The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.
Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives).
Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions).
Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets).
In the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.
Underland is the first book I’ve read by Robert Macfarlane – a celebrated British nature writer and literary critic who currently teaches in the Faculty of English at Cambridge – so I didn’t quite know what to expect from what looked like a sciencey exploration of the world beneath our feet. I understand now that Macfarlane’s career has concerned a “long-term mapping of the relations of landscape and the human heart” – making this book more sociological than geological – and once I learned to pivot my expectations, I grew to admire Underland for what it is: a poetic adventure-travelogue about underground spaces and the people tied to them. Macfarlane’s lyrical language borders on indulgent at times, and he writes from a decidedly progressive-campus point-of-view, but I found his adventures to be both fascinating and thrilling, and his thesis (This is among the best things we can try to do: to be good ancestors) to be sound. I look forward to reading Macfarlane’s earlier works.
The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree...Macfarlane travelled widely, over the course of a decade, exploring mines and glaciers and caves and catacombs. In every place, he stayed with engaging characters (and Macfarlane has a true gift for capturing people in a few strokes), and with every experience, he was able to relate the voids under our feet with the oldest tales and metaphors in human culture (from Persephone, Orpheus, and the Minotaur, to Alice tumbling down through the rabbithole, we humans seem to have long been fascinated and repelled by the deep dark). Whether pulling himself through a narrow passage of rock (that necessitated turning his face to the side in order to squeeeeze through) or solo-climbing through a snow-covered pass to find a remote cave (against the emphatic advice of his local Norwegian host), Macfarlane relates some heart-thumping tales of adventure (that always turned my mind to the wife and children waiting for him back home in England). But while Macfarlane quotes freely (and interestingly) from research, literature, and poetry, he sometimes lost me when his own clear prose sprouted purple wings:
I lie down to lead, I follow the thread, and each tiny room in the ruckle opens onto the next as it should, in turn, in order. I pass through the last of the gaps, and as I lift myself into the entry shaft I feel the snap of the black stone’s jaws at the empty air below my toes, and then I am out of the swallet and into the hollow, and warm air is rolling around me, and my bones grow again in the storm of light and ferns furl their green over and into me and moss thrives on my skin and leaves teem in my eyes, and Sean and I sit laughing, knowing for those few moments that to understand light you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark.(Another rhetorical indulgence that annoyed: “What was it that Barry Lopez called these old routes of movement and migration within the landscape? Corridors of breath. That was it.” I liked the references but not the faux self-interrogation on the page. I suppose it’s all a matter of taste; it’s not to mine.) And as for the progressive politics: As I said already, I really liked Macfarlane’s ability to capture people’s characters succinctly, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the only two people he lampoons – a tourguiding miner and someone burying spent uranium tubes – work at jobs of which he disapproves. Speaking with the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake about the recently discovered “wood wide web” of fungi-enabled, underground resource sharing between trees in a forest, Sheldrake notes, “Politically, I’m obviously inclined to dislike the language of biological free-marketry far more than the socialist version.” Obviously. Macfarlane travels to Norway and meets an anti-offshore-oil-drilling activist, and this bear of a fisherman, Bjørnar Nicolaisen, takes the author out on his gas-powered fishing boat to discuss the evils of oil extraction. Macfarlane joins “urban explorers” as they breeze past No Entry signs and locked gates (even trespassing into a control room at the Tower of London) and notes sympathetically, “At its more political fringes, urban exploration mandates itself as a radical act of disobedience and liberation: a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city.” And while the trespassing itself made me squirmy, Macfarlane has different concerns:
There are aspects of urban exploration that leave me deeply uneasy, and cannot be fended off by indemnifying gestures of self-awareness on the part of its practitioners. I dislike its air of hipster entitlement, its inattention towards those people whose working lives involve the construction, operation and maintenance – rather than the exploration – of these hidden structures of the city. I am sceptical of the dandified nature of its photographic culture, which seems chiefly to refocus the problems of Caspar David Fredrich’s iconic 1818 painting Wanderer above a Sea of Fog. 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.(And again this might come down to taste and temperament: the more one agrees with these viewpoints, the less they might break the flow of reading.) In the end, the very best parts of Underland were the death-defying adventures and the people that Macfarlane met along the way. He didn’t just descend into the Abyss of Trebiciano, climbing down a precarious ladder for two hours to reach an underground river, he did it in the company of a seventy-year-old pipe-smoking gate-keeper whose most frequent reply to any enquiry was, “Allora”. Macfarlane didn’t just follow some map to explore the far reaches of the Parisian Catacombs, he followed a young woman with scarlet lipstick, a quick stride, and an encyclopedic knowledge of that “invisible city”. This ultimately, and compellingly, is a book about the connections between people and underground geographies; a fascination we humans seem to have shared across time:
I think of the black and red hand-prints left on the cave walls at Chauvet, of the red figures of the dancers with their outstretched arms, of the spray-can hand stencil on the catacomb wall in Paris, of Helen reaching a hand down to haul me out of the moulin. I think of the many people I have encountered in and through the underland who have been committed to shared human work rather than retreat and isolation. Many of them have been mappers, really, of networks of mutual relation, endeavoring to stitch their thinking into unfamiliar scales of time and space, seeking not the scattered jewels of personal epiphany but rather to enlarge the possible means by which people might move and think together across landscapes, in responsible knowledge of deep past, deep future and the inhuman earth.I may have some quibbles with the writing, and it may not have been the book I expected to read, but there is much in Underland that intrigued and enchanted me. I definitely will be picking up more from this author.
