During each period, each generation has to face the following problem: how to do something new when ‘all’ has already been done? This question is pregnant regarding all the human activities involving creation: art in all its forms, trading and science. Increasingly during the past ninetieth and twentieth centuries, this question has also become pregnant regarding minor or undisclosed activities such as sport and outdoor activities. In our early twenty-first century, these activities are no longer undisclosed. For the largest number of those who practise, this has joined the field of mass consumption. However, a smaller number remains who doesn’t fully follow this trend: I am one of these few people out of the largest number of consumers.
The pregnant question above has no answer outside the philosophical and ethical fields. I spent many hours, months and even years to think of it. Regarding the undisclosed and dicey outdoor activities I practise, caving and cave diving, it took me a lot of time to reach the conclusion that making something new is foremost a question related to thoughts and to a non-material field. Indeed, we are in technological times where ‘all’ is virtually possible if you have enough means, team or money. A very caricatured example: if you want to have a cave to explore in your garden, just buy the proper plot and pay for digging! We are also in a world where very few areas remain unexplored: all is already known by direct exploration or at least by aerial or satellite imagery and by other geophysics means. Regarding material facts, almost what can be explored has already been explored and what remains is unreachable at the scale of only one (wo)man. Eventually, all is submitted to regulation; and even to reach wild unregulated places, you have to pass through the net. You have to be selected by this net, where regulations very often favour collective endeavours to the detriment of sheer individual achievement.
In this book, I expose my own solution to this question of making something new when ‘all has already been made’ and how I have been led to this solution because of sundry events. In order to do that, the following things must be developed: How have I learnt caving and cave diving? How do I practise them, and how do they link with other parts of my life? How have they shaped my relationships with other people? Why did I become (and still am) cave diver and caver? Why do I prefer solo caving? Practising such activities engages one’s full existence and being. Again, due to the fact we are in technological times and that almost all has already been discovered, my personal solution doesn’t deal exclusively with caves. It is foremost a struggle in order to avoid to be overwhelmed by the anonymous mass. Being ‘well-known’ is probably important for business, but what matters for oneself is to have a full biography. What matters is to preserve oneself as a clearly distinct being, character and soul when coping with the different events of life, whether they take place inside or outside caves.
A play of words borrowed to the great history: it could be regarded as a ‘battle of the sum’, for it requires a high level of integration of different parts of life with unavoidable losses. In order to really exist, you have to coordinate your professional, outdoor and familial lives. There are three lives, whereas other people have only two lives. In order to understand something, this triple sum cannot be crumbled. The different thoughts you have during a given moment in a given place depend on a whole; these three lives are weaved together here. They cannot be disconnected.
I will mainly tell things about my caving life and how I regard caving, but I will also unravel some other threads of my character and some other parts of my life: in short, who am I really? Those things are sometimes far from sumps, pits and underground beauties; perhaps another author would manage to conceal them. Therefore, thinking of readers only interested by technical aspects of cave diving or to people only interested in sport and outdoor adventures, I would like to apologise. I’m not interested in sending you back the perfect image of the perfect caver and cave diver. I’m not the template you are looking for.
Not all the readers are cave divers or cavers or engineers. I would like to apologise again: it is very difficult to give you the right amount of technical explanations when needed. There will be sometimes too much and sometimes not enough. Anyway, what matters is not only the technical aspect of things. The most important is foremost a question of thoughts, something inside a non-material field. ‘Techniques’ are often regarded as the most important obstacle, as what does or doesn’t enable things. Nevertheless, at the scale of a human life, technical difficulties are easier to solve than conceptual and philosophical ones. The most difficult is to gain the proper outlook and the corresponding confidence. Some references are given at the end of the book or after some quotations. Among them, only few are about caving or cave diving, but they all contain precious philosophical elements that have sometimes been vital to the author in order to reach the proper point of view.
Eventually, it is very important to precise that the word caving has several different precise meanings in the following chapters. Sometimes ‘caving’ has a whole sense, including cave diving as well as caving in non-flooded caves (‘dry’ caves if one prefers). In other parts, ‘caving’ and ‘cave diving’ are regarded as two distinct activities. The context should prevent the reader from an ambiguous meaning. However, it is necessary to be very careful. The mix-up of the different significations of the word caving can raise a lot of problems. For instance, at least in France, for those who practise scuba diving, ‘caving’ means only ‘cave diving’. Reciprocally, many French cavers make no distinction between scuba divers totally unable to safely dive a sump and experienced true ‘cave divers’.