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the awful darkness inside the world
I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that ‘the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright’. The intimacy of that posture is moving to me – the dead and the living standing sole to sole.
Flies on the grass blades are exotic as tigers – eyes of a thousand ruby hexagons, wings of the finest filigree.
‘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’.
I think of Ovid’s version of the ‘Baucis and Philemon’ myth, in which an elderly couple are transformed into an intertwining oak and linden, each supporting the other in terms of both structure and sustenance, drawing strength for each other from the ground through their roots – and tenderly sharing that strength through their en-kissing.
‘look down. A city lies under your feet.’
‘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.
To fungi, our world of light and air is their underland, into which they tentatively ascend here and there, now and then.
Little of this thinking is new, however, when viewed from the perspective of animist traditions of indigenous peoples. The fungal forest that science had revealed to Merlin and that Merlin was revealing to me – a forest of arborescent connections and profuse intercommunication – seemed merely to provide a materialist evidence-base for what the cultures of forest-dwelling peoples have known for thousands of years.
Words are world-makers – and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.
One brings a harmonica, two bring guitars, and Merlin’s brother brings two sets of bones and a small set of hand drums.
Later, Nadar would step into the basket of a hot-air balloon and photograph Paris from above, becoming also a pioneer of high-altitude photography – the first person ever to make images of a city from a moving vessel above it as well as in shadows deep beneath it.
