The Gates of Hades

A more perfect cone couldn’t have been made in an ice cream factory, it’s the volcano crater that any child would draw if asked to draw a volcano crater. The ferry to the Eolian Islands has the usual smell you’d expect on a ferry, layers upon layers of sea spray creating a briny musky odour that is comforting and solid. I don’t know if rust has a smell, but if it did, this would be the place to smell it. The island of Vulcano is the first stop of the seven in the archipelago, most people are onward bound to her sister islands, but a handful of locals like to come here from the mainland as it’s their nearest escape. As we disembark, Vulcano pelts rotten eggs at us from the very moment we set foot on it. Right by the port are smouldering sulphur rocks on both sides of the only road that leads out of the port, with a putrid mist rising from them, gassing everyone passing through as if she was deliberately warding people off. The first gates warn but don’t deter, we march through them with the amused satisfaction of a youngster succeeding in a rite of passage. The next thing you see is a bubbling pool of volcanic mud. I wonder how many have already been swallowed up by it. Just beyond, the black beach of volcanic sand is soaking up heat from the merciless sun like a videogame villain soaks up the energy of the fire balls shot at it. It’s so bright that the jet black sand comes off as closer to ash grey and it’s peppered by a multitude of what seem like blinking eyes of some alien creature, but are in fact broken fragments of obsidian shimmering in the light. A fluttering butterfly seems momentarily to give a friendlier welcome but it’s just an illusion, it was only a dried up bougainvillea flower dancing in the wind.

The low houses are of course all white, but a washed out dull white, like driftwood, rather than the brilliant white of some of the more bougie islands. Monumental cacti spill over their garden walls and are so sun-cooked they could be metallic; they could almost be Louise Bourgeois spiders turned on their backs. There’s a palpably wild streak to her. She’s not inhospitable, despite first impressions, but definitely more closed off to the casual visitor. Visitors, however, are not in short supply, everywhere seems either full or the wrong side of slightly too busy.

As we settle down at the beach I look up to the volcano. Volcanic activity is lower this year and it’s allowed to climb up to the crater. The sulphurous smoke plumes aren’t as strong but they still lend a certain latent pungency to the air. I’ve always seen people walk up but never done it myself (it was closed off last year). I’m not sure what to expect. Perhaps I’m worried it will be huge disappointment, at best an anti-climax, or perhaps I’m scared the gates of Hades itself are up there. Last year it was the heat from below the ground that was unforgiving and barred the entrance. This year the heatwave is relentless and the sun hammers down with untold fury. Either way, it seems the gates of Hades are guarded by fire, whether from above or from below, and thou shalt not pass.

I wonder though whether that isn’t Hades at all up there, perhaps that’s actually the way out of it. Perhaps Hades is right here, in the land of the middle, the land of humans. The screaming tourists, the cheesy summer anthems blasting from the aperitivo bars, the bit of transparent plastic wrapping in the sea that makes you jump because at first it looks like a stingy jellyfish, and then makes you boil with anger at the insult to the beauty of these seas. Hades is perhaps the ostentatious forced happiness of the people who must be happy because they’ve paid to be here. But you won’t find any happiness here that you didn’t pack with you. What they sell is the equivalent of a plastic trinket of the Eiffel tower compared to the real thing. Not an issue for me though, I have mine next to me, it’s the brothers I travel with. It’s the knowledge that if I ever needed it, they would give me half of their blood, as I would do for them. It’s the knowledge that if I ever run out of my own happiness, I can borrow a squirt of theirs. I can tell that isn’t true for everyone. You can immediately spot the couples that won’t be coming back next year because they won’t even be a couple next year. Hades is their uncomfortable silence soaked in frustration and hidden sighs. The strained smiles of those who can’t bear the sight of their own children but are wrought with guilt at the thought of it could cut you like jagged rocks. Surely Hades is full of jagged rocks like that. Those so impatient to relax that they become angry. Hades has a deafening echo of anger. Those who are making angry work calls from their sun lounger who aren’t even familiar with the concept of relaxing. Hades is right at the top of their inbox and their itchy fingers keep tapping on it frantically. Hades is the accumulated anxiety that simply refuses to play musical chairs and won’t stop dancing even if there are enough sun loungers for everyone to sit comfortably. Sweat and impatience are the smells just beneath the sulphur that make the air more pungent than it needs to be.

The ferry that brought is here is called Caronte, Italian for Charon, the dutiful ferryer of souls to Hades and it seems so fitting that the wind is hotter than it’s ever been. Air so warm it actually burns the skin. The temperature reached 45 degrees in the port today and everyone around us is clearly feeling it. All the people who came seeking those exotic beasts, the Chimera of peace, the Phoenix of reconnection with themselves, or with their other halves, all seem so lost and dazed. They don’t know where they are and they don’t know where they are. These beasts don’t belong in Hades, not unless you bring them with you. In this Hades you will only find a sea of worn-out souls like the white of the houses, each one bubbling with anguish under the surface like hot volcanic mud.

It's the last day and the heat has slightly subsided. It’s now or never, I will finally make the climb this year and find the dreaded gates. It’s early morning and the sweet nectarine scent of the night before has given way to an earthy smell that’s almost burned and distinctly acidic. No one’s around, so devoid of any reference points I somehow take the wrong turn in the path and as I go up and it soon starts to looks like less and less of a path at all. My feet sink deeper in the volcanic sand at every step on the ascent, making it very tricky. I have totally lost the way, but upwards is an inescapable direction, so rather than turn back and look for a proper path I march on alone, the sun is still low and I’m mercifully on the shady side of the slope until almost the end of the climb. Then the moment comes, and the last few paces open up the view over the crater, Charon draws the curtains slowly over the view of the gates of Hades at last. The sight in front of me turns me into stone, breath suspended, a moment that will last forever. Taking the wrong way up means I land on the edge of the crater without a soul in sight and I feel an intense sense of privilege at having that moment of majesty at the gates all to myself. In that precise moment I feel, with the fullest intensity, the realisation that they are the not the gates to enter Hades, but rather those to escape it. “L’infer c’est les autres”, as Sartre said.

Vulcano isn’t the prettiest of the seven sisters, nor the easiest in character or the most loved. She has a dark and thorny beauty, with a pure and closely guarded spirit, the thorny beauty of a thistle. She’ll reward those who match her wild heart and don’t ask her to be like the others. I love that she’s underappreciated and doesn’t mind it. They’ll tell you she guards the gates of Hades, but, disguised behind a cloud of sulphur fumes, she only ever wanted to show you the way out.

The Casimir Effect

“Scientific revolutions are not made by scientists. They are declared post factum, often by philosophers and historians of science rather than by the scientists themselves.”

- Hendrik Casimir

What a strange ethereal plane I find myself in. Somewhat suspended above my own life, even above grief, which is some form of relief. This is incredibly alien; surely only the purity of youth can inhabit this state, swim in these pristine waters. Life, age, carries too many pollutants, the waters are muddy, strewn with debris, toxic algae and all manner of sticky viscous substances whose origins are vaguely familiar, but conveniently blurred from sharp memory. No one cares to trace the factory that dumped all that toxicity in their stream of life, you were right there, you watched it happen, but you don’t want to know about it. You just try and clean up the waters as best you can.

So what is this? What is this feeling? It tastes strangely metallic in the same way distilled water does, due to your taste buds not being used to the lack of impurities. It’s infuriatingly intoxicating. Infuriating because it doesn’t exist, it was never real. A perfect film script, written, directed and acted by me and by me alone. I was a runaway train; I yanked her arm and dragged her to a place she never meant to journey to. I thought for a minute we were travelling somewhere together. She was just too polite to ask me to stop and let her get off the train. Why didn’t she just stop me? How did I get it so wrong? It’s just too surreal to think I had imagined it all, she must have known something was building up. Can those layers upon layers have been so weightless? Maybe it was a brief moment of uncertainty, wondering how far I’d go. Perhaps just innocent curiosity, like a child dropping an ant in a cup of water with no genuinely cruel intent, only an anatomical interest in the ‘what happens’. Probably neither, just a distracted gesture without any real thought or motivation. Just the thousandth distracted gesture in a distracted day of a distracted life. A consciously numbed life, with a gaze fixed on a horizon that seems scorched and yet is the only possible focal point for her eyes. It was close. At least I thought we came close. I thought we were close, I felt we were close for a brief second. But there is a surely common misconception about the concept of closeness, that it is somehow a stable state of matter, an attractive force that makes the elements experiencing it stick or get closer still. That is not always the case, and the science behind it is compelling.

So many things about life rely on geometry. Allicin is the molecule in garlic that’s responsible for its smell. It’s a chiral molecule and our nose only smells it in one orientation, a simple geometric mirror image of the same molecule would be undetected by our olfactory receptors.

Geometry, what a curious operator, such an unsuspectingly powerful arbiter of reality. Geometry is also responsible for a very strange quantum mechanical phenomenon called the Casimir effect. It’s a very counterintuitive but measurably real phenomenon, it seems to be a force out of nothing, a force that exists from a position of closeness and a consequence of geometry. How painfully familiar that sounds.

Two concepts that are important to understand this phenomenon, the first one being the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, one of the pillars of quantum mechanics. One must take a deep breath before plunging to these subatomic depths, much like the deep sea, they are alien lands where strangeness is Queen and chance is the court jester. The Principle is this: even if the exact initial conditions of a system are known, at some future point the exact position and momentum of the system cannot be simultaneously determined with complete precision, because the act of observing such quantities would changes their reality. The concept same is true with regards to the energy of a system in any particular time interval.

Eq.1 Heisenberg energy-time uncertainty

There is an undeterminable amount of energy that may exist in an unfathomably small time interval. It is this playful dance of energy and time which gives rise to the phenomenon called ‘quantum fluctuations’, the second fundamental concept. Above the sea level, back in the world of humans, we are acutely aware of the wonderful creations than can arise when energy and time dance together. It’s no different down there in the deep sea really.

Quantum field theory is the theory that describes elementary particles, the tiniest building blocks of the universe. In this context, quantum fluctuations are essentially energy fluctuations in a quantum field and give rise dual particle/antiparticle pairs that form randomly from nothing and annihilate each other again all within a very short space of time. It is as if they ‘borrowed’ energy to exist and then immediately gave it back. Their dance having no real beginning or end, existing and vanishing in the randomness and uncertainty. It seems like a fanciful idea, but it is permissible due to the fact the energy at a given point is not fully determinable because of the uncertainty principle. Quantum fluctuations are a background hum of creation and destruction in the universe that is almost hard to believe, but it’s predicted consequences very much have measurable effects. The Casimir effect is one such occurrence.

Hypothesized by Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, the Casimir effect is a force experienced by two large conducting plates when they are placed at a miniscule distance from each other in a vacuum. The quantum fluctuations in the electromagnetic field interact with the conducting plates when they are at such small distances apart creating an imbalance between the field within the plates and the field outside of them. For two simple parallel plates that force is attractive, just like attractive is the force we normally expect human closeness should generate. However, the exact geometry and arrangement of the conducting plates in space is what determines whether the force will be one that attracts or repels. The same is true of human closeness, there are arrangements of the elements that can cause them to repel, not in spite of, but precisely because of the closeness. This unintuitive truth seems oddly self-evident, a contradiction I surrender to without complaint. We were perhaps just the wrong alignment, the wrong configuration of this unsuspecting, curious arbiter of life that is geometry.

I surrender to the truth without complaint, but not without regret, not without sadness, not without melancholy. This last one in particular scars the deepest. We both have a factory within us that produces bricks made of compressed melancholy, but we build fundamentally different structures with them. I build impossibly winding roads that don’t lead anywhere. With the same bricks she builds impossibly high walls that don’t let her go anywhere. I perhaps delight in the elaborate windings of my roads, but I’m left frustrated by the fact they lead nowhere. She’s perhaps frustrated by the feeling of being trapped within her walls, but delights in the comfort of protection they afford her from external agents. She isn’t the slightest bit interested in seeing where my roads go or how intricately I build them. I tried to break through her walls, but she only built them higher and stronger. There runs however a deep and silent kinship for the fact we are made of the same bricks. We don’t know each other’s structures in any detail, but we know what they are made of. That is an odd duality of closeness and distance, perhaps as odd as the duality of particles and antiparticles that fluctuate randomly in a vacuum. But the music has faded in the distance and the dance of energy and time, if it ever even existed at all, is a floating spectre too faint to even perceive. And all I am left with now is a quantum of uncertainty.

The Dance of the Witches

In the old town of Gent, if you face the church of St. Nicholas, turn around and look at the building opposite. Then look up! The 16th century façade of the mason’s Guildhall is a particularly sparkling jewel in the crown of perfect Flemish architecture that is all around the square and around town, but that isn’t what makes it remarkable. Placed evenly on the stepped gable are 6 bronze statues of dancing figures. Their pointed hats, their pose, their defiant abandon – they must be some sort of witches. But what are they dancing about?

Oh, may the witches dance on the graves of those who are of arid spirit. What greater corrosive force could there be than a soul that has no thirst to commune in joy and sadness with her fellow human? What greater power of destruction can exist than indifference? The absence of hate is a vacant mask if it comes with an absence of light, it is more poisonous than the repentant soul who drank from the cup of Mephistopheles and felt remorse for it. There is only virtue in the Hippocratic oath on account of the word “first”. “First” do no harm, meaning there must be a second, more important task: doing good. Harmlessness is a bland dish that nourishes no one, causing no pain an arrogant presumption. Oh, may the witches dance on the graves of the perpetrators of indifference.

What heinous crime it is to spend energy creating a vacuum when life provides us with such abundance, or better still, provides us with the ability to create abundance. We can fully own only one thing, and that thing is our own truth. How dare they try and deplete our most valued resource? Oh, may the witches dance on the graves of those who wish to silence our truth. A truth we must live fully, deafeningly loudly, or perhaps delicately and with stubborn gentleness. The volume of us should be free to modulate according to our feelings. Oh, may the witches dance on the graves of those who tell us to turn down our volume.

Of those who take and give nothing back, what terrible leak must they have in their soul for them to lose all that wealth of affection? What bullet holes must riddle their emotive fuel tanks for them to have nothing but fumes to light the stuttering engine of their lives? Do they not feel the need to plug those holes, or do they not see them? Is it sickness or cruelty that stops them healing? Oh, may the witches dance on the graves of those who absorb completely but radiate nothing.

A question remains: who are these witches? Are they women? Are they spirits? Are they ideals? It doesn’t really matter; it only matters that they exist. May they dance and dance wildly, dance in the wind, dance on the water. May they dance in the purest Dionysian ecstasy that belongs fully only to those who have the ability to dissolve the salty crystals of everyday preoccupations into the ocean of mundaneness, letting the currents wash it all away. May one of these witches whisk me away; may she get me drunk. I want to fall in love with one and I don’t care if it kills me. I want to dance with the witches before I die, I want it intensely. Oh, may the witches dance on the graves of those who would deny us this dance.

Taking vs Making

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it”.

-       Ansel Adams

The wind and the cold are at their most biting just before dawn, and yet right there, atop a mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada, is where you would find Ansel in his prime, hunting for the perfect light. Having travelled to a suitable spot before sunrise amidst pockets of snow stubbornly resisting the spring melt and setting up an extremely heavy and bulky camera must have surely felt like an act on of making to him, and when referring to the physical act of fabrication, the brilliant American landscapist certainly isn’t wrong. Speaking from his point of view as a master craftsman, there was much that he made as physical objects. But to me that is what he was, a craftsman, a particularly ingenious tradesperson who used a systematic approach to achieve a canon of perfection expected of a master maker. His photographs impress me immensely and simultaneously give me absolutely nothing.  

Today the expression has been hijacked and distorted in a different sense. It’s become a statement of assertion of intent of the photographer, an exercise in intellectual vanity. An authoritarian stamp of intellectual protection of it’s creator.  It is a fundamental statement of fact about the medium that a great photograph can be created, wholly or partly, by accident. That is deeply dissatisfying to anyone who spends time tuning and refining their eye, their sensitivity and their skill, that their efforts might be surpassed by a mere act of chance. This is where the inferiority complex photography has always suffered from starts to creep in, surely a true art cannot be created by a combination of randomness and the act of ‘being there, at that time’.

I disagree with this profoundly, it disrespects the very essence of what is photography. The invention of photography has battled against our greatest adversary, the largest, most dominant force in all our lives: the unstoppable passage of time. With photography we have snatched, with gleeful irreverence, something from the plane of the infinitely moving and consigned it to the plane of the infinitely stationary. This is the greatest act of deicide humans have ever committed. To kill time is to kill every God we have ever invented. A beautiful act of revolution that is worth celebrating, it’s worth more than the vanity of making explicit an intentional moment of creation. “Taking” speaks of the human spirit and it’s battle against the elements and the universe. Having been taken, a photograph cannot be returned to the continuum of time, it is human forever more, stamped with our desire to live beyond our years. I honour that spirit and will very proudly continue to take photographs. The making for me is what I do with the photographs I take.

“God remains dead. And we have killed him”

-       Friedrich Nietzsche