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I took a series of deep breaths, lifted my arms above my head, joined my legs, expelled the air from my lungs in a rush of bubbles, and slowly sank. At a depth of ten feet or so, the weight of water building on skull and skin, I fanned my hands to keep myself steady, and opened my eyes. Pressure pushed gently against my eyeballs. Ahead of me in the water was the black mouth of a tunnel entrance, leading away into the rock, more than wide enough to engulf me, its stone edges smooth. The pull of the mouth through that eerily clear water was huge. Just as standing on the edge of a tower one feels
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The springs astonish me, as springs always do.
Dehumanization But despite it all, they were people like you and me. Who are you? The living thrown into the madness, Killed with clubs and stabbed, Here crucified and no cross for you. But O, you humans, Your bones in the bottomless pit, They were people like you and me, Killed in the golden freedom. As you pass by, stop for a while, Think of your wrists bleeding in the dark night, Barbed wire wrapped around them, As they, cursing, goad you on, Beaten, naked, a corpse still living, You can hear the blows of the rifle butts, The screams, the groans, the terror turning into the sweetness Of
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Across the Dolomites and the Julians, retreating glaciers have begun to disclose their contents from the conflict a century earlier: rifles, crates of ammunition, unsent love letters, diaries and bodies. Two teenage Austrian soldiers have surfaced from a glacier in Trentino, lying top to toe beside one another, each with a bullet wound to the skull. Three Hapsburg soldiers melted out of an ice wall, hanging upside down near the peak of San Matteo at an altitude of 12,000 feet. The problem is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure . . .
‘A mountain has an inside,’ Nan Shepherd wrote in her great study of the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain,
The drilling has punctured a natural-gas cavern, the cavern’s roof has collapsed, and now poisonous fumes are pouring into the upper world. The decision is taken to ignite the gas and burn it off. It is expected that this will take only a few weeks. More than four decades later, the pit is still on fire. It has become known as the ‘Door to Hell’ and ‘Hell’s Gate’.
The other way is by boat, rounding the tip of the archipelago, and passing through the notorious Moskstraumen, one of the strongest whirlpool systems in the world, about which Edgar Allan Poe wrote his 1841 short story ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ – in which the whirlpool is figured as the portal of a tunnel leading to the core of the Earth.
I murmur a mantra to myself: Take the time that needs to be taken, take the time that needs to be taken. Why are you here? Why are you here? ask the rocks and the wind in reply.
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. MJP 11/20/2019
Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: 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. Here that seems right, I think. We ghost the past, we are its eerie.
The trio had entered what would become known as Chauvet Cave, also nicknamed ‘the Cave of Forgotten Dreams’, and it contained the greatest gallery of prehistoric art ever discovered.
Like many people who have arduous and dangerous jobs, Bjørnar is uninterested in narrating his hardships.
In 1923 the Russian mystic and painter Nicholas Roerich staged a Himalayan expedition with his philosopher wife, Helena, to seek the entrance to the city of Shambhala, which would lead in turn to a ‘Hollow Earth Kingdom’.
We saw his art in NYC. Mjp 12/3/2019
The Deepwater Horizon catastrophe of 2010 was partly a consequence of pushing deep drilling to its limits in an effort to open new territories.
One of the agreements tacitly made by consumers with these industries is that extraction and its costs will remain mostly out of sight, and therefore undisturbing to its beneficiaries. Those industries understand the market need for alienated labour, hidden infrastructure and the strategic concealment of both the slow violence of environmental degradation and the quick violence of accidents.
elegiac
‘Do as you would be done by,’ I say. ‘The golden rule of reincarnation.’
What Bjørnar fears is a version of ‘solastalgia’, the term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’.
To imagine ice as a ‘medium’ in this sense might also be to imagine it as a ‘medium’ in the supernatural sense: a presence permitting communication with the dead and the buried, across gulfs of deep time, through which one might hear distant messages from the Pleistocene.
If you see a bear, you can be sure the bear has known of you for far longer, and has come to investigate.
Ariadne’s thread: the thin winding line that will show us the safe route out at the end of the day.
I had an Anthropocene ox on my Holocene tongue.
eldritch
it calves so far below the waterline that it can kill you from beneath without warning. They call this puitsoq, “the ice that comes from below”.’
talking inconsequentially,
Shins and forearms break easily in stone jaws.
Light passing through ice therefore travels much further than the straight-line distance to the eye. Along the way the red end of the spectrum is absorbed, and only the blue remains.
Over a quarter of a million tons of high-level nuclear waste in need of final storage is presently thought to exist globally, with around 12,000 tons being added to that figure annually.
Cloaca Maxima
a noughts-and-crosses board,
At Boulby they encased xenon in lead in copper in iron in halite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to see back to the birth of the universe. At Onkalo they encased uranium in zirconium in iron in copper in bentonite in hundreds of yards of rock in order to keep the future safe from the present.
The half-life of uranium-235 is 4.46 billion years: such chronology decentres the human, crushing the first person to an irrelevance.
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’.
interstices
I reach my hand towards his and meet it palm to palm, finger to finger, his skin strange as stone against mine.
Fin. 12/17/2019. Trump impeachment ote tomorrow. MJP
