of cognition for mankind, the only religion of an enlightened future," (3) then I know how denuded the scientific mind has become. It is clear that some men long to embrace logic as if it were the most alluring siren of all. They succumb to its seductive wiles, masquerading as it does in the garb of the rational intellect, content to believe that it alone holds the key to unlocking nature's mysteries. Any mish-mash of mysticisms that suggest otherwise is consigned to the ashcan of history, along with so many systems of thought and belief which these men consider to have outgrown their use.

Dear friend, this is my dilemma. My heart warms to the marvelous configurations that I see before me in this cave. The gorge into which I have travelled to reach my destination is filled with such a variety of affinities that I find it difficult to know where to begin. Should I record their genus, or merely drink in all their mutations to which chaos so readily subscribes? It is a question that troubles me because it goes to the very heart of what I have been trying to say. Either I register criteria, and so identify with the order that is assumed. Or I encounter every exaggeration in what I observe as symptomatic of the hidden chaos upon which nature seems to thrive. On this point my nomad friends are certain, for long ago they have come to the conclusion that the Rainbow Serpent, canny Spirit that it is, prefers to remain at the bottom of its pool in a state of formlessness rather than subscribe to the limits imposed by manifestation. Mortal coils are clearly no substitute for the imaginative wrangle we all delight in when we embrace the idea of infinitude ourselves. I ask you, then: which path should I take?

There is no clear-cut answer. After all there is a purity about numbers which is heaven-sent. Yet here in this cave in the heart of a gorge I am conscious of how easy it is to dispense with number in favour of feeling. In feeling there is a sense of unity; yet I know also that unity is associated with the numeral, One. So where does this leave me? Do I count the leaves on a Zamia, knowing that it is poisonous? Do I consult the Rainbow Serpent whose bountiful coils are capable of hugging me to its bosom? Or do I finally dismiss the polite mechanisms of modern existence (where comfort is contagious!) and reach out, like the hand stencils behind me, for what is, not surprisingly, ungraspable? The real question is whether I have put enough ardour into this enterprise in the first place!

So you see, I am no more resolved now than I was at the beginning. Rather deliberately, I suspect, my nomad friends have left me here to ponder on the true nature of chaos. All I have to guide me is the vast ochrous map on the wall behind. Other men's hands indicate provinces that I have not yet had the opportunity to inhabit. Yet I now know that these are the frontiers I long to explore in future. For the palm of a man's hand is etched with destiny, experience and character, all qualities that have the power to overcome disorder. Like crumbling papyrus it gives account of certain verities that time has nearly erased. These, I'm sure, pertain to the journey a man makes in search of sanctity rather than certitude. Which means that what we know as "chaos in matter" reflects a formlessness that is sacred, a font of blessedness no one should ignore. Let me assure you, my friend, that the custodians of this cave have no intention of doing that!

But I must not linger too long here, sitting alone outside this fissure in the wall of the gorge. Like an oracle the cave entrance behind me beckons. Since my nomad friends are not due back for another week, it behooves me to investigate more thoroughly their world, if only as an act of courtesy. For it becomes obvious to me that in wishing to understand the mysteries of nature more deeply, I am able to offer my impulses towards perfection with far greater vigour than in the past. Why don't you drop everything yourself and join me -- here in this gorge, among all this basalt and these poisonous cycads? Together we could plumb the depths of this cavern, whereby we might discover new beauties hidden away from the light. In turn we can share them, and thus discover what true brotherhood is all about.
Regards, dear friend,
James Cowan

NOTES

1) Friedensreich Hundertwasser, The Beauty of Fractals, H.O. Peitgen and
P.H. Richter, trs., (Springer-Verlag: 1986)
2) Ibid.
3) Conversation with Professor Gert Eilenberger, University of Cologne