Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.

‘The problem,’ writes the archaeologist Þóra Pétursdóttir, ‘is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure, outlive us, and come back at us with a force we didn’t realise they had … a dark force of “sleeping giants”’, roused from their deep time slumber.9

Seeing photographs of the early hand-marks left on the cave walls of Maltravieso, Lascaux or Sulawesi, I imagine laying my own palm precisely against the outline left by those unknown makers. I imagine, too, feeling a warm hand pressing through from within the cold rock, meeting mine fingertip to fingertip in open-handed encounter across time.

‘all there were, were fireflies / And from them you could infer the meadow’.3

‘No divinity in which I would wish to believe would declare itself by means of what we would recognize as evidence.’ He gestures at the data read-out. ‘If there is a god, we should not be able to find it. If I detected proof of a deity, I would distrust that deity on the grounds that a god should be smarter than that.’

The rhetorical ‘we’ of Anthropocene discourse smooths over severe inequalities, and universalizes the site-specific consequences of environmental damage.

We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.

I recall Kimmerer, Hardy and Nelson, and feel a sudden, angry impatience with modern science for presenting as revelation what indigenous societies take to be self-evident.

the realm of mind is integrated into the community of the trees, and ‘the word for world is forest’.20

Science is full of this stuff: full of happenstance and stumbles and getting knackered and crazy in the field or the lab. It’s so weird to me how science always presents its knowledge as clean.’

‘I have this plan,’ Merlin says, ‘that for each formal scientific paper I ever publish I will also write its dark twin, its underground mirror-piece – the true story of how the data for that cool, tidy hypothesis-evidence-proof paper actually got acquired. I want to write about the happenstance and the shaved bumblebees and the pissing monkeys and the drunken conversations and the fuck-ups that actually bring science into being. This is the frothy, mad network that underlies and interconnects all scientific knowledge – but about which we so rarely say anything.’

Stories, songs and rhythms are all also animate, they are, they be.

The word for world is forest.

Just as a mountain does not end at its summit or its foothills, but extends instead into the weather it creates in the air above it, and the orogeny of the rocks that have raised it, so a city does not cease either at its foundations or the spires of its tallest buildings.

I wonder at what will remain of our cities as the Anthropocene unfolds over deep time – the stratigraphic markers that will endure in the rock record. Over millions of years, the inland megacities of Delhi and Moscow will largely erode into sands and gravels, to be spread by wind and water into unreadable expanses of desert. The coastal cities of New York and Amsterdam, those claimed soonest by the rising sea levels, will be packed more carefully into soft-settling sediments. It is the invisible cities – the undercities – that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock. The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence.28 Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids – these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.

Mythologically, the underland is often a place in which women are silenced or pay brutal prices for the mistakes of men.

I think there is no innocent landscape, that doesn’t exist …6

The problem is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure …

‘elastic geography’, whereby space is to be understood not simply as the backdrop for actions of conflict, ‘but rather the medium that each … action seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate’.

Take the time that needs to be taken, take the time that needs to be taken.

In the Celtic Christian tradition, ‘thin places’ are those sites in a landscape where the borders between worlds or epochs feel at their most fragile.

Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers, more as drift.

The hands of the dead press through the stone from the other side, meeting those of the living palm to palm, finger to finger

‘this is what truly separates us’ from the makers of this art: ‘not the space of time but the sense of time … In our minute splicing of our lives into milliseconds, we live separated from everything that surrounds us.’