The Benjamin Report

Reflections on “The Cave”

“The Cave” is a short story written by Liliana Colanzi. It was published in her new collection of short fiction “You Glow In The Dark” earlier this year. You can read her story in the link provided, but you can read my thoughts on it here.

Sometimes I take comfort in the realization that everything leads to nothing. Every moment, every fall, every fiddle and piss is just movement forward along the winding track that ends with itself. Going forward and forward and forward, so forward that it falls into that void that compresses and itches and explodes.

That’s how I felt reading this story and how I feel now that it is soon over. Colanzi, here at least, restricts herself to a single location, a cave. In this cave neighboring civilizations will birth and die without ever seeing the light, intruders will leave their mark then promptly disappear and never return, and otherworldly beings will take comfort in a pastime that was never even theirs. All these moments reach a sort of oblivion within the reader, but to the subjects trapped in these pages (the romantics, aliens, birds, and specks of light that may just be shit-eating chrysalises) they are every mark of a world that we cannot experience.

What makes “The Cave” such a remarkable and exciting story isn’t what it has to say to its readers, but what it implies of the things it’s hiding. There are mutant bats whose newfound prosperity centralizes them in the darkness and with them grows a whole ecosystem, but it all goes extinct shortly after a sneeze is released upon the cave from a European foreigner who was simply taking a short nap outside. A nonbinary time-traveler sees dinosaurs but fails to understand/believe they could be anything other than generated pixels from a malfunctioning computer system. And a bird eats a larva and poops a golden egg.

In section 4 we learn, in the final paragraph altogether, of a whole society of troglobites that have never seen sunlight nor know of any such thing’s existence. Later on they’d vanish “without ever having encountered the creatures that had seen the stars.” Colanzi’s descriptive language topples even more towers in section 6 when she describes a cave formation as “a dance that lasts tens of thousands of years.”

It doesn’t take skill or talent as much as competence to tell a well-formed story. But it takes years of developed skill and talent to tell a saga in just a sentence. This is what Liliana Colanzi has accomplished over and over again in 12 or so pages. Besides such admiration of genius, to truly bring someone the endless and vast despair of the ever-expanding universe, then elucidate on its many faces tumbling through terror, toss, and triumph along an exhausting journey is an experience that can only be felt in its own way.

Perhaps life is meaningless, and my time here is a flicker of light that lasts but a second in the corner of a dark cave. But perhaps there’s also joy in the flash, my small millisecond of time here that’s not destined to be forgotten (because it was never remembered in the first place). Like the cave itself, I fold into the earth and join with the other corpses, all victims of the same serial killer we know as time. But dammit all, at least I had fun.

An old essay I wrote reflecting on environmental art. Don’t have the original article it was written as a response to, but I think you’ll get the gist.

Thank you for reading. I have more stuff planned I’ll be working on (and maybe even releasing) throughout the week. Sorry again if this episode seems underwhelming. I’M WORKING ON IT ALRIGHT!??!?!

But seriously thank you. 🙂