“Underland: A Deep Time Journey” by Robert Macfarlane. Have you heard of it? It was hailed as a best book of 2019 by over a dozen reviewers. Richard Powers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Overstory” (which has been highly recommended, and I will get to soon) said of it, “Profound in every sense of the word.” All I know is that I needed a book about a journey for my 10 to try in 2020 self-challenge through the library. This one is more than highly rated and the comments enticing. The description on Amazon begins with, “In Underland, Robert Macfarlane delivers an epic exploration of the Earth’s underworlds as they exist in myth, literature, memory, and the land itself.”
I go to the library and check it out. First, I have a book to finish, so “Underland” waits. Today I began the book. Do you think of yourself as claustrophobic? I do not. Oh, I have no interest in going into caves, but I could hide-and-seek in a dark closet without fear. And now I find that even words can make you sense a claustrophobia that requires one to look up from the book, step away into the sunlight. The whole point of 10 to try is to challenge. Well, challenge accepted.
All this and I’m just minutes into a book that has hours ahead, but I had to capture the thoughts ringing through my mind.
Macfarlane winds us into the book much as his descriptions wind us into the undergrounds he explores. We learn about burial chambers from 10,000 years ago and he moves us through time to the Thai footballers trapped in a cave. Macfarlane notes, “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.” Hmmm, never think about underground much. Do you? That is, so far, the premise of the book; that we not only don’t go underground much, but we don’t even imagine it much. In fact, he references history having an “abhorrence” of underground spaces.
That is where he mentions that claustrophobia “retains its disturbing power even when being experienced indirectly as narrative or description.” That seemed senseless as I read it, but not too many pages forward there was a description that did just that and my heart raced a bit. Then I had to go back and find the passage to copy it down. I was feeling claustrophobic, sitting in my largest room with a high ceiling, bright yellow walls, many windows, and the sun streaming in. How was this possible? What primitive part of our brain makes us so sensitive to the loss of space, air, and sight? Just as he writes, I did shift uneasily. Over the next few pages there are a couple of true stories about tight spaces that you will have to seek out yourself, but I was mightily uncomfortable reading them. Even in my skimming to refresh on parts I did want to capture, those were words I did not want to revisit. After one, Macfarlane, who DOES go into some places I could never imagine, even he says the words “took cold grip of my heart, emptied my lungs of air.”
Until reading his thoughts, and some from “Vertical,” by Stephen Graham, I had not thought at all about the fact that we think of the world horizontally. We look up but, beyond the tops of trees and the clouds, there isn’t much to see or absorb. Only those with a penchant for caves and tunnels, or who benefit from extractions of all sorts, think of much beyond the superficial surface. Of course, I’ve often joked about digging to China, as the saying goes. But my soil studies included only an overview of the Earth’s crust with focus on the top one to three feet. I have learned, and was reminded here, that there is a massive amount of water within the Earth. That, alone, would keep me on the surface. Dark tight space and massive water are the things that would make nightmares for me.
Then he starts talking about what is underground being exposed by melting and shifting lands. Ancient corpses, 200,000-year-old elements, Neolithic remnants, and something called “hunger stones.” Those are stones that have, for centuries, commemorated droughts. On has a German inscription that warns, “If you see me, weep.” Of course, there are much worse dangers as all the modern era contaminants start to rise to the surface. Macfarlane quotes an archaeologist commenting about what we bury coming back with unexpected force. Okay, that probably isn’t good. Another story for another day.
In these few pages (a mere 2% into the book, thank you Kindle), I’ve learned a lot already and now a new term: deep time. In 1981, a man named John McPhee wrote an explanation of deep time including, “Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”
Deep time is the unimaginable vastness of Earth’s history. I highly recommend a PBS Nova series called “Australia: First 4 Billion Years” to get a sense of this timeline and the concept of time being measured in inert and fixed elements left behind, not anything relative. As Macfarlane says about viewing the world through deep time, “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.” Who knew my lazy television watching would inform me in a way that connects to my sedentary reading habit? At least my brain is getting exercised. That Nova series made this concept so easy to see.
Metaphysics seems to be entering my field of view more often lately. Thinking about the word understand, I have NEVER seen that word before as stand under. Macfarlane say it “bears and old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it.” Huh, so say the online resources I checked, although generally it is thought that the segment under refers to among rather than specifically beneath. Still, the idea of getting connected to instead of simply a cerebral exercise is interesting. And discover meaning uncover, not necessarily find by happening upon. The Online Etymology Dictionary includes, “uncover, unroof, unveil...” Certainly easy to connect with the underworld.
Then, what is really drawing me to this writing is the juxtaposition of things I can relate to versus those that are beneath my feet. Dragonflies flitting about, horses languishing in the grasses, birds making sounds with their wings on the wind. He is a poetic writer for one delving into the depth of the Earth. Which is great to lighten the subject when we read that much of the world is a cemetery. In fact, Robert Pogue Harrison, author of “The Dominion of the Dead” (about burial practices) is referenced as writing “To be human means above all to bury.” What? Here’s the logic. Humanitas comes from humando, meaning burial, which comes from humus, and we come full circle to my soil science class where that means the organic component of soil. In ancient times, evidently, we believed in soil to soil (you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust stuff). Some chambers have been found that suggest dead were interred underground about 300,000 years ago. That’s pre-sapien!
Back to the Harrison book. Macfarlane copied these words for us.
For the first time in millennia, most of us don’t know where we will be buried, assuming we will be buried at all. The likelihood that it will be among our progenitors becomes increasingly remote. From a historical or sociological point of view this is astounding. Uncertainty as to one’ posthumous abode would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of people a few generations ago.
Yeah, why don’t we think there is an afterlife? Why aren’t we carefully buried with our most precious belongings and implements we need in the next world, for the next life. What the heck? People for most of the past 300,000 years thought it important. Who the heck are we to buck the trend over the last, what, century? Now I’m worried. Actually, I was worried about that ten years ago. I had this sudden, and I though irrational but maybe not so, thought that in cremating my late husband I gave him no ability to pass on to something else, to regenerate, reincarnate, or whatever. I suppose religion can assist there if you believe in the soul since that is what would move on and I don’t think that gets burned. But I don’t strictly “believe” in any of that. Yet, something deep inside me really called out back then.
Of course, there are still religions and cultures who do subscribe to some form of burial and/or afterlife. Perhaps it is when we relegate these thoughts to myth that we turn away from burial because, instead of a passage, we can so easily imagine it as a smothering experience. Do we see the essence of the fire in cremation as more of a release, and one that requires air, whereas underground there may be no breathing? There are cultures that believe in funeral pyres rather than burial.
So, I didn’t know that this book was going to include so much about death, and it probably will move on as I get into it. However, I had a cat euthanized yesterday. He was dear to me for 15 years and the last pet that Jeff and I owned together. AND… in a few short weeks I’ll come upon the date marking the 10th year after his death. Oh well, perhaps it is the best time to be delving into burial, the wonders of deep time, and all these feelings that bubble up out of nowhere when the words speak of what, to me, are unspeakable journeys underground. Why not combine the senses and let them wash over me?
The one section that made me stop and reflect is where the passage is so small that he wants to evaporate so he can move through like a gas instead of a bone bag. Even when he and his caving companion reach a solid space, he notes that they don’t speak because,
“Language is crushed. We are anyway too busily engaged building structures within ourselves that might house our spirits, for the pressure here is immense, a weight of rock and time bearing down upon us from every direction with an intensity I have never experience before, turns us fast to stone. It is a fascinating and terrible place, and not one that can be borne for long.”
Boy howdy is that the truth. Do those words grasp you as they did me? Of course, there is more context as he describes this underground place they are moving through, all of which I am not able to imagine and don’t really want to. I could not bear it and I’m simply reading it. Had to stop and write this. And then reading it again to share, it pressed on me some more. I took, am taking, shallower breaths and my rational brain is not liking the lizard brain controlling things. I can almost feel the relief as they move through the swallet, what a cool word, and into the above ground air where he describes growing bones again, and the world teaming with sights, sounds, and colors.
I may have to purchase a copy of this book as I may not make it through in the allotted time if I have to stop, breathe, and go outside every so often. I’ve mentioned in prior essays that I enjoy books about specific things and phenomena. This looks as if it will join the ranks of those that have gone before. Although I am still not far into the reading (9%), given the praise that was heaped upon this widely in 2019, I imagine it will continue to amaze and confound me. Confound, because I did not expect to be pulled underground by words. Yes indeed, there is pressure in being underground, if only in my mind.