Deserts And Caves

One of the books I got last week at the library book sale was Spirituality and the Desert Experience, by Charles Cummings, OCSO (1978, Dimension Books, Denville, NJ). This exploration of spiritual deserts by a Trappist monk (he died in 2020) is very readable and possesses one of those qualities that I so enjoy in a book: the need to set the book down frequently and ruminate on what I’ve just read.

In chapter two (pp. 42-44), Father Cummings describes a sleep study profiled in National Geographic magazine from March of 1975 (Vol.147, number 3) which was conducted by a French scientist named Michel Siffre. Father Cummings tells us:

[Siffre] endured 205 days of isolation to find out about the natural sleeping and waking patterns of human beings whose schedule is not governed by clocks and calendars. Siffre’s isolation chamber had to be situated where he could not observe and be influenced by the alternation of day and night. He selected a place 100 feet below ground, in Midnight Cave, near Del Rio, Texas, about thirty-five miles from the Mexican border…

As Siffre descended into his solitude the last human face he looked upon was his wife’s. For the first third of the experiment Siffre remained in excellent form and was not troubled with loneliness. Then, after the second month, he began to deteriorate physically, mentally, and emotionally. He struggled with loneliness until it became almost unendurable. Only a sense of duty and the hope of important scientific discoveries kept him from terminating the experiment sooner…

By the 156th day Siffre’s prolonged confrontation with his own self was yielding a painful but potentially beneficial insight. He wrote, “When you find yourself alone, isolated in a world totally without time, face to face with yourself, all the masks that you hid behind — those to preserve your own illusions, those that project them before others, — finally fall, sometimes brutally [p. 432].” Solitude and loneliness were leading Siffre to a degree of self-knowledge that few people attain. And the knowledge is never gained without pain.

But a still more painful experience was in store for Siffre. At the end of it he would be at his limit in the desert of loneliness and desertedness. In the fifth month of his solitude Siffre discovered another living creature in Midnight Cave: a mouse. Siffre was jubilant; at extremes of loneliness even a mouse looks like a friend. Siffre hoped to trap the mouse, which he named ‘Mus,’ and have it for a companion. For several days time no longer dragged but passed swiftly as Siffre fed Mus with jam and worked out a plan to capture him under a casserole dish. Then, “My patience prevails. After much hesitation Mus edges up to the jam. I admire his little shining eyes, his sleek coat. I slam down the dish. He is captured! At last I will have a companion for my solitude. My heart pounds with excitement. For the first time since entering the cave, I feel a surge of joy. Carefully I inch up the casserole. I hear small squeaks of distress. Mus lies on his side. The edge of the descending dish apparently caught him on the head. I stare at him with swelling grief. The whimpers die away. He is still. Desolation overwhelms me.” [p.435]…

If ever there was a moment when Siffre experienced himself as lonely and forsaken, it must have been at that devastating moment when the whimpers of his little mouse died away. The surge of joy and excitement he felt in his heart was stillborn. Siffre had not asked for very much, only for the comforting presence of another living being — yet even that was denied him. Michel Siffre was not living in the physical desert but he knew the full dereliction of the desert experience in the silence and solitude of Midnight Cave.

~ S.K Orr