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Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.
When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.
When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.
What these narratives all suggest is something seemingly paradoxical: that darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation.
darkness might be a medium of vision, and that descent may be a movement towards revelation rather than deprivation.
We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.
We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.
‘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’.
We are part mineral beings too – our teeth are reefs, our bones are stones – and there is a geology of the body as well as of the land.
The most notorious story in British caving history involves a twenty-year-old Oxford philosophy student called Neil Moss.
Claustrophobia... ugh
We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most . . .
Salt flows over time. It creeps around. It sags.
In 1999, at a conference in Mexico City on the Holocene – the epoch of Earth history that we at present officially inhabit, beginning around 11,700 years ago – the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was struck by the inaccuracy of the Holocene designation. ‘I suddenly thought this was wrong,’ he later recalled. ‘The world has changed too much. So I said, “No, we are in the Anthropocene.” I just made the word up on the spur of the moment. But it seems to have stuck.’
Really? It just made up?
come’. As the Pleistocene was defined by the action of ice, and the Holocene by a period of relative climatic stability allowing the flourishing of life, so the Anthropocene is seen to be defined by the action of anthropos: human beings, shaping the Earth at a global scale.
Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.
As we have amplified our ability to shape the world, so we become more responsible for the long afterlives of that shaping.
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 gorge on the glut of light, the fetch of space.
Instead of seeing trees as individual agents competing for resources, she proposed the forest as a ‘co-operative system’, in which trees ‘talk’ to one another, producing a collaborative intelligence she described as ‘forest wisdom’.
Seen in the light of Simard’s research, the whole vision of a forest ecology shimmered and shifted – from a fierce free market to something more like a community with a socialist system of resource redistribution.
Merlin Sheldrake, as the oldest joke in mycology goes, is a fun guy to be around.
LOL
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.
Louis de Bernières has written about a relationship that endured into old age: ‘we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.’
there exists a honey fungus, Armillaria solidipes, that is two and a half miles in extent at its widest point, and covers a total lateral area of almost four square miles.
To fungi, our world of light and air is their underland, into which they tentatively ascend here and there, now and then.
feel a sudden, angry impatience with modern science for presenting as revelation what indigenous societies take to be self-evident.
‘Take a last look back at the light, because you won’t be seeing the sun again until next week. Let’s go.’
All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere.
a densely stacked modern cityscape leads, inevitably, to a new geography of inequality that requires reading in vertical terms. Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks.
And I feel uneasy at the opportunities urban exploration holds for insensitivity to those people who have no choice but to exist in contexts of dereliction and ruin.
My heart shivers fast, and my mouth dries up instantly. My body does not want to enter that opening. ‘You’ll need to pull your pack along with your toes here,’ says Lina.
Claustrophobia
‘A peak can exercise the same irresistible power of attraction as an abyss,’
feel a sudden horror reaching up and out of the sinkhole to coil around my heart. Something terrible has taken place here, and continues to reverberate.
Looking across the bay to the northern shore – and there by the glimmering birches is a figure standing dark on rising ground, where no figure should be.
Looking back across the bay to the northern shore – but now by the birches there is nothing there, no one at all.
I look across the bay to the northern shore and there, there, by the glimmering birches is a figure standing dark on rising ground, where no figure should be.
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.
Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put.
Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by climate change or corporate action: the home become unhomely around its inhabitants.
I have often sensed the indifference of matter in the mountains and found it exhilarating. But the black ice exhibited another order of withdrawnness, one so extreme as to induce nausea.
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.
The myth of Sisyphus
