Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  ~

  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’. In ‘all its technical vocabulary’, Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, ‘Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery.’

  Kimmerer herself is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. A speaker of what she calls ‘fluent botany’, she is careful to distinguish this from what she refers to as ‘the language of plants’ – that is to say, the language that plants speak, as opposed to the language that is used to speak of plants. Kimmerer does not disdain the precisions of botanical lexis, which ‘polishes the gift of seeing’, but she finds it also to be of necessity a lexis of objectification and distancing, with something missing beneath its finely faceted surface. That missing something is predominantly the acknowledgement of life in the more-than-human world, an indifference which is grained into language not just at the level of individual words, but at the deeper-down levels of grammar and syntax.

  In Potawatomi, by contrast, almost all words declare the animacy or inanimacy of that to which they refer. The language is predisposed to recognize life in otherness, and also to extend the reach of that category of ‘life’ far beyond its familiar limits in Western thought. In Potawatomi, not only humans, animals and trees are alive, but so too are mountains, boulders, winds and fire. Stories, songs and rhythms are all also animate, they are, they be. Potawatomi is a language abundant with verbs: 70 per cent of its words are verbs, compared to 30 per cent in English. Wiikwegamaa, for instance, means ‘to be a bay’. ‘A bay is a noun only if water is dead,’ writes Kimmerer:

  trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb . . . releases the water from bondage and lets it live. ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers.

  Like Kimmerer, I wish for a language that recognizes and advances the animacy of the world, ‘the life that pulses through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms . . . well[ing] up all around us’. Like Kimmerer, I relish those aspects of discourse that extend being and sentience respectfully and flexibly beyond the usual bearers of such qualities. Like Kimmerer I believe that we need, now, a ‘grammar of animacy’. A modern predisposition to regard animacy as anomaly runs through what the poet Jeremy Prynne once called ‘mammal language’, by which he means the language that is used by humans, encoding intent, agency and muscular power deep in its grammar.

  The real underland of language is not the roots of single words, but rather the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time. Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users. They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world. Words are world-makers – and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.

  Projects have recently been started around the world to gain even the most basic of vocabularies for the experiences of life and death in the Anthropocene. These stuttering attempts to speak what it is we are doing have generated ugly new terms for an ugly epoch: ‘geotraumatics’, ‘planetary dysphoria’, ‘apex-guilt’. Such words feel like futile forms of nominalism, a hopelessly hyperactive pointing and naming. They stick in the throat in two ways: they are difficult to utter and hard to swallow.

  Only one of these recent coinages resonates with me: ‘species loneliness’, for the intense solitude that we are fashioning for ourselves as we strip the Earth of the other life with which we share it. If there is human meaning to be made of the wood wide web, it is surely that what might save us as we move forwards into the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead is collaboration: mutualism, symbiosis, the inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human communities.

  You look at the network, and then it starts to look back at you . . .

  Writing of mycorrhizal fungi, Albrecht proposes that we rechristen the Anthropocene, naming it instead the Symbiocene – an epoch characterized in terms of social organization ‘by human intelligence that replicates the symbiotic and mutually reinforcing life-reproducing forms and processes found in living systems . . . such as the wood wide web.’

  The word for world is forest.

  ~

  That evening, in a deep part of the woods, far from a road, near an Iron Age earthwork and an old pollard beech grove, on a slope of high ground nicknamed ‘Friendship Rise’, Merlin and I settle down for the night. We scrape a shallow fire-pit, haul dead birch trunks around it for seats, and set a small fire going with a tinder of leaves and kindling of twigs, in contravention of Epping Forest bye-laws, with murmured apologies to the Corporation of London.

  Merlin opens his rucksack and brings out a small decoction bottle containing a dark moss-green liquid. He shakes it.

  ‘Coca extract. Home-made. The perfect pick-us-up after a day among the leaves.’

  He reaches again into his bag, and brings out another bottle.

  ‘Home-made honey mead,’ he says.

  He reaches in again, and brings out a third.

  ‘Home-made cider,’ he says.

  The brown glass of the bottle carries a single white label, on which is written the word ‘Gravity’.

  ‘I pressed this from some windfall apples that had fallen from Newton’s apple tree in Cambridge. It’s quite hard to get to, that tree. It’s in Trinity College. Security is reasonably tight. The scrumping had to be done under cover of night. I wish I could have brought us a bottle of the first ever batch we made. That was from apples scrumped from Darwin’s orchard at Down House. You can probably guess the label name for that batch.’

  ‘Evolution.’

  ‘Bingo.’

  People begin to emerge from the shadows of the trees in ones and pairs: friends of mine and friends of Merlin, friends of our friends, invited by social network, by text, by phone, zeroing in on our location using GPS. One brings a harmonica, two bring guitars, and Merlin’s brother brings two sets of bones and a small set of hand drums.

  Moths dance around the flames. Satellites blip above us. The red landing lights of planes, visible through the crown shyness, cut paths between the leaves. I have a strong sense of the forest looming around and over and below us.

  I drink Merlin’s coca decoction, feel my mind rapidly sharpen. The fire works its magic of storytelling and conviviality. People talk, reestablish existing connections, make new ones, bring into being a temporary community in that fire-braced forest space. I show the whalebone owl and the bronze casket, explain about their giving and the obligations they bring with them. Merlin and I tell some of our day’s understories. Merlin speaks, like Tsing, of the soil as a city, a city beneath our feet in which countless species and kinds of matter are busy interacting.

  A young man whose nickname is ‘the Hand Owl’ plays bluegrass on his cupped hands alone, hooting and whooping. Folk songs are sung – ‘Nine-Pound Hammer’, ‘Seven Drunken Nights’, ‘Brown Trout Blues’ – with people passing chorus lines and verses from one to another and back again. Merlin plays the bones, clacking a beat for each new song. The night chills us and the fire warms us.

  Drums, songs, stories. The trees shifting, speaking, busy making meaning that I cannot hear. Fungi writhing in the birch logs, in the soil.

  I sit with my back to a birch log, feet to the fire, next to Tara. Tara is tall, gentle of speech, Greek. She is a singer. She grew up on a small island in the Mediterranean. She learned song and voice from a Russian émigré who had been washed up on the island by the tides of history. She tells me about the consequences for the island of the refugee crisis: the networks of support that were put in place for the refugees, but also the resistance of the islanders who saw the crisis as a threat to their ways of life.

  ‘There reaches a point whe
re you see other humans drowning, or washed ashore with nothing,’ says Tara, ‘where there is no possibility other than to help with all your heart. It isn’t kindness, exactly – because there is less element of choice than people think, and for this reason it is less noble.’

  Later, Tara sings a sad song from her island, and my heart breaks a little. The flames die to purring embers.

  I am too tired to see the fire to its end, so I wander away into the forest to find somewhere to sleep. Looking back I can see only orange glow, shadows cast against the surrounding trunks – then the firelight dwindles until it is lost in the forest’s dark.

  I find myself in a grove of pollard beeches atop a prehistoric earthwork. Under one of them, children have built a den of sticks and boughs, resting them against a low branch to form a crooked timber tent that is long enough for me to sleep in. It is an invitation I cannot refuse, so I creep inside the den and lie down, looking up through its slats at branches, stars, satellites. I feel myself suddenly – strongly – surrounded by beings whose ways of relating to one another are dimly but powerfully perceptible, as if seen through thick gauze. The sensation is at once comforting and lonely-making.

  Owl hoot. Dog bark. Back in the clearing the fire dims, song falls silent. The canopy of the pollards spreads above me, whispering in the night breeze. There’s something you need to hear . . . Seeking sleep, my mind follows leaf to branch, branch to trunk, trunk to root and from there down along the hyphae that web the earth below.

  SECOND CHAMBER

  Down in the labyrinth under the old ash tree with the riven trunk, a new passage is chosen and followed.

  This water-worn rift bends into the earth, each fresh curve emerging from its predecessor as pleat is shaken from pleat in the unfurling of a cloth. As the rift deepens, its sides lean closer to one another and its roof drops until, just where it seems the rift will narrow to impassability, it opens abruptly into a big new chamber.

  Sound echoes off this chamber’s walls and light flickers across them, and where the light falls it shows the stone to be alive with more scenes from the underland. The scenes here are those of hiding, sheltering and finding – dispersed across time and space, but bound again by strange echoes.

  An artist is at work a thousand years ago on a painting that will become part of a menologion for an emperor. The painting shows a mountain rising from a desert landscape. The sky above glints with gold leaf. The bedrock is blue-grey. From the mountain’s slopes rise two cypress trees and an evergreen oak. The mountain’s side has been cut away by the artist so that what it contains can be seen. In the shadows of its interior seven men are asleep. The rock encases and shelters them. They wear loose robes of grey, red, blue, tawny-brown, purple. They lie close together. Some are barefoot, some shod. There is a brotherliness to their pose – a tenderness to the way one of the sleepers rests his hand on the brow of another. These are the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, known in Arabic as alkahf, the ‘people of the cave’, and theirs is a story of waiting in darkness, within rock, until it is safe to emerge. Their story recurs in the Christian and Islamic traditions; it is there in the Qur’an, in the Roman Martyrology. The young men, fleeing religious persecution in the city of Ephesus, enter a cave mouth that leads them deep into the mountain. In that den of night, exhausted by flight, they lie down and sleep. They will sleep for 300 years – and when they emerge all danger will be gone.

  Cold sleet on old slate. Grey air, grey stone. Hawthorn bushes crabbed in the low ground. A single holly bush, its berries reddening. Winter in a slate quarry hollowed into a mountain, almost 2,000 feet above the sea. The work here is brutal, killing. The quarrymen have long died of explosions and falls, the slate-cutters of lung disease. The workers walk here each weekend from their homes, following paths marked by lines of white stones. They sleep together in barracks through which the wind blows, two men to a bed, curled up for warmth. For this privilege they must pay the quarry owners. Sometimes at night, they sing chapel hymns together. So it has been for almost 200 years here – an asymmetry of power and suffering. Something odd is happening in this quarry now, though. Men from a ministry have come, and they have paid for five of the caverns cut inside the mountain to be converted into bunkered treasure rooms. Small brick houses have been constructed inside the caverns, their interiors air-conditioned and temperature-controlled. And up the old quarry road have laboured lorries containing hundreds of large, thin packages. The packages are paintings: Claude’s Landscape with David at the Cave of Adullam, Piombo’s Raising of Lazarus, Van Dyck’s eleven-foot-high version of Charles I mounted on a horse, work by Gainsborough, Hogarth, Constable, Turner and Monet. All of these paintings have been taken under armed guard from the National Gallery in London and transported to this cored-out Welsh mountain, to be placed in these brick chambers under 300 solid feet of 400-million-year-old slate – safe, surely, here of all places, from the bombs of the Luftwaffe.

  Nuclear fears crackle the world’s air. The Cuban Missile Crisis is only weeks past. Flashbulbs pop and crowds cheer as a man enters a limestone rift near Nidderdale in Yorkshire (Nidder – a variant of ‘nether’; to ‘nidder’ or ‘nether’ is to ‘keep down’, to ‘press under’). The rift opens into a complex cave system, its full extent unexplored. The man wishes to study the effects of chronic darkness and the absence of visible time upon body and mind. He wishes also to show the people of Britain that ‘if we need to go into caves in a nuclear war, all we need do is wrap up warm and take down a lot of food’. There, in the underland, he believes it will be possible to wait out the radioactivity above ground until it is safe to emerge. He pitches a tent by a stalactite. The man intends at first to spend a hundred days in the underland, but without the cycle of day and night he loses circadian knowledge, and his body instead falls into a rhythm only of need – sleep when necessary, in short bursts. He emerges after 105 days below ground, to find a world unburned by nuclear fire.

  Inside a tent made from shrapnel-torn sheets of white plastic a shaft has been dug into sandy soil. It drops fifty feet vertically, at which point a tunnel just high enough for a man to stand in extends laterally for 900 feet, to where a similar shaft rises to the surface, its mouth also concealed by a tent. The two shafts are separated by a national border. The illegal tunnel is a means of evading a punitive blockade on the movement of goods across this boundary. There are hundreds of similar tunnels, riddling the underland below the frontier, and along them are smuggled supplies of food, clothes, hardware, people, livestock and weaponry. When war flares here, as it does often, air-strikes target the tunnels with fighter planes dropping one-ton bombs in an attempt to destroy what is buried. But the tunnels are relatively cheap to make, swift to repair, profitable to run – and lifelines to the community blockaded behind the border. So they must be dug, though diggers lose their lives each year through cave-ins and bomb strikes.

  A summer’s day in Connemara in the west of Ireland. A woman wades into the water of a bay, walking the slick stones with the confidence of custom. She is an artist and among her subjects are the submerged dark depths of the human mind, and those points at which mythical and physical landscapes powerfully converge. She has always been at ease in water and she has taken to swimming in the sea each day – sometimes straight out offshore for half a mile, sometimes into a sea cave to the north of the bay. She has also begun holding her breath and diving to the bed of the bay, carrying sardines with her, with which bait she has learned to tempt conger eels out of their lairs in the rocks. These powerful creatures, some as long as she is, come snaking out of their holes to take the sardines she offers. Some even allow her to stroke them. It has become important to her art to encounter these uncanny beings in their own realm: a confrontation with what lies beneath, a befriending of fear. 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 darkn
ess in Europe . . .’

  A door is set into a wedge of concrete which angles back into a mountainside, high on an Arctic island. The roof of the portal radiates an otherworldly green – an installation of prisms is reflecting the aurora borealis that are shimmering in the polar night sky. Prophecies of the world’s end in fire have receded; now the eschatology is one of ongoing breakdown rather than apocalypse. The end times are here, present, all around now, no longer deferrable. The heavy doorway opens into a tube of corrugated metal sloping deep into the mountain, far above sea level. This is a doomsday vault, made to survive for as close to eternity as can be reached on Earth. The frosted vaults of this eschaton, quarried from the limestone of the island, hold not people – but seeds. Life in fabulous abundance is here, chilled to dormancy: 90 million seeds; 860,000 crop varieties, 120,000 different strains of rice alone. Squash, alfalfa, sorghum, pigeon peas, foxtail millet, some of the earliest strains of Levantine wheat and durum, more than 10,000 years old. The outside of this mountain has no trees – just scant coverings of lichen, moss and little more. Inside, frost-flowers bloom on the vault walls. The seeds bide their time.

  On the Anatolian plateau, where ash spewed by volcanoes 30 million years ago has hardened into a rolling terrain of cones and dips, a man is rebuilding his house. He decides to knock down a wall where it stands flush with the bedrock tuff – and behind the wall he discovers a chamber. Off the chamber runs a passage – and the passage leads down to a subterranean city. The city has eighteen different levels arranged over 300 vertical feet, and it offers shelter for up to 20,000 people. There are chambers for storing food, water, wine and oil. There are sleeping rooms, communal rooms, cooking rooms and tombs. Stone doors can be rolled across key openings to isolate areas in case of attack. Air moves by means of dozens of vertical ventilation shafts, and thousands of lateral tubes dispersing air between the individual chambers of the city – and through its centre runs an underground river.