Disruptors

by Shalini Singh

“Time has to be understood as “a quantity according to the permanence of which we measure the existence of all things when we show something to be, to have been, or to come into being at a certain existing time”

Time has been conserved in paintings, holes, lingams, and the multitude of primitive flora that covers and inhabit the Borra Kohalu caves. These caves are untouched by outside elements. Time remains still in the spaces of the 150 million young cave which was unknown to everything that walked the face of the earth, once upon a time, now in perish. Time is depicted as a mighty arbiter in the numerous stalagmite and stalactite- Shiv and Parvathi of this black hole in the ground. Since the sight of the caves had been discovered, hordes of scientists, geologists, and archeologists had been sent to re-discover. Many convoluted caves remained untouched. We knew of some. We pined for them. There was a cave created by God, waiting for us. It was attracting us, the visitors. It was The Cave. Pinakin, a dead supervisor whom I revered, would have remarked looking at the cave that each space occupied structures inside were curious and excellent tokens of some divine artifice. Wholesome. An allegorical natural composite structure enveloping structures, shapes, the whole ground- for there seemed more admirable contrivance in the intestine of a man’s body than the celestial orbs; more economy in the structure than in poetry.

We were intellections in a cosmic find of a mysterious kind. The aphotic cave found us. The dark of the cave lulled us, nearby. Usually, light leads people like us to the places we call home after home. It had these paintings of water, fire, air, and wind; of what the eyes can see, the hands can feel, the radiating energies emit. An entelechy in the air. Such caves exist in particular regions of a spatially inhomogeneous universe. The mind of the matter is left as an edible print of time and space on carbonate rocks and mica. A still-born monopoly of wonder. A cognizable print of the senses. Like benign universes, usually, these caves allow neither nuclei, atoms nor stars to exist. The cavemen had painted ‘other worlds’ and ‘many worlds’. As time went by, we were not sure if it all was painted. Or painted by men. Or by animals. Or Gods. Some paintings were speculative, some fantastical, others, discernible at a rude count. And what was to be, and what was and is not now, and what is now and what will be—all these mind ordered inquiries…..

Time, fixed, stunned, in a highly complex process. Time punished us, as we stood, crouched, and walked inside the cave, day after day. Laid bare on the walls, was nature’s craft- a distribution of art since the Archean age. Years earlier when Bela and Hector graduated, they had written multiple papers on cave explorations and their findings. They used to find time in these caves, preserved as-is. They revered B. Carter, who formulated a few principles of interest—The presence of observers in the universe determinates its time dimension; the universe has to be at least as old as to allow the emergence of an observer. Bela and Hector determined themselves to be wallowed by the gratitude of mankind which was least interested in these caves but considered the findings to be determinant of the universal cataclysm and the conditions that enabled their existence. As observers, we made sure that we knew the past of the universe, for the future.

On day 40th, we realized our place as observers- confusing and ‘not right’. Like there are chess positions that humans’ players can understand easily that the most powerful chess engines can’t, a carbon dating device can only tell you so much. The thing born creates the use and we were of no use to this particular rich cave. We were mere passerby’s, now high on the pecking order to mutilate the unknown. We cannot deny that an infinite number of things exist, or once existed, but have since ceased to exist, that have never been seen or grasped by man, and have never been of any service to him. But yet, we could not deny ourselves the curiosity of a cat with nine lives and none to spare. We hardly ate, slept.

Solastalgia “is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault” (e.g., by climate change).

A small patch between two rocks showed a frail outline of the feelers of an ochre coloured snail that had become brownish- yellow. Stunted but huge in proportion to its contemporary modern snails. In this case, the snail was hypnotizing. Even though the patch was small, the presence of the void around the patch illuminated the snail, God-like. A semblance of a divine token? A magnificent detail in nature. A patch of genius in nature.

Hector asked me or rather told me- “Do you know a crowd of physicists since Newton have found God in stars, in bacteria, in water, and flora; not to mention those who find him in the wrinkles of the rhinoceros’ hide, in beehives, in zebra stripes…….?” At that instance, a terraqueous globe of mass and matter, a species we did not know, we could not know; slithered in the subterraneous heat on the cold hard cave surface, erasing the snail altogether. “Where did the animal go?” I ruminated, peering and on the verge of tears, which did not come easily. Dehydration made it difficult.

“What was it? Was it even an animal?” asked Hector, who sat on the ground, his teeth chattering and his eyes, red. He looked like a mad man. I never saw him come out of the cave. When I used to wake up, he used to be already gone. The search inside the caves was an Alchemical meditatio.

The cave spoke to us, even in our dreams. Sleep consisted of twisting, turning, and shrieks of joy coupled with anguishing cries on most days. Our occupation was not ours anymore. We were a mere extension of a macrocosm that had blessed us with a temple where we came to pray, every day and the more we came, the weaker our faith became. I don’t know if we were prisoners in this cave, for we hardly ever came out of it. There enveloped an urgency in each of us three, coming from different areas of interest to study something we considered a once in a million occurrence in the history of histories. A small part of history unfolded in front of our eyes. Our mouths had forgotten how to speak. We heard silence like a dear sister. We used to exchange glances with an occasional “Wow” “Oh my god” and “Is this real?”

“Is this real?” was a phrase that we constantly thought of and not only we did mouth these words but also knew that even if it was a dream, we did not want to pinch each other or wake ourselves up. We wanted to be asleep in a reality which was far from real. At the end of each day, all three of us, gathered our tired bodies, overdeveloped egos out of the cave, leaving the tools as is, the cave as is, moving from the avowal of opinion to the recognition of truth. In our sleep, we saw our destruction.

Carmina qui quondam, studio fl orente peregi: “These are the songs I used to sing.” The cave was illuminated at night as if hundreds of fireflies had decided to make the cave their grounds of fancy play. A steady, stately cycle. During the daytime, it was dark inside,
resting heart fires and fireflies. Our familiarity with the remarkable aspects of nature had removed our sense of wonder at them in the upcoming months. A place for everything and everything in the right place. God had created the Universe in accord with some perfect numerological or geometrical principle and we thought, we were its consequence. We thought we owned other consequences which arose from him and that we had a duty towards these consequences. But did we? The most personal is the most creative; we could not decipher God’s creativity through a digging knife, a folding shovel, or rusty tillers. We just could not. This we realized on Day 100th. Every minute in nature’s order and definiteness is much more vividly visible in heavenly bodies than in our own form, whereas change and chance are characteristics of earth’s perishable items. Somehow this cave No. 978A did not belong to the perishables of the earth but was a part of the cosmic abundance. Images immortalized by marrying the technological, nautical, agricultural and authoritarian stimuli- Paintings of intelligent design plans rather than the chance concourse of creative bursts.

The presence of an observer affects not just the universe’s temporal dimension, but also the whole system of characteristics. An observer must appear once in every physically actual world; hence every universe must establish the circumstances for the existence of observers. Bela who hardly ever spoke, sat in a yogic position, reminding us of how the cave was waiting for us. Regardless.

“The cave must have known that we were coming. The universe is real only when it includes its observer.” The universe’s existence is as vital to the observer as the observer’s presence is to the cosmos. If the cosmos is intended to be real, it must contain properties that allow the observer to exist.

As we tried to understand the cave where we had spent more than three years, we could not find a single trace of the producer of these images which now beguiled us, taunted us, and made us weep in unison. The Universe is anthropic and non-anthropic at the same time. Suddenly the paintings were anthropic and non-anthropic. The universe is anthropic in terms of what we know about it and non-anthropic in our ignorance of it. What is a man that the universe should be mindful of him? Bela found her fears melting.

We sat in the caves, day after day for years. It must have been 10 years before we all came out of it. For once and all. Elegant, invariant, old. A small incomplete sketch made with colorful coals, not easily available now, etched in pyroxenite outcrops was a thing of awe and wonderment at the end of days. The sketch was confusing and mysterious- a multitude of imagination spilled unintentionally. A sketch of the last winter before the boars came out on the plains from the highlands and summer of wild oats and cranberries and nights of starships in the skies and days of dwindling prospects of survival and raining fireworks from the sun and winds of worship and periods of fine weathering, all plying. Red Hot Chili Peppers, ‘The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie’ was playing on my mobile phone, a low sound ringing and echoing in the old caves, giving it a theatrical gallop. I think every day when we walked from our tents back into the caves, we listened to The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie and in the heavy dignified coldness of the caves, freezing below negative, we danced with our ancestors.

Due to weathering, there were few areas in this cosmic harmony that weathered away. 10 years seemed like a million. A documentary we once watched together as children, told us that there will come a time when the time will erase stone structures. It is not a question of if but when.

“What purpose these paintings serve that you understand?”, asked our every man- Hector, polishing his tools.

“Important purposes. Not singular. I believe in Aristotle’s beliefs. To know what matters to us and why- the Material composition provides us with its ‘Material Cause’, but to explain it completely we require an understanding of three further ‘Causes’. A ‘Formal Cause’ that is intrinsic to the paintings surviving even after all those years of earthquakes, floods, and disasters- which prevents it from behaving like another…”

Bela, crouched in the sun outside the cave, echoed in “Someone made these drawings, work of arts, call it what you may- through deliberations with ‘Efficient Cause’. Once we know the agent of these arts of work, we shall know the ‘Final Cause’—the purpose for which these paintings exist.”

“This is art in the natural order of eternity” Hector smiled, like Buddha attaining Nirvana under the bodhi tree, for this cave was no less than that tree for us.

We had salvaged in the depths of this mysterious cave a small sketch of flames rising against gravity while leaves fell off from the bushes and trees- art showing elements at play- encompassed by a succession of seven solid and crystalline spheres; they carried the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and finally the fixed stellar background. Some things that have remained as is in the order of nature through the passage of time.

The Cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in- G. K. Chesterton

When we went inside the cave, all three of us, together, we were hypnotized and subjugated to our blind fates in our conquest of becoming famous, becoming eternal. A conquest of consequences. Later we realized how wrong were we.

The Universe is in a dynamic state of expansion revealing that its size is inextricably bound up with its age. These paintings were huge, universe-like. The roofs of the caves looked limitless in their emergence. Figures of known and unknown mammals synthesized bit by bit in the primordial inferno of creative overflow-

Doctor Andre, our guide, who excavated the ruins of the mountains which lined the caves said that- most of the paintings were made during a raised awareness. A sense of ‘doing’ erupting either from a shroom ritual to please the Soma gods, which we knew little of. “When I entered the first cave, I knew I was where I needed to be”, he used to say. Chant.

I am here

I am here

I am here

We understood that intelligent life had to exist at some point in the Universe’s history. But if it goes out before our stage of growth, far before it has had any discernible non-quantum impact on the Universe as a whole, it’s difficult to understand why it had to exist in the first place. For this cave to be present in such harmony, we assumed many things. Original ideas are exceedingly rare and to Hector, these paintings were alive with the originality of an exceptional kind. Without precedent-painters of the ark. The reality is that humans are a carbon-based sentient life-form that spontaneously evolved on an earth-like planet orbiting a G2 spectral type star, and whatever observations we make are inevitably self-selected by this fundamental fact. Ptolemy and his followers described retrograde motion by referring to an epicycle, which was the ancient astronomical equivalent of a new physical rule. Copernicus demonstrated that the epicycle was superfluous; we were viewing the planetary motions from the moving Earth’s perspective. Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem proves that any mathematical system sophisticated enough to encompass arithmetic must contain true assertions that cannot be proven true, whereas Turing’s Halting Theorem proves that a computer cannot completely understand itself. Similarly, the Anthropic Principle demonstrates that the perceived structure of the Universe is limited by the fact that we are witnessing it; that the Universe is, in a sense, observing itself.

The age of the cave is a story in and of itself. While many scholars early on doubted Borra Cave’s artwork as ancient in origin, its antiquity eventually became well established, with a large proportion of occupations of the cave occurring between 18,000 and 14,000 years before the present (BP) as determined in part through the use of carbon-14 dating of charcoal from artwork within the cave.

When we had discovered the cave, the cave was alive. Did I mention that there were hundreds of species of flowers that bedecked the vast dark floor, giving it an appearance of untouched flora marrying the earth in the Araku? Now when it was time to go, we could feel the shift of nature from a married happy woman to a divorced bitter old grey lady, paining, aching with the visit of three humans, who somehow did not belong. The cave had grown worn in just three months. It was as if it knew, we were pathetic. And we had plundered. The earth was forgiving but the cave diminished this forgiveness with giving us clues, plenty of clues. Just clues. No evidence to support our theories. Our respective collective being plundered by shame and disgust of being unwanted by a place so sacred. A sanctuary, no more. As if a mist had lifted, only to unveil the ugly after the breathtaking. This cave has had an infinite amount of time available to mature but it took three months for the cave to understand death. It was not a calamity nor nature’s wrath. It was simply plundering men with their unwavering, unforgiving curiosity which warms the cockles of their void as they unearth the earth, wrangle the roots, disturb the soil, dig into fossils and play with harmony. This alchemical meditatio. The cave speaks to me, even in my dreams. My occupation is not mine anymore. I am a mere extension of a macrocosm which has blessed me with a temple where I don’t come to pray, every day. The more I stay away, the stronger my faith becomes.

Of all the riddles that bedeviled in us, we genuinely thought we came to participate in a divine salvage operation. The balance of three humans is unbalanced – two males and one female, two clerics and one laity, two fox and a hedgehog, armed with an omnivorous curiosity and a passion for omniscience.

In the end, we were just a bunch of passive specialists. We were unequals in one of the oldest democracies of the earth, plundering our shame.