“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.” ~ C.G. Jung
Hello from Maryland. Today’s post is the final in the cellar series. Thanks to those who answered the two-question poll at the end of part 6. There are two more questions at the end of this post. I’d love to hear your opinions as I rethink a few things to find more time for my fiction.
In last week’s cellar post, we descended into the shadows of the unconscious. commented that she’s always wanted to live in an underground house. Same! When I was about twelve, my nuclear physicist uncle sent me some articles with this note: “Underground is the way to go.” I’ve been dreaming ever since. What could be smarter than nestling into the constant mild temperature of the earth, facing windows into the sun for warmth?
Inspired by 's enjoyment of the metaphorical aspects of architecture, we’ll continue to root around in the underworld today and wrap up with a plea to make space for darkness, even in today’s modern buildings.
Secrecy, madness and murder
The unconscious is a secret kept from ourselves, and from others (or so we believe). Likewise, the cellar is a place of secrecy, where diabolical plans may gestate. As Emily Dickinson1 reminds us:
Its hour with itself The Spirit never shows; What terror would enthrall the street Could countenance disclose The subterranean freight, The cellars of the soul. Thank God the loudest place He made Is licensed to be still!
For Bachelard, “The cellar becomes buried madness, walled-in tragedy. Stories of criminal cellars leave indelible marks on our memory, marks that we prefer not to deepen. . . [S]ecrets are pondered. And underneath the earth, action gets under way . . . [the] sinister projects of diabolical men.”2
Weirdly, Edgar Allen Poe’s life parallels mine in a few ways. He was a student at the University of Virginia, he lived in Baltimore, and he, too, had a fascination with the cellar. As a setting for his twisted tales of sinister, secret plans and unspeakably evil deeds, the cellar appears in “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Black Cat.” (Possibly others?) for Bachelard, the reader of Poe hears the “accursed cat, which is a symbol of unredeemed guilt, mewing behind the wall.”3
Stephen King picks this up in his story, “Apt Pupil.” Victims are murdered in the kitchen and buried in the dirt floor of the cellar just below. This echoes the Egyptian cellar-burials noted in Part 2, but leans into the fundamentally negative modern attitude towards death.
Prisons, punishment and poisoning
Our fear of the dark recesses of the unconscious extends to imagining prisons and places of punishment. In Hawthorne’s words, “What other dungeon is so dark as one’s heart! What other jailor so inexorable as one’s self!”4 (Show of hands; who else has been there?)
Folktales tell of being locked in the cellar with the key thrown away or into water, associating this with captivity in a dungeon.5 Who else felt acutely for the abused hero in The Count of Monte Cristo? He’s taken to a “subterranean room whose bare and reeking walls seemed as though impregnated with tears.”6 Locked away deep inside the earth, he is ignorant of outside events, deprived of the life-sustaining sense of orientation in the world:
“I have lost all that bound me to life; now death smiles on me as a nurse smiles on the child she is about to rock to sleep; now welcome death!”7
Many American architects harbored a love-hate relationship with the city. Louis Sullivan uses the cellar-prison metaphor in the criticism in his Autobiography of An Idea, which argues that the city deprives people of the liberty of open air and kills the spirit:
“Boston City swallowed him up. The effect was immediately disastrous. As one might move a flourishing plant from the open to a dark cellar, and imprison it there, so the miasma of the big city poisoned a small boy. . . He mildewed; and the leaves and buds of ambition fell from him.”8
Victor Hugo dramatizes the difference between light-filled buildings and the cellars-prisons-sepulchers below-ground in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. You can imagine these dank spaces networking beneath the entire city.9
Underworld monsters
It’s not a stretch to the cellar standing in for the underworld itself. In Argentinian and English folklore, the cellar is the dwelling-place of the “familiar,” a witch’s helper gifted by the devil. The familiar is fed on red meat and only comes out at nightfall.10 The cellar’s darkness is an ideal environment for such a monster.
In Babylonian mythology, the Great City is the lowerworld, the abode of the dead. It is a vast seven-walled cavern in the depths of the earth.11 Here, the dead lead a feeble existence in the form of shadows with no hope of return to a better life.12 In Scriptures, the Deep signifies the bottomless pit, hell, the place of punishment, chaos in the beginning of the world, or the grave.13
These are some of the complex, mostly negative connotations that have accompanied this consideration of the cellar—historically, culturally, and architecturally. Inevitable attempts to neutralize its power include raising it above-ground, renaming it a basement, carrying the rational order of the house downward, or eliminating it entirely. Thankfully, Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons remind us of the cellar’s rich imaginative legacy, still available to us. No matter how reduced in purpose, well-lit, or finished it is, hidden corners lurk still in suburban basements:
“As a young boy, I was plagued with an overactive imagination—compounded by the fact that we lived in a house with your standard, monster-infested basement. Occasionally, I would hear my father’s command that never failed to horrify me: ‘Go down to the basement, Gary, and bring up some firewood.’ Death.
“And so down I’d go, certain I was about to become the leading character in a story that would be told around campfires for generations to come. (‘Say, has anyone here heard, “The Boy Who Went for Firewood”?’)
“My task nearly completed, I would begin my quick ascent back to the world of the living. And then, as it had countless times before, it would happen. With an audible click, followed by sinister laughter, the lights would go off.
“Engulfed in blackness, I would scramble my way to the top of the stairs only to find the door held firmly shut. From the other side, where the light switch was controlled, I would hear my older brother’s voice begin to chant: ‘It’s coming for you, Gary! It’s coming! Do you hear it? Do you hear it breathing, Gary?’
“Unbeknownst to my parents, the deep grooves in that side of the door were not caused by the dog.”14
Architecture and origins
Returning, then, to architecture, let’s consider the Bibliothèque Sante-Geneviève, which I’ve written about before. The heating system was cutting-edge for its time, located as one might expect in the basement. While we take central heating for granted now, it was cutting-edge at the time and can be imagined as emerging directly from primitive associations with fire.FN For more on that, see Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
“Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.”15
Anyone familiar with “Memory Palaces”—the subject of many of
’s posts in his wonderful Substack, “The Craft of Memory”—recognizes the powerful somatic connection between spaces and memory. The ability of certain memories to transcend time is ensured by their location in the cellar, with its associations with timelessness.In our increasingly digital world, this primal need to house memories is overlooked. We tend to dismiss our attachments to physical objects and environments, or misread or ignore their psychological effects on us. Architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz demonstrated not only that architecture influences our attitudes positively or negatively, but also that our surroundings can determine our conduct. For him, it is decisive that the environment, as shaped and perceived by us, has a certain order. Disorder creates negative attitudes like fear, estrangement, and hopelessness.16
In this journey through the cellar, let’s not lose sight of the liberating potential of the old origin story. Recall the Egyptian sense of being born of the earth, that womb to which we will inevitably return. Joseph Rykwert writes that the inhabitants of houses make peace between their mortal condition and their place on earth. “The reconciliation is what dominates the vertical organization of the house, from the cellar to the roof.”17 This twinning of the physical and metaphysical is a frequent theme in Rykwert’s writing:
“The return to origins is a constant of human development and in this matter architecture conforms to all other human activities . . . The return to origins always implies a rethinking of what you do customarily, an attempt to renew the validity of your everyday actions.”18
Architecture is a robust vehicle to carry cultural meaning. We study, interpret and transform precedent on every project. It’s critical to understand the historical and psychological context of any element, form, space or lowly cellar—before designing a fresh response to today’s needs. Even the highly inventive architect Le Corbusier had a creative process of reinterpretation, rather than of creation in a cultural void.19
Birth, life and death are the invariant essentials of our existence. These have been, and are meant to continue being, reflected and interpreted in our architecture. The cellar as a place of origins, the primordial cave of birth, a place to emerge from into the light, is no longer an explicit part of our cultural tradition. But history isn’t linear. The past is not a dead repository of failed prototypes best left in the dust. Just as the present can never represent the purest attainment of our species.
All of the cellar’s associations—with the subconscious, as a place of introspection or seclusion, escape or refuge, as a place of secrecy, madness, disorder, and punishment, a place that defies time and logic—all of these are fully present in every cellar, today, now. Every cellar in architecture. Every cellar in literature, in art, in film, in the imagination and in our dreams.
Please share your thoughts
Poll questions:
November’s “Talking Back to Walden” gets into Thoreau’s ideas about affordable housing—it may surprise you. For my part, I share something tender I’ve been avoiding for months. You can read it here. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.
In the chat
I found too many “Far Side” cartoons about cellars and basements to include here, so I started a chat to share a few more. Let’s have some fun with this.
Read past installments of “Digging into the cellar” here:
Part 2: Where we encounter deep time, birth, death, and a return to origins
Part 3: Finding refuge, permanence and timelessness
Part 4: Leaving the known world behind
Part 5: Cosmos, chaos, walls and stairs
Part 6: Social hierarchy and the unconscious
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts. It’s always the highlight of my week.
Bianchi and Hampton, eds., The Poems of Emily Dickinson, p.339.
Gaston Bachelard, trans. Maria Jolas, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp.20-22.
Bachelard, p.20.
John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., Inc., 1980), p.503:19, quoting Hawthorne.
Stith Thomson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 6 vols. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958).
Alexandre Dumas, Count of Monte Cristo (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1928), p.38.
Dumas, p.54.
Norton and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City From Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p.191.
Victor Hugo, transl. Isabel F. Hapgood, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (Duke Classics, 2012), eBook, p.563.
Thomson, Motif-Index.
This description of a seven-walled cavern bears a striking resemblance to descriptions in both Bosco’s L’Antiquaire and Borges’ story, “The Immortal.” All dramatize anxiety, loss of certainty and disorientation.
Gertrude Jobes, Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore, and Symbols (New York: the Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1962), p.117.
Jobes, pp.424-425.
Gary Larson, The Far Side Gallery (New York: Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1984), Introduction.
Bachelard, p.8.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), p.120.
Joseph Rykwert, “One Way of Thinking About a House,” in The Necessity of Artifice (New York: Rizzoli International, 1982), p.85.
Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 19810, p.192.
Alan Colquhoun, “Displacement of Concepts in Le Corbusier,” in Essays in Architectural Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), p.51.
I've never lived in a house with a cellar. I don't think I could. I don't like the dark or enclosed spaces and a combination of both would surely lead to madness.
This was such a great series of posts! I equate the cellar with the dark unconscious and “one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” (Jung) The cartoons of someone holding a candle and gingerly making their way down into the cellar capture that so well.