You'll find me in the crypt!*
Catacombs, crypts, cupboards these are a few of my favourite things! The meditation instructor encourages the class to visit our ‘happy place’, to visualize it deeply, to have a fully immersed sensory experience, the sights, sounds, scents, touch, and taste of the place. Inhale she instructs. She suggests ‘the beach option’, ‘the forest/jungle/woods’ option, even the ‘intergalactic space option’ up a celestial escalator and into the cosmos. But, she insists, we do not have to follow her guide, it is after all our happy place, subjective, idiosyncratic, deeply personal.
In my mind's eye I enter the crypt.
The sights: dimly lit, eyes adjusting, there the chalky shape of some bones. The sounds: an echoe-y nothingness. The scent: a deep inhale, it’s mildew. The taste: a touch of wet soil. I am in my element.
Photo: in the The Crypt Gallery in King’s Cross St Pancras next to the incredible artwork of Rachel Mercer.
Despite this penchant for the underground underworld I have never slept in a coffin, read The Twilight series or gone through a Goth phase. Instead as a teenager I dressed in a strange combination of Kickers shoes, flared black trousers and neon crop-tops, I read Danielle Steele romance novels and I slept, not in a coffin, but on a comfortable mattress on the floor, squat-style.
Yet my love for the hidey-hole, for the micro-space had begun early. My mother spent much time during my childhood fretting and agitated; I was missing again. My grandparents owned a charming country cottage in the Home Counties of England, the garden ran into the dense, old-growth woods and they had a hot-tub and a steam tube, but it was not the bucolic, or the 80s style spa they’d created on their patio that appealed to my ten year old tastes, it was the myriad nooks and crannies within the crumbling house itself. Mum was screaming. Again. Where had I gone? I was found at the back of the wardrobe, in the slide out draw beneath the bed, curled in the bat and wasp-filled attic.
Ten years later I would find myself, with a handful of close friends, tunneling below Egham, Surrey. There were various stories as to why Royal Holloway, the Victorian University we then attended, had these tunnels beneath the original Founder’s Building, as a pioneering college built solely for women in the mid-nineteenth century it was said that the tunnels were deemed necessary in case of emergency, that is if all this learning sent the female students into some kind of hysteria then at least they could be discreetly secreted below ground from the University to an asylum in nearby Virginia Water. Another story claimed that it was more mundanely seen as necessary to have these tunnels so that when working-class workmen were on site to fix various things around the college they could be kept below ground and thus not be given the opportunity of corrupting these young learned ladies who studied in the light above. Whatever the truth was, the tunnels to us were enchanting simply by being clandestine; they led us from a backdoor in Crosslands student cafe into a tiny-bricked space of exposed wires, intermittent light, and piles of random junk. At points we had to crouch till almost doubled over at others we could nearly stand upright. We twisted and turned and ended up in the scorching space of the campus boiler room before emerging back into the weak afternoon light.
Another decade on, and house-hunting with my frustrated husband, he became livid with the ease at which I said yes to every single dark, cramped, awkwardly-shaped, windowless hovel that the shady South London estate agents showed us. These spaces struck me as...perfect!
One year, when a close member of my family was very ill I decided to book a trip to Paris; I wasn’t after creme patisserie, retail therapy, or even fine art, what I needed to feel better was a subterranean session. The eighteenth century catacombs of Paris had been created to solve the problem of an excess of disease and the corpses stretched a mile beneath the city, below all that allure, and elegance is a place of decoratively laid out skulls, fibias and tibias stacked and styled into baroque patterns. The queue to enter the catacombs was lengthy, it turned out I was not alone in my love of the underworld, it didn’t matter, this was not an irritating English queue, this was a glamorous Parisian one, it was spring, the sun was blazing and we had time to swig a bottle of Bordeaux between two before going under. Buzzed and dehydrated we stumbled for the next hour through this fantastic gallery of bones.
Photo: a picture of some bones I took insider the Paris Catacombs, 2014.
So was I looking for a womb or a coffin? Did I want to be unborn or dead? Simply not here, or somewhere else entirely? Dropped out of it all. My favourite film as a child had been Cocoon. My favourite type of person still is: the old type of person. And I love that inward looking time of year that is: the bleak mid-winter. But no, I like living, I want to be here, I like the now, and yet the pull of the buried is sometimes strong. Besides I knew that I wasn’t alone in this feeling. I was not unique. When I talked to friends about the desire to burrow most of them felt that same need too, most agreed that the pull to create a dark den, to build a tent fort, to curl under a weighted blanket, was often irresistible. So what is it about being sunken that’s so appealing? Being underground and in the dim silence means the avoidance of a whole lot of nonsense. A hidey-hole away from small talk, fussing, to-do lists, in more recent years the discussion of mortgage rates, of content creation, the need to buy dishwasher salt and drain unblocker, the pros and cons of low-traffic neighbourhoods, the pros and cons of social media, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the word ‘unprecedented’, the endless warring opinions, the babble, the petty, the pointless panic, the trivial, the flapping over the small stuff. The underground, the basement, the abyss, is the terrain of the meaningful, the indescribable and the wordless...
*this is a modified version of a site-specific reading I gave in September 2021 in the belly of The Crypt Gallery as part of an artist’s exhibition led by Rachel Mercer & also featuring the work of Jessica St James. Do check them out!