Michel Siffre has spent more time underground than maybe any semi-reasonable living person on the planet. In 1972, the speliologist descended Midnight Cave, a little over 150 miles west of San Antonio, TX, where he lived for six months. It was just one of many explorations and endurance experiments he has arranged or participated in. NASA was particularly interested in his work, recognizing the value better understanding of human circadian rhythm would have for planning long term space flight.
In the cave, he lived without natural light, while deprived of any mechanism that might give him an idea of time. He was connected to a variety of monitors to observe heart, brain and muscle activity and he reported his actions to a team of scientists at the surface; waking, eating, sleeping, etc. Within a short period, his patterns of activity and his patterns of sleep began to slip into strange pas a deux, an adage between the steady rhythm of daily routine and the concept of minutes and hours, fluidly dancing around it. His waking hours became longer. In return, when he’d finally sleep, he’d rest for say, fourteen hours. Time became a soup. Instead of a twenty-four hour clock, his body tuned itself to a thirty-six (and sometimes forty-eight) hour schedule. One can imagine the problems that arose being outside of time; for example, he noted that he had suffered from bouts of short term memory loss.
Isolation, feeling the slip of time, lost routines…these have become ubiquitous enough experiences over the past year that the issues appear regularly, wrapped in online discussions of mental health, memoir essays, and writing about what constitutes culture. I grimace at the thought of how many musicians have released Blank: The Pandemic Sessions.
Why the need to be so literal?
As an artiste (har!), trained in the institution, it disappoints me, that I too have left that foundation saddled with the guilty responsibility to over-explain, to over-clarify, to leave little wiggle room for misunderstanding.
Our weird isolated, jarring, and sad year will leave its mark deeply enough that the angel of history will see to it that this period will find its way into much more clear analysis. It will seep into art & culture in nuanced ways, less measurable from within the moment, as an art historical study of European art after The Black Plague might illustrate.
For right now, I guess, I prefer thinking about the beauty of Siffre’s acts, the elegance of dancing with the dark, and of unmooring himself from the binding contract we all share with the moon and sun.
*Go buy stuff & support Morwan here:
Like what what’s going on here? Bombs away in the comments!
Not into this song? Stick around for the next one, it may be what you didn’t know you needed! Remember, there are only two genres of music here at SERMONS!: good and bad, and I have too much to do to waste time on bad music.