Cave Paintings

The creativity that fills space and solitude

A woman just willingly spent 500 days in a Spanish cave, beating the world record for voluntary cave-dwelling, playing lab rat to science studies about mental health in isolation and circadian rhythms in nonstop dark…and having the time of her life.

Beatriz Flamini lost her sense of the passage of time, the way you might if you aren’t exposed to the markers of day vs. night or if you’re reveling on a fantasy vacation. When they went to fetch her out of her stoney hole, she was confused, saying she lost count after 65 days—certainly she hadn’t been down there for more than 7x that. Maybe only 160.

“‘Already? No way.’ I hadn’t finished my book.”

She wrote, read 60 books (I’m unclear if the book she didn’t finish was one she was writing or reading), knitted hats, drew, painted, exercised, cooked, and was bummed that she wouldn’t get to finish everything on her to-do list.

Hands at the Cuevas de las Manos upon Río Pinturas, near the town of Perito Moreno in Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. The art in the cave dates between 13,000–9,000 BP.

Perhaps since I wrote that dark poem as a kid about the guy hunkering down in his bunker for millennia, I’ve harbored a similar kind of escape fantasy. I gravitated toward a hidden nook in my yard alongside the brook to contemplate life, or cry when a boy I liked liked me back (I was scared!). In middle through high school, I longed for my family to just move to anywhere-but-here so I could start fresh knowing no one. As a young adult, I happily took some big oversea trips alone. I was pleased to be laid off from my first post-college job in advertising so I could hide out in my rent-controlled NYC apartment and write the book I’d been taking notes on for a few years. I left later subsequent normal jobs to cobble together a bunch of odd artsy gigs (like run birthday parties in the paint-your-own pottery shop) while I went to grad school to get my MFA in creative writing. I considered it buying time to write, and it was worth it.

It was becoming clear that my dream of being a fiction writer—a novelist—was an all-or-nothing pursuit for me that would require extreme measures. I would only partially joke to people that my craft required me to be a hermit in the woods, or live in a cave. (And I’d argue writing was an inevitable pursuit for me with such innate tendencies to begin with.) Though an above-ground cave with windows of course would always be preferable to an in-ground one, I knew the main ingredients necessary to being a real artist was time and solitude. Virginia Woolf’s essay about productivity requiring “A Room of One’s Own” really resonated, as did the other side of that, the madness of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story about a woman trapped in inactivity in “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

I knew these things, and then I had kids.

I would struggle against the not-writing, and not even reading (beyond parenting how-tos), for years on end. One day, as I once wrote about in this old 42nd birthday post, my then-husband asked where “we all” should go for my birthday, and I said, I should go away to a cheap motel in nearby Peekskill alone for the weekend to write. And that’s pretty much the first and last time I worked on that fourth novel for many years, until I started taking Kirsten Bakis’s inspiring class at the nearby Hudson Valley Writers Center. That brief creative time abruptly ended when I got a job managing the place instead and moved out of the workshop room to jealously eavesdrop from the adjacent office.

Rhino drawings from the Chauvet Cave, about 30,000-32,000 years ago

The minute I turned “mom” any form of selfishness (forget self-care) was gone. It rarely occurred to me to try; that brain space and physical space—and time—I needed to write was just gone, along with the burning impulse it once grew from. Everyone would tell me to take the time away when I could, even my husband, but it never felt possible. I’d take that weekend, but that wasn’t sustainable. I couldn’t live in a motel every weekend, I couldn’t just skip out regularly on these little parasites. And I had to work for money now, more than ever. Were I to mastermind my temporary escape, I’d feel too guilty or too distracted, and then too pressured to produce something worthwhile. The bar had been greatly raised, too high. If I were to make such sacrifices to write, the writing would have to really matter. P.S. I don’t believe the eccentric, ego-driven male artists we all know about because they became so successful/famous, encountered any of the same internal roadblocks when they had kids, but that’s a whole different essay.

In my true crime obsession, I seem to gravitate to disappeared women stories. The Missing Maura Murray podcast, charting the mystery of the college student who just seemed to evaporate into the ether from the center of the road in New Hampshire where the search dogs lost her scent, is one of the ones that haunts me most. If any of these sort of lost women did willingly create a new life for themselves somewhere—which is unlikely when we all know in our hearts it’s murder—wouldn’t that be something. What if Maura’s off-grid right off that road in a cave no one has stumbled upon for 19 years, not falling prey to societal demands, or social media for that matter. Oh the books she would write!

My girls and I have been going through the “Alone” reality show and we’re all convinced I would be pretty good at this—that is, being abandoned for as many days as I can stand to fend for myself in the wild. The muscly-ist guys who are trained survivalists always seem to use the satellite phone for a rescue a few moments after they glance at their one photo of their wife and kids (quite the opposite of the male artists above). I get it, I do love my kids and would feel the pull of missing out, but if I did it I’d be fine and win the million unless a bear mauled me. Problem is, I wouldn’t find it possible to sign up in the first place.

There was an interesting bit in the news coverage about the woman-in-the-cave that reveals to me she must not be a mother. The rule was her isolation was not to be broken by any communication from anyone in her family, not even if it was emergency/someone was dying. I think I would happily cut out some family members for 500 days (no Thanksgiving, phew!) but my own kids? Unlikely. I don’t think that’s really in the mom-playbook.

Flamini’s two-thumbs-up review of the experience as “excellent and unbeatable,” reminds me of the time my own mother was in the hospital after a cyclist plowed into her backside while she was walking our dog and punctured her kidneys with his handlebars. Despite having a near-death experience and being wholly unzipped for major surgery, she said how peaceful it was when everyone was only nice to her, bringing flowers, not making demands. She had a great time trapped there feeling so free.

Aboriginal painting at Jabiru Dreaming, Kakadu NP, Australia, photo by Sardaka CC BY-SA 4.0

My favorite homemade expression is: you are free when you choose your cage. I relish solitude and I don’t believe in boredom. When my daughters tell me they’re bored, I tell them that’s a bad word which signals their lack of imagination. There is always so much to do in your own head!

My to do-lists have sub to-do lists. As an introvert who finds my energy from within rather than without, I also loved the loosening of time and responsibility in the liminal space of the pandemic and got a ton done—if not any actual creative writing. I tend to think I’d also do well in jail, should I ever find myself on the wrong side of true crime. I’d read all the books in the prison library, write tons of novels, take whatever education is offered, learn all the menial jobs—pretty anything save for finding God.

In lieu of being a convicted criminal in some fancy fantasy of jail, I’m instead playing with a more sustainable idea of balance these days. My main pandemic project was getting a little plot of land upstate, a semi-escape I can build into almost every weekend of my regular life, going off-grid-ish but not fully. Turns out I am truly happy unplugged, doing yard work, building things with recycled pallets, and reading in the RV that came with the land. There on a blank screen with no connection to any wifi, or maybe even in a notebook, I can also even begin to write. This growing impulse brought me to commit to the regularity of this newsletter, and could even lead to writing books again someday…perhaps when the girls are in college, or when the economic drain of college is over, or after they move out after moving back in after college—or when I’m done making all these excuses.

But here’s a crazy idea to grapple with: the secret suspicion deep inside me that maybe the old novelist dreams don’t fit anymore, maybe I’m no longer that person who wants to shut out the world in order to sit at a laptop, and that might even be ok too.