Here’s the truth: I couldn’t send this letter last week because I was sitting under fluorescent lights at a university library, cursing under my breath at the dozens of people who seemed to have gathered there solely for a chat. I will never understand people who go to a library to have a conversation. Go literally anywhere else??
The irony is that I was furious with them because their noise was distracting me from writing my letter to you about how sound is sacred. How it dismantles the boundaries between bodies; how it’s one of biology’s first and loudest statements of our inextricable enmeshment; and how humans have long honoured sound as a route to transcendence. How, in fact, many cosmologies have somewhere in their root system the idea that creation itself begins with sound. That the world might be sound, made manifest.
But there I was, cursing the noise. I even took a few opportunities to sigh loudly and slam my laptop shut. Yes, I’m that passive-aggressive. Then I got home and looked at what I was trying to write. What an idiot. This is why I love writing, why I love writing these letters to you. Because it reminds me that I live on this edge: still deep in the conditioning of a society that prizes rules, progress, achievement, linearity, neatness, bodies as discrete units. Even as the living world around me is forever calling a different story: that life is entanglement and progress is a lie and the only good direction is back, back, ever slower to approach the source, some sense of the great poised potentiality from which it all sprang.
Anyway. The library. My passive aggression. My desperation, under those fluorescent lights, to write to you about a cave I’d visited ten days earlier, where I made exactly the same mistake.
Kents Cavern is a cave network in Torquay, a hollow gouged into the Devon limestone by water 2.5 million years ago. I visited because I’ve been studying cave art, and I wanted to refresh my body’s experience of what it is to stand in a cave.
The thing that’s really captivated me in my study of cave art has been recent research into the role of sound in that art. Did you know that cave paintings are often placed at the sites on cave walls that resonate most? Some studies have found that the paintings seem to speak: that they were placed at points with unusual echo qualities, which create the impression of sound emerging from the rock itself.
Because modern culture is primarily visual, this wasn’t even noticed or studied until the last couple of decades—by which point, many caves’ soundscapes had been irrevocably altered by having the floors knocked through for easier access to the art, or having walkways and other apparatus inserted.
And what does this tell us, this clanging machinery in those sites of sacred sound?
That there is a whole way of being in this world that we can’t even really conceive of. That we inhabit our bodies and our consciousnesses in an entirely different way to those prehistoric ancestors.
It all makes new sense of some of the oldest myths and creation stories, which hold that echoes are in fact spirits or even gods. This was once a widespread belief, found in mythologies from multiple continents. There’s Echo, the Greek nymph condemned by Zeus’s jealous wife Hera to speak only the last words uttered to her. Hopi mythology tells of Palongawhoya, created by the great Spider Woman to bring the world into good resonance by calling out into the new-formed Earth, making it an instrument of sound that reverberated in tune. And archaeoacoustician Steven J. Waller quotes a legend from the South Pacific that states that Echo as “the bodiless voice” is “the earliest of all existence.”
Of course, these days, we smirk at such ideas. We think we’ve figured echo out. We think our scientific explanation says it all. When you go into a cave and shout, you produce a vibration, which flies out until it’s knocked off a rock, then comes back to you.
And so we knock out the floors of caves, we fill their sacred echo bellies with apparatus, we yell bad jokes into them on guided tours. Above ground, we stream fluorescent light into the hush of libraries and go to them to dissect how shitfaced we got last night. Every space is the same, just a backdrop to the human project, and nothing is sacred.
And if some part of you is still tuned to hear those old echoes, it’s very hard to feel at home in a society like this. Where even the cave, even the underworld, isn’t sacred.
From here, it’s easy to find yourself being a passive-aggressive arsehole in a library, or in a cave in Torquay wanting to rip your own skin off and sprint away from the guide and your group, alone into the deep dark.
For my money, this is it: the very thing that makes so many of us feel unmoored and alone in this society. The sure sense, deep in your bones, that there is something more, something vitally important that we’re missing. Worse, the sense that all of society is determined to stop us ever touching, or hearing, that vitally important thing.
I think this is what originally drove me off on my own hero’s journey; what sent me off on a fool’s errand for 11 years, looking for home. It was the alienation I so often felt, especially in situations just like this.
And I know this road. I know how dangerous it is. Every week, I sit in addiction recovery meetings and listen to stories that start with people feeling they’re different and will never belong, and end with them nearly drinking themselves to death. I’ve got my own story in that genre. It’s a shitty genre.
So I find myself back at a very familiar sticking point. On one hand, I know that running off into the deep dark of the cave, living the life of a hermit, telling myself that I’m all alone against the world and everything’s irredeemable—I know this is a bad road. I don’t see that path working for anyone, honestly, but for someone with my particular neurology and proclivities, it could take me directly to my grave.
But the other pole doesn’t seem quite right either. The wholehearted embrace of all the cacophony of the modern world, whatever form it might take. The idea that I should simply force myself to try to find the sacred in the library chatter and the fluorescent lights and the cave turned into Disneyland. My body wants to shrink from all this, and I don’t think going home can possibly mean ignoring that instinct entirely.
The answer has to be somewhere in the middle. It has to be in the fact that actually, I’m not alone in feeling these things. There are many of us. Perhaps it’s most of us: a huge mass who want more sacred spaces in our society, and more quiet, and more connection to that vitally important thing, somewhere beyond the chatter.
After all, we were all built for transcendence. The proof is in the ears on our heads and their connection directly to our souls.
Because what happens when an echo comes back to you? Even if you don’t believe it’s gods speaking back from the rocks, even if it’s just the vibration of air—it’s still magic. It still moves tiny hairs inside your ears, which send signals all around your body, which can change your entire state of being. On a good day, all this can bring you into a sacred kind of alignment with everything around you. You can feel in your body where those ancient mythologies came from—the ones that said the whole world, including you, is energy, resonating together.
Looked at this way, the problem I’ve been grappling with in libraries and caves becomes not, how can I get the fuck away from these idiots? but rather how can I help build a world where it’s easier to listen for the gods?
I hope to have some thoughts on that next week. Unless I get waylaid by another temper tantrum. It’s always possible.
Love,
Ellie
Love your writing Ellie. Thanks for sharing so deeply and personally.
I’m reminded of our being deep down in the Mythrium in Central London in July - a busy noisy place but somehow we both crossed some threshold there despite distractions. We touched the sacred. And it It feels increasingly important for me to work to access the sacred amidst all the hustle and bustle of the modern world. Although quiet and stillness is always preferable it may be a luxury or privilege we need to look at differently on such a crowded planet.
That said I’m craving some more time in a deep cave soon. 🐻✨❤️🙏