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Claustrophobia is surely the sharpest of all common phobias. I have often noticed how claustrophobia – much more so than vertigo – retains its disturbing power even when being experienced indirectly as narrative or description. Hearing stories of confinement below ground, people shift uneasily, step away, look to the light – as if words alone could wall them in.
Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd – crushed to irrelevance.
katabasis (a descent to the underland)
‘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 Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
Boreholes, funnels, pipes, slithers and tracks are all trace fossils – stone memories where the mark-maker has disappeared but the mark remains. A trace fossil is a bracing of space by a vanished body, in which absence serves as sign.
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.
The hyphae of these so-called ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi were understood not only to infiltrate the soil, but also to weave into the tips of plant roots at a cellular level – thereby creating an interface through which molecular transmission might occur. By means of this weaving, too, the roots of individual plants or trees were joined to one another by a magnificently intricate subterranean system.
The technical term is actually “inosculation”, from the Latin osculare, meaning “to kiss”. Inosculation means “to en-kiss”. It can happen across trees and between species too.’
In the language of forestry and forest ecology, the ‘understorey’ is the name given to the life that exists between the forest floor and the tree canopy: the fungi, mosses, lichens, bushes and saplings that thrive and compete in this mid-zone.
Potawatomi, a Native American language of the Great Plains region, includes the word puhpowee, which might be translated as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’.
At the end of each day, sleep feels speleological: a nightly descent, a resurfacing each morning.
‘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.’
One hundred thousand years ago anatomically modern humans were beginning their journey out of Africa. The oldest pyramid is around 4,600 years old; the oldest surviving church building is fewer than 2,000 years old.
