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proved for the cultivation of mushrooms or for clandestine royalist meetings during the civil war or for haunting by a demon lover, but in order to address, soften the audience, explore aloud and without interruption the angelic oddity of pristine . Say it, in the dark, to be prised aurally. Pristine . Paid by the local tourist board to conduct small groups about in almost pitch-blackness, underground, I am investigating the subject of pristine. Strange well of feeling, curvature of space, unseen the caves except for a single hurricane -lamplight held aloft.
    – You might think they know you inside out, I begin. In these caves nothing is what you imagine: everything becomes pristine. Listen. In these delicate clinkings prised , I add, with a kind of irritating emphasis.
    I need to get their complete attention. Tin lamp on wrist, cavernous prudence, intestinal possession. Enormous difficulty of trapezoid act of speech to get the punters to listen properly. It’s a nightmare of a job: rush nothing, slow down to a speed that might just ontradict everything a man or woman has thought, treading carefully in the lamplight. Cold air always the same temperature. Pristine bazaar.
    – If I attune my mouth with sufficient precision, and align my ear, I can reveal the names of everyone in this cave, at the drop of a pin, I say to them as a warm-up.
    It is necessary to come up with something, after all, and I no longer see the point of saying anything unless it is in the form of a pronouncement made effectively with my dying breath. Many auditors could be forgiven for having already abandoned me, but I have a job to do, in the employ of the local authorities, not a significant salarybut I wouldn’t be doing this for the money would I, for me it’s about supporting a new phenomenon spreading far beyond any cultish local initiative, for the authorities it goes without saying it is also a previously unheard-of tourist money-spinner, how to get grockles, that is the dialect term in this part of the world, how to get them, or the locals themselves, down into the otherwise out-of-bounds and commercially pointless caves and allow them to experience something to set their ears ringing, have them recall and talk about it to family and friends, like so many echoes, long after listening, generating notable future income of ear and pocket.
    – What on earth is he talking about? I overhear a disgruntled fellow asking.
    That’s it, I say to myself, I don’t take offence. I request that the gentleman repeat the question and I listen with the special attentiveness that I have acquired from spending innumerable and improbably long hours in the caves and, after a pause, I say simply:
    – Your name is Thomas Swarovski.
    And the man in question is of course awestruck, as are others in the group, and the problem then is to quieten them down so that the event doesn’t turn into an audio -freakshow of clamouring infantilism, what’s my name, tell me, tell me, or conversely, for this can also happen, to placate any listener who should then voice their surmise that Thomas is just a plant and I knew his name before we entered the caves. In truth, however, it is an easy thing to do: if you attune your hearing properly in the silence of the caves and listen, most people are speaking a more or less audible version of their name in most of the things they say. It consists in a sort of layered or side-on effect,like the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors , a kind of private embassy of the ear, hallucination’s jinn.
    But in the ordinary run of affairs how many people go out of their way to pass even five or ten minutes in a good deep cave completely cut off from the outside world and take the opportunity to hear themselves speak and really listen to themselves? It can come to seem strange that people pay good money to entertain or instruct themselves with drugs or sex or universities or even submit themselves to psychiatric counselling when they could just as