Introduction

Abstract

On a summer evening, a man enters a cave, carrying not only some minimal provisions (beer, potato crisps) but also candles, a typewriter, and paper. He types questions and awaits the answers, transmitted through his own typing (leaving in the resulting typescript “touch-typing mistakes of apparent oracular provenance”).¹ His central question, one at which he has arrived only after crawling “through the tunnel of daylight” and having “reached the chorus of noise in this black cavity,” one that is refined and repeated over the course of his sojourn in the cave, is “How should I reform my life?”² The man is driven to the question by his failings, most immediately a failure to act and help a victim of assault, but, it is suggested, also a series of failures in relationships. The cave’s oracle answers in typically cryptic fashion: “A ccp, nomayomopm pf/A combination of drips outside in the now dark tunnel sounded exactly li m like someone moving belongings out of a car,” and, later, “engage in hunting other things where settle son who speaks only once and that a moment of danger … your fate to have no son but he is the first person you meet after leaving your sperm in the cave…”³ The questioning man stays all night in the cave, moving deeper when beckoned by the oracle, losing along the way much of what he brought in with him—torch, crisps, candles, even the typewriter—and finding additional voices (especially that of a woman he has loved) and ever more elaborate answers to questions he cannot quite articulate.