cataphile anonymous

earlier this week i had the incredible chance to get into the quarries of paris. the vast network of tunnels and rooms and strange, forgotten things that extends beyond one's strength to walk was an experience that has sat with me for days now; and i must confess i feel slightly obsessed with all things underground.

i didn't quite know what to expect before going into the quarries (often referred to as catacombs which is a bit misleading as only a part of the tunnels was used in this purpose), nor had i much information about them in general. i did have some kind of guess as of how it might be having visited similar places in other countries, but in retrospect i must say that any assumption i might have had was completely misplaced. and in all honesty i do understand that it might not sound that mind-boggling, going into underground tunnels; and yet that is exactly what it was.

apart from the excitement and haste of getting into the tunnels, the experience as a whole was almost meditative. everything is different once you're 30 something metres underground; the darkness, how the air feels, how everything sounds and how the lights of the torches reflect from the crystal clear water you come across with every now and then. and i can't even begin to comprehend the amount of history that nests in these endless tunnels; when our cataphile guide pointed the wall behind which was located the bunkers of the french resistance during the second world war i could not help but to be fascinated, and when in the catacombe part of the network the countless amount of human bones in messy piles emerged from the complete darkness, it did make me think the lives of those people and how the world would have been when they were around.

and the fact that this all and more just sits there, this whole word of its own, under our feet all the time; it is so detached from everything that is your daily life and it is so incredibly interesting. once you're down there the world above ceases to exist, and you sort of lose your sense of time, distance and place; in some way it condenses your own human experience into the present moment and present moment only. there is nothing else than the quiet tunnels full of darkness, and as surprising as it may sound, it feels almost comforting. and then, after hours and hours in the darkness, when you eventually surface and are almost violently pushed back into the everyday world with all the lights and noises and smells and what not - you do look at it differently, at least for a while. and of course, when taking the metro home in your dirty clothes and wet shoes, grinning like an idiot for a good part of it - the everyday world perhaps looks at you a bit differently as well. 

and i have to say - before i went in i thought that it would probably be a one-time experience for me, that it would be the kind of thing that once you've seen it, it's enough. but, and you might have guessed this, i do think i was mistaken.

don't even know

the thing that was these days was the limitless, shapeless uncertainty that extended into all directions. had she felt compelled to find a comparison to it G would have thought of her childhood, living in the small farmhouse next to the open fields were his father grew barley and wheat; and how every fall, after the crops had been cut, the vastness of the open landscape was almost too big for her child brain to comprehend. then they had used to go, her and her father, in the early mornings when the air was cool and the colours of the approaching winter were already painting themselves into the landscape, and walk on the fields; and she remembered how the ground under her feet continued further than she was able see, stretched so far there were almost no borders, and the air smelled like earth and her father like cigarettes.

it was that feeling of being small and standing in the middle of something extending beyond your strength to travel that she would have tried to describe, had someone asked her how she felt these days. only now her father was not there to carry her home when she would get tired, and the air didn't smell of earth any more but of fumes and garbage and cheap chinese restaurants. and, in all honesty, there was no one to ask her the question about how she saw things, so the slightly faulty comparison didn't really even matter.

what did matter, though, even if G had no one to share it with, was the helplessness she felt when faced with her own confusion. she didn't know much about anything, didn't know where to go or what to do or what to want, even. furthermore she knew that she didn't even have the right to be feeling the way she did; G knew that in the grander scale of things she had it remarkably well. 

every day she read from the paper or saw in the news the sad and horrible things that people had to endure all the time, everywhere. war, crime, hunger, abuse, natural disasters, poverty, accidents, death, rape, child abuse, every possible bad thing she could have ever imagined and more was happening to someone else all the time. every time she left the house she saw people who had it worse than her; she saw families living on the streets, drugged children resting on the arms of tired-looking women begging for money in the metro stations. she saw people talking or rather shouting to themselves, covered in their own filth, and she saw the empty look in the eyes of the prostitutes she passed on her way to work. and here she was, in the middle of her safe and relatively steady existence, daring to say that she was not happy and didn't even know why.

and that was really the worst; the not knowing. had there been something she could have focused on -  an unsatisfactory job, bad relationship,  30 kilos of overweight, something, anything - but instead there was absolutely no reason for her unhappiness. it just sat there, rested on her like big bird sits on a branch of a tree, unmoved by the wind that was her attempts to get rid of it. and of course she recognized that the guilt brought about her unjustified lack of happiness made things even worse and added to the length of the road she would have to travel; and so the thought became even more exhausting, and the motivation to start the journey lessened.

it didn't mean that life would have been somehow bad; it's just wasn't good, either. it was an existence with little ups or downs, and even if G felt stupid most of the time for keeping it up and doing the things that came along with it, everything from greeting the clients ay work with a smile to cooking a dinner in the evening, the other option was even more unappealing. to start to take down the constructions of her life, one by one and not knowing where to begin in order to find out the one that had a fault in them sounded arduous, so much so that even the thought of it made her shy away from thinking about the matter.

so what was left then was to see if something would surface. and she would again think of her childhood; when they had walked the fields with her father every now and then he would bend down and pick up a stone the plough had brought to surface. he would take the stone and put it in the big pockets of his work pants and take it away from the field; and just as impossible as it would have been to find that particular stone from the vast fields when it was still inside the dirt, hidden from view, it was equally difficult for G to start looking for her own stone when she had no idea of the general direction of its whereabouts.

so she walked on the fields of her mind, on the ones that had no borders, ploughing it by living her everyday life; hoping that eventually the stone would surface, and that she could finally name it and grasp it and take it away.

of running

i sometimes - not often, but every few months or so - think how i would be if i wasn't a runner.

because that - a runner - is what i am; even if not a professional athlete or even a solid competitor on an amateur level, it still categorize myself as such after doing it on a regular basis for over a third of my life now. the definition of a runner is one of the few attached to me by myself (and possibly by others) that i am completely sure of and that i whole-heartedly agree with. 

i think running has changed me in many ways, and i think most of these changes have been good; but yet i have no way of knowing how i would have turned out had i not started running. would i have picked up something else? maybe i could be a skillful musician now, or perhaps i would have written a book. maybe i would have surprised myself (and others) and picked up a team sport of some kind. or maybe i would have just gone mad. 

who knows, really, and of course it makes very little difference. it's just interesting in a way that i find it very difficult to imagine a state of not being a runner; not waking up in the morning and self-evidently putting on my sneakers as the first thing. it would definitely be a different kind of existence to the one i have now - not saying it would automatically be worse, but in all honesty i'm not so interested in it, either.

that's why i hope i don't ever have to find out how it is not to be a runner; that i can keep on being one as long as i want to. because even if sometimes running on the same route over and over again can feel tad boring, or if there are times when bad weather makes the whole thing unpleasant, or if every now and then my legs are tired - even then it does feel good to recognize that running is a constant in my life, something that stays and doesn't ask any more than i what i give. a thing that is mine and what makes me me; something without which i wouldn't be myself.

say what?

it is interesting, incredible almost how two (or three or four or seventy five) people can look at the same thing and get an entirely different experience out of it. how something that is the air and sun for one doesn't mean a thing to another, and how even in a conversation when talking about the same topic you still speak of two different things.

and sometimes you fall into the trap of thinking that people understand you, that they think or at least could think like you; that your experience of the world is somehow transferrable. it is a slippery slope to assume that what you say is what people hear, as the meanings and tones that words have are only yours. they might be similar enough to those of other people, at least close enough to make your point across; but if you think that the message you intended to deliver is done so without any alterations, you are often mistaken. 

and it's not merely a question of words. you pay attention to different things according to your preferences and interests which basically, in the end, renders parts of the surrounding world invisible to you. there are things you see as well as things you choose to look away from; and it all springs from the same place and that place is you; the being and identity and consciousness that is yours and yours alone. and it's not to say that we couldn't connect, or anything of the kind; it's just that we all connect in our own unique way, and sometimes the link between us is faulty. 

and it's an easy thing to forget, that people don't look at the world the same way you do and vice versa. easy to get annoyed when people don't respond the way you would want them to or act how you would expect them to; just like your own behaviour can at times irk someone else. and the thing is that no one is in the right or in the wrong here, we just see the world differently.

because that is what it really comes down to, in the end - how you see things. and from there on it is relatively straightforward, as in how you see things results - or rather, should result, in how you behave and what choices you make. in case the two - how you see and what you do - don't go hand in hand, a problem emerges; a threat of a misunderstanding of a more fundamental sort. because if you go against how you see things, if you can't justify or explain even to the one person who speaks your language why you do the things you do, how can you expect the rest of us to understand? it makes everything incomprehensible, both to yourself and to the world, and that is the situation where one is completely alone.