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Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.
The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.
Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives). Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions). Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets).
Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that whic...
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In that vanishing point, neither of us speaks. Language is crushed. We are anyway too busily engaged building structures within ourselves that might house our spirits, for the pressure here is immense, a weight of rock and time bearing down upon us from every direction with an intensity I have never experienced before, turning us fast to stone. It is a fascinating and terrible place, and not one that can be borne for long.
Dark-matter physicists work at the boundary of the measurable and the imaginable.
“inosculation”,
Fungi and lichen annihilate our categories of gender. They reshape our ideas of community and cooperation. They screw up our hereditary model of evolutionary descent. They utterly liquidate our notions of time. Lichens can crumble rocks into dust with terrifying acids. Fungi can exude massively powerful enzymes outside their bodies that dissolve soil. They’re the biggest organisms in the world and among the oldest. They’re world-makers and world-breakers. What’s more superhero than that?’
Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send immune-signalling compounds to one another. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant via the network that it should up-regulate its defensive response before the aphids reach it.
I realize I can trace patterns of space running along the edges of each tree’s canopy: the beautiful phenomenon known as ‘crown shyness’, whereby individual forest trees respect each other’s space, leaving slender running gaps between the end of one tree’s outermost leaves and the start of another’s.
The kingdom of the grey. It speaks of fungi’s utter otherness – the challenges they issue to our usual models of time, space and species.
Fungi thwart our usual senses of what is whole and singular, of what defines an organism, and of what descent or inheritance means. They do strange things to time, because it is not easy to say where a fungus ends or begins, when it is born or when it dies. To fungi, our world of light and air is their underland, into which they tentatively ascend here and there, now and then.
We are coming to understand our bodies as habitats for hundreds of species of which Homo sapiens is only one, our guts as jungles of bacterial flora, our skins as blooming fantastically with fungi.
Ursula Le Guin’s angrily political novel, set on a forest planet in which woodland beings known as the Athsheans are able to transmit messages remotely between one another, signalling through the medium of trees.
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To me, walking through a wood is like taking a tiny part in a mystery play run across multiple timescales.’
puhpowee, which might be translated as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’.
In Potawatomi, not only humans, animals and trees are alive, but so too are mountains, boulders, winds and fire. Stories, songs and rhythms are all also animate, they are, they be. Potawatomi is a language abundant with verbs: 70 per cent of its words are verbs, compared to 30 per cent in English. Wiikwegamaa, for instance, means ‘to be a bay’. ‘A bay is a noun only if water is dead,’ writes Kimmerer:
The real underland of language is not the roots of single words, but rather the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time. Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users. They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world. Words are world-makers – and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.
‘Our waking existence is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld,’
Urban exploration might best be defined as adventurous trespass in the built environment. Among the requirements for participation are claustrophilia, lack of vertigo, a taste for decay, a fascination with infrastructure, a readiness to climb fences and lift manhole covers, and a familiarity with the varying laws of access across different jurisdictions.
entitlement,
Alternative To privelage is entitlement
Another rise in the dunes brings us still closer to the roof, and I feel my skull scrape on rock as I ease through, head turned sideways for clearance, face pressed against the stone-sand. Lina pauses for thought at only one junction, and then on we snake for ten minutes, until a dune slopes away to a black rabbit-hole, down which we each go head first. I pop out of the rabbit-hole into a Wunderkammer.
Total claustrophobic
‘This cave system is a mile in length, nearly 400 metres deep, and it perforates an entire mountain from one side to another,’ says Lucian. ‘The free movement of wind along the cave system, combined with the chill of the rock itself, keeps the temperatures within the system well below freezing. Snow gathers in the cave mouths in the winter, blown deep into it by the northerly winds, and – hey presto! – over thousands of years, the snow becomes a long thin glacier, winding within the mountain.’
Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as ‘occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness. The Slovenian karst is an ‘occulting’ landscape in this sense, defined by the complex
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The man is a medium, a geologist-spiritualist, an oil speculator. Oil is a gift given from God, limitless in its underland abundance, divinely stored for the use of mankind. One must just know where to find it. For the oil emits ‘coruscations’ – atmospheric glitterings above ground, perceptible to those few people sensitive enough to detect them.
Bjørnar looks often through things: hard into them and right through them with those pale eyes of his. He looks through people, through bullshit and through the surface of the sea.
In a dynamic I have seen so often in the underland that it has become a master trope, troublesome history thought long since entombed is emerging again.
The inhabitants of this village are part of the precariat of a volatile, fast-warping planet.
The colour of deep ice is blue, a blue unlike any other in the world – the blue of time.
Polar bears can smell a food source from up to twenty miles away.
The half-life of uranium-235 is 4.46 billion years: such chronology decentres the human, crushing the first person to an irrelevance.
Are we being good ancestors . . .?
