River Styx in Howe's Cavern
We visited Howe’s Caverns today. As we wandered along the passageways that followed the River Styx deep beneath the cow pasture overhead, thoughts of Virgil and Dante descending into the depths coupled with Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth swam through my mind.
We read the Verne novel to our son Ben at bedtime last winter. It struck me how the imaginative space that narrative generated for him would find reinforcement in this literal journey. And when he ventures into Dante and encounters the figure of the ferryman Charon, impressions of our guide pushing us along the underground waterway in a flat boat with a long pole will resonate as strangely familiar.
The term for the journey to the underworld to meet the dead is “nekyia.” Such literal encounters with the Earth, be it atop a mountain, beside a waterfall, tossing in the surf, or deep in a cave, such encounters as these give the symbolic patterns unfolding in our lives shape. Such other-worldly places, and here I simply mean different than our commonplace relationship to time and space, challenge our modern sensibility in its effort to seal off the mysterious. The Other is always at hand, in fact She’s right beneath our feet.
I’ve also posted a Howe’s Cavern Portfolio.
Autumn Hills
...if it looks you in the eye and you look back
The Fix Is In
Getting past the shield