Page 24 - WTP Vol. VII #6

Straight-Jacket (continued from preceding page)
I began to see quite soon that sensory deprivation would set in quickly. It does, even in the sanest person. I am familiar with sensory deprivation. As
a caver I have experienced it on a couple of occa- sions. Once, while caving in Cantabria, Spain, I was one of a party investigating a river-cave (Cueva del Agua) in the Matienzo valley. Some way inside the cave, my light, powered by a belt-held Nicad Oldham battery—a miner’s lamp in fact—failed. I elected to sit alone at the edge of the underground river and await the return of the exploring party. I watched them go; the last vestige of light reflected from the wet rock walls faded, and all was stygian night. Completely lightless. And all the time the perva- sive—and psychologically paradoxical—white noise of the fast-flowing, unseen river was reflected and re-reflected from the hard limestone walls. An ambi- ent sound, altering with changes of head-position, and very disorientating.
female. My sovereign identity began to flake away. Such was my experience on the banks of that river- cave, my dissolving self warm and comfortable in my neoprene wet-suit which fitted very closely round my body and limbs. What an experience, and not without pleasure! It was, in fact, liberating.
In conditions like this it doesn’t take long before the imagination—or maybe some interior system less controlled and more primitive—begins to take the place of the exterior world. About half an hour in my own case within that river-cave. Voices form in the white noise of the flowing water. You are hal- lucinating. Very quickly you understand the pre- cariousness of consciousness, if that word has any sense beneath the commonalty of supposed mean- ing. Many people would find this very worrying. I didn’t, for some reason. I don’t have much faith in the external integrity of reality. That’s a fluid con- struct of the (partially) exteriorly informed brain. So, in this mysterious cave, I began to enjoy my hal- lucinations. I allowed them free rein. To be truthful these hallucinations would have had their free rein despite any desideratum of my choice. They had free rein. The voices were mysterious indeed; they uttered profound and explicit metaphysical and existential truths which filled me with awe. (Yet I couldn’t remember any of them once I was outside the cave. Their arcane sense evaporated, like that
of dreams.) My voices were numinous. Had I been of a paranoid disposition maybe these voices would have been slyly and then openly accusatory and hostile, though in this I speculate.
Well, how the mind can deceive and re-deceive itself! The light faded and the perennial night reas- serted itself. It had been another hallucination. (I might call it a visual metahallucination in that, while it lasted, it controlled and suppressed the primary auditory hallucinations.) The sleepers awoke once more and began their metaphysical disquisitions. Then, after another quarter of an hour the reflected light reappeared; this time from a totally unexpect- ed quarter: in fact, from a face of solid rock. Another hallucination!
And then I found that various automatically-accepted conventions began to be stripped away. I started
to lose track of time. I lost an understanding of my chronological age. How might I put it? My evanes- cence had become eternal. I’m not being clever. I’m not trying to express a paradox for the sake of it.
No: this time it really was the returning party. Dis- orientation, followed by quick reorientation. What an experience. Cueva del Agua, and what I learned there. It’s a fascinating cave, by the way, and rela- tively simple, though it does involve a long swim through a natural underground canal (best done in backstroke so that you can appreciate the forma- tion of the high roof.) I later considered the story
of a man who had been marooned in another cave nearby—Uzueka—for a period of many hours: over- night, I think. When rescued he described visual hallucinations of immense complexity and religious significance—altars—unknown muttered masses in a phonetically correct but undecipherable language taking place against a background of geometrical constructions not dissimilar to Louis Wain’s late cat paintings. This story was detailed to me second- hand, so I cannot vouch for it. One of my lasting impressions is that the sleeping speakers are forever present in the mind, waiting to rise and wake from their slumber and to begin their arcane and world- replacing polylogue once more when conditions are right for them to do so.
I lost my sense of gender. I was not male and not 17
These experiences made me wonder whether some types of psychotic illness might not be due to an internally imposed mental isolation—an inner sen- sory deprivation—of areas of the brain crucial to the
After an hour I awaited the return of the others. I saw a light in the distance; it was a down-stream reflec- tion in the wet rock. The party was returning. Soon
I would see the direct light of their lamps. Reality reasserted itself. Identity immediately returned. The internal voices muttered and then faded as though their speakers were overtaken by sleep.