SECTION OF A BODY
In 1871 the Berlin psychiatrist Carl Westphal named agoraphobia. In 1879 Benjamin Ball named claustrophobia. In 1889 the Viennese architect Camillo Sitte turned the first into a problem of urban design, and urged his city to build small enclosed squares. Rome had staged both fears in a single approach. For centuries, pilgrims reached St. Peter’s through the narrow streets of the Borgo and emerged into Bernini’s colonnade. In 1936 the Fascist regime began to demolish the Spina di Borgo and erased the squeeze. Underground, both fears return without a city. Where the ceiling drops to the height of a lying body, the body learns its own section. Then the passage opens, and the opposite fear arrives: a body too small for the dark around it.

The fears belong to the body. The damage belongs to the cave. At Timpanogos Cave, in Utah, the National Park Service measured visitors warming the air by up to a degree on busy weekends. Our boots carry surface mud onto clean floors. Other hands leave harder marks. In Cuccuru Tiria we crossed rooms marked with writing, and ceilings where hands had broken off stalactite after stalactite. In 1996 the speleologists of Corongiu de Mari had already recorded the same kind of damage. I traced body and rock with the same white line, and marked each joint like a station in a cave survey. The void keeps a record of the body in return. The modern city named its fears of space. Then it laid pipes, so that no one would have to enter the void it drinks from.