He stood in the present; he wasn’t trading in dead pasts or incalculable futures. He promised you something definite and tangible, something you could grasp. He proposed digging a hole through the earth. That was all.1
Why must one bring the world into the tunnel when the tunnel is supposed to be the way out?2
There is a story about a painter who confesses to killing a woman3. The story starts with a crime scene and lament and is slowly traced back to understand his reasoning. The plot portrays him as a lonely, closed-off person, and her as the first and only one to notice a tiny detail in his painting of a mermaid—a detail of incredible significance to him - and that recognition only enlarged his astonishment and yearning for intimacy, leading him to fall head over heels in love, though not in a mature way, but in an anxious, apprehensive way—the way someone inexperienced in intimacy would act, filled with proclamations of affection and fear of abandonment. Soon his already severe anxiety deepens with each revelation—first, that she has a blind husband, then a lover, then a secret companion, until at last, the crushing truth emerges, that the woman he adores, the very love of his life, does not belong to him alone but offers her company as a service to many; this he cannot stand - the burden, that he must either accept that he will never have her for himself, that he must accept his cuckoldry, like her husband, or leave, so instead, he reaches for a knife and stabs her and she drops breathless to the floor, a body once full of vigour, her blood staining the beautiful Moroccan carpet4.
The inconsiderate writer of this proto-incel story has left us with a lifeless body and a visibly stained carpet to hide; the weight of time presses upon us, causing the pages to collapse onto one another, trapping us in the uneasy twilight of a crime of passion not our own. This story is a bomb of false accusations, ticking. The only rational course seems to be wrapping the body in the cursed, stained carpet and dragging it down to the basement. And then reaching for a shovel and digging deep without rest, boring through mountains of sand, gravel, coke, slag, and track ballast; concrete mixers; ash heaps; mine shafts glowing with orange light—
and then—
a maze of ducts, pipes, and flues; drains winding among main and lateral sewers; narrow canals edged with black stone parapets—
and then—
a world of caverns whose walls are black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts5 —
until both can be safely hidden from the meddlesome guardians of the law.
Concealing a dead body is just one of many ways to get into tunnelling. How exciting it is to explore a new hobby! prepare to bear the symbolic weight of the shovel as you violate the plane of the surface dwellers.
The Tunnel and The Tower
I see a retired geisha entering a bathroom stall with two near-twink-death-twinks to indulge in cocaine as I paint the dragon scales on my back in bright red. There is a girl with black horsehair leaning over me, explaining that the world can be understood in towers and tunnels. This is not based on a true story. This has been revealed to me in a dream.
There is humility in tunnels, and there is pride in a tower, she says.
Tunnels are secretive and synonymous with disappearance. In a similar fashion, one can disappear in a tower, but one’s invisibility is always on display. Your ghostly presence overlooks the neighbourhood.
Imagine placing yourself in a tower Montaigne-style. Ivory tower-style. Gathering an immense library and writing a Treatise on Everything. Becoming a Man of the Tower. Then imagine quietly abandoning your post for infinite excavation. The solitude and simplicity of digging, of meticulous, purposeless labor. Being a child, wrapped in a blanket of dirt, buried deep in Mother Earth’s womb… Merely conjuring a thought so rich in symbolism sets a feeble heart trembling.
Tunnels are feminine, and towers are masculine in shape, yet we usually speak of princesses locked up in towers and men obsessively digging tunnels. There is a psychoanalytic reading to this, the girl says, but it is not interesting.
There is no sign or thought of the sign that is not about power and for power.6
A tunnel is a sign of a power shift, a transition from impotence into hyperpotence. You drill a hole through a mountain, under a sea, beneath a prison to come out a free person. It is different from a cave in the scope of its ambitions and the problem of its purpose. The intentional tunnel is not meant to be inhabited like the cave; it is meant to be passed through. The incidental tunnel, on the contrary, is a byproduct of compulsive hobby tunneling, outsider art and its iterations.
Digging a tunnel is an ultimate, compulsive gesture of people who have bottled up for life; a cry for help from those who never cry and who don’t really seek help, resembling ‘bootstrap’ therapies self-imposed by older generations through hard labor, ambition, and strain. If we were to entertain the classical reading of a hysterical, female subject fleeing the constraints of a settled life on a manic, adventurous journey (M. Bovary-style), digging appears as its counterpart—a compulsive, male-coded, lonely, autistic pursuit (Bartlebooth-style).
The Dream
I sit comfortably on a verandah whitewashed with lime, and rest my eyes on the property I have acquired through inheritance. A lady pours me a cup of tea, then smiles politely, shy, and bites her lip. I find her endearing. The sun swims in the pools of her eyes, sunk into her perfectly black pupils. I fix my gaze on her gloves. They have an overprint of a gazette, and the letters create newspaper columns that collapse around her fingers. I try to read what it says.
"Have you been tunneling? Have you been towering lately?" she asks.
Tunnel and tower as a literary genre, the glove says.
If modernist novels are towers in their structural ambitions, postmodern ones must resemble the former. My lifelong obsession with postmodern lit led me to think of tunnels metaphorically - narratives contracting around the reader, or whatever - yet their presence is often simply literal, manifesting as the ever-beloved paranoia woven into labyrinthine corridors beneath the earth, where wheelchair-bound-serial-killers or secret-post-office-workers sneak around.
And then there is the most literal [The] Tunnel by W. Gass, which I recently acquired. I did not enjoy this book, as I do not enjoy things ergodic. Some postmodern writers illustrate chaos with stylistic serenity, while others consciously let chaos permeate the pages. And God be my witness, I labored over The Tunnel ‘as if it were the body of a woman,’7 but I was met with an asinine neuroticism for which I was emotionally unavailable. And so I left—but I came back!
She asks if we use symbols for simplicity or for infinite storage.
Going for a book within a book theme, he tells a story about a protagonist who writes a treatise on Innocence and Guilt in Nazi Germany, which soon turns into tangential confessions about the demons of his past and present. Dissatisfied with his life, he begins to dig a tunnel in the basement of his house—a symbolic gesture to escape the grave of the ‘successful life’ he had already dug for himself. A theme quite different from House of Leaves, where the labyrinth-like tunnel is stumbled upon, the Minotaur is stumbled upon, an underground maze like Củ Chi, spiked with traps and corpses, is stumbled upon in its infinite storage space, expanding under the house, in the basement, and outside the bounds of physical laws; all of that being one of the most aesthetically pleasing concepts I have encountered lately. Both novels conceptually border on genius, but the formal path taken is too Kaufmanesque to be experienced with full engagement.
Gass and his neurotic main character led me to r/hobbytunneling and the warmth of its community of 711 people, bound by a shared fantasy of professionally leaving society. I learned about the tradition of tunneling and legendary figures such as L. Arakelyan and H. Dyar, as well as those nicknamed the Mole Man and the Tunnel Girl, and I dug deep—what I had previously known as just soil slowly revealed itself to be topsoil, clay soil, sandy soil, loamy soil, silt soil, gravelly soil, peat soil, loess, hardpan, or the tough, troublesome bedrock. I learned about hand augers, earth borers, pickaxes, mattocks, spades, shovels, brace-and-bit drills, mechanical winches, block-and-tackle rigs, carbide lamps, hand-cranked ventilators, bellows, timber struts, iron braces, sledgehammers, cold chisels, wheelbarrows, hods, plumb lines, claw bars, pry bars and surveyor’s compasses set North but useless, completely useless underground.
On the forum, there is no why—only how to dig. The knowledge of tunneling is exchanged freely, not only because gatekeeping a ventilation method could end someone’s life, but because the solace of a lonely heart is found in the quiet kinship of digital gestures exchanged along unseen paths woven beneath constellations of sleepy houses.
Once every few posts a fellow tunneller breaks down sad news. There was Carl, who one day ‘decided to wrap up [his] tunnelling and work on some other projects on the surface,’ abandoning his fellow tunnellers and shattering the community’s heart.
‘I think part of me would have been happy to keep digging forever, but I also felt like familiarity was maybe creating a sense of complacency. I think I was getting too confident in the stability of the soil, and letting myself believe that I could get away with less and less shoring. I hope that by keeping my time spent in there to a minimum, if it ever does decide to just up and collapse, I won’t be there when it happens,’ said CarlFromOregon, and emerged from his hole safe and sound, a changed man.
Other patterns emerge in the forum. We witness narrative clichés that begin within a happy relationship, where the person develops a special interest and soon causes his partner to worry about his mental health8. Yet these stories are less about genuine animosity than about learning to coexist with an eccentricity; accepting a degree of separation not measured in miles, but in a sea level difference.
And then, there is the problem of dirt.
The Dirt
You are secretly burying a dead body wrapped in a carpet. The problem of dirt is, at its core, the problem of leaving traces. While erecting a tower consists of assemblage and creation, digging relies solely on destruction. Disrupting the peaceful surface of one’s basement produces immense amounts of waste that must be disposed of without raising suspicion. There are records of tunnels used solely for storing dirt from other tunnels9. Gass’s protagonist hides the soil in his wife’s antique furniture.
Traces left on the surface form into a story about the impossibility of disappearance. Un Homme Qui Dort is, ultimately, a fantasy. Pessoa’s heteronyms are a fantasy. The real tragedy of an introverted soul is that leaving society is synonymous with symbolic death. There is a direct pipeline between Antigone and Chris McCandless. This impossibility can only be exercised within the safety net of established relationships—this is why most hobby tunnellers live with their partners, siblings, or their family. Disposing of dirt leaves a mark on the surface, and the surface will know, because it cares for you! The best you can hope for is the silent approval of your lonesome practice.
One of the sweetest spots I have is for creating in solitude, for oneself. This is the art I idealize—fetishize even—in its art brut purity of the spirit or spirit-like event. The simplicity, elegance, and unlimited possibilities of digging seem to produce a particular surplus of enjoyment, making it a political gesture so often regulated.
Society is a concept shaped horizontally, and even its inherent vertical hierarchies manifest themselves in horizontal fashion, such as land ownership. Consumption is a horizontal act. The transmission of culture is a horizontal act. Estranging oneself from society into a tunnel or a tower is a vertical act—an escape from a horizontal world, a retreat from the laws of performative displays and appearances.
And it was like the two of us had been living in separate parallel passages or tunnels, without knowing that we were traveling, one next to the other, like similar souls in similar times, to find ourselves finally at the end of the passage.
In the axis of everyday life, solace can be found only when going down, as it is the only axis that 1. is finite and 2. allows for the introduction of new horizontalities into one’s life—ones inhabited only by oneself, dust, and a comforting silence.
All the history of those passages was only a ridiculous invention, or belief, of mine, and that after all there was only one dark and solitary tunnel, mine, the tunnel through which my infancy had passed, as well as my youth, and all the rest of my life.10
The loneliness of digging a tunnel is autistic in nature. We speak of tunnel vision when we speak of autism. Monotropism. There is only the path forward, focused and meticulous. Monomania, as in a single psychological obsession in an otherwise sound mind, does not take you from A to B, because the B is written with an ink of a desire… And that ink is obscured….
Absolute loneliness ends with online confidantes. Discovering a supportive community of hobby tunnellers revealed the unwritten laws of mutual attraction. A gentleman of the Tower, who grew up in the Internet era devoid of early neo-hippie delusions about digital sovereignty, can only be excited about the heavy circulation of knowledge - even though the tiny flame of revolution was extinguished, never to be rekindled. All left to enjoy is millions of solitary tunnels of special interest turned into a rhizome of spectacles, advices and jokes.
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.11
We might see the evolution of forums and memes as a societal emergence from some type of collective autism—one that arose from the realization that we all undergo similar experiences. Their change over time primarily relies on technological progress, but what interests me is the shift in mutual awareness, as if millions of brains have greeted and recognized each other in their brightest and darkest aspects - a prerequisite for a good sense of humour. The progression I have noticed, being lucky enough to witness and participate in the earliest days of memes, has moved from the anxiety of a shy "Am I weird for...?" to the confident recognition of one’s strangeness. It is exciting to live in times where absurd and surreal jokes are not an end goal, but an entry point.
If tunnelling appears autistic in its outward form, symbolically, it is an introverted journey that some of us go on within. Some tunnels become decorated, well-lit and presented to the outside world; some become closed, flooded with cement or abandoned. The luck of distribution of resources and attention ultimately determines who will become the "Tunnel Girl," who will be fined by the city council, or both.
All said and done, I am not yet ready for the real tunnel. The tunnel actually scares me12. I grew up in a segment house that was very narrow and tall, and I dwelled on the top floor. I am somewhat of a tower guy. I guess you could call me a Man of the Tower.
The universe... must be a torus. I have no explanation for this thought. A tunnel driven through a torus is a spandrel, a necessary side effect of construction. A tunnel is inherently uninhabitable. The difference between a tunnel and a cave is the degree of safety. A tunnel guarantees an escape but provides the anxiety of being crept upon from behind. Two people in a tunnel can secure both its ends but will never lock their eyes. The Tunnel of Love relies on perpetual motion. In a tunnel, you should never be stationary. You should keep moving, because I have begun training an elite group of volunteers in the art of tunnel warfare, armed only with a handgun, a knife, a flashlight, and a piece of string. I am a Man of the Tower. These specialists, commonly known as tunnel rats, would enter the pit alone and travel inch by inch, looking for booby traps in search of you! a serene body resting peacefully on the warm, soft tunnel ground, which, on certain days, seems to shift ever so slightly, rising and falling like a living thing, breathing, resembling a lung or a colon, urging you forward, away from my troupe of specialists, equipped with a piece of string to tie tightly around your limbs as they take off your scalp. Poor soul… you are being hunted.
And I need you more than I want you.
And I want you for all time.
The unspoken fantasy of tunnellers is the day when two secretly dug tunnels meet, and the walls collapse onto each other to reveal a fellow soul. I can conceive of no other outcome than a romance or a lifelong friendship emerging from this. Because there is always someone on the same plane, digging the same tunnel through the dark nights of the soil. And there is always someone above, watching over you with loving grace. And the —
And the Wichita Lineman
Is still on the line.13
May you have the strength to persevere with your obsessions in the new lunar year
The Tunnel, Bernhard Kellermann
The Tunnel, William H. Gass
The Tunnel, Ernesto Sabato
There was no carpet; it is my own addition.
Life: A User’s Manual, Georges Perec
Libidinal Economy, Jean-Francois Lyotard
from The Tunnel, William H. Gass
That reminded me of the octopus Netflix documentary, a work of art iconic for all the wrong reasons: the incidental sexual tension between the two, a jealous wife, an affair-like structure to the story, and the orbiting question of ‘how’ is he gonna do ‘it’ —things, I would presume, that were not intended in the making.
Tunnel “Dick“ in the Stalag Luft III (The Great Escape)
The Tunnel, Ernesto Sabato
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, Richard Brautigan
claustrophobic
The Wichita Lineman, Glen Campbell
A curious revelation... unearthing this and discovering I stand amid the depths of my own dig
Honey, I am the underminer! Time of seeing structures once enclosed whole under weight crumble....are worms but the antithesis to the tunnel incarnate, living proof of calculus' overuse?