A DROP MEANT TO BECOME A STALACTITE

“The shape of a cave. Enveloped by darkness. Our voices echoing of the walls. We are afraid to speak. We see nothing. Nothingness spreads around us. But in this nothing we find what we did not know existed. In our bodies we begin to feel the rhythms, faintly at first. We tend to them and now we hear other voices, not our ones, but of those who have come before. We feel the hunger deep within us. The melodies ancient, secret, buried, now pulsate within us. And we can feel those who came before us, and before them, and before. The hunger deepening. Back to the beginning. The shape of a cave. Space divided and not divided, space turning in on itself, transforming.” –Nancy Tuana (1994) Emerging from the pores of the rock, the drop has been lingering among the bats on the cave’s ceiling for many hours. Enriched with lime, it hangs in the depths, waiting to slowly solidify in time with the subsiding humidity. Melting into the rock in the continuity of the drops that preceded it, the drop wants to become part of the cave; a cave that oscillates between this world and the next, between origin and end, between sensual perception and spiritual abstraction. It is a patient and at the same time risky wait, as a somewhat too energetic flapping of a bat's wings or a gust of wind penetrating into the depths can finish it off and abruptly tear it out of this petrifaction it so eagerly hopes for. The drop does not yet know that this time it will be a fine yet sooty smoke that will tickle it out of its stone-becoming and irrevocably shift its fate in another direction. This smoke came from afar or far above, snaking its way in with the torch's footfall-seeking advance through the entrance into the cave, the hole, the pit, the ditch, the room (of one’s own), the atelier or the space for thought. Wherever the smoke grazed the rock, it left a subtle tint, unwittingly marking traces in nearly complete darkness. The torch searches for the origin. The origin of the cave, the origin of people and, for Georges Bataille, also the origin of art: "’Lascaux Man’", writes Bataille, "created – created out of nothing – this world of art in which communication between individual minds begins"(1955).