Midnight Cave, Texas: The Experiment.

Midnight Cave, Texas:
The Experiment
--For Michel Siffre

   A man descends into a cave
   long abandoned by bats. For six months
   the electrodes and wires of science
   bristle from his head.
   in the dark chest of the earth,
   a hundred feet beneath the seasons
   and with no clock but
   the wound timepiece of himself,
   he seeks his own rhythms.
   Above him colleagues monitor
   his vital functions
   and turn the lights on
   and off at his request.
   His dreams, of course, are his own,
   part of the self's short-circuit,
   not to be monitored by the surface crew.
   After the 130th cycle
   there are no days), after waking
   in panic in absolute darkness,
   he writes, "When you find yourself
   alone, isolated
   in a world totally without time,
   face-to-face with yourself, all
   the masks that you hide behind--
   those that preserve your own illusions,
   those that protect them before others--
   finally fall, sometimes brutally."
   The man sits on a rock
   in the circle of light
   around his pale-blue tent
   for a succession of eternities
   swaying mindlessly. He daydreams
   of the dense jungles of Guatemala,
   the sunlight filtering
   through wet leaves. His boyhood
   fantasy of finding Mayan relics
   somehow sustains him:
   "I will go to Central America
   and I will regain control of my soul."
   On the floor of the cave
   the dust of ancient bat guano
   filters, particle by fine particle,
   through itself.

Copyright Al Zolynas. Originally published in THE NEW PHYSICS, Wesleyan University Press, 1979.