i think the size of a room depends on the context. a little shed out in the yard? well that could be a palace for a spider. youve gotta be thinking about these things. you could be in a dark cave feeling your way along the wall hand by hand but then your buddy comes over with a couple of flares and soon you notice how, strikingly, Upwards still looks just as unknowably faraway as it did before.
theres something about a Large Underground Space that really gets to me. every day we manage with the sky. all day long its up there, with all its big and open and so very empty space, and yet still only being the near edge of the starting line to get way out there. and to be fair, we Do talk about it a good deal, yet even then it’s literally the smallest talk we do. but something for me is to imagine if there was a roof up there. what if there was a firmament. of fully dark and tough stone. what if, for as much space as we had, we were nonetheless Contained.
when i was 13 my family visited silver dollar city in branson, missouri. now, silver dollar is an 1880s-themed amusement park which is also home to marvel cave, itself holding what's known as the Cathedral. this is the name given to one of the biggest cave entrance rooms in the united states. because the prospect of this, among several other things about caves, frightened my younger brother, our mom stayed back with him while i went with my younger sister under the watch of our family friend who had joined us for the trip. in due time our small group of a dozen or so cavegoers had begun the tour, climbing up several flights of minimally-lightbulbed stairs, stairs which banged menacingly out into the near-dark for each of our group’s upwards-avalanching staccato footsteps, footsteps which were rebounding off of a wrought-iron structure that seemed to hoard up all of the light available to us, leaving nothing in existence to speak of beyond an arm's reach. soon we were gathered up on a little landing with the one half of our two-person guide team who had stayed with us. making sure everybody was safe and settled there, he had us look out into the darkness for an extended period of time, soaking in the presence of the cave, feeling the weight of time all around us, unseen yet not unsensed. and then he echoed out to his companion to flip on the Cathedral's lights.
2008's journey to the center of the earth was a formative movie for me. it jabbed the exact same vein as land of the lost, rat race, and jumanji, among other things. movies id watch again and again for their ability to engross me despite how anxious theyd get me, with will ferrell facing off against all sorts of freaky prehistoric life, cuba gooding jr going through All Of That, and even just imagining the concept of robin williams getting trapped in that awful jungle for years and years, to say nothing of how stressful literally everything else about that film is. but what i think got me the most about Journey- the most striking, awe-inspiring, definitely the most dreadful image i can recall- was the ceiling of an underwater ocean.
the film of course doesnt give us any context as to exactly how large the ocean or the cavity it sits in is, but regardless, just the coining of this space as an Ocean evoked in child-me such a hugely reverent fear. the idea of there being, somewhere dizzyingly far beneath the ground i can see and touch, any sort of unspeakably massive cavern entirely closed off from sunlight yet with enough water and, crucially, space to put it in, to match up at least in spirit to the oceans of the earth's nice and safe crust that i had at best managed to come to a hesitant understanding with. it honest to god freaked me the hell out in a way i had never experienced before then. i would imagine being down there on the shore, looking out at the water, so much water that it would have its own horizon, water that would perhaps rise to form balkingly massive clouds which would be made all the more undeniable and tangible for how the ceiling would contain them, water that would be either thrashing with horrifying Somethings in it, or would sit entirely still, and somehow feel even more disquietingly goliath for it.
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