Copyright 2009 by Stefan Bolz
I look around the room. It has all kinds of equipment in it. One wall holds climbing gear like helmets with flashlights mounted on them, ropes, hooks, harnesses, back packs, etc. The other wall holds medical supplies containing all kinds of industrial size tubes of creams, potions, powders, drops and tinctures, anti inflammatory sprays, cans with soft soap foam in them, bandages, gloves, scalpels, syringes and so on. On the third wall there are ladders, brushes, power washers, large heating lamps and whole body suits.
A woman stands in front of me. She is in her sixties with short grey hair, dressed in rugged hiking outfit. She is my guide. I know this because of the yellow letters on her black baseball cap saying “GUIDE”. She hands me a large darkish green back pack. “Everything you need is in there,” she says. I guess she has done this before. “Yes I have,” she answers my thoughts. Then she hands me a pack of gum. “For your ears. We are going to go quite some ways down in the elevator. You might take one so your ears don’t pop.” I don’t want to sound silly and ask questions, especially because she looks as if everything that is happening is the most normal thing in the world. “Thank you,” I reply. “Follow me,” she says, while handing me a white hard hat with a flashlight mounted to its front. She opens a steel reinforced door that leads into a long, narrow hallway. “Put this on so you don’t hurt your head.”
For the last day or so, my ears were bothering me: a slight white-noise-sound together with pressure coming from the inside and radiating outward into the left side of my head. I can only use my phone on my right ear and can’t listen to my beloved iPod with head phones on. So I thought I would like to explore this ear thing a bit more to see what it had to show me. From my work with my therapist I have learned to explore certain aspects of my unconscious by visually journeying through the landscape of my mind.
So here I am, walking down this long narrow corridor, illuminated by overhead lights that are drilled into the bare stone ceiling every 10 feet or so. The shape reminds me of a mining tunnel. As I look down, I see that I am wearing very solid looking hiking boots; some sort of gore-tex pants and a light jacket of the same material. The back pack lies heavily on my shoulders. This actually feels more comforting than straining and while I wonder what’s in it, my guide turns left and after a short while we arrive at an old fashioned, yellow metal elevator door. The door parts and opens, giving way to the second set of doors made from welded metal bars. As we enter the cabin of the elevator the platform moves slightly downward, adjusting to our weight. The doors close and the woman pushes the only button that is there. It says “DOWN”.
As we drop, I can feel a slight pressure in my lower abdomen not dissimilar to what usually happens during the first drop in a roller coaster. Judging from that, we must be going pretty fast. There is a small Plexiglas opening in one of the cabin’s walls. Behind it and illuminated by yellow light, I clearly see the number 10. Looks like the number of an alarm clock from the seventies, the ones where the numbers are cut in half and the upper parts flip over to reveal the next number. As I stare at it, the number changes from 10 to 9. After a while it flips over again to 8, then 7, 6, 5. We must be hundreds and hundreds of feet below the surface by now, I think. 4…, 3…, 2…, “We are not only going down but you also are getting smaller. Much smaller,” my guide tells me. “We are not dropping so much in feet but in size.” “Ah,” I answer. “Sure. OF COURSE!” All this is far from making any sense to me at all. “How small… are we going to get?” I ask. The number changes from 2 to 1 and the elevator slows down. “You can’t possibly explore your inner ear without shrinking down to a reasonable size,” my guide tells me happily. BING! “We are here,” she says. The doors open.
The first thing I’m aware of is the noise level. “You might want to take these!” my guide yells at me while handing me a set of yellow plastic ear muffs, the kind of ear protection you get when working on a construction site. “I’m fine!” I yell back. “Thanks!” She shrugs and puts hers on. “Where are we?” I ask. My guide doesn’t understand a word I am saying. The noise around me – a mixture between a low but intense vibration and what it must sound like when standing next to the turbine engine of a large airplane – is absolutely deafening. She hands me the ear muffs again. I finally give in and put them on. “I can’t hear you without them and you will have trouble hearing me otherwise.” I can hear her soft voice loud and clear through what must be integrated ear phones. “Where are we?” I ask. “This is your inner ear,” she says.
I look around. We stand in what I would call an organic cave. A cave not made of stone but of some kind of organic, live, matter. From where I stand to the other side is probably a third of a football field. It is relatively dark in here. A few light beams come through what at some point must have been a large, round opening. The shape of the cave reminds me of a funnel – larger on one side and becoming smaller on the other. As my eyes slowly get used to the semi darkness I can see that all around me, covering the ground, walls and ceiling, are what looks like thin straight branches sticking out of a blackened, thick substance. The driftwood colored branches are all bent in the direction of the smaller side of the cave.
I kneel down to take a closer look at whatever it is that is sticking up so strangely. The ‘things’ are about as long as my hand and as I touch one of them I realize that it is actually a bundle, made of hundreds and hundreds of individual pieces of hair, like that on a very expensive painter’s brush or a bundle of fiber optic cable - extremely soft and very fragile. A low vibration radiates from the string of hairs. “This must be the cause for the noise,” I say to my guide as I take off the head phones. The intensity of the distorted sound hits me like a train. It screeches and rumbles deeply as if someone who has never played a cello plays it right into my ear. I put the head phones back on.
Now I can see that the hair bundles are actually much longer than I originally thought. There is about a foot of gooey, sticky stuff holding the hairs in place. “I have to get the gooey stuff off so they can move around more freely. No wonder it sounds so horrific in here. They are all out of tune. “ I had no idea how to go about it. “Let’s see what’s in your back pack,” my guide tells me. I had forgotten all about my back pack until she lifted it off my back and placed it in front of me. I opened it to find, amongst other items, a few tools like a chisel, a hammer, a crowbar, a battery powered drill, etc. “That’s pretty useless,” I say out loud. “Isn’t there anything else I can use?” I ask, looking at my guide. She just looks at me smiling as if to say: “You’ll get it. Don’t worry. I’m just here to make sure you stay on track.” I look around the cave. There is a stark contrast between the few beams of light coming through the openings and the rest of the cave. I follow one of the light beams with my eyes from its origin through the room and onto one of the sides of the cave.
Looks like there is no gooey stuff where the light hits the hairs. I walk over to the small patch and kneel down. The fragile looking hairs feel soft as they gently stroke my hands when I touch them. And something else happens. As they touch my hands, I can hear them. There is no other way to describe this. I hear them, not in the usual sense but as the tiniest most beautiful fading whispers of a melody within me. I glance back to the origin of the light – a hole in one of the cave’s walls. I get up and go over to the wall. I can see the outline of a much larger opening that is covered by a hard and deformed mass. “I need to get this off,” I think to myself. “Ah, the chisel.” It dawns on me that there was a purpose for all the tools in my back pack.
I take a hammer and the chisel and start to break off pieces of the hard mass. Easier said than done though and my progress is slow at best. After a while I start sweating and the hard hat and the hearing protection head phones feel increasingly uncomfortable. At some point I take them both off. The noise level is almost unbearable. In addition to that, whenever my chisel touches the hard mass, a low vibration goes through my hand and into my body. “Hardened thoughts of anger over what I have heard.” I’m not sure where this thought came from but it makes me stop. I think about what it means. “What have I heard lately that made me angry?” I think to myself. “What made me so upset that I didn’t want to hear it anymore and created a barrier to obstruct any sound from entering?”
There has to be another way besides trying to chisel the hard mass away. I look over to my guide. She grabs something from inside the back pack. It looks like a very oversized tube of tooth paste. “See if this helps,” she says. I want to tell her that any cream or tooth paste of some sort is certainly not going to help get rid of a hard mass like I’m dealing with here. “I need a power drill!” I yell at her. “Or one of those Hammer drills construction workers use to break up pavement and concrete!” She gestures me that she hasn’t heard a word I just said and continues to hold out her hand with the tube in it.
Ok fine. I take it and look at what it says on the outside of the tube: Lookwithlove. One word. And below it, “If you have questions about this product, go to www.lookwithlove.com for further information.” I glance at my guide. She shrugs. I decide to, for now, just go with it. What else am I going to do? I’m standing inside my ear. How much more surreal can it possibly get? So I unscrew the tube, put some of the paste like substance into the palm of my hand and start applying it to the hardened mass. Almost immediately the hard material starts to soften. Whenever I put more of the cream on my hand, I have to look at the tube of course. Lookwithlove. Lookwithlove. Lookwithlove. Ok, I get it. I’m not stupid. Sometimes it takes me a while. I once heard that everything we do is symbolic. So, if I apply “Lookwithlove”, literally and symbolically, to “hardened thoughts of anger over what I have heard” then I’ll get: “Look with love on my hardened thoughts of anger over what I have heard.”
As I apply more and more of the paste onto the material, it softens and becomes transparent and jelly like. While I do this, something else happens. The deafening sound is sometimes overlaid by the soft small melody I heard before. The more of the mass breaks off, the more light streams into the cave. I look behind me to see that wherever the light hits the gooey material, it hardens, breaks apart and disappears, leaving more and more patches of the silver grey hairs. As this happens, the intense sound seems to lessen as well. There is one point where the screeching sound and the beautiful melody are equally present. In order to continue it almost seems as if I have to concentrate on the inner melody in order not to be overwhelmed by the screeching sound outside. This is much harder than the actual work of applying the paste.
Finally, I seem to get some momentum going and more and more of the hard mass turns into jelly and breaks off until there is almost nothing left. As I turn around, large areas of the gooey stuff, now illuminated by the light, become hard and start to break apart. While I watch this, a second thing happens. Whereas before I could only hear the melody inside of me, I can now hear it from the outside as well. I realize that what I hear aren’t instruments. Those are human voices coming from outside the ear. A chorus so sweet and beautiful and otherworldly, it fills my heart with utter joy. Nothing I have ever heard before in my life comes even close to this. It fills the cave and reaches deep into every corner of my soul filling it with its radiance.
After a while, my guide stretches out her hand. I give her the chisel and the hammer. She puts it into the back pack, together with the hard hat and the ear protectors. “You ready?” she asks? “Yes,” I reply. We walk to the elevator. Before we go in, I turn around. The cave is covered with a sea of millions of silver white hair moving softly in the light. The soft vibrations permeate my body. “This is better than any massage,” I think to myself. I step into the elevator and my guide presses the only button there is. This time it says, “UP”. The numbers change from 0 to 1, then 2, 3, 4, 5… I feel light. Somehow lighter than when I came down here. 6,7,8,9, 10. The elevator stops. My guide exits and we both walk through the long mining tunnel until we reach the door to the equipment room where she takes my back pack and places it on a shelf. “See you next time,” she says. We shake hands. I turn around and open the door to the outside.
