The Liminal Compass: Terra Incognita
In the house that I grew up in, there was a Chinese puzzle ball; layer upon layer of lace-like ivory carved painstakingly into hollow spheres, each independent of the other and all carved from a single piece of elephant tusk; solid animal strength transformed into beautiful and unsettling fragility by human hands. Of the layers I could see, scenes of trees and flowers adorned the filagree surface, punctuated by the larger circular apertures through which a sculptor, some hundred years before had passed their tools to tease the next globe free from its solid ivory centre. If one were to take a needle and carefully shift the delicate spheres around inside one another, you could hope to line each layer of apertures up, penetrating right to the heart of the ball. But the view of each layer would only ever be partial. There was no way, short of destroying the puzzle; smashing it into pieces, which would reveal the whole surface of each individual sphere. Beyond the second layer, the stories of gardens and night skies and figures that I imagined dwelt in the depths of this tiny world, lay almost entirely hidden. The puzzle ball, my father said, had seven layers all together.
I remember the low hum of blended reverence and excitement that this knowledge gave me, holding the tiny ball in a flat open palm, no heavier than the rabbit skull we had found once on a forest path. I would never; we would never, know this little world in its entirety. Even the artisan who had created it had never witnessed its whole story unfurled before their eyes. I stood, in the Saturday-morning, still, sun-trapped air of our living room, the settled steadiness of the house plants I was growing up with around me, the drone of lawnmowers outside, and cupped the puzzle ball in my hand. This is my earliest conscious memory of the wordless, ungraspable, deep-dark vibration that is the experience of brushing against the unknown and unknowable. In that encounter, and in the many times I returned to look at and cradle the little world in my hand, I sensed the exhilaration of teetering on the limits of my understanding; the sweet, honey-flavoured grief of losing the ending of a story that was never mine to tell; the sudden feeling of standing amidst a kaleidoscope spectrum of images and colours, sounds, sensations, only a portion of which was my child’s experience to share.
We are used to defining ourselves in relation to the familiar and the known: facts, photographs, memories, maps, scientific data, passed along the family tree of the human species. We have grains of information inherited and look forward to the harvesting of knowledge to come; an assumption of an ever more detailed picture of the whole world that lies ahead; our areas of Terra Incognita slowly and doggedly filled in.
Our language of knowledge is littered with the rhetoric of possession; we hold, harness, define, own and guard. The unknown is territory that calls us to conquer, to draw into our map, gathering facts and experiences around us and building them up into the fortifications with which we defend familiar assumptions, until a new world is discovered and we are compelled to draw the map anew. And sometimes, within the darkness of the unknown, there lies an even further possibility; an impenetrable mountain pass of the unknowable. An encounter which, when we come face to face with it, forces us to acknowledge that ours is a redacted version of the world; that there are some realms of knowledge that are simply unconquerable. Perhaps, if we were more truthful, we would admit that our colonial approach to owning knowledge is a project doomed to fail. That there are some landscapes of knowledge that we will never be able to fully access. That we can record the melody of birdsong the world over but will never fully understand its meaning. That we can scan the depths of the oceans but be unable to define whether a life for the creatures we find there is one of sorrow or of joy. That the wall of complexities, contradictions and variables that sits between us and knowledge of a viable future for our species is perhaps just too vast, too impenetrable, too slippery, for us to ever scale its heights, and so, we must act, even whilst we sit in uncertainty.
Almost thirty years after I first gazed at the little ivory puzzle ball I tumbled into a journey that held the promise of things unknown to me: new country, new people, new landscapes, new weather, new ways of working. The expedition rushed into my life with a heady cocktail of expectations and promised experiences. Known to others but new to me and so seemingly carrying a simple offer of knowledge to gather in and hold for myself.
I spent the months of preparation palpating the surface of the information I could find on Cueva de los Tayos for fragments with which to build a picture of the place we would be travelling to. Shifting the ivory spheres this way and that to see what lay inside.
What was the cave like? How vast? What form? What would four days of endless night feel like? How would we get in and out again? How would it feel to co-exist as surface-dwelling beings alongside the creatures that called the underbelly of the earth their home? What did the cave sound like? What might creep into my dreams down there in the dark?
I circled the questions doggedly, prodding them for answers, slowly squeezing little droplets of images and place-names and kit required from the body of knowledge that existed out there on Tayos. Sometimes there was a yielding; single pearls emerging on the surface like sap: The cavern we would camp in was 250m long with a roof as high as a cathedral. Our journey would take us from Quito to Banos to Mendez to the Coangos River before embarking on the hot, uphill trek through the forest to emerge on the plateau that forms the home of the Tiwiram family, Shuar guardians of the cave. The cave was populated by tarantula, whip scorpion spiders and the occasional rainbow boa. We would traverse the cave and the rainforest in wellington boots; the only footwear capable of withstanding the onslaught of mud and water that would form our path.
I took these patchwork pieces; known to others and simply unknown to me. They were clean and bright with the promise of transforming unknown into known. I too would soon possess them, and in anticipation I began stitching them together to form the quilt that I would wrap around me once I had measured myself up against the experience of Tayos.
But as I asked more questions the image that began to emerge was less like the ordered completion of a quilt and more like a game of consequences; an overall form emerged but with a head that didn’t quite match a torso misaligned with legs that seemed to spring from an another identity entirely. My mental map of Tayos was a mess: a jumble of known coordinates alongside the magnetism of a Terra Incognito that persistently resisted my preparatory research and endless queries.
The true unknown by its nature goes beyond what is simply not known personally yet. It carries with it an entirely different allure; that same suspicion of impenetrability that I had felt holding the puzzle ball all those years ago; an inky depth and undertow tug that is a familiar call to those whose curiosity travels along paths that extend outwards in order to twist ultimately inwards to the heart of who you think you are. And as I wrangled with my patchy Tayos quilt the unknown was always present. It nestled in between all those bright patches that signalled novelty; tangible, understandable things that were known to others and ready to pass on to me. I could taste it on the tip of my tongue; it lurked on the sidelines of all our preparations. It hovered around me; that same butterfly sense of teetering on the edge of my limits that the puzzle ball had first evoked all those years before.
Much later, after I had returned from Tayos, I stumbled across Rebecca Solnitt’s words on the unknown, drawing into focus the drive behind that tug that I felt in the run up to the journey.
“Leave the door open, for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
In retrospect when I look back to those months of preparation I can see that what I was drawn to as I stalked around the perimeters of the known and the unknown of Tayos, was the sense that in this mysterious place that I couldn’t quite pin down, was the possibility of redefinition, or to put it more accurately, further definition of myself. By venturing into the unknown I would hold up new mirrors to myself. I would, perhaps, see myself anew. Tayos would be my re-framing, my magnifying glass, my microscope.
“Humans are tuned for relationship” wrote David Abrams. “The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears and nostrils: all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness…….we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.”
I know who I was in relationship to the familiar: the spruce and larch and sea gulls and family and work colleagues and houses, bottle-openers, emails, bus routes, bookshelves, bays, songs, winter winds and summer showers that constituted the pixels of my life’s picture. Things that were so familiar that even the non human ‘others’ had been fully assimilated into the fabric of my world. Those parts of my map were drawn in permanent ink and at 1:1 scale. But who was I when reflected in this unknown; a cave that held both fears and challenges within a picture that was full of holes and thus was somewhere I could never fully prepare for. What would this unknown of darkness and heat and spiders draw in on the map of me?
And then the time came for me to take my partial, raggedy map of Tayos; full of the unknowns that drew me to it and hold it up to the place itself. To see which holes could be filled in with new knowledge, gathered from brushing up against the unknown. To understand what image the quilt would reveal and what shape it would give me when I wore it.
These are some of the patchwork pieces that I collected.
Into the unknown of the descent into Tayos I took the hard facts of a 65m drop into darkness, a harness around my waist and chest and pelvis, all the previous photographs I had seen of the lush greenery surrounding the yawning, pitch black mouth of the cave. And added; the swaying motion of the rope with the pendulum of my loaded rucksack dangling beneath me; the fading out of stripes of green, to gold, to black as the light on the striations of rock petered out and the uninterrupted dark took over; the unexpected sideways billowing of the chasm into a space halfway down, which rolled the sound of my voice around it and swallowed it into an unreachable void. The feeling, first of unexpected happiness as I groped around the sensations that were swirling around my head and found terror to be absent, and then a sharp protectiveness of this time, swaying in the void, an experience all my own, a silent wish that I could stay in the in-between for longer, untouched by others, suspended in space.
As my toes brushed the foot of the chasm, swaying as the rope pulled me back and then relinquished me to the solidity of the cave floor, another blank of Terra Incognita, blooming with colour. The unknown of the cave, a place I had associated with challenge and fear, layered with all our cultural readings of dark, enclosure, the subterranean, suddenly brought up against the atmosphere of the place itself. Soft air; a diffusion of dust and moisture and swirling pockets of cool and warmth that felt like comfort. The unthreatening welcome of fawn and dove and mallow in the tones of the rock face. The unexpected revelation that here felt like home.
In anticipating the unknown that was persistent darkness, I had stepped outside myself and pondered on what reaction the self in my experiment with light deprivation would have. I imagined an underwater struggle towards the sunlight; a claustrophobic sense of all pervading gloom; a tearing sense of loss of the daylight that I spend so much of my time as an architect seeking to let in, harness and reflect. But instead the patchwork piece labelled ‘darkness’ I brought out of the cave was the colour of peacefulness. It spread a cloak which cut out the anxiety of seconds ticking away and replaced it with the timeless expansiveness of an unlit world; no cycle of sunrise and sunset, no meaning to minutes and hours. The clock of the cave operates in years, centuries and millennia; slowly forming stalagmites, the rippling of rock into waves of water-formed fabric, the imperceptible shifting of form and reach as the 5km of mapped cave passages and caverns journeys outwards, further into the depths of the Andes, reaching its fingertips down to the river. The darkness held up its mirror and showed me a self that embraced it.
The first encounters with the tarantula; a paralysing fear I’d had in childhood wrapped up in the archetypal form of all spiders: the cave broke my cartoon phobia down into something much less binary and infinitely more real. Great slabs of rock reaching obliquely up towards the roof of our cathedral cavern basecamp, infilled with the soft, sifted soil of the cave floor and interrupted suddenly by the unmistakable presence of those first two tarantula. Two exclamation marks in the white expanse of a black page. Seeing them in person held the same disorientating feeling of seeing the famous in real life; the familiar rendered utterly new by graceful movement, three-dimensionality and the incontrovertible understanding that it was we who were intruders on the home of an unwitting host. They made such sense in that place, were infused with such a strong sense of belonging and strange integrity that whenever I think of them now I’m flooded with a sense of gratefulness for the way in which they shattered a simplistic image into something so much richer, binding into my memory the poetry of their slow dance across the cave floor and their indifference to us.
We were four days in the cave. These memories I gathered in along with many others; piling up my arms with fragments of parchment filled with texture and colour to stitch together my map, my quilt, a subtle shape-shifting in the mirror. I held it out in my mind’s eye looking for the completed picture that had emerged.
But my map of Tayos remained full of blank expanses. It is still. As I emerged from the cave again, into the orchestra of birdsong and insect humming and shifting leave and undergrowth of the rainforest, back through the forest and against the rain-swollen torrent of the river flow, back to first, Ecuadorian humanity, and then through the dry, sterilised air of the airplane to the familiar fabric of my life in Scotland, I carried with me new lines on the map. The ones that demarcate not the unknown, but the unknowable. The blank pieces I tried to fill and found I couldn’t. The experiences that were too ‘other’, too vast, too timeless for me to fully own. As I grappled with forming responses to questions from family, from friends, from all the generous people who had helped us on our way there, I understood now, why the preparatory map I had taken in to Tayos had been so incomplete and confusing. I had been working with a map formed of other people’s unknowable realms and now here was my own.
As Rebecca Solnitt says “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration - how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?”
I ventured into unknown territory and found in the cave many things that transformed me in ways big and small. But the parts of my map I hold most dear are the lands which I know I cannot enter. The places where I am forced to stand on the edges of my limits of understanding, wondering at the story that is unfolding on the other side of the border.
It turns out we are not the sole gatekeepers of knowledge. Ours is a perspective that will always be fragmented and full of gaps on the page between the words that form our language. In the gaps lie the maps that belong to the cave, the spiders, the bats and in a way this realisation is the most important knowledge of all. The borders of those unaccessible realms are drawn in humility but they point to a world so much richer in experience than we could imagine when we pretend that the territory that is ours is all there is.
We will never know all the answers. We will never know the surface and detail and the millions of stories that populate each layer of the puzzle ball. But we can hold it, gently in the palm of our hand and wonder at the endings of tales that are never ours to tell.