Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

An aversion to the underland is buried in language. In many of the metaphors we live by, height is celebrated but depth is despised. To be ‘uplifted’ is preferable to being ‘depressed’ or ‘pulled down’. ‘Catastrophe’ literally means a ‘downwards turn’, ‘cataclysm’ a ‘downwards violence’. A bias against depth also runs through mainstream conventions of observation and representation.

Where the River Elbe flows through the Czech Republic, summer water levels have recently dropped so far that ‘hunger stones’ have been uncovered – carved boulders used for centuries to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the hunger stones bears the inscription ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep.’

‘To be human means above all to bury,’ declares Robert Pogue Harrison in his study of burial practices, The Dominion of the Dead, boldly drawing on Vico’s suggestion that humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, meaning ‘burying, burial’, itself from humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil’.

Twelve thousand years ago in a limestone cave above the Hilazon River in what is now northern Israel, a grave was prepared for a woman in her forties. An oval hole was dug in the cave floor, and its sides were walled with limestone slabs. Her body was placed in the grave, curled against the northern side of the oval. Two stone martens, their brown and cream fur sleek in the low light, were draped over her: one across her upper body, one across her lower. The foreleg of a wild boar was laid on her shoulder. A human foot was placed between her feet. The blackened shells of eighty-six tortoises were scattered over her. The tail of an aurochs was put near the base of her spine. The wing of a golden eagle was opened over her. She had become a wondrous hybrid – a being of many beings. At last, a single large plate of limestone was pulled over the hole, closing this compound creature inside her chamber.

Eight of the nine barrows were excavated in a single week by the Reverend John Skinner and his men in 1815, the exhumation motivated by a combination of antiquarian interest and grave robbery. All were found to contain at least one cremation. One of the barrows held the wealthiest burial found anywhere in the Mendips: a woman who had been pregnant, missing her pelvis but buried with beads of amber and faience, a copper awl and an elaborate dress fastening. Twenty-four years after he plundered the Priddy Nine Barrows, Skinner would shoot himself in the face. It is thought that his friends succeeded in concealing his suicide, thus allowing his body to be buried in the consecrated ground of his Somerset parish at Camerton.

Modern archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age barrow in a Mendips wood find the remains of a woman placed in a funerary urn. The barrow had already been ruptured by deep ploughing when the cemetery was planted with trees early in the twentieth century, but the urn somehow survived. The archaeologists disinter the urn, and study the remains of the woman that it holds. Once their work is done, one evening while white moths flit in the shadows of trees, they rebury the woman’s remains in a replica urn. As they do so one of them speaks a blessing at the graveside – a reburial ritual performed across the space of several thousand years, spoken out of respect and also, perhaps, out of apology.

Dark-matter physicists work at the boundary of the measurable and the imaginable. They seek the traces that dark matter leaves in the perceptible world. Theirs is hard, philosophical work, requiring patience and something like faith: ‘As if’ – in the analogy of the poet and dark-matter physicist Rebecca Elson – ‘all there were, were fireflies / And from them you could infer the meadow’.

‘Why are you searching for dark matter?’ I ask. ‘To further our knowledge,’ Christopher replies without hesitation, ‘and to give life meaning. If we’re not exploring, we’re not doing anything. We’re just waiting.’

As to God? Well, if there were a divinity then it would be utterly separate from both scientific enquiry and human longing.’ He pauses again. It is not that this thinking is hard for him – he has moved down these paths before – but that he is picking each word with care. ‘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.’

Reminds me of one of the few good moments in Star Trek V: "What does God need with a starship?"

‘At the weekends,’ Christopher says, ‘when I’m out for a walk with my wife, along the cliff tops near here, on a sunny day, I know our bodies are wide-meshed nets, and that the cliffs we’re walking on are nets too, and sometimes it seems, yes, as miraculous as if in our everyday world we suddenly found ourselves walking on water, or air. And I wonder what it must be like, sometimes, not to know that.’ He pauses, and it is clear that he is thinking now beyond the confines of the salt cavern, beyond even the known limits of the universe. ‘But mostly, and in several ways, I’m amazed I’m able to hold the hand of the person I love.’

The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’

While we have devised abbreviations for marking out deep time in the past – BP for ‘before present’; MYA for ‘million years ago’ – we have no equivalent abbreviations for marking out deep time in the future. No one speaks of AP for ‘after present’, or MYA for ‘million years ahead’.

Note to self.

The metaphor drives the scholarship.

‘Maybe, then, what we need to understand the forest’s underland,’ I say, ‘is a new language altogether – one that doesn’t automatically convert it to our own use values. Our present grammar militates against animacy; our metaphors by habit and reflex subordinate and anthropomorphize the more-than-human world. Perhaps we need an entirely new language system to talk about fungi . . . We need to speak in spores.’ ‘Yes,’ says Merlin with an urgency that surprises me, smacking his fist into the palm of his hand. ‘That’s exactly what we need to be doing – and that’s your job,’ he says. ‘That’s the job of writers and artists and poets and all the rest of you.’

She remembers the words of Wittgenstein, who came to live on this same coastline in order to undertake some of his most intense philosophizing: ‘I can only think clearly in the dark, and here I have found one of the last pools of darkness in Europe

All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere.

When Christopher Wren excavated the foundations of Old St Paul’s after the Great Fire he found a row of Anglo-Saxon graves lined with chalk-stones, beneath which were pre-Saxon coffins holding ivory and wooden shroud pins. At a still greater depth were Roman potsherds and cremation urns, red as sealing wax and embellished with greyhounds and stags, and beneath those were the periwinkles and other seashells that spoke of the ocean that had once covered the area.

Dog-rose tangles through the understorey of their garden, blossoming pink and white. Bees swim in the blossoms. I think of the strange lines Rilke wrote to the translator of his Elegies: ‘We are the bees of the invisible. Frenziedly we gather the honey of the visible, to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible

In all cases, at stake is what Pamela Ballinger – in her major study of ‘the terrain of memory’ at the borders of the Balkans – refers to as ‘autochthonous . . . rights’, meaning the battle for the right to claim authentically to ‘belong’ to a given area of land, rock and soil.

Basovizza/Bazovica has become, more even than the other known foibe, an example of what Pierre Nora calls ‘lieux de memoire’, ‘memory-sites’: places in a landscape where the meanings of history are most actively created and contested.

I think of W. G. Sebald’s writing about landscape and the relics of violence; how his narrator in The Rings of Saturn, walking the tranquil but chronically militarized coastline of East Anglia, becomes preoccupied to the point of ‘paralysing horror’ by the combination of an ‘unaccustomed sense of freedom’ in the landscape with ‘the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place’. I remember taking a friend to the former nuclear weapons test site of Orford Ness off the Suffolk coast – where Sebald had also been – and seeing her weep uncontrollably on its shingle bank by the brown waves of the North Sea. The state violence latent at the Ness had caused the surfacing in her, unbidden, of memories of a cruel relationship in which she suffered for several years. The violent event persists like crushed glass in one’s eyes. The light it generates, rather than helping us to see, is blinding.

A woman’s body is prepared for burial in Thessaly in the fourth century BC. Her lips are closed by a coin bearing the head of a gorgon, there to pay the ferryman who will carry her over a dark-watered river towards the realm of death. Placed on her chest are two heart-shaped leaves of gold foil, into which metal words have been etched. Together the leaves form a Totenpass – a death pass or death map.

Early this millennium, on the sweltering north coast of Java, a lake of toxic mud has spread over four square miles of landscape, gouting out of a central crater from which a plume of foul-smelling gas also rises, and burying twelve villages. This mud volcano began to erupt ten years previously, shortly after a multinational corporation, drilling for oil in a Late Miocene stratum some two miles below ground, ruptured a high-pressure aquifer and opened a series of blowout vents on the surface – from which ever since has flowed this torrent of ancient, poisonous sludge. By some the mud volcano is seen as a consequence of corporate greed – an unnatural disaster. By others it is seen as an emanation of batin – of the submerged occult forces of the underland, of ghosts and spirits that dwell in the landscape and exist far beyond human bidding.

The Troll’s Eye is a wave-smashed tunnel around 100 feet in diameter, running east-west wholly through the rock of a small island, in which the setting orange sun is framed once a year.

We ghost the past, we are its eerie.

‘Art is born like a foal that can walk straight away,’ wrote John Berger, ‘the talent to make art accompanies the need for that art; they arrive together.’

Please let this be true.

These animals live, as Simon McBurney memorably puts it: in an enormous present, which also contained past and future. A present in which nature was not only contiguous with them, but continuous. They flowed in and out of a continuum of everything around them; just as the animals flow into and out of the rock. And if the rock was alive, so were the animals. Everything was alive.

I think of the Old English term unweder – ‘unweather’ – used to mean weather so extreme that it seems to have come from another climate or time altogether. Greenland is experiencing unweather.

Everywhere the underland of the glacier declares itself less as structure than as hue, a radiant blue brimming in every fissure or shaft. In Scandinavia, this blue light is sometimes known as the ‘blood’ of the glacier: an uncanny image for an uncanny phenomenon.

Like a face flushing

And it sings, the moulin sings, with a high, steady, neck-tingling cry.

The cultural theorist Sianne Ngai suggests that, when shocked or grieving, we find ourselves able to speak of the experience only in ‘thick speech’. When speaking thickly, Ngai says, we are challenged in our usual ability to ‘interpret or respond’. A drastic slowdown and recursion of language occurs, a rhetorical enactment of fatigue and confusion. Tenses work against one another. There is a ‘backflowing’, a loss of causal drive, a gathering of hesitancies and stutters. We speak an eddying speech, cloyed to the point of congealing.

Up there on the thinning ice, during those weeks in Greenland, I recognized this ‘thick speech’. I would struggle often to stop language from sticking in my throat. The black-inked words in my notebooks seemed sluggish, tar-slow. Writing lost its point, clotted into purposelessness, there in an ice world that was both unhomely and untimely. Often it felt easier to say nothing; or rather, to observe but not to try to understand. I had an Anthropocene ox on my Holocene tongue.

Where the freshest calvings have happened, the ice is bluest. These marks of rupture seem not scar but revelation. This is the first sunlight that ice has seen for tens of thousands of years.

In indigenous cultures that live adaptably in close contact with ice, it has always been an ambiguous entity, and the stories told about glaciers have often blurred boundaries between human and non-human activity. Glaciers appear in these stories as actors – aware and intentful, sometimes benign and sometimes malevolent. In Athapaskan and Tlingit oral traditions from south-western Alaska, for instance, as the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank documents, glaciers are both ‘animate (endowed with life) and animating (giving life to) landscapes they inhabit’. In languages from this region, special verbs indicate the living power of what in English might be classified as passive landscape presences. These verbs recognize in the ice both its actions and, vitally, its powers to act. Linguistic anthropologists refer to the ‘enlivening’ influence of such verbs: their deep-level acknowledgement of a sentient environment which both listens and speaks recalls Robin Wall Kimmerer’s wish for a ‘grammar of animacy’ that might acknowledge the autonomy of plant life.

Camus called this property of matter its ‘denseness’. Confronted by matter in its raw forms, he wrote, ‘strangeness creeps in’: perceiving that the world is ‘dense’, sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman . . . the primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.

Here was a region where matter drove language aside. Ice left language beached. The object refused its profile. Ice would not mean, nor would rock or light, and so this was a weird realm, in the old, strong sense of weird – a terrain that could not be communicated in human terms or forms.

on a loaded moraine slope you walk like a cat. Your aim is to dislodge nothing, not even a grain of quartz. You move tenderly. You advance with soft tread, placing the balls of the feet first, not heel-jabbing with a stiff leg. You never pull on a rock with your hand; instead, you press down with your palm or fingertips so that any force you apply confirms the rock in its location. You never put your full foot-weight on a boulder without testing it first. You never move when someone is directly below you on the fall-line. You never put your foot or your arm into a gap between rocks, in case the one above drops down. Shins and forearms break easily in stone jaws.

This map at the Earth’s end has echoes of Jorge Luis Borges’s cautionary story ‘On Exactitude in Science’, which imagines a world in which the art of cartography aspires to such representative perfection that the Cartographers of the Empire construct ‘a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire’. But of course this one-to-one scale map proves both unusable and overwhelming. The ‘following Generations’, perceiving the danger of such a map, leave it to erode. ‘In the Deserts of the West,’ ends Borges’s story, ‘still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars.’

I think of Sebeok’s ‘atomic priesthood’ charged with conveying warnings across generations in the form of folklore and myth. I think of the last line of the poem pinned on the tin sheet above the sinkhole into which people had been clubbed and pushed and bayoneted up in the Slovenian beech woods. A curse be upon anyone who might attempt to erase this record . . . I have a swift, chilling sense of the Kalevala as part of a messaging system, the warnings of which we have not heeded or even heard.