Edited in Paint

This is about my second caving trip, from last November, way before the time of the previous text. I had also started writing this way before the previous article, but it didn't quite fit together, and I wanted to write about SRT while the memory was still reasonably fresh. Also a note - the above picture, apart from the editing, isn't mine, unfortunately I didn't take my camera to that caving trip. And as a final explanation - the last sentence of this text has no particular meaning apart from its sounding intriguing.

Sparks draw white, orange, and green space-time diagrams across the faces of the figures encircling the bonfire. With the twist of a wrist on a mouse, someone’s editing a brown, autumn photograph in Paint. He or she is using such warm colors that the heat of the subtly shaded flames dries the continuously pouring rain even as it reaches our jackets.

That day we had visited a cave popular in Victorian times. The floor, once caressed by hundreds of hands and feet, now slid away from us in cold, slippery disgust. We slide down on a huge slab called “the tombstone”, into the depths of the underworld, laughing as we go.

Presently it is time for the lamb. Roasted whole above the second, smaller fire – how can I adore these animals when they appear in the spring, so naive and beautiful, and adore the taste of that cold lamb burger? But oh, it is so good, so primitive; I rip it to shreds with my carnivorous teeth, the ritual of fat on fingers and succulent roughness between fangs. The ritual of fire.

The fire is something like twice my height. It hypnotizes. Like a television set, you can’t help but stare in its direction. Waves of heat hit me; behind me the rain pours in an endless wall of movement; I am standing on – or rather forming – a boundary between two opposing worlds; the flames fly up in an endless wall of movement.

The next day we went through a “duck”. My newly acquired understanding of the meaning of the word did nothing to lessen my wetness behind the ears in matters of caving – for a “duck” (a partially submerged passage) tends to get one’s ears completely wet (one ear on the way in and one on the way out)...

Some more ridiculously tight tunnels and an amusing spirally slide-staircase type thing. Then – someone edited a brown, caving photograph in Paint. He or she must have been dreaming of Christmas. White, glistening icicles, patches of crystalized snow carpeting the ground...

The world is so unreal that either it was edited in Paint or...?

Dangle from a Tangle (of Hellish Enjoyment)

Something between parachuting and skiing. You’re suspended between nothingness and nothingness, like when parachuting. But you can stop almost when you want to, like when skiing. If the rope breaks, you die, like in a parachute. But the chances of it breaking are closer to the chances of your falling off a cliff when skiing than of your falling off a parachute when parachuting.

That was just about the worst metaphor I had ever thought of. It came to my mind when doing the thing it describes – single rope technique. Which is as good a demonstration as any of the sort of experience SRT is – it’s scary. It gives you weird thoughts.

Why parachuting? Probably because I had never done it. Why skiing? Because my family happened to be in Austria doing just that while I dangled from a rope somewhere below the mountains in Wales.

But my adventure with SRT started not in Wales, but in England, in my own lovely Oxford (yes, that claim of ownership is almost completely unfounded). It began on a gloomy Saturday afternoon on Wolvercotte Bridge. “Gloomy” being a bit of a euphemism (and “a bit” being a euphemism also), as there was howling wind and a fair amount of rain. But I didn’t really notice. I was too preoccupied with putting on a fiendishly complicated harness and attaching some loathsome caribiners and other such confusing thingamajigs onto it.

Three months and n miles later, time had erased any grasp of single ropes I might have acquired on that Saturday afternoon. But this time I learned more quickly – for caves tend to be more fun than bridges, and contrary to the beliefs of countless soulless teachers, one does learn better while having fun.

“I can see you’re enjoying yourself” – says Tim at the end of my descent. Enjoying myself? Suspended somewhere between amazement and terror, hatred and love, hysterical laughter and tears of relief, swinging to and fro between these emotions on a thirty-metre long rope – yes, I am enjoying myself like hell.

Thanks, Tim, for that reassurance. Nothing makes me enjoy myself more than someone who tells me that I am clearly enjoying myself – and lately people seem to be telling me that quite a lot in situations in which they are clearly both absolutely right and sorely mistaken. Just the day before coming to Wales, my philosophy tutor greeted me with the joyous reassurance of “I can see you are enjoying this logic course very much”. After half the night spent on a ridiculously difficult problem set, followed by that indescribable dawn of new ideas sometime around daybreak, when like sunrays of enlightenment and trills of freshly awoken birds, the only possible solution sprang to mind without warning – yes, I was enjoying the logic course like hell.

Where was I? Ah, above the thirty-metre drop already, clambering out of the cave as fast as possible. Why the rush? We were due to miss our callout – the time we said we would be back, and the time after which those back in the hut could begin to organize a rescue party. Darn, how’d that happen?

If it weren’t that stressful, getting out at such a speed and such levels of adrenaline would have been great fun. As it actually was that stressful, the above sentence is really rather meaningless, and it was great fun nonetheless. At least for me, probably not for the leaders, for whom it really was that stressful.

The sky was so clear, the silence and starriness so intense that I thought for a moment that it would have been a better idea to have spent the day above ground, in the magnificent mountainous rooftops of the caves we had been exploring, below their own ceiling of blue sky. But then there have been many mountains and blue skies in my life, and only one first-ever SRT, only one hell of tangled up enjoyment.

Because

This was originally written in Polish, for a competition. The requirement was that it start with "I like oranges because..." and that you buy a kilogram of oranges along with it. As the nearby Tesco didn't have enough oranges, I was left with this text...

I like oranges because they can instil life into any still life. They are suns the size of your palms, suns that can be placed in the lower right-hand corner of a painting, where the sticky juice of golden light drips onto them succulently. Where it touches them hardest, they reply with pale goose bumps; elsewhere they merely smile warmly. When you place them next to red-and-green apples, they contrast with a color full of enthusiasm, at the same time calming their spotty cousins with a uniformity of finish.

You can cut them a bit with a bluish knife, and a delicate smell of pale gold pieces dressed in flimsy white fluff will fill the painting to the brim.

You hold in your hands the suns of the South, picked for you from a sky without a single cloud – orange distilled from the essence of blueness. Eat them; that’s what they’re for.

Triptych

From Sunday's excursion to London.

The marbles in Westminster cathedral form a dizzyingly dazzling quilt of inter-hue relations. Pink, green, blue and gold, its Byzantine extravagance is a far cry from the typical English Gothic, and how it stuns! Westminster is the largest catholic church in London, but it’s not its size that impresses. The nave – the widest in any place of worship in England – seems more like the waiting room in a train station than a monument to God. This may be due to its unfinished state – above a certain height, the marbles give way to a dark, crude stone. As if the message of the church were that paradise is on Earth, not above our heads and tombstones. A very convincing message, if not for the ray of light that, right before our exit, embraces the rough materialness of the stone suspended somewhere up there, above our heads.

But it’s not Westminster cathedral we came to London for. It’s for the National Gallery, for a journey through the history of beauty.

The thirteenth to fifteenth century paintings are exquisite. It’s that period that’s so very often underestimated – as if art had emerged completely formed with Leonardo and Raphael. I’ve only really discovered it through the pre-Raphaelites, and to be honest this discovery slightly undermines my love of this nineteenth century style. For it seems that the pre-Raphaelites did not add much to what people had painted like in the fifteenth century – they just revived and slightly modernized it. And the fact that it can be so easily modernized makes fifteenth century art astonishing.

Nonetheless, one does get tired. If I closed my eyes at the end of this section, I’d probably see rows of hyper-realistic Virgins clad in pointlessly, dizzyingly bright gowns, holding pudgy, naked baby sons who stare out into space vacantly...

The Madonna with the Iris – workshop of Albrecht Dürer

This one strikes you from the moment you set eyes on it. The intense crimson of the gown, along with the hyper-realism of the surroundings – of course that’s what draws your attention to it. But there’s more to it – the Virgin’s face, roundish and unholy, crowned in piggish-blonde hair, seems to be exclaiming, with the air of a lady of high standing: “Oh look, it’s a child, how cute!”. She might soon return to her partying and give the child back to its nanny. But the sparkles of gold upon her hair!...

They force me to reconsider my hasty conclusion. “Oh look, it’s a child” – is not her expression the one of someone who just looked at a loved one as if they had just seen something completely new, to whom it seems for a moment that they understand, they know? The expression of someone who loves. In the unholy, vain way that is the only way we can truly love. “Look, this is my child.”

As for the child itself – at first, he strikes me as impossibly stiff and unnatural, in that curled-up way of his. But then look at the way he’s clutching his mother’s arm with his feet, the way he’s holding her wrist with the palm of his tiny hand. His whole body is tense, yes – it is tense because he is completely taken up with his sucking, he is one great gulp of milk and life.

Then there’s the hyper-realism of the surroundings. Each blade of grass makes your insides somersault. And the simplicity of the background view, the one line of the horizon cutting the air and sea with a sharp calmness. And the color, the subtlety of the color!

Unnatural at first, impossibly natural second, finally as unnatural as only life can be – yes, there’s always room in the world for another well-done Madonna.

Unfaithfulness – Paolo Veronese

The diagonal of her back juts out of the painting and into your face. She’s showing us her backside, and I can’t help but laugh.

It’s the nicest of the four “allegories of love” exhibited in this room (unfaithfulness? the nicest?) – but they’re all extremely nice. A lot of it undoubtedly has to do with the color, the same subtlety as in “The Madonna with the Iris”. Indeed, our unfaithful Venus is uncannily similar to the Madonna – she’s even got the same hue of hair. Perhaps this is the “partying” for which she leaves her child to her nanny?

She’s handing a love letter to a pink-clad and rather characterless dandy, while her lovestruck husband (?), dressed in pretty orange, looks on with sad – and intelligent – puppy eyes. He is softly holding one of her hands as the dandy gluttonously snatches the letter from the other one. The husband seems calm (perhaps resigned, perhaps still naively trustful, maybe gently reproachful), but for the odd perspective from which we see his foot; it seems to jerk in pain involuntarily, as if to kick the hated rival. The cupids stare on in disgust.

A Woman Bathing in a Stream – Rembrandt

White, coarse, thick – the paint thrown onto the canvas with a frenzied palette knife, the gown, the gown! The nearby darkness billows vaporously with abstract golds, there’s a momentousness somewhere in the air. There she stands, soft and blurry under the coarse cloth, completely preoccupied with the cold water she has just entered. A film paused for a second, there is an immense stillness in the way she is about to lift the gown over her thighs. There is such intimacy here, such quiet and simplicity. “The picture appears unfinished (...), but it was clearly finished to Rembrandt's satisfaction since he signed and dated it,” reads the information plate below the painting. Unfinished? But “finishing” would have beat all the beauty out of this masterpiece! There is nothing more or less in the painting than what needs to be there.

After hundreds upon hundreds of gaily colored gowns, carefully outlined hyper-realism, and overpopulated heroic dramatisms, Rembrandt quietly puts a coarse, wet cloth over your eyes and filters gentle sunlight through it.

Yes, if paradise is anywhere, it is on Earth. But it is not in the marbles of our earthly walls, it is in the rough stones of our ceilings and the stripes of light that slice through them.

Whoa, that was a swiping generalization. Hurray to Rubens and Vivaldi, obviously you guys are just as wonderful as Rembrandt and Bach.