Today I spent three hours in a hole in the ground.

In company with The Jeff, Alisa, and three other folks (including Our Fearless Leader), I journeyed to Clarksville, NY today, and there kitted up elaborately, clambered into a sinkhole, slithered into a crack between jumbled rocks, and followed far more experienced people around underground for rather a long time.

It was flurrying when we went underground, but the cave itself was cave temperature, which is to say about 55 degrees. The water was plenty cold, though.

The cave is long and narrow, following the course of an underground stream (as caves will). It runs through sedimentary rock scalloped from water wear (imagine the dishlike ripples on a wind-chopped lake, transposed to stone) and speckled with fossils, and there are veins and pipes of chert and calcite running through it. The chert tends to project in shelves and ledges, being harder than the sedimentary rock. The calcite wears away faster, and makes depressions.

There are places where the ceiling is big slabs of schist, which sparkles in the helmet lights, and there's a great deal of walking ducked over, sidling sideways, or crawling on your hands and knees (sometimes through water). There are a few soda straws and other small limestone accretions, but the cave has been known and visited since the 1850s if not longer (I saw one graffito from 1878), and not much fragile remains in there. We went the length of one side of the cave, down to what's called the Lake Room, where there is indeed a small underground lake (about fifteen feet deep and maybe ten feet by twenty-five feet in area), and there our Fearless Leader told us about a caver who had died in the lake, working on a dig--attempting to remove enough sediment to connect an underwater passageway to another nearby cave.

Once I got the hang of moving underground it wasn't bad. I retain heat well, and I'm pretty comfortable with being wet and muddy, so that wasn't too much of a problem. The footing isn't great. The acoustics were wonderful, though--resonant and spooky, amplifying voices and splashes and the trickle of water. One thing I did notice was that I didn't have any problem with the alertness stress and exhaustion some of my caver friends report. Instead, I felt calm and alert, peaceful, more relaxed than I usually do in my daily life. I suspect this may have something to do with post-traumatic anxiety and hypervigilance being put to a purpose, rather than being allowed to feedback loop.

We came back to the entrance where we'd come in and proceeded past it, through a fairly snug crawl (I am assured by experienced cavers that it was not anything like "tight," but it was more than uncomfortable enough for me--I made it through mostly by joking about how it was a perfectly good way to give yourself a double mastectomy) and through another "avenue" (or fairly broad, fairly high stretch) that involved a tiny little waterfall--about ten inches high, but there was a sinkhole fifteen feet deep on the downstream side--which I managed to avoid falling into, go me) and some crawling over tufa dams, which are a rock formation that occurs when mineralized water sits in pools, and builds itself little accretionary dams around the edges. Essentially, picture a terraced hillside, only in rock and water.

Then we scooted on our butts down a chute to another small lake, and this is where I had one of the scariest experiences in my life. I was fine climbing into the lake up to chest level, and edging into the crevice leading to what was described to me as a "sump" (a short submerged passage) but what I hadn't realized was that getting into the sump required getting my body through a narrow space with not one but two projecting chert ridges. Now, I have a pretty deep ribcage, and I'm carrying some extra weight (which is probably helpful in other ways, because I never got cold, despite wading through waist-deep water in a fifty-degree cave for a couple hours) and because I don't have really appropriate caving gear, I was wearing three layers of fabric--thermal cotton, synthetic, and a layer of silk--and anyway, it was painful and extremely awkward getting my body past the first outcrop.

But I did it. And then realized that the free space on the second one was even smaller, and I was going to have to go over it--or at least enough over it that I was sliding my legs past it rather than my pelvis or ribcage. All this while chest-deep in forty- or fifty- degree water, mind you, and without being able to see any potential footholds on the side of the cave (because the water was muddy from the people who went through ahead of me) while wearing bulky, slippery neoprene gloves.

It wasn't actually all that *dangerous* (I know perfectly well that Fearless Leader and the others would have gotten me out of there if anything had gone seriously wrong), but it was absolutely scary as anything I have every done--I remember thinking quite clearly that I was in a position where I could, in fact, do something that would get me killed, and with the water as cold as it was I knew I didn't have a lot of time to act and still have the strength to do it in. I never actually panicked, I don't think, but I could see it from where I was.

I have no idea how I managed to get my leg over that rock and drop back into the water on the other side, but I did--and then once I was over it, between the stark terror of having nearly gotten stuck, the exertion, and the thermal shock, I had another problem, because I'd started to hyperventilate (spasming diaphragm, big gasping panting shallow breaths--true hyperventilation) and couldn't make myself stop. Which makes it hard to get through a narrow underwater passage.  (There was about four inches of freeboard, so we could hear the people on the other side.)

The Jeff asked me if I wanted to stick my hand through so I could feel the other side, and I said yes (between spasms), so I did that and he grabbed my hand. And I did the only thing I could think of to do, which was grab a breath, stick my face under the water (that'll interrupt a hyperventilation reflex but good), and swim for it.

And then got out on the other side and had a lovely adrenaline reaction and called him names and then went and hid in the corner until I stopped shaking and we could leave the cave.

I am very bad at admitting any kind of weakness or inability, and I was really very unhappy with how poorly I handled the whole thing. However, apparently I have the minority opinion, as the Jeff, Fearless Leader, and Alisa all seem to think I did very well. I'm trying to decide if I'm every going to try it again, because some of it was pretty nifty, and of course, I am stupidly macho, and the fact that I feel as if I did not acquit myself well makes me feel like I need to go back and do it again to prove I don't suck.

Anyway, I'm still processing. I'm the antithesis of an adrenaline junkie: I hate being scared, and I hate the aftermath of being scared. I also hate the way I treat other people in the aftermath of being scared: my fight or flight reflex is broken, you see. I only have fight left. Which means you really don't want to be around me if I'm scared. But I also feel like being scared is a challenge, and something I should push myself through, because it's a weakness. And I'm apparently not allowed to have those. But I feel like I was a tremendous disappointment, and made a complete ass of myself.

ECR.

Chaz would have loved it. Especially the part where I was wondering if I was going to die.

The bruises on my ribcage are going to be insane.

And hey, it's all material, isn't it? Someday I'll put that scene in a book.

'Not even to see fair Lothlórien?' said Haldir. 'The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though it all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.

'Some there are among us who sing that the Shadow will draw back, and peace shall come again. Yet I do not believe that the world about us will ever again be as it was of old, or the light of the Sun as it was aforetime.'

--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

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Of course one of the things that influences Tolkien's writing here is the shadow of the Great War. What he's describing is the universal reaction to trauma. The human reaction to trauma.

But the great Lie of American literature is the epiphantic healing, the moment of crisis and catharsis that leaves us shaken but again whole. And of course that never happens in real life--a broken sword, perhaps, can be forged anew (and given a new name) but a broken life cannot.

Those scars are with you always, and it is a cruelty and a lie to pretend otherwise. Amputated limbs do not spontaneously regrow themselves, and learned trauma responses do not vanish in the morning light or the light of a new love. No one can save you but yourself.

Once you have been broken that severely--by war, by fire, by abuse, by loss--you will never be whole again.

This is not a message of hopelessness.

This is a message of hope.

Because the idea that you can be healed by the touch of an angel, by the passing moment of grace, and then you will be all better like Mommy stuck a Batman bandaid on the cut after giving it a spritz of neosporin--that is the real message of despair. If you can't bounce back from your trauma, then you must be weak. If you can't be healed by a healthy serving of The Love Of A Good Woman or The Love Of A Good Man (or just Manly But Emo Bonding, if you happen to be living in a hurt/comfort fic) then you are a failure.

You should be able to get up after a crushing experience like a TV character who spent last episode submerged in a leaky coffin with nothing but a cell phone*, and carry on. If you can't, you should be ashamed, because you are weak.

There's a scene in one of my books, The Sea thy Mistress (if it's still there when I revise and the thing sees print in 2010 or thereabouts) that I found revealing in the reactions it got. The short form is that the protagonist has just hit bottom. And he says to an old enemy--who has come to help him--"I don't break."

Some of my first readers said, "What do you mean? He's broken; he's in pieces all over the floor!" And others said, "Wooo! You gonna make it, son!"

The ones in the first category saw the pit he was in, and saw that he'd given up in despair, and didn't see how he could climb out of it. The ones in the second category knew a harder truth: that survival begins when you start to fight, and dropping the load once doesn't mean you will drop it twice.

The only broken that matters is when you lie down and don't get get back up again.

Everything else is just a bend.

But there's that expectation, as cpolk says, of the butt-chinned hero enduring everything with a quip and scarce a wrinkling of his manly brow. And that's so unfair. People who have been traumatized are different, afterwards. They have learned something horrible, and often they have learned something horrible about themselves--that they cannot live up to that fictional ideal.

Because nobody can.

They have suffered the emotional equivalent of an amputated limb. It is unfair to expect them to soldier on as if nothing had happened, to have an epiphantic flash of healing and be over their grief like that.

Post-traumatic stress is compounded by grief. In a very real way, it is grief. We grieve for the person we were. We grieve for what we have lost. We grieve for the ways we will never quite be whole.

And of course you can't live there. You can't dwell in your grief. (Well, of course you can, and this is the great Lie of Victorian literature--that dwelling in your grief is somehow noble and shows trueness of purpose and heart.) If you try to live in your grief, then all your life shall be as ashes. And that, while poetical, is a sucky way to get through the day.

But here's the thing, and the way these two poisonous Lies collide. Because the first Lie tells us that if we cannot bounce back into an epiphantic healing after a couple of therapy sessions, then we are Broken. And the second Lie tells us that if we are Broken, there's nothing to do but sit by the fire with Miss Havisham and her cake full of spiders, waiting for a poignant Auctor Ex Machina to set us alight and free us from our lingering.

And you know, that sucks.

Whereas the truth is this: life is about adapting to trauma. Life is about finding work-arounds. Life is also about using that trauma, because the thing about broken edges is they cut.

And knives are tools as much as weapons.

And I think it would be nice if more literature did not reflect one Lie or the other, because I find, personally, that people are not disposable.

And my best teapot is the one with the glued-together lid.

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This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

--Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas"

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*What carrier is that, anyway? Because I want to switch.

One of the two best pieces of advice I ever got about writing was from ccfinlay. (1) What Charlie said (to several of us of the OWW amoeba) was "There is always room for excellence."

And it's true. (2)

What this means in practical terms is that there is no such thing as good enough for the aspiring writer. Don't aim *for* the target. Aim through the target. Adequacy isn't.

The other thing that it means is that writers, while we are in some respects in competition with each other, are in competition in a funny sort of way. You don't lose readers to another writer the way McDonald's loses customers to Burger King. You lose readers because you aren't giving them what they want, not because somebody else is.

Admittedly, on one level, there are only a certain number of novel slots in a given year. On the other hand, while my readers may have some overlap with, say, autopope's or desperance's or papersky's or truepenny's or naominovik's readers, the fact of the matter is that all those book purchases come out of a discretionary budget. And people do in fact spend the food money on books, if they want the books badly enough. (I've done it.)

So, scott_lynch selling a book does not automatically mean that I will not sell a book. In fact, it may mean, in the long run, if Scott is wildly popular, that there are more readers in the bookstore looking for science fiction and fantasy. And some of them may slop over to me.

It's an ecosystem, in other words.

And so that's one reason why I do the day-in-the-life-of-a-writer blog I do. *g*

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(1) The other one was from skzbrust, and it went something like, "It doesn't matter if the first novel you've finished sucks. Because finishing a novel is more that 95% of the people who want to be writers will ever do, and if you have finished one, you can finish two. And the second one may suck less than the first."

(2) In fact, I am reasonably convinced that there is a heck of a lot of room for commercial mediocrity, too.

"We're very hardened today, and we only look for the edge. And Chim was saying that that's not necessarily the best way to see people."

--From an NPR piece on the Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibit of the work of war photographer David "Chim" Seymour.

John Gardner talks about this a bit in On Becoming a Novelist, the best book about learning to observe the world that I know of. (It's not a book on writing; it's a book on looking.) About how harshness--what he calls the disPolyanna fantasy--isn't any more honest than sentimentality.

s'true.

Okay, specifically, because I feel like it, I'm going to talk about this a little bit more. Cynicism is fashionable, and stylish, and easy. It's why so many of us are, in fact, cynical in high school. (That, I think, and some lingering traces of childhood sociopathy, and the human tendency to assume that everybody else is much like we are. As we grow older, and our motivations become more complex--and often less selfish--our acceptance of cynicism is colored. So is our idealism. They are not mutually contradictory values.)

Cynicism is also, in its own way, just as shallow and false as sentimentality. Edginess is facile. It is a simplification, and as such, eventually serves as a sort of Teflon armor.

Real emotion, real existence--conversely--is complex and sticky and gets down into your gut and up your throat. And thus so must real art be.

It's not something you can turn aside with a stylish flip of the hand, and it's not something that confirms either the sweet or the bitter preconceptions, but rather marries them with other, disparate elements.

It's kind of like cooking, really. Baklava goes better with coffee than with a milk shake, yanno?

The Hell's Angels are suing Disney for trademark infringement.

You know, some days, just about when I'm ready to pack it up and move to that Unabomber cabin in the woods...

...the universe throws me a bone.